What If There Had Been Social Media in the 1920s?

Would we have made more progress throughout this past century…or would we just have devolved into futuristic ogres?

There’s a lot to complain about when it comes to our public leaders and authority figures. In that same vein, we’ve seen many negative ramifications arise from the advent of the World Wide Web and other screen-based innovations.

My purpose, today, isn’t to debate whether the Internet and social media have made life better or worse than it can be. I feel that most people would agree how we need to strike a balance between online civility and online empowerment.

Instead, I’d like to do a thought-experiment. I’ve always been fascinated by alternate universes where history played out differently than in our lived reality. So, let’s dream up an alternate timeline where social media went mainstream way before the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.

Like, let’s say that computers and video cameras were invented a good half-century earlier than in actual history. Even if they’d been dreamed up at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, computers would have led to some version of the Internet. That venue would have provided a platform for some manifestation of social media.

How would it have developed? How would national and global affairs have been shaped by it?

This meditation of mine, obviously, is purely speculative. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that many of the same prominent public figures in world history still would have followed their passions or compulsions.

How might our social fabric have been enhanced — or hindered — by those hypothetical circumstances? And what role could social media have played?

An Alternate Universe

If television and film had been invented during the 1850s (presumably with the telephone and radio having emerged around the time of the 1776 American Revolution), that would have dramatically altered the course of the Civil War in America. Put yourself in the place of a civilian who witnesses biological brothers from the same family attempting to kill each other, on a remote Kentucky battlefield — splattered across the screen of a black-and-white antennae TV. Think of what it would have been like for Americans to be sitting in their living rooms, in the Summer of 1873, watching Sojourner Truth be interviewed by Joseph Pulitzer on the publisher’s THN (The Hearst Network) evening news program.

Conceivably, we may have seen the earliest household computers by the 1910s. Some incarnation of the World Wide Web could have surely followed in the 1920s or 1930s — and really taken off in the 1940s.

I’m assuming there still would have been a digital divide between socioeconomic classes. But if enough of this technology was incorporated into public school classrooms…that alone should dramatically shift the second half of an alternate Twentieth Century into uncharted waters.

Let’s say, prior to 1920, most of America’s presidents and congresspersons had remained largely the same. If there was widespread dissatisfaction with Woodrow Wilson’s accommodationist presidency, could politicians other than Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, or Herbert Hoover have succeeded him? Could social media have boosted the out-of-the-box ideas of Hiram Johnson or Frank Lowden? Might it have propelled the maverick war hero profiles of Leonard Wood or John Pershing?

And then there was the 1918 Spanish Flu. Unlike with COVID-19, Americans struggled helplessly as the 1918–1921 pandemic ripped through the population with no real medical treatment. How would America have coped with that, if the Internet had been at its fingertips?

Conspiracy Theories

According to HealthLine’s Richard Gunderman, the “Spanish Flu” moniker arose because Spain was more transparent about its spread than other countries (including the United States) were. In fact, one theory speculates that this pandemic may have actually originated in rural Kansas. But, nobody knows for certain.

If social media had been around in 1918, things would have been different. In our reality, big cities were subject to quarantine as influenza ripped through the human population. In particular, it devastated Indigenous communities within the United States. Yet, it wasn’t prominent in the national media headlines.

Imagine what Tumblr or Facebook would have been like, throughout this alternate reality of 1919 and 1920. Spaniards may have been scapegoated for the pandemic by fearmongers. Such a stigma could have extended to people of Hispanic, Latino(a), and Chicano(a) heritage, in general — as well as to members of Tribal Nations.

Could we have seen Gerald Winrod blogging about how the U.S. should exile anybody with ties to either Spain or Latin America?

Would “Bombay Fever” have been treated as a “co-conspirator” to the Spanish Flu — inciting hatred and violence against North American residents of South Asian Indian descent?

Perhaps irresponsible doctors may have taken to cyberspace, extolling the virtues of castor oil and bloodletting to rid oneself of influenza?

Or, Seventh-Day Adventists might have used the pandemic as an excuse to rail against human consumption of poultry or swine. Many of them could have based this declaration on the pretense that chickens and pigs were theorized as possible vectors for transmitting the Spanish Flu.

Couple all of this with the fact that there was no viable treatment or cure for Spanish Flu during this era. Although Edward Jenner and Benjamin Jesty were instrumental in revolutionizing the smallpox vaccination throughout the late-Eighteenth and early-Nineteenth Centuries, most ailments still lacked reliable immunizations or antibiotics to combat them.

