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...would sponsor a White House Conference on the American Family. While no one can doubt the sincerity of Carter's belief in strong families, the promise was intended to shore up electoral support among cultural conservatives in general and Roman Catholics in particular (Presidential Campaign, 1978; transcript of Lumiere interview with Jody Powell, July 17, 1995).
In 1980 such a conference more or less occurred. It was called the White House Conference on Families because Americans, including officials in the Carter administration, increasingly disagreed not only about so called family policy, but also about what constituted "the family." Partly because those disagreements were often bitter, no conference session took place any closer to the White House than Baltimore, Maryland. During the intervening three and one-half years, what had been a third-level campaign promise (not remembered by Carter's press secretary Jody Powell 19 years later) turned into at least a second-level political liability. Indeed, family policy became an ideal vehicle for the new Christian right to ride into the political mainstream (transcript of Lumiere interview with Jody Powell, July 24, 1995, p. 19).
The general course of events should be no surprise. As psychologist Arlene Skolnick observed in 1991, fear that families were less than they should be and might be getting worse was an "American tradition" stretching back more than 300 years. Accordingly, protection of the family has been a powerful motif among reformers since the origins of mass politics before the Civil Wal, and rhetorical legacies from the late 19th century and policy decisions from what is usually called the Progressive Era before World War I still influence the discussion. In all periods worries about the family were typically mixed with other concerns, including conflicts over race, religion, gender, sex, and social order (Skolnick, 1991, p. 8). (2)
From Purity Crusaders to the Welfare State
By the late 19th century the bourgeois, Victorian or (as many would have said at the time) Christian family was triumphant as an American ideal but much less than fully established as a social reality. Middle class Protestant reformers within the overwhelmingly Protestant culture feared with some justification that Civil War service had rendered men increasingly susceptible to such family-threatening vices as drinking alcohol and marital infidelity. These reformers repeatedly invoked the need to protect the family as they mobilized grassroots anger and aspirations, built private benevolent organizations, and lobbied for government action at the local, state, and federal level. Most of these "purity crusaders" thought the worst threats to the family came from indulgence in personal "vices," notably divorce, gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and pornography (including information about birth control). A minority of reformers, including Protestant advocates of the social gospel, argued that poverty and economic exploitation threatened individual virtue and family stability at least as much as did sins of the flesh. These activists created "institutional churches" and urban settlement houses to provide a range of services, sometimes including daily child care for mothers forced to work outside the home. Often they advocated legislation to improve working conditions for men as well as women. In other words, in the late 19th century, middle class religious and cultural conservatives (by current cosmopolitan standards) were not necessarily economic conservatives. And while self-designated protectors of the family usually emphasized the plight of ostensibly helpless wives and children, they also paid attention to the personal behavior of and economic opportunities available to husbands. Outside of the middle class, many supporters of the Populist party combined religious or cultural conservatism with an American version of anti-corporate radicalism (Foster, 2002; Pivar, 1973; Lasch, 1977, p. 6). (3)
The foremost--perhaps the only--19th-century federal legislation that might qualify as economic family policy in the contemporary sense was the provision of pensions for Union veterans of the Civil War and their survivors. Despite charges, both justified and wildly exaggerated, that the program was mired in corruption, Republican administrations in particular steadily increased benefits and loosened standards for eligibility. Between 1880 and 1910 pension expenditures comprised one-fourth of the federal budget. In addition, southern states provided more modest benefits for Confederate veterans and their survivors (Skocpol, 1992, pp. 1-149).
The Progressive Era from roughly 1900 to World War I revealed both an extraordinary concern with issues relating to the family, however generally defined, and the beginning of what historian Edward D. Berkowitz calls the "first experiment in self-conscious family policy" (1988, p. 47). This age of mild reform coincided with increasing political activism among women, notably stepped up agitation for women's suffrage, the emergence of a fleer "new woman" among young adults, a rising divorce rate and falling birth rate among those whom Theodore Roosevelt called the "best races" (quoted in Lasch, 1977, p. 8) and the arrival of millions of poor Catholic and Jewish immigrants whose family values differed from the American bourgeois ideal. Indeed, the Progressive Era still qualifies as the period in which Americans worried most earnestly about the fate of the family and conducted the fiercest debate about the meaning of masculinity and femininity. Worries about these changes prompted countless speeches, sermons, and articles as well as numerous books offering advice on virtuous living and proper child rearing. Some federal legislation reflected the fears of changing gender relations and obsession with personal vices. In 1914 Congress officially established Mother's Day to honor the steady homemaker untainted by the ways of the "new woman." The nationwide panic about prostitution--"white slavery"--in 1910 produced the Mann Act, which became the chief source of federal court cases before Prohibition. Advocates of Prohibition emphasized that a ban on the sale of alcohol would protect wives and children from beatings or desertion by drunken husbands (Connelly, 1980; Filene, 1975, chaps. 1-3). (4)
The overwhelmingly white middle class social welfare side of progressivism combined the legacies from late nineteenth century benevolence, a strong belief in scientific and social scientific expertise as ways to define the social good and efficiently cure social ills, and an uneasy faith in government regulation. Progressive reformers, not to mention Americans as a whole, differed among themselves about the legitimate role of experts, the effectiveness of voluntary benevolence, and the limits of government coercion. These differences contributed significantly to the complexities of the movement and the era that continue to intrigue historians. Ultimately the Progressive Era yielded a host of local and state regulations and then, on the federal level, a rudimentary regulatory state that included the Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and Federal Reserve Board. Some of these measures, though not conceived as self-conscious experiments in family policy, affected the ways in which families lived, often decisively, as was the case with enforced racial segregation. In many cases, some sort of connection was obvious to everyone involved. Proponents of women's suffrage used a venerable "maternalist" argument that women voters would purify society as they purified domestic life, while opponents often claimed that women voters would lose their femininity and thus imperil the home. Workmen's compensation (as the measure was usually called despite significant numbers of women and children in the workforce) was heralded as a way to protect families when the male "breadwinner" was injured on the job. Once again, those whom we would now call religious or cultural conservatives were not necessarily opponents of government regulation and welfare legislation. Moreover, activists frequently invoked protection of the family as a rationale for voluntary or government actions even when the connection was tenuous. Historian Eric Rauchway (2001) has suggested that the "liberal family" was "one of the main organizing metaphors" favored by the white middle class reformers of the pre-World War I era. In the ideal metaphoric social family, the poor and unfit were to be controlled where necessary, educated and reformed as appropriate, and protected until in most cases (it was hoped) they could fend for themselves and live as responsible citizens.
