One of the things people miss is the economy of the 1950s. In many places a (white) man with a high school education could get a job that would allow him to support a stay-at-home wife and children, buy a modest house, buy a car, and take annual vacations. Of course this was due to the fact that the US's major economic competitors of the time had been laid to ruins in WWII, and many of those countries which would become competitors were still peasant societies (or something close to it). That economy will never return.