Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
was the first to be extolled by Republicans as a traditional, iconic, “American values” family inasmuch as it displayed free-market values of self-sufficiency and autonomy. In this way, economics-focused family pledges also began to promote neoliberal values, intertwining, for the first time, the Hearth and Soul family approaches within partisan (Republican) agenda and presaging a dynamic soon to come. On their part, Democratic platforms, much like the Republican ones in the Progressive Era, did not address family values but concentrated on addressing bare economic need, eschewing the Soul frame for the Hearth.50 “Family need” was a prominent theme running through Democratic platforms of the 1950s, serving as the premise for multiple promises of state-provided material help, such as through the Food Lunch and Food Stamp programs51 and numerous child welfare programs and services.52 In this way, Democrats after the Depression and after World War II revived the earlier social-progressive creed that obligated the national state to achieving material family well-being, the Hearth ideal.
In sum, in the midcentury decades of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, family came to slowly inform party competition and political development in new ways. Under the pall of the Great Depression and led by the New Deal Liberal-Labor Democrats, the economic security of families was elevated in the parties’ agenda, now viewed as an “inescapable obligation” of the modern national state. Policy attention to family was no longer confined to “special” family categories, such as the families of veterans, workers’ families, or immigrant families; instead, parties began to assert national state responsibility for a safety net for family as a more universal category. Democrats approached family as an economic distributional unit, a way to classify, direct, and target specific national programs to families based on their material need or income but also as the collective material context of the experience of human vulnerability.
Republicans at this time, more resembling Democrats of the earlier Progressive Era, were less committed to the economic family ideal as a lasting obligation on the national state. Instead, they circumscribed these pledges to their support of free markets and associated values such as private initiative and self-reliance, harnessing individualist market-based values to oppose the expansion of the national state. Although families remained incidental to Republicans’ emerging neoliberal agenda, in pledges aimed at protecting the autonomy of the yeoman farm family, they began to construct neoliberal family values. The values of self-reliance and free enterprise were asserted as traditional American values, part of the “American method” to resolve all economic and social problems, and gained some traction with the onset of the Cold War and the battle against communism in the 1950s. In this way, family began to gain Republican attention as the potential locus of valuational, antistatist, market-based solutions to national and international problems.
The 1960s: Expansion of the Hearth Approach
Through the 1960s, Democrats continually promised to provide “a better life for all families,” steadily pushing the bounds of national state obligations and its machinery to include more economic needs of families and individuals. In their 1956 platform, Democrats had made the first of many pledges to the elimination of poverty, avowing to increase all family incomes, especially of those earning the least.53 In 1960, they went further, pledging to the “Economic Bill of Rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience [in 1944],” many of which provided for family (not just individual) material welfare: promising “the right to earn a minimum wage sufficient for families basic needs (clothing, shelter, recreation)”; the right of a farmer to “give him and his family a decent living”; and “the right of every family to a decent home.”54
Low-income families, in particular, received heightened attention, and the party pledged expanded programmatic assistance to them in the form of housing, city revitalization and slum clearance, public assistance benefits, community programs, and so on. To this end, Democrats called for further expansion of the national state, condemning “the present inequitable, underfinanced hodgepodge [of] state (welfare) plans.”55 Republican platforms in the 1960s also addressed families’ material well-being, particularly in the case of low-income families.56 They pledged support for special education programs for poor preschool children,57 help to low-income farm families,58 and housing programs for low-income families.59 Like Democrats, they too began to address poverty as a scourge capable of directed policy elimination, making references (albeit in a more subdued tone) to “our crusade against poverty” and to “conquering disease, poverty and grinding physical demands.”60
Republicans, however, also continued to oppose the Democratic expansion of the national state on the grounds of free-market values and principles. In their pledges to address human needs and assist low-income families, they relied on monetary and fiscal policies and privatization, rather than only entitlement programs and bureaucracies. In the case of housing for lower-income families, they proposed a system of economic incentives to attract private industry to the low-cost housing market.61 They condemned the Kennedy-Johnson administration for having “refused to take practical free enterprise measures to help the poor” and vehemently opposed the Democratic war on poverty insofar as it “would dangerously centralize Federal controls and bypass effective state, local and private programs.”62 Republican platforms thus did not elevate family economic need to the level of a right obligating the national state but addressed it more as a matter of compassion, repeatedly stating that “there are many things a free government cannot do for its people as they can do them [and] [t]here are some things no government should promise or attempt to do.”63 Despite these prevailing differences over the national state, in the long period from the New Deal through the Great Society, both parties increasingly converged in pursuing a Hearth family approach, focusing on a family’s economic security as an important policy concern.
At the same time, Republican platforms—much more than Democratic ones—continued to also highlight market-based values. Initially, the Republican Party had embraced such values wholly as centered on the individual, and family was incidental to this focus. In the 1960s, this began to change. Republican platforms began their long turn toward a Soul family approach, now connecting “family” to free-market “values” first in planks on poor families and welfare reform. In planks on juvenile delinquency, the Republican Party began to call for federal programs to “strengthen family life.”64 The party also openly condemned Democratic welfare programs not only on the usual grounds that they created “debilitating dependence which erodes self-respect” but now also that the programs “discourag[ed] family unity and responsibility.”65 By 1968, the Republican Party was calling for revision of existing welfare programs to “encourage and protect strong family units.”66 It was on planks regarding welfare and the poor that the party first experimented with and developed what was to become a durable Soul family approach, crystallizing their broad valuational approach with a new focus on the family, connecting social traditionalist values such as family strength and stability to neoliberal, free enterprise values. The fact that the Republican Soul family approach was first politicized in welfare policy as a central ground to limit state involvement underscores the strongly uneven and punitive character of that approach that continued to apply to exclude certain categories of families from programs and benefits even while it created other programs to enhance the rights and autonomy of other kinds of families.
For its part, the Democratic Party too began to develop its own set of values in the 1960s, in this case incorporating values to extend material benefits to more families than ever before. Values of personal dignity, inclusion, and equity permeated its platforms and were increasingly applied to assert the inclusion of (economically) disadvantaged and vulnerable families. With the growing prosperity of the 1960s, the 1964 Democratic platform stressed the “common good” principle by entitling the platform “One Nation, One People.” In that platform, Democrats asserted that the well-being of each American depends on the prosperity and (economic) well-being of all.67 The party thus continued and expanded its focus on the poor and disadvantaged, condemning “the inequity and waste of poverty” and asserting that its national purpose was not only to “continue the expansion of the American economy” but also to “exten[d] the benefits of this growth and prosperity to those who have not fully shared in them.”68