What If There Had Been Social Media in the 1950s?

Rock n’ roll, the Korean War, McCarthyism, racial segregation, the space race…how would computers and SmartPhones have altered these pathways?

At the encouragement from one of my friends whom I met on Medium, I’ve been writing a series of alternate universe thought-experiments. These essays speculate on how American history (or world history) might have unfolded differently if social media had arisen earlier in our timeline.

Previously, I’ve written respective pieces on how history might have played out had social media been a part of American life throughout the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s.

So now, I’m going to do the same for the 1950s. Rather than using the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, or World War II as inflection points, I’ll focus on how a hypothetical World Wide Web of the 50s could have endured social media chaos based on the rise of McCarthyism and Cold War threats.

How would instant-messaging, video-conferencing, and image-sharing have been affected under the daunting shadows of Joseph McCarthy and Nikita Khrushchev?

Earlier Fights Over Civil Rights?

For this timeline, let’s assume that the television and film industries had sprouted during the 1880s (preceded by radios and telephones becoming commonplace during the Jeffersonian/Napoleonic era). Aerial imagery and novice audio would have captured phenomena such as the Krakatoa explosion, inauguration of the Eiffel Tower, or spread of ragtime music throughout the American Deep South. Our screens would have depicted Asian immigrants being hounded due to The Chinese Exclusion Act or dead bodies stacking up during the Battle of Wounded Knee.

The Earp Family probably dominates the three-ring circus brought on by lawlessness of the Wild West, spawning plenty of tabloid fodder. Authors such as Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde rule the literary world with the same swagger that “tech bros” own Silicon Valley in the present.

Due to the impact of Sojourner Truth’s death in 1883, media mavens broach intersectionality a lot sooner than in our reality. Amidst the battle for black liberation, opposite factions may have lined up behind Booker T. Washington and Alexander Crummell — with George Washington Williams refereeing a civil rights coalition in the type of role our timeline saw MLK take.

Women’s suffrage may have accelerated as Belva Ann Lockwood, Phoebe Couzins, and Susanna Salter capitalized upon audio-visual venues to promote gender equality. Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles could have been early pioneers for LGBT+ rights, while Plenty Horses and Chae Chan Ping took to the airwaves to lead the fight against imperialism and ethnic genocide.

There may have been earlier resistance to white supremacy and misogyny as Cap Anson and Moses Walker appealed to baseball fans. At the same time, Buffalo Bill, Mary Myers, and Anna T. Jeanes could have bridged the entrepreneurial world with a sphere of confluence between philanthropy and civic activism. News anchors and reporters would have been in utter awe of these folks!

By the 1940s, the computer has become a mainstay — especially as a response to reenergize business sectors following a less severe version of the Great Depression. As Harry Truman’s presidency deals with chaos, the Internet emerges. Public fear and outrage following the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been the first major American debate raging across cyberspace (the way “Monicagate” was, during the earliest days of the Internet within our timeline).

No Saviors in the White House

Initially, the failures of General Friedrich Paulus at the Battle of Stalingrad could have cultivated a pro-Soviet movement within the United States, under the philosophy of the-enemy-of-my-enemy is my friend. But pushback to those sentiments would have been underway as soon as Vyacheslav Molotov’s role in accelerating the Manhattan Project within Soviet borders was leaked to the public. Any revelations about Truman’s role in enabling this dynamic should have inevitably created more backlash toward Truman himself.

As fears intensified over the Soviet Union’s threat to the rest of the world, how would American culture have shifted? Might social media of the late-1940s and early-1950s have led to a surge in anti-Russian hate crimes?

Discourse about the morality (or lack thereof) of nuclear proliferation would have made Truman even less popular than he was in our reality. Would he still have eked out a victory over Thomas Dewey? Who knows? While Dewey’s policies could have lent themselves to an insurgent candidacy boosted by social media fervor, that theoretical advantage may have been offset by Dewey’s own failure to speak beyond generic and vanilla platitudes.

