The Roaring 20s

I’ve spent a little time on Linkedin this week, browsing through the endless flow of pandemic-related posts. They fall into a few predictable categories.

• How to stay positive, upbeat, and productive during a global crisis!
• How to manage your team to keep them positive, upbeat, and productive during a global crisis!
• Give me money for tools and tips to stay positive, upbeat, and productive during a global crisis!
• You can exploit this crisis to make more money!
• I just lost my job due to a global crisis!

Even in the best of times, Linkedin is mostly useless pablum, but during a pandemic, it becomes painfully obvious that the business world runs on positivity porn and intellectual dishonesty. It’s a dangerous bubble, disconnected from reality. Here’s an example that really made my hair stand on end:  “The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 was followed by the boom years of the Roaring 20s! We’ll bounce back just like that! Stay positive!”

Where do I even start? Let’s talk about the Roaring 20s, shall we?

We’ll start with the utterly useless or destructive presidencies of the 20s. There was Harding's corrupt presidential administration, noted for the Teapot Dome scandal where the Secretary of the Interior accepted bribes to lease Navy petroleum reserves to private oil companies at low rates with no competitive bidding.

Then there was the ineffectual Coolidge administration. Coolidge was a conservative who advocated isolationism and ignored the agricultural depression which was the precursor to the Great Depression, preaching self-sufficiency and limited government while he himself did almost nothing as the country’s figurehead.

The president who actually presided during the stock market crash and onset of the subsequent economic misery was Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer who decided that the best way to fight the economic downturn was to impose tariffs on foreign goods, thus increasing America’s isolation and reducing the demand for American products overseas.

The 20s also saw the rise of organized crime thanks to the puritanical and ill-fated experiment with Prohibition. Closing down the production and distribution of alcohol threw a lot of people out of work and opened the door to widespread smuggling and its cousin, bribery. Only 5% of illicit alcohol was actually seized by law enforcement, and alcohol poisoning rose 400% as people turned to unregulated or homemade product.

Then there was the common acceptance of eugenics as a practical approach to improving the human race. One of the outcomes of the pseudo-scientific eugenics movement was the forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit” to breed, which resulted in over 60,000 Americans being involuntarily sterilized. American eugenics inspired Hitler in his quest for racial purity in Nazi Germany.

Racism and racial violence ran rampant in the 1920s, with the KKK re-emerging as a national force with 6 million members across the country. There were incidents of mass violence like the Tulsa riot where at least 200 black Americans were murdered and their community destroyed. During the decade there were about 300 known lynchings of black Americans.

And lastly, there’s the unfortunate truth that the fabled prosperity of the 20s was enjoyed by only a few Americans. The majority, 60%, lived below the poverty level. Farmers, immigrants, minorities, and rural Americans were almost totally excluded from the glittering consumerism popularly associated with the 20s.

So no, I don’t want a repeat of the booming 20s, thank you very much.

Americans need a lot less happy talk and nostalgia and a lot more reality. Some people are using the pandemic as an opportunity to talk about and work towards a more equitable, healthy, and sustainable society. Some people are using it as an opportunity to exploit the market and scoop up undervalued assets in a downturn. And some are using it as an opportunity to push destructive agendas such as racism, isolationism, and environmental exploitation.

Which kind of person are you?