PARTISAN REVIEW
electrician, just as there was a genius cameraman behind every big
movie-director. The same with the engineers in radio; it was the
men in the control room who really counted. A doctor today was
dependent on his technicians, on the men in the lab and the X-ray
room; they were the birds who could make or break a diagnosis.
John's deep voice swelled as he warmed up to his theme. Their
class was finished, he told the two girls tenderly, sliding an arm
around Kay; but individuals in it had something to pass on to in–
dividuals in the rising class, just as old Europe had something to
pass on to America.
In
these terms, he explained, his marriage to
Kay was a sort of exploitation from below: his vital energies were
exploiting her hereditary resources of culture and taste. Hence, to–
gether, he said, smiling, they represented the future, not a future of
class struggle and violence as the rabid Communists saw it, but a
future of gradual assimilation and mass abundance through the
machine.
John-Kay interrupted- was very much interested in the possi–
bilities of technocracy. He predicted an economy of plenty and leisure
in which everybody would only have to work a few hours a day.
It
was through such an economy that his class, the class of artists
and technicians, would come naturally to the top; the homage people
paid to money today would be paid in the future to the engineers
and contrivers of leisure-time activities. For instance, one of John's
Williams fraternity brothers had become a playground director here
in New York, after having wasted three years in Wall Street trying
to sell stocks and bonds on commission. There was a real future in
playgrounds. Already a man like Commissioner Robert Moses was
the idol of New York. With his splendid new parkways and his
civic playground, Jones Beach, he was making a new city, a city of
planning and pleasure. Private enterprise-suggested John-also had
a part to play, if it had breadth of vision. Yes-agreed Kay-Radio
City, where John worked, was an example of the same thing, under–
taken by enlightened capitalists, the Rockefellers, and there was the
new Museum of Modern Art, which also had Rockefeller hacking.
New York was experiencing a new Renaissance, with the new Medicis
competing with public ownership to create a modern Florence. You
could even see it in Macy's, where enlightened merchants, the
Strauses, were training a corps of upper-middle-class technicians, like
