Howard Scott (April 1, 1890 – January 1, 1970) was an American researcher and founder of the philosophy of Technocracy. He formed the Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated.

Early life

Little is known about Scott's early life and he has been described as a "mysterious young man".

Margaret Mead and her friend Eleanor Steele became close friends with Howard Scott. After graduating from college, Steele fell in love with Scott. Mead and Steele found that people often made up stories about Scott. At that time both Mead and Steele were under the assumption that Scott was already married.<blockquote>In any event, we believed that Howard had a wife, and he did have a mistress, an actress whom we saw perform in a magnificent prevention of King Lear, and then there was Eleanor.

According to Ralph Chaplin he met Scott in Greenwich Village and was invited to his studio. Chaplin and Scott discussed the improvement of the I.W.W to better help a worker revolution and Scott was said to have made some impressive statements, insisting that the revolutionary force will be with engineers. They also talked about Thorstein Veblen's Soviet of Engineers. Scott was dissatisfied with Veblen's use of the word 'Soviet'. Chaplin spoke of the IWW's need to have organized information. Scott suggested an Industrial Research Bureau explaining the importance of having all the data for an informed decision.

Chaplin wrote: "That idea appealed to me at once. After all, the engineer was included in our revised "One Big Union" chart. But I resented the bohemian atmosphere in which Scott seemed to thrive. All the time he was discoursing so plausibly about teardrop automobiles, flying wing airplanes, and technological unemployment, I was looking at the other side of the studio where an appalling phallic watercolor painting was displayed among blueprints and graphs on a big easel. Evidently the "Great Scott" was a man of diversified interests."

In 1920 during an IWW convention (it's unknown if Scott attended), the IWW created an official Bureau of Industrial Research, and the same year they hired Howard Scott as a research director. Scott had "overstated his academic credentials", and he was discovered not to be a "distinguished engineer".

Growth into a major movement

M. King Hubbert had joined the staff of Columbia University in 1931 and met Howard Scott. Hubbert and Scott co-founded Technocracy Incorporated in 1933, with Scott as chief engineer and Hubbert as secretary. Scott remained as the chief engineer of Technocracy Incorporated until his death in 1970. Scott gained many devotees. M. King Hubbert, for example, considered Scott extremely knowledgeable in physics. There was some discontent with Scott's management during World War 2, and a number of technocrats quit Technocracy Inc. and established their own organization which lasted for about a year. Virtually unknown now, the organization had more than half a million members in California alone at its time of greatest popularity during the 1930s and 1940s.

On January 13, 1933, Scott gave a speech about technocracy at New York's Hotel Pierre, before a live audience of 400 people, which was also broadcast by radio nationwide. "disastrous", and "a complete failure",

Decline and legacy

In 1941, as fascism gained ground overseas, Technocracy flooded the US with advertisements featuring identical gray cars and uniforms, In July 1987 the Akron Ohio chapter of Technocracy Inc. compiled and published all of the spoken events of Scott that they could find into a book. It reached a page count of 2030, and was titled; The Words and Wisdom of Howard Scott. Part of the intro-page reads;<blockquote>Was he a visionary or a man of great perception? Or was he a man with an analytical brain, able to see things as they were, not as people would like them to be, or more to the point, hoped they would be? He was a man of great integrity, refusing all kinds of financial inducement to set up a harmless research foundation which would have made him rich, but would have betrayed his principles. He was concerned with the practical problems of running and organizing a modern technological society; to this end he devoted his life. Events have borne out the correctness of his analysis; the predictions of Technocracy have all proved to be accurate. Whether we as a society have the wit to take advantage of these findings remains to be seen.