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Originally Posted by Lenny2
Sure but a "middle class family" in America, pre-FDR's new deal lived in tenement housing, a family of 6-8 people living in two rooms and sharing a community bathroom with 10 other families.
ALL of the males in the family would work at a factory, 80 hours per week, just so they could put food on the table (food being a family's biggest expense in those days)
It was a far far cry from what we consider "middle class" today.
So when I say there was no middle class back then, by today's standards, that's an accurate assesment.
Today's lower class (welfare) has a higher standard of living than the "middle" class did in those days.
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People working 80 hours a week in a factory were never "middle class". They were poor. The pre-FDR middle class were hanging around speakeasys, listening to jazz, drinking gin in the back seats of Ford Model-T's and generally enjoying the flapper lifestyle prior to the great depression.
One of my great great aunts used to run a hat shop in the town she lived in and made a fairly easy life of it back in the 1910-1920s. So obviously not only was she not working 80 hours a week selling hats, but other people (well, other women, lets be honest) felt as though they had enough money to spend on hats to keep her in business and well fed indefinately. For all I know, that hat store may still be in some far off tucked away corner of my family... although most likely she got fucked by the depression just like everyone else.
To borrow heavily from Dickens, Oliver Twist and his ilk were poor. Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Marleys were middle class (probably pushing upper middle, but by no means rich nor royalty). The middle class was not as extensive, surely... the majority of people were mostly poor, with a smaller section of middle class, a smaller section still of the non-titled richer upper classes, and of course the top 1% ultra stupid rich. What FDR did was make conditions such that a lot of those dirt-grubbing poor people could have a little upward mobility into the middle class, at the cost of limiting the insanely huge opportunities the rich-to-uber-rich enjoyed (which is why the rich-to-uber-rich still, to this day, hate him and everything he'd ever done).
As for the 'standard of living' thing that claims that todays poor people are ever-so-much-better-off than yesterday's rich(er) people, that's a highly debatable topic based on what you consider 'standard of living'. Sure, due to our consumerist wastrel lifestyle even the most meagre lifestyles can support the aquisition of a lot of 'stuff', but I don't personally believe that the accumulation of stuff directly leads to a higher standard of living. Where's the criteria? An average poor person with at least some modicum of health insurance could certainly live LONGER than even a king 150 years ago, but who lived better? Does the ability for everyone to buy a disposable $30 DVD player today mean that we're utterly superior in lifestyle to people in the 50s, many of whom didn't even own a TV but were in far better shape, could look forward to a lifetime of job security, low crime rates and clean urban centers?
There's a trend lately of people going off to do what is known as 'freeholding'. They sell off all the crap they don't need, move to the country, buy 40 acres or so of tenable farm land and run a self-sufficient farm, often times completely off the grid (self contained power, water, sewage etc). Some people get sick of the high intensity and transient nature of our modern society and want to get back to a simpler existance, so much so that they're willing to throw off many of the trappings that you or I might consider essential to daily life, to acheive it. I think it's fairly clear that although an agrarian existance may have been more physically demanding that not everyone would agree that it had an inferior standard of living.