As journalist Leoné Chao-Fung points out, young men — and young people, in general — endured the greatest mortality rates from the 1918 influenza. Along with the lack of germ theory within medical science, this reality was due to two additional factors. Soldiers, who were predominantly male in World War I, spent a lot of time in close quarters. Also, Americans between the ages of 20 to 40 had stronger immune systems, which weren’t as prepared for the unusual virulence of Spanish Flu compared to those of their younger and older counterparts.

Hence, another reason why “Hemingrebels” are commonly known as “the Lost Generation.” If you were born between 1878 and 1902, statistically, this influenza posed a greater risk to you than it did to Civil War veterans or future World War II veterans.

Great Leaps Toward Progress?

In our reality, the Spanish Flu ended in 1921. Would it have undergone a longer trajectory, if cyberspace had existed throughout the Roaring Twenties?

Approximately eight years passed between when the Spanish Flu had visibly subsided and when the stock market crashed in 1929. During that period, an accumulation of terrible policies created a spectrum of ill-timed conditions that converged to result in the Great Depression.

According to business professor Barry M. Mitnick and economics professor Aleksandar Tomic (in an interview with Business Insider’s Anne Field), there were seven major factors that ushered in this gloomy era of American history:

• Bank speculation that was unregulated and underregulated
• The reckless actions of investors on “Black Tuesday” (October 24, 1929)
• Badly-planned mass production of industrial goods and agricultural commodities
• High rates of personal debt leading consumers to drastically cut their spending
• Andrew Mellon’s inept oversight at the Treasury Department
• President Herbert Hoover’s overall weak leadership
• Congressional passage of the Smoot-Hawley Bill (aka The United States Tariff Act of 1930)

If computers and Internet had been available to Hemingrebels and their progenitors, could many of these blunders have been avoided?

There are some scenarios I could see playing out where Americans’ health would have been taken more seriously in a post-WWI digital age. Especially with different leaders at the helm.

For example, more widespread knowledge about preventing — and curbing spread of — the Spanish Flu likely should have conditioned Americans to become more cautious. An agronomist such as David F. Houston could have taken to 1920s-style Twitter and Instagram, warning fellow Americans about Mellon’s imprudence. Other representatives of the Federal Reserve — including Board chairman Roy A. Young — may have felt more emboldened to speak out about the value of caution, in order to maintain the public’s trust.

Imagine a 1920 Republican presidential ticket headlined by Hiram Johnson, with Leonard Wood as his vice-presidential running mate. Aside from the Johnson/Wood penis jokes that might have inevitably arisen in future decades, this duo could have steered a solid national course that Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all failed to blaze. Although the Hiram Johnson from our reality was an isolationist, he would ultimately become a conditional supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Meanwhile, Wood’s foreign policy experience (and his popularity amongst Teddy Roosevelt loyalists) could have served as a diplomatic devil’s advocate to Johnson opposing U.S. involvement with the League of Nations.

In our timeline, FDR brought us out of the Great Depression — and the legislative package that would become his New Deal led to valuable domestic social programs. FDR may never have skyrocketed to national prominence in a parallel universe dominated by Johnson/Wood leadership. But, with preventative measures being disseminated across TV screens and computer monitors, the Spanish Flu would have been fresh in everyone’s memory as the United States dealt with new challenges related to economic balance and foreign relations.

Future Forks-in-the-Road

Digital technology certainly would have extended beyond U.S. borders. An infinite number of twists-and-turns could have been taken — harnessing the power of electronic media — to alter our historical itinerary.

Spain, acting responsible in terms of pandemic mitigation, may have been treated like a “killed messenger.” On the other hand, not everyone in the world was paranoid. King Alfonso XIII could have taken to the airwaves (and his modem!) to give other countries a firsthand testimonial of the influenza’s effects and survivability.

Even if Alphonso XIII had rallied David Lloyd George, Alexandre Millerand, Victor Emmanuel III, Yoshihito Taishō, Mikhail Vladimirsky, and (whoever became) Woodrow Wilson’s successor to harness the power of cyberspace in the name of protecting global citizens — their international enemies may have resented such public transparency. Over the course of the next eight decades, there’s no doubt in my mind that the likes of Adolf Hitler, Enver Pasha, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Michel Micombero, and Saddam Hussein would have censored the Internet heavily within their own countries.

Had such restrictions become the norm, in and around those regions…then how might U.S. foreign policy — and international relations, as a whole — have unfolded much differently?

Those paths jut out, across innumerable degrees of imagination.