The most explicit family policies of the Progressive Era related to mothers and children, who were widely regarded as permanently dependent even though at least a plurality of households relied on their wages. The reform record was mixed. Juvenile courts proliferated with the goal of reforming rather than punishing adolescents who had fallen into crime. There was little support for publicly funded day care for children because such a program ran counter to the prevailing opinion that they needed to be nurtured at home by their mothers (and the proper role of mothers was nurturing children). Similarly, protection of children from physical abuse by their (often immigrant) parents was left to voluntary benevolent organizations and ad hoc action by the police. The United States Children's Bureau, established in 1912 within the Department of Labor, disseminated advice on child rearing in an effort to combat infant mortality. Child labor attracted widespread attention. For instance, Protestant churches sponsored "Child Labor Sundays" to dramatize the exploitation of "holy innocents." Many states restricted the most dangerous child labor, in factories and mines, but parallel federal legislation was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1918. State laws limiting working hours for women, often advocated on the grounds of protecting the health of potential mothers, barely survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1906. By 1921, such laws existed in 41 states (Michel, 1993, 279-293; Sealander, 2003, pp. 20-22, 56, 130, 137-245; Skocpol, 1992, pp. 370-374).
The movement for what were called "mothers' pensions" or "widows' pensions" left the longest institutional legacy. This campaign received a major boost from President Theodore Roosevelt. Although Roosevelt yielded to no one in his denunciations of white slavers and childless "new women," he seems to have inherited from his father, a leader of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a special concern for families left economically vulnerable by deceased or irresponsible fathers. In 1909 Roosevelt presided over a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, the first of several precursors of the Carter-era White House Conference on Families. In keeping with the progressive emphasis on national unity and tactic of representation of all interest groups deemed legitimate, the three conference vice presidents were a Protestant, Catholic, and Jew active in the cause of child protection. Sharing the growing dissatisfaction with orphanages, the prevailing mode of caring for orphaned and abandoned children, Roosevelt in principle endorsed government assistance. Because "home life" was the "highest and finest product of civilization," the conference declared, "children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons." More wary of activist government, Edward Devine of the New York Charity Organization Society called mothers pensions an "insidious attack upon the family." Yet the principle was widely accepted. Within 2 decades nearly every state had on paper a program to aid single women--not necessarily widows--raising dependent children (Davidson, 1994, p. 74; Lindenmeyer, 1997, pp. 18-22, Olasky, 1992, pp. 141-142; Sealander, 2003, p. 106).
World War I and the Red Scare that followed exacerbated the country's most volatile social and cultural divisions, raised skepticism of government regulation, and doomed progressivism as the dominant mood. As battles over religious issues raged between Protestant theological liberals, many of whom were social gospelers, and theological conservatives, the most prominent of whom came to be known as fundamentalists, the latter camp increasingly focused on personal salvation and suppression of personal vices. Thus social reform seemed at best a distraction from what really mattered--salvation through Christ. Cultural conservatives of all faiths responded vigorously to a slight increase in premarital sex among young adults as well as a widespread discussion of sex in the news media. Fundamentalists sought to protect high school students from the teaching of Darwinism because, as Rev. John Roach Straton put it, "Monkey men means monkey morals" (Ribuffo, 1983, p. 90). The Ku Klux Klan, which may have attracted as many as five million members, not only pressed an ideological attack on Catholics, Jews, and assertive African Americans, but also used coercion and violence to enforce chastity, marital fidelity, and Prohibition. Given this agenda, the Klan's auxiliary of culturally conservative women thrived. Roman Catholic clergy and middle class laity, convinced that sexy Hollywood movies spread decadent Hollywood morals, led an incrementally successful campaign to censor the movies (Hart, 2002, chaps. 1-3; Ribuffo, 1983, pp. 90-92; Walsh, 1996, chaps. 1-3). (5)
Although no longer fashionable within the Zeitgeist, social welfare progressivism persisted into the 1920s. Always a coalition of disparate and sometimes incongruous allies, the "movement" lost focus and fragmented as new issues came to the fore. A constitutional amendment allowing the federal government to restrict child labor passed Congress but never came close to ratification. Skimpy aid from mothers' pensions reached no more than one-fifth of the families in need. A federal Women's Bureau created in 1920 vigorously defended the Progressive Era legislation which gave special protection to women. A Supreme Court decision in 1923 striking down a District of Columbia...
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