A Spectator's Notebook
IT is not improbable, I think, that I can claim to be the only London journalist to have enjoyed a long con- versation with Mr. Howard Scott, who has leapt into the news with almost comic suddenness as the apostle of Technocracy. Sonic months ago in a New York club I strove over the lunch table to get at his idea of the newest industrial revolution. He is a tall, dark, energetic and self-confident man, I think from Virginia. An engineer by training, he talks with an assumption of scientific knowledge—which may be quite genuine. He expressed the utmost scorn for the Soviet mechanistic schemes, and especially for their tractors, citing some details of a precise warning given by his associates to the heads of the Stalingrad plant, which warnings, he affirmed, had been fulfilled to the letter. Mr. Scott deals plentifully in the American jargon of industrial and social psychology, and when he launched into a piece of general philosophy I was amused to note that he was giving out with an air of authority certain alike dicta from a new book which I happened to have read for the author in proof. With marvellous assurance Mr. Scott announced the imminent overthrow of all the statesmen and economists, and even the industrialists who fancied themselves to be modern. And, needless to add, he took for granted that England was sunk. He predicted that his great news was almost due to " break " on the front page. I thought his stuff was fantastic, but on that point at least he was right.
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