EPTMarion King Hubbert and Technocracy Interview
Oral History Transcript — Dr. M. King Hubbert
Interview with Dr. M. King Hubbert
By Ronald Doel
In Bethesda, MD
January 17, 1989
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA,
Doel:
Columbia and New York City was the area where Howard Scott was, and the Technocracy movement. You were involved in that.
Hubbert:
Yes, that's right.
Doel:
Do you recall the first time that you met Scott, how you became involved in it?
Hubbert:
I think so. There was organized down in the Village a club called the Meeting Place. It was made up of professional writers and newspaper people, and architects. It was professional level people. And it occupied what was principally a dining room, also a minimal social lounge, over a restaurant on the ground floor called Lee Chumleys. So that they could have meals served from Lee Chumleys restaurant up there, but it was primarily just an informal social gathering place. So after I'd been there for about a year, one of the secretaries in the department invited me to go down to this place, to meet this very interesting person.
Doel:
This is Howard Scott?
Hubbert:
This is Howard Scott. And I did. And I was pretty much bowled over with the man's scope, knowledge, understanding. It led to a personal friendship, and then the Depression got deeper and deeper. This was about 1931, say, and I kept pushing him to try to get some of the things he was talking about on paper. It was the same kind of thing I'd been working on about mineral resources, energy resources, and so on. And the employment problem. And I should remark by way of background, that following World War I, he had been one of -- practically a leader -- in a small group of a dozen or so people called the Technical Alliance. I used to have their little leaflet of organization, people who were in the main line-up. I can only quote it from memory, but one of them was Tolman(?) later the dean of the graduate school of Caltech, Richard Tolman, and leader in the field of statistical mechanics. He has a big book like that on the subject.
Doel:
Right.
Hubbert:
And he was one of that group. This was largely a group that had been associated one way or the other with World War I, military production including the Wilson Dam on the Tennessee River, the big associated air reduction plant for nitrogen, and a whole bunch of those things. And so after the war, or out of this wartime association and experience, these people kind of got together and formed this little group who were asking fundamental questions about the society in general. Wouldn't it be better if we did things this way instead of this way, etc. One other thing, I'm trying to remember some of their names. Richard Tolman. I think Steinmetz was peripherally involved, at General Electric. The other man who was not in that group but associated it was Stuart Chase, the writer on economic subjects during the thirties. They had quite a number of conferences and discussions, and outside people came in and were members of these discussions groups. One of them was Veblen, and Veblen wrote a book, ENGINEERS IN A CRISIS, out of that association. There was another man I think was from Columbia and I can't remember his name now. He wrote a penetrating book called DEALING WITH CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PROBLEMS. It was a highly read and regarded book in the late twenties and early thirties, but I can't remember the author's name at the moment or the name of the book. I think he was professor of history, maybe, at Columbia.
So it was a group of that general nature that had died out during the twenties. Then I come along and hear Scott with all his background, and I tried pushing him to try to get things going again. The Depression got deeper and deeper. Oh yes, two other people at the old Technical Alliance. One was an engineer named B. Jones who was a leading consulting engineer in New York state. He had a big consulting engineering office on Park Avenue, I think about 40th St. and Park Avenue. Another was Freddie Ackerman who was one of the top architects in New York. He had a big architectural firm. And these men came back, said, "Let's get going." The other thing was that the Depression was getting deeper and deeper and more and more desperate, with more and more people in the breadlines, including the professional people of the engineering societies and the society of architects. Yet you had this dogma of the time that, oh, by God, we couldn't have the dole. Everybody has to work for a living. So how did you work when you sold apples on the corner of 42nd St and Fifth Avenue and so on? They were doing that. It seems we couldn't have government support, that would be a dole. So the engineers were supporting their own unemployed members and the architects were doing the same with theirs. Paying them a living wage. So that's where B. Jones for the engineers and Ackerman of the architects proposed that we start using these unemployed engineers and architects to start putting some of this stuff together. And so we organized them into teams to go into the engineering society's library, the New York Public Library, and after specific information, primarily various kinds of mineral resources, and energy resources, coal, oil, iron, various metals, and then plotting these up into graphs.
Doel:
Of course you'd had an interest in that from the time you'd taken Bastin's course at Chicago.