Assuming Truman had still won in 1948, social media could have made the 1952 Republican presidential primary between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft a lot more competitive. Eisenhower’s charismatic personality would have played well over livestreams and in TV ads. On the other hand, Taft’s noninterventionist positions may have endeared him to the antiwar crowd.

By that same token, the Democratic presidential primary in ’52 could have been a similar coin toss. Dueling narratives between the anti-crime platform of Estes Kefauver and the anti-corruption platform of Adlai Stevenson might have divided the party…and not necessarily in Stevenson’s favor.

One thing of which I am certain: none of these men (Eisenhower, Stevenson, Taft, Kefauver), as a hypothetically-elected president, would have been safe during the 1956 election.

Unlike in our reality, America of this version of the 1950s would have been sharply divided over the Korean War, red-baiting, and post-WWII reconstruction efforts. User-based communities across the Internet would have magnified these tensions.

Red Eggs & Spam

Another key split in American public opinion could have furrowed any hope for national unity following U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s February 1950 “Enemies Within” speech.

Consider how ravenously Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Alex Jones and Josh Hawley crave the spotlight, in the present day. That’s how intensely McCarthy would have ramped up his on-air grandstanding as the House Un-American Activities Committee proceedings were televised.

Because, in a 1950s with Internet, they wouldn’t have merely aired on every major broadcast network…they also would have been livestreamed over Facebook. Attendees would have tweeted every salacious remark made by either McCarthy or those whom he was publicly interrogating.

A hypothetical President Eisenhower and an emerging U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy both would have been diminished by online critics for their hesitance to attack or criticize McCarthy. In fact, as the GOP primary was held for the 1952 presidential nomination, Taft could have piggybacked off of Eisenhower’s feckless sense of caution to possibly capture the nomination himself.

The prospect of a Bob Taft vs. Estes Kefauver showdown in November 1952 might have been intriguing, indeed.

However, even if presidential candidates themselves would have been more skittish about the notion of taking on an out-of-control, airtime-hogging Joseph McCarthy…

Renegade minds amidst the American zeitgeist would have been far less shy!

During the 82nd Congress, a “Gang of Four” spearheaded by Margaret Chase Smith, Ralph Flanders, Stuart Symington, and George H. Bender could have leveraged camera time to weaponize sound bites against McCarthy — reminding the general public about the dangers of witch hunts.

Increasingly, a slew of independent voices in the American media would have shown up to give the senators airtime against McCarthyism: Herbert Block, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Tom Wicker, Frederick Woltman, and Maxine Cheshire.

A 1950s version of Tiktok could have made it all the more convenient for them to disseminate that anti-McCarthy message to the masses.

Undoubtedly, the Soviet Union would have tightly regulated Internet access (including social media) for its own citizens. The Russian people would have been at the mercy of propaganda put out by whoever was setting the U.S.S.R.’s foreign policy agenda.

This would have created an aura of distrust between the Soviet Union and other nations of the world. None of us could know what they were telling their people, and their citizens would have had scant access to the media commentary we were generating.

Thus, a continuous haze of mystery and uncertainty probably envelops Soviet activities — coming to a head with their launch of Sputnik in 1957. Are they building a massive nuclear arsenal? Are they spying on us with intergalactic satellites?

I imagine what would have followed, well into the 1960s, may have resembled clusters from every corner of the ideological spectrum playing their own internal games of “Assassin” amongst themselves.

Who, amidst our ranks, are double agents for the Russians?

Who was sent by Joseph McCarthy to tattle on our private dialogue?

Who is masquerading as “one of us” while carrying water for the KKK…or the homosexuals…or the CIA…or the Vietcong…or the beatniks…or Marilyn Monroe’s groupies?

Imagine rival gangs of jukebox-playing greasers facing off over whether Elvis is a messiah or an opportunist.

The rock n’ roll music genre ostensibly would have taken on a much more combative political tone, as the decade passed.

These assorted powder kegs might have set the stage for 1960s counterculture to become multiple times more incendiary than it was in our reality. Or, alternately, they could have provided the tumultuous discord necessary in order to give hippies, feminists, Black Panthers, queer people, and Merry Pranksters a common canvass atop which they would unite.

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