A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

There were probably no specific events that led Lovecraft to the shift, but rather an accumulation of many. One significant factor, perhaps, was the so-called Technocracy survey of 1932. The term technocracy was coined by an inventor, William H. Smith, to mean rule by technologists. Elaborated by Howard Scott, an economist and intellectual, the notion led to Lovecraft’s most important conclusion about the economic state of the nation: that technology had made full employment impossible even in principle because machines that required only a few workers to tend them were now doing the work previously done by many individuals, and this tendency would only increase as more and more sophisticated machines were developed. Any sensible and realistic economic and political system must then be based on this premise.

The election of 1932 was of course a landmark. Roosevelt won in one of the largest landslides in American history; but his inauguration would not occur until 4 March 1933, and on 22 February Lovecraft wrote one of his most concentrated and impassioned pleas for political and economic reform—the essay ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’.

In this essay—which he apparently made no effort to prepare for publication, or even to show to his colleagues—Lovecraft advocated the following economic proposals: (1) Governmental control of large accumulations of resources (including utilities) and their operation not on a basis of profit but strictly on need; (2) Fewer working hours (but at higher pay) so that all who were capable of working could work at a livable wage; (3) Unemployment insurance and old age pensions. None of these ideas was, of course, Lovecraft’s original contribution—they had been talked about for years or decades, and the very title of Lovecraft’s essay makes it clear that he is simply echoing what others had said over and over again. Let us consider the history of these proposals in greater detail.

The least problematical was the last. Old age pensions had been instituted in Germany as early as 1889, in Australia in 1903, and in England tentatively in 1908 and definitively by 1925. In 1911–14 unemployment insurance came to England. In the United States, the Social Security Act was signed by Roosevelt on 14 August 1935, although disbursement of money did not begun until 1940.

Government control of large accumulations of wealth has always been a pipe-dream in America, but government control (or at least supervision) of utilities and other institutions was by no means a radical conception in the 1930s. The Roosevelt administration did not undertake such an action until 1934, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was formed to regulate interstate telephone and telegraph rates. By 1935 the Federal Power Commission was governing interstate sale of electric power (natural gas came under control in 1938), the Public Utility Holding Company Act had authorized the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to curb abuses by holding companies (specifically those governing utilities), banks came under federal regulation, and higher taxes were imposed on the wealthy. This was certainly not socialism— although reactionary politicians and businessmen constantly bandied that word about to frighten the electorate and to preserve their own wealth—but it was at least a step in that direction. Of course, many foreign countries exercised actual governmental ownership of public utilities, whereas the United States continues to this day to settle only for governmental supervision.

The most striking of Lovecraft’s proposals is the limitation of working hours so that all who were capable of working could work. This idea enjoyed a brief popularity among political theorists and reformers, but in the end the rabid opposition of business doomed it. In April 1933 Senator Hugo Black of Alabama and William Connery, chairman of the House Labor Committee, proposed a bill for a thirty-hour week so that more people could be employed. Roosevelt did not favour it and countered with the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), which ultimately led to the NRA (National Recovery Administration). This established a minimum wage of $12 a week for a forty-hour week. But, although hailed initially as a landmark in co-operation between government, labour, and business, the NRA quickly ran into trouble because its director, General Hugh Samuel Johnson, believed that businesses would of their own accord adopt codes of fair competition and fair labour practice, something that naturally did not happen. The NRA became the object of criticism from all sides, especially among labour unions and small businesses. Less than two years after it was enacted, on 27 May 1935, it was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, and was officially abolished on 1 January 1936. Many of its labour provisions, however, were ultimately reestablished by other legislation.