Part V
4 Strictly speaking
5 period three of the U.S.A. Industrialization,
6 1920 to 1940
7 in turn breaks down into
8 four telescoping sub-divisions:
9 1920--1932
10 1933…1937
11 1938--1939
12 1940.
13 The first was ‘‘quantitative,’’—
14 (‘‘flaming youth’’):
15 the second ‘‘qualitative,’’—
16 (lugubrious New Dealing
17 of a mixed pack
18 of bright new cards
19 and dirty old ones):
20 the third ‘‘paradoxical,’’
21 (ominous and phoney):
22 the fourth ‘‘exquisite,’’
23 (the teleologic tunnel.)
24 Panics once generations apart
25 had accelerated in recurrence to the threshold of a continuous high frequency blur bespeaking race schizophrenia and specie suicide blitz
26 or
27 a clean new world.
28 In the first of these four sub periods of the last twenty years the U.S.A, suddenly aware of its exalted position in world affairs, through its willy-nilly elevation to the role of ‘‘creditor nation’’ thrust upon it at the period outset, recognized that INDUSTRIALIZATION had indeed become the overwhelming characteristic of the U.S.A, economy well overshadowing agriculture
29 in common and private wealth making;—which was not slighting to agriculture but an unexpected admission of industry’s thenceforward dominant role.
30 Yet it never occurred to U.S.A, leaders business or governmental to question the adequacy of the traditional hay-seed accounting system to cover this entirely new way of living upon the cumulative fruits of science, whose increments could only be such abstracts as speed, health, precision, knowledge, satisfaction, and happiness.
31 So in this first period,—1920--1932,—of world civil war armistice the U.S.A, phlegmatically consolidated its gains as main world supplier during the 1914--1918 open fighting in which high speed quartermaster role it had been forced by emergency to acquire a multitude of new ways of producing, chemically, electrically, synthetically.
32 The majority of these new ways and new products had heretofore been accumulated, tabled, pigeon-holed, or outrightly suppressed as hobbies and gadgetry, or fantastic nuisance to lucrative inefficiency over a period of fifty long years.
33 Wherefore: post war business re-possession of industry was widely marked by grief and chagrin, amazement and incomprehension, not as much by returning soldiers
34 (the popular notion)
35 as by the old time proprietors and bankers (with brilliant exceptions
36 such as Dupont and, once again, Ford), because their former comely properties had swollen to harem-queen dimensions and acquired wanton, trackless, wireless, high flying ways.
37 That there were advantages involved never penetrated their heartbreaking, nor deflected their one-way thinking and wishing.
38 Self-helpless old-fashioned business was forced to call in the services of some new kinds of doctors whom the bankers were recommending, professional Trouble-shooters, they called the milder homeopathic variety;
39 Liquidators, they called the surgeons among them.
40 These brusque opportunist doctors were an odd breed of pre-war academic engineer more expert at detecting the butter side of its bread than the trend directions of science.
41 The breed had been frustrated
42 by war unleashed progress
43 too rapidly pole-vaulting over stupid timidity to incorporate its anaemic suggestions in the new panorama.
44 The breed’s swollen inferiority complex gained sadistic satisfaction as it encouraged vulnerable confidences amongst the first forming ranks of industrial science and technology researchers and artist inventors, by showing its ‘‘engineering’’ credentials then two-facedly wielding the financial scimitar.
45 Having wrought havoc within the properties of the befuddled old owners, and strafed valiant struggles of vision endowed pioneering engineers, as the merger tactics of bankers required, (be it noted the same dismay and confusion tactics as constitute the opening barrage of the Nazi) they next made their retaining fees permanent by re-introducing themselves to their ‘‘clients’’
46 in the role of ‘‘Public Relations’’;—counsel, required by mysterious intricacies of the new industrial pattern.
47 This particular new kind of public relations counsel is not to be confused with the many innocuous varieties of assistant vice presidents in charge of receiving secondary callers on management presidents; nor with any employee of any advertising agency, nor again with free lance promotional copy writers; nor with any of the small fry space hounds, stunt stooges, or promotional men,—no matter how ambitious,—who have not attained major power in extra-legal industrial intrigue.
48 For this special invisible behind the board chairman yama yama an appropriate name is ‘‘publicitor.’’