The only people fucking 7-10 year olds in 1920s America were pedos. Fucking disgusting.
In re: this used to be normal. Marrying 2nd and beyond cousins, yes. Marrying off girls as soon as they start menstruating, no. I have an interest in geneology. In my own family the frequency of older women marrying younger men is more prevelent than it is today. In particular, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when there was a deficit of men of marrying age, the wife being older was a norm. Almost as if there was a societial agreement that because men in these women's age group had been so thinned by the Civil War, these older women got first choice from the next generation of men. Going back to pre-Revolutionary times, my own personal family history--as documented by census records, gravestones, family Bibles, and the occasional marriage documents--does not reflect a societal normalization of pedophilia.
Contrary to what Trumpers would have us believe, pedophilia is NOT a long established and oft-practiced American marriage custom. In my own opinion, those who go on and on about the "good old days" when a man could deflower a teenager on the first night of marriage speaks much louder of those people's current fantasies than it does of any historical reality. Yes, May-December marriage did occur and yes, pedophilia is not exclusivley a phenomenon of the 21st Century. But pedophilia was not the norm in the 19th Century.
Pedophilia among American men today speaks much more to those men's sexual inadequacy than it does to any revival of an alleged common practice from the days of yore. In addition, based on my own experiences, someone bragging about his male ancestors marrying young teenagers speaks more to the speaker's own romantic failures than it it does to his actual geneology.