No doubt it was. Workers were alienated before the industrial revolution too, and we were already emitting CO2 before the 1950s, but the scale of the problem changed in a very impactful way.
Of course I doubt we can get reliable statistics from 1920s, but I don't think you should disregard their argument just because it was happening before. Gambling is as old as numbers, and it's not going to go away, but we can still look for the factors that drastically increased the magnitude of the issue.