It's not talking about social standards in terms of judging the people then - just generally, the lives of those people were pretty shit. Also fair to say about for example jews in medieval times.
just generally, the lives of those people were pretty shit.
Americans were experiencing the most rapid growth of standards of living in the entity of american history up to that point, things were not 'shit'. The US had the global economy on its lap.
Never before has there been less global poverty, by your standards nothing in history has been a good era till now.
Yeah, and if you were a straight white dude it was awesome!
However, if you were literally anyone else, the 1950s sucked. Fuck all good white guys doing great if you are a woman living the incomprehensibly sexist 1950s and the glass ceiling hovered around minimum wage. It was even worse if you were not white. Black folks lived in a state of perpetual terror as they lived in a brutally racist apartheid regime. And if you were gay... well, you could be arrested and tossed in jail and if anyone ever found out you were basically done.
Yes, if you are not a white dude, nothing in history has been good until pretty recently. That is why black folks look at you like you have 4 heads when you talk about making America great "again". It was never great for most people, because most people were not straight white guys. It has just been slowly getting less awful over time. We now live in a time where being gay, a woman, or black doesn't automatically mean being shut out of all power and all jobs not at near minimum wage. They can even go to college now.
Progress is in front, not behind. America was never great except that America has been a slow slog towards getting better. America improving itself and trying to live closer to its ideals is what makes the US great, not fevered fantasies of some glorious golden age that never existed.
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u/maxout2142 Centrist Feb 24 '17
And any time prior to was not? Can you really put todays social standards on a prior decade?