Hubbert:
Yes. And then I got a man by the name of [unclear] who was a professional in industrial engineering at Columbia, and talked with him at the Faculty Club, got him interested. He provided some of the drafting facilities and space at Columbia University for some of these men to do their drafting work. Well, this went along, and it broke into the press, oh, about 1933. Somebody saw this work going on, some reporter. "What's this?" "Well, it's an energy survey." "Energy survey, what's that?" Then they saw these big charts and so on and they got all excited, and this thing broke out all over the newspapers. Then there was a terrific hue and cry developing from people who wanted to help, what could they do? Well, there was no organization and no way of utilizing their interest or their desire to help. Again, one of the fundamental things, before they could do anything, maybe was education. So then -- well, Scott used the word Technocracy, that's a word he coined himself, by way of contrast with bureaucracy or plutocracy or democracy and so on, because the social structure that he was visualizing was none of the conventional things. Instead of that it was a social structure whose fundamentals were the energy and mineral resources, and whose accounting system was based on physical relations, thermodynamics and so on, rather than a monetary system, hence the contrast that his was not a plutocracy or any other conventional -- there's no social system in existence that was based on the principles that he was talking about. He coined this term, Technocracy, as describing what he had in mind, as contrasted with the conventional divisions, social divisions. And well, in order to have some kind of an organizational structure, we then had a lawyer who was a friend, at one of the big law firms in New York state, draw up the papers of incorporation and get it through a judge who had to approve it as incorporated here in New York called Technocracy Incorporated. That was a structure in which we could rent an office, and have a minimum sized staff, mostly volunteers, and could also begin to do some internal work by way of organizational structure.
Doel:
And this all occurred right after the publicity in the early 1930s?
Hubbert:
That's right. Finally, after about four years, there was a turnaround in the press, where they began to be very critical. Then we got all kinds of hell from the press, whereas before they almost had [unclear]. And in the meantime, why, we got out various publications, regrettably nothing of great importance. What I wanted to do was to get on to the technical writing, but through the emergency of the situation, the demand of the public to have something to do, we had to try to get some kind of an organization operating. I drew up a kind of a small study course of the basics of what we were talking about, for use in these small groups that were assembling around. That was published in a small booklet without authorship. It was called "Technocracy Study Course." They also put out a little magazine which was more, I'm sorry to say, political than technical. But it did have some fairly good technical papers. All this ran on through the thirties. By the end of the thirties, I'd come to the conclusion that the thing wasn't going to accomplish anything I was interested in. The technical part of it simply wasn't going anywhere.
Here's what Marion King Hubbert had to say to the Board of Economic Warfare, in these Letters and Hearing regarding Hubbert's involvement with Technocracy:
In the winter of 1931, I came to New York as a member of
the staff of Columbia University and quite by accident heard
of Howard Scott and some of the things he was talking mind
you, this was when there was still going to be two chickens
in every pot and prosperity was just around the corner. I was
introduced to the gentleman and we had dinner together, and we
covered quite an extensive range of subject matter. He was a
total stranger to me. I had never beard of him before and
what he told me was largely the work of this old Technical
Alliance and its implication. I was impressed with it as
the most important piece of scientific thinking I had ever
heard of and that impression still stands.
At my instigation, Mr. Scott rounded up some of these old
group members again, and we formed a small informal group that
started to review the old work, quite informally, no formal
organization. That went along quietly until it got out in the
newspapers through the Columbia University publicity agent
who wanted some publicity for the University; so, that, in
turn, spread around the press for a while and before very long,
it looked like a forest fire. The reason it looked like a
forest fire was because, fundamentally, we stated that technological
employment was real and that the number of persons who would >
be employed ten years from now would be less than the present
on the same hours of labor which at that time was the rankest
kind of heresy. In fact, it was such bad heresy that steps were
soon taken to oppose it, but, in the meantime, seven or eight
publishing houses rushed out with books on Technocracy. Those
houses included a fair percentage of the publishing houses
of New York City and some elsewhere, the books being written
by their own appointed men who did not know beans, but the most
of what people read about Technocracy was contained in those books.
At that stage, at the same time, we had a deluge of people
who wanted to work or be of assistance or contribute money, so
to protect ourselves legally, to prevent piracy of the type that
was going on, we set up a membership organization so we could
utilize these people. We incorporated as a membership corporation
under the laws of the State of New York. That was about 1933.
