Animating the Technocratic Utopia

As Michael O’Pray has argued, animation, because of its “ability to represent other impossible worlds” through the “virtuosity” of artistic “control” and “representation,” is driven by a utopian impulse (200–201). While animation obviously can generate complex world-building, the relative simplicity of the “cartoon” compresses that new order down to a scale of control that is the very definition of the utopian urge. O’Pray recounts how Sergei Eisenstein, in studying the cartoons of Walt Disney, had found a kind of anthropological evidence of this impulse, as it speaks to our “desire for omnipotence,” our “desire to will something”—another world, another way of being—out of the imagination and into existence (200). This link between animation and the utopian impulse can be conceptually useful for assessing cartoon depictions of an emerging technological culture during the inter-war period (November 11, 1918–September 1, 1939), a time when those same utopian desires were finding expression in various live-action films, such as the German Metropolis (1927), the American Just Imagine (1930), and the British Things to Come (1936). While this period saw economic depression, unemployment, and even larger threats of social instability, technoscience—that is, the general epistemological, ontological, and ethical uses of science and technology—offered a great hope for controlling and improving life through the mechanisms of modernity. But some of those same technoscientific developments had recently contributed to world devastation through industrialized warfare, and they further threatened to change society beyond any traditional political or cultural controls. American cartoons of the period readily reflect this dichotomy, examining the possibilities of technoscience, offering much critique and some comic acceptance, while ultimately helping viewers work through the challenging situation presented by an emerging technological culture.

While there has generally been little attention to how science and technology surfaced in early animation, this essay narrowly focuses on the way cartoons addressed a single problematic development that was often seen as symptomatic of the influence, even a kind of overreach, of technoscience during the pre-World War II era—the Technocracy movement. Drawing on, as Miles Orvell puts it, “the authority of technology, with its promise of rational solutions to social problems” (163), Technocracy held out to those overwhelmed by the World War, the Depression, and their various aftershocks its own promise of utopian change. While Howard Segal notes that many in the movement expressed an “aversion to utopianism,” he also explains that “Technocracy did assume that a better society of some kind could be fashioned in the near future” and offered some plans for achieving that betterment (Technological 125). Under the leadership of such figures as Howard Scott, Walter Rautenstrauch, and Harold Loeb, and drawing heavily on the then popular “principles of scientific management” that had been articulated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the movement sought to stake out a path toward accomplishing many of the era’s utopian dreams by applying the scientific method and engineering techniques to a wide range of cultural issues. Through adopting what William E. Akin describes as “a comprehensive engineering world view” (56), Technocracy’s founders argued that it could quite literally engineer society and control cultural change: reforming government, industry, and the economic system through the use of rigid scientific principles and the latest technology, all of which would be coordinated and administered by a select scientific elite.

While both of the movement’s two leading organizations, Scott’s Technocracy, Inc. and Loeb’s Continental Committee on Technocracy, fundamentally disagreed on what authoritarian measures might ultimately be necessary, they similarly saw the technocratic reorganization of society as logical, inevitable, and, above all, imperative. As Howard Scott starkly forecast in the first issue of The Technocrats’ Magazine, “unless a vast change is made in the political and economic system of this country we may soon face a collapse of our present social structure, the downfall of currency, and utter chaos taking the place or orderly government” (2). However, Technocracy was more than just an urgent response to the cultural disruptions of the Depression; as Beverly H. Burris observes, it presented itself as “freeing people from political tyranny and unhappy personal relationships, and...