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America under Technocracy.

Curious map arguing for a divergent historical path for the North American continent on the eve of American involvement in the Second World War, suggesting that the region should be merged into a single country ruled by "technocrats" - members of a technically skilled, and empirically-driven elite. The "Technate of America" is shown to stretch from Greenland to the Date Line, and encompass parts of Columbia, Venezuela, and the Guyanas, in a configuration that was supposed to be completely self-sustaining. This map was issued in 1940 by the American branch of Technocracy Inc., one of the two major organizations devoted to the spread of technocracy.

This map shows all of North America as colored red, the color of technocracy, with cities and rivers shown. Along the coastlines and at major strategic points are "Defense Bases," with points at Pearl Harbor, the Galapagos, Bermuda, and Cape Farewell. Regarding this aspect of the map, in a particularly long and winding speech given in Detroit, Howard Scott (founder of Technocracy, Inc.) says:

It's like the Navy publishing a copy of our North American defense map on the inside of their front cover and the flyleaf of the back, and then coming to tell us that we were plagiarizing their map. We said, well, you'd better look it up in the Library of Congress, because it was registered there before the war. Don't you think you should know your own institutions before you come and tell us something like that?

While he provides no context to this statement (he was discussing the "yen" symbol used by the technocracy movement), it can be surmised that he is talking about the defense configuration shown on this map and replicated in a few other works published by the technocracy movement.

Technocracy Inc.

While the technocracy movement had its roots in the 1920s, it exploded in popularity during the despair of the Great Depression and took deep roots in the American and Canadian West. The organization was founded on the belief that the world should be ruled by technocrats, and that this form of governance should replace democracy. The followers of the movement followed semi-fascist organizational rules, such as all wearing grey suits, painting their cars grey, and having a series of salutes.

Despite some factional splits and the unusual tendencies of the organization's leader, Howard Scott, Technocracy Inc. and associated movements peaked in the imminent pre-war period. In 1940, the organization would be banned in Canada due to anti-War sentiment, but it survived in the United States. The movement has persisted until the present day.

Rarity

We find only one example in OCLC, at Wisconsin Historical Society Library.

A variety of digitized photographs of Howard Scott and his followers show them standing beside other versions of this map, some of which were very large.