The Society’s First Conference

In February 1969, two of the Society’s Board members, Charles Williams and Rowan Wakefield, sent out a questionnaire asking members’ thoughts on holding an international meeting, to which we could invite all our members.

The members responded enthusiastically to the questionnaire, but I feared undertaking a conference would be beyond the means of our infant organization. I had failed in my efforts to raise much money for the Society, so we still depended heavily on the meager financial support that I myself could provide, and my savings were rapidly draining away. If the conference failed financially, I feared the Society itself would collapse.

Still, I was impressed by some Society members advocating the conference. One was Frank Hopkins, the State Department planning officer who had taken over the arrangements for our luncheon forums in downtown Washington. Hopkins spoke very favorably of John Gerba, a planner for the U.S. Office of Transportation who had volunteered to become general chairman of the conference and lead its organization. I hardly knew Gerba at the time, but I had learned to trust Hopkins’s judgment, and Gerba seemed genuinely dedicated to making the prospective conference really happen. So, despite my fears, I gave the go-ahead for the “First General Assembly of the World Future Society,” to be held in Washington in the spring of 1971.

Gerba went to work with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm. He quickly recruited a planning committee with a wide range of talents, and the committee began laying out an ambitious program that would attract maximum participation by the Society’s members.

The committee members wanted the conference to reflect their consensus that the future is too important to be left to political leaders. The committee felt, therefore, that the Society needed to pioneer in cross-cultural communications that would enable people in different nations and different walks of life, young and old, male and female, to communicate better with each other and learn to work collegially on world problems.

Striving for maximum inclusiveness, the planning committee arranged 59 formal sessions plus informal sessions that could be set up while the conference was in progress and led by anyone who wanted to discuss a topic. There would also be a “Soap Box” offering open-mike sessions where attendees could take turns addressing the audience on any topic they wanted to discuss.

Due to Gerba and his committee — plus the enthusiasm of our Washington members — an astounding 400 people contributed in various ways to producing our first conference. Some Society members recruited speakers, others distributed conference literature or sought contributions from local Washington businesses. And some members opened their homes to conference attendees who could not afford a hotel room.

Most impressively, Roy Mason, architecture editor of THE FUTURIST, rallied his colleagues in the art and architecture worlds to create, in the conference exhibit hall, a unique futuristic village made of inflatable plastic dwellings and furniture.

The planning and preparation for the conference lasted nearly two years, and while it was going on the Society’s membership was growing. So the expected attendance at the conference — initially 250 — had to be raised to 700. To get additional hotel space, the conference venue was moved from the Mayflower Hotel to the Washington Hilton, then Washington’s largest and most luxurious conference hotel. It was then, as now, much frequented by U.S. presidents, senators, and other top government leaders.

The conference committee contacted almost everybody prominent in the futurist world, and many agreed to come — people like Herman Kahn, co-author of The Year 2000; social psychologist Donald Michael; geochemist Harrison Brown of Caltech, who had authored The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954); IBM’s corporate planner William W. Simmons; policy analyst Ian Wilson of General Electric; engineering professor Willis W. Harman of Stanford Research Institute; engineer-author Theodore Gordon; and scores of others.

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, whose movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had become a sensation, told me he didn’t want to be listed on the conference program due to a provision in his lecture contract, but he came unannounced and participated actively in the conference, as did fellow science-fiction writer Frederik Pohl.

By the time the conference was over, 1,016 people had registered, making it the biggest meeting of futurists ever held up to that time! Most found it a highly rewarding experience, and, to my great relief, there was a modest surplus of revenues over expenditures.

The Washington Post featured our meeting on its front page and provided a colorful description of the people who attended:

“They came from France where the futurist movement started, from Israel, from Argentina, from Britain and Germany and Canada, from every corner of the United States, and their diversity, even superficially, was staggering.

There were beards, hundreds of them. There were gray retired-colonel crew cuts. There were combed, glossy executive haircuts, and extravagantly proliferating bushes, hair that straggled down over collars, hair bound into head bands, hair that languished on shiny furrowed domes. … At the Wednesday opener in the Washington Hilton scores of young people with knapsacks and bedrolls stood in the registration lines next to the button-downs and throat scarves. They mingled, too, right away. They didn’t wait for the closing.”

Though highly successful, our first conference was not without misadventures. The unexpectedly large attendance meant that many conference sessions were jammed, with the worst crowding occurring during the opening reception. This was especially embarrassing for me because I had persuaded our distinguished Board member Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, to attend this reception, and when he arrived the crowd was so thick that I found it impossible to get any refreshments for him except for one miserable glass of ginger ale. Happily, Glenn was impressed by the crowd and soon found himself surrounded by admirers.

Another problem occurred when psychologist B.F. Skinner arrived to sign copies of his famous book Walden Two. His “Meet the Author” session had been scheduled during the supper hour, when the exhibit hall where he was to speak was deserted. I had made a point of being there to greet him, but when I did, there was no one for him to talk to but myself. After locating one other listener, I rushed around the hotel like a town crier shouting that the famed psychologist had arrived. To my relief, a crowd quickly gathered, and Skinner delighted his impromptu audience. Later, several of our members led him away to a party they were having.

Before Skinner left, I had a brief moment to report to him on my visit to the Twin Oaks community, which was based on the psychological principles he advocated. It turned out he had never visited Twin Oaks himself but took a keen interest in it. Unlike most experimental communities established in the 1960s, Twin Oaks survived into the twenty-first century, and at last report was still going strong. Score one for Skinner’s psychological theories!