What If There Had Been Social Media in the 1930s?

Could Hitler have been stopped in his tracks…or would a cyber-obsessed media just have egged him on?

This past spring, I penned a thought-experiment entitled “What If There Had Been Social Media in the 1920s?” It was a rumination of how history may have taken much different turns, had television, film, computers, and the Internet been widely dispersed during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.

I had such fun with it, I decided to tweak the recipe a little bit: how American history might have unfolded along a divergent course if those technologies had developed one decade later than in my initial thought-experiment.

Again, this exercise is purely speculative. It takes the electronic innovations of the mid-Twentieth Century and plunks them down into our lives almost a full century earlier.

If we’d had Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, et. al., just as World War II was heating up — how could that have influenced our domestic policy and national security priorities?

If social media was a thing during the first half of last century: what role would it have played in other countries carving out their own destinies?

Dimensional Doorways of Dopamine

Let’s imagine that television and film both hit the markets during the 1860s (assuming that telephone and radio were previously invented and mainstreamed amidst the rise of commercial agriculture and additional states joining the union during the Confederation period). Consider the flurry of news broadcasts chronicling Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, domestic terrorism from the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan, and the earliest days of the women’s suffrage movement. Frederick Douglass and Alice Stone Blackwell would have been making the rounds on all of the newsmagazines and nightly programs, the way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Raphael Warnock are today.

Under this hypothetical timeline, the home computer should have become commonplace by the 1920s. If such a techno-whirlwind had brought our stock market new revenue streams amidst the Roaring Twenties, maybe the Great Depression could have been minimized (or avoided altogether)? It’s easy to imagine an alternate version of the World Wide Web popping with American households throughout the 1930s and 1940s — and, by the 1950s, it would have been a routine part of America’s economy.

As always, there would most likely have been a digital divide based on socioeconomic class. But, assuming it was fully integrated into schools and businesses, it would have increasingly touched the lives of even the working poor with greater access.

Let’s say, prior to 1930, most of America’s presidents and congresspersons had remained largely the same. Even without a massive Great Depression exacerbated by Herbert Hoover’s administration, I could picture Franklin Delano Roosevelt still defeating Hoover (albeit probably by a closer margin) due to FDR’s charisma and eloquence. The question, however, is to what extent Roosevelt would have been able to maintain that initial popularity.

Rather than John Nance Garner, suppose that FDR had pushed for Democrats to bless a running mate for him who was far more telegenic and personable. My choice for FDR, in this parallel universe, is going to be Byron “Pat” Harrison — a Mississippi U.S. Senator who was known for being respected by colleagues, beloved by constituents, and proud of his maverick style.

With the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression being minimized (or completely avoided) due to the power of the “Information Superhighway,” our national attention would have very likely shifted toward the genocide and war crimes abroad of Adolf Hitler throughout the 1930s.

Cold Comfort for Führer Wolf?

Given how FDR was overwhelmingly the favorite to win the Democratic presidential primary in 1932, a not-quite-as-weak incumbent in Herbert Hoover would have been tougher to beat. That’s why I have Roosevelt choosing Pat Harrison as his running mate. Harrison supported fair trade, Social Security, and fiscal restraint when formulating tax policy. As a “favorite son” of Mississippi, then-Senator Harrison would have definitely helped out Roosevelt, electorally, in the South.

Under the Roosevelt/Harrison ticket, the emphasis would have been on productive foreign relations that mutually increased revenue for America and its allies. Once elected to the White House, could they have offered a private olive branch to Joseph Stalin?

If U.S. leadership had marketed a pragmatic economic partnership to the Soviet Union’s General Secretary, would they have pitched it to Stalin as an opportunity for him to achieve the Soviet utopia he was envisioning? Stalin might have jumped at the chance to join this alliance as a way to help bring his people out of widespread famine — serving his ends by becoming beloved rather than feared.

With strong U.S.-Soviet foreign relations in this alternate version of the 1930s, Stalin could have been persuaded to reject a potential deal with Hitler by the end of the decade. Nazi Germany certainly would have been a lot more deterred from invading the Soviet Union if Hitler was aware of how sturdy a Stalin/Roosevelt pact could be.

Of course, even with new U.S. allies to the east, the mentally-unwell Hitler still might not have thought twice about poking the bear. But would Hitler have overreached, even while aware of how there were cameras and microphones in every corner of the globe?

