Abundance Fabricated
Abundance Fabricated
Abundance Fabricated
Abundance, Fabricated
Automations Promise to the Postwar American Left
Max Novendstern
Harvard University
May 5, 2014
I. INTRODUCTION
Once or twice in a generation, The New York
Times declared on April 7, 1963, a single word
captures the attention, imagination, and concern of
the American people. For previous generations,
abolition, unionization, and prohibition were
such words. They seemed to offer some profound
clue to the problems and the promise of complex
forces at work in Americas past. In the Sixties, the
Times continues, America had another such word.
Today, the word is automation.
1
Even the most casual Times reader would appre-
ciate the sentiment. Over the course of the Sixties,
Americas newspaper of record published more than
seventeen thousand articles containing the word au-
tomation. Readers would learn, for instance, that
in 1962 John F. Kennedy ranked full employment
at a time when automation. . . is replacing men to
be the major domestic challenge of the Sixties.
They would learn in 1967, Nikita Khrushchev called
automation the means we [communists] will use to
lick you capitalists.
2
They would learn that work life was on the
precipice of foreboding change (Automation Is
Said to Create Boredom Along With Joblessness,
one headline asserted, adding mysteriously, Edu-
cation in New Recreation Philosophy Should be
Compulsory
3
); that family life was too (Automa-
tion Tied to Home Tension, Automation Tied to
Mental Stress
4
); that in 1957, Pope Pius XII saw t
to weigh in (Pope Urges Care With Automation)
5
;
and that in 1955, Congress held fourteen days of
public hearings on the broad economic and social
impacts of the automation revolution.
6
But a perceptive reader might be bemused. Be-
Automation References in The New York Times
cause three years before Congress hearings on
automation, and a decade before The Times declared
it the word of its the generation, no Times reader
would never have heard of the word. Because the
word did not exist.
In 1952, technology consultant John Diebold
introduced automation to the general public as
the title of book he had adapted from his Harvard
Business School graduate thesis, written only one
year before. Dyslexic, Diebold disliked spelling
automatization. Because he was using the word a
lot, he coined something shorter. The origins of this
generation-dening word were humble, indeed,
Diebold conceded.
A. Words Rise
This paper is about the rise of the word
automationhow the word traveled from the title