Techno Racket (Scrappy - 1933)

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When this cartoon was produced, Technocracy was the political fad of the moment. Developed and promoted by Howard Scott, an engineer without a college degree, Technocracy would end the Great Depression by having engineers (Technologists, Howard called them) take over and run the country on a rational basis, controlling production and society by science and machinery. By having machines do all the heavy lifting, workers would only have to work four hour days, 165 days a year, and would be paid a guaranteed $20,000 yearly income, which was a small fortune in 1930s dollars. Under Technocracy, there would be no poverty or want, everybody would be well-off with plenty of free time to enjoy themselves, and Life would become one long, happy, paid vacation in a Technocratic utopia.This is a potted description of Scott’s complicated program, but his basic message was that machinery would create a better Life for Americans. But in the public mind, Technocracy’s program was distorted into meaning that robots- Mechanical men, as they were called back then- would do all the work while people took their ease, and the media picked up on this concept and promoted it. There was the underlying fear that automation, (though they didn’t call it that at the time) would displace workers because you didn’t have to pay machines wages- Which is what Scrappy, the mean little Capitalist, tries in this cartoon, much to his sorrow. In some ways, this cartoon comes across as a Marxist parable about Capitalism, though I honestly doubt it was intended that way. The concerns it addresses are very much of its era. By 1934, as New Deal began to ease the Depression, Technocracy started to collapse as a movement, and by 1941 was gone, just another political panacea that held the public interest for awhile, then faded away.