Human beings usually operate in their own self-interest. If Americans — and citizens of other developed nations — were witness to the Nazis’ autocracy through crisp audio and brightly-colored motion-picture frames, how intense would outrage across the planet have grown?

Those who were peddling the idea of American exceptionalism would have balked at the oppressive 1933 Civil Service Law excluding non-Aryan citizens and residents.

U.S. capitalists would have watched the devastation and social unrest created by Nazis’ boycotts of Jewish businesses in Germany.

The American people would have been horrified by seeing footage of forced sterilization inflicted upon Germans accused of having “genetic disorders” — especially if journalists had captured it on video and then leaked it to the international press.

And, after the 1935 Nuremberg laws were enacted, Hitler’s eugenics programs would have drawn scorn and panic from every corner of the globe. Envision someone who managed to sneak a video recording device into an actual concentration camp.

Watching prisoners die in a gas chamber via Facebook Live would have been horrific even if you were seeing it from the comfort of your mansion on the North End of Boston.

There’s no doubt in my mind that most countries would have boycotted the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

Could this growing isolation have cut Nazi Germany’s power off at the knees before World War II even had the chance to begin? Can a Hirohito-led Japan achieve such an expansionist undertaking with Nazis being persona non grata on most continents?

If spectators are rightfully driven to vomit when watching people incinerated within a sinister cubicle…how are they going to react to the imagery of Chinese “bayonet babies” being skewered by the Japanese Shogunate?

You can bet that FDR’s “fireside chats” would have been televised, had that technology been available. I could definitely picture Eleanor Roosevelt being offered a TV broadcast time slot based on her syndicated newspaper column entitled My Day.

People from all countries taking to the airwaves in this manner would have inevitably marginalized both Germany and Japan on the world stage.

Détente or Detour?

Granted, even if a megamajority of America conceivably bubbled over with anti-Hitler and anti-Hirohito rage…there are always nutty detractors embracing the inane.

The 1939 equivalent of QAnon and the Proud Boys could have plausibly pumped their fists along with Hitler’s Reichstag speech.

Likewise, some leftists from that college-aged generation of “Great Goldens” would have opposed war on moral grounds. However, even amongst pacifists on the Left: several might have changed their minds if they’d admired Stalin — and then realized the threat posed to Soviet society from its west flank (Nazi Germany) and its east flank (Shogunate Japan).

When Amelia Earhart went missing in 1937, one of the popular conspiracy theories was that the Roosevelts had sent her to spy on Japan’s activities across the Pacific arena.

Another theory has Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crashing on the island of Saipan where they were captured and executed by the Japanese. Did the U.S. government discover this…and then cover it up?

If these theories were indeed false: fringe groups might have weaponized them to try to discredit FDR’s proposed New Deal expansions. But, on balance, I don’t think it would have mattered.

With cameras and microphones so commonplace, Hitler and Hirohito would have had de facto bounties on their heads, in this sort of alternate universe.

And, this inevitability creates an even more tantalizing question…

With World War II drastically shortened — or even avoided, altogether — would there have been any incentive for developing the atomic bomb?

If President Roosevelt had still died from a hemorrhagic stroke in 1945, Harry Truman (if still chosen as FDR’s successor, following Harrison’s 1941 death) might never have had to contemplate such a harrowing option. And, assuming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared nuclear destruction…

Could the decades-long Cold War have been bypassed entirely?

If elected in 1948, would Truman have been in a viable position to run for a second full term in 1952? I suspect that would have depended on how much corruption existed within his administration. In an alternate dimension with no Cold War, camera lenses everywhere, and celebrity culture rising quickly toward the middle of the century — would Truman’s appointees have been of better character than those who served him in our reality?

Had monumental failures just simply been in Truman’s nature, then I could see Harold Stassen — the former Governor of Minnesota — filling the void into which our reality’s Dwight Eisenhower eventually stepped. Stassen was pro-U.N. and in favor of basic income. In the face of any deficiencies from Truman, a robust platform of stability may have boosted Stassen’s appeal after years of global bloodshed.

And, as German- and Japanese-created atrocities were exposed so vividly on the world stage — would many Americans have been compelled to look inward, demanding faster domestic changes?

Given the unapologetic desire of Hitler to snuff lives based on people’s race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation…

Could the 1950s have experienced a vibrant counterculture within America? Would the Traditionalists (members of “the Silent Generation”) of their reality have ended up becoming more like the JonesGens agitators (younger Boomers) of our reality?

That ambience may have given way to an American civil rights movement that was both accelerated and far more transformational.