Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
first and then Democrats began to see an increasing role for the national state on behalf of families, insofar as they considered it in the national interest to protect children as its future citizens. When the parties did address family in their platforms, they did so primarily through address of their economic conditions and less so through a focus on their values, although these were an important subtext.
However, the parties in this early period also engaged with family in distinctive ways. Republicans were more apt to embrace the Hearth family approach, consonant with their nationalistic state-building agenda. Democrats were instead more willing to use the national state to pursue a valuational family focus, particularly in regard to maintaining white family supremacy. Democratic platforms demonstrated more parochial values of white supremacy and social traditionalism in their family pledges, whereas Republican platforms referenced more macro, nationalistic, or patriotic values.
As the country moved into the Depression and the midcentury, the economic Hearth family approach increasingly gained leverage, engaging the two parties more and involving the national state still further. The family values Soul approach then underwent a fundamental transformation: cementing a new home within the Republican Party, utilized in opposition to the centralizing New Deal state and its unprecedented intervention into the economy.
Midcentury (1936–1964): Greater Convergence and Rising Salience of the Hearth Approach
The Great Depression was a transformative event. It directed the attention of the parties to the plight of impoverished lives and conditions as never before.30 The widespread deprivation, hunger, and unemployment were front and center in the elections of the 1930s. As the economic collapse had occurred on the watch of Herbert Hoover’s Republican administration, the Democratic Party was swept to victory in 1932. In that campaign, however, Democrats did not pledge a bold new agenda but continued to embrace the constitutional traditionalism and parochialism of their previous platforms, supporting programs of unemployment and old-age insurance only under state laws and still promising “the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary.”31 Preoccupied with lambasting Republican economic policies, the Democratic platform in 1932 made only a single reference to family, in the usual plank on veterans’ family pensions.
By 1936, however, the party had fundamentally altered its ideology. Its platform now offered a new, expanded vision of the national state and its engagement with family. “Protection of family and home” became a central ideal of New Deal welfarist pledges and was elevated to top a list of three “inescapable obligations” of “a government in a modern civilization.”32 Several new economic assistance and contributory insurance programs such as savings and investment, old-age insurance and social security programs, consumer protection, family health programs, and housing assistance were promised by Democrats as part of their newfound national responsibility to the family.33 Democrats went from devoting merely one pledge in 1932 to invoking family in 12.6 percent of their platform in 1936. They also vowed to seek constitutional amendments, if need be, to “clarify” the reconfigured nation-state’s obligations and responsibilities, now berating the Republican platform for its narrow focus, which, they said, “propose[s] to meet many pressing national problems solely by action of the separate States.”34
The increased Democratic attention to family also coincided with the New Deal coalition’s emphasis on “humanizing the policies of the Federal Government.”35 Family material well-being, the Hearth family focus, was now front and center of New Deal Democratic ideology. Family was no longer seen in a piecemeal fashion, as a collective category of certain groups who were the real subject of their pledges, for example, pledges to families of laborers/workers or of veterans. Instead, Democratic programs were now more universally family centered, targeting family as a more universal context for experiencing human vulnerability and thus promising to boost family material assets and/or constructing family’s “safety net.”
The Republican response to the Great Depression reflected the party’s new commitment to antistatism, begun before the economic collapse. Starting in 1928, the Republican Party had veered away from its previous statist, nation-centered ideology and began to embrace, then as now, an ideology of “neoliberalism” that focused on the individual and free-market capitalism and was hostile to the national state.36 In their 1924 and 1928 platforms, Republicans thus asserted “private initiative” and “self-reliance” as cherished values, fundamental to the “prosperity of the American nation,” and mandated limited (national) government intervention into the affairs of business and the states.37
Also, by the 1920s, Republicans shifted from their previous Gilded Age/Progressive Era focus on macro industry and big business to embrace more local, small business. In so doing, they combined capitalist, free enterprise values now with a localism, previously absent in their ideology. They promised to “stand against all attempts to put the government into business”38 and “deplored” efforts by “the Federal Government [to] move into the field of state activities,” claiming, “it weakens the sense of initiative and creates a feeling of dependence which is unhealthy and unfortunate for the whole body politic.”39 Within their new market-centered ideology, “private initiative” and “self-reliance” were individual values, central to both free markets and local government.
By placing their faith in the individual rather than government, Republicans in the Depression and midcentury eras soon began to assert (individualist) values and behavior as policy solutions rather than (nationalistic, government) material help or benefits. Despite persisting economic deprivation, the party steadfastly committed to the conviction that “the fate of the nation will depend, not so much on the wisdom and power of government, as on the character and virtue, self-reliance, industry and thrift of the people.”40
Family did not play a significant role in the emerging Republican neoliberal values agenda of the midcentury. Whereas Democrats increased sixfold their pledges to families in 1936, Republican platforms through the 1930s and 1940s only marginally increased reference to families: from 2 percent to only about 4 to 5 percent of all their pledges. Nevertheless, Republican platforms through the 1950s also accepted the Hearth family approach to an extent, devoting some pledges to the provision of family economic security. In planks often entitled “Security,” Republicans promised economic assistance to families in familial situations such as maternity and child health,41 public assistance of dependent children,42 and in the provision of low-cost and low-rent housing.43 Both parties acknowledged the family’s changing needs in light of wars (World War II, the Cold War) as creating further national state obligations.44 Since 1936, Republican platforms also have promised their own safety net programs, cautiously admitting “society has an obligation to promote the security of the people, by affording some measure of involuntary unemployment and dependency in old age.”45 Republicans circumscribed that commitment to family economic security within their prevailing paradigm of individual self-initiative and free-market values, asserting that these programs would only “supplement … the productive ability of free American labor, industry, and agriculture.”
Republicans also began to derive values from a special class of families—farm families—and asserted the achievement of these families’ well-being as a “prime national purpose.”46 In the case of farm families, Republicans pledged much economic assistance and material benefits: farm subsidies, commodity loans, farm credit, crop research services, development of rural roads, and rural electrification services were promised in order, they said, to “make life more attractive on the family type farm.”47 When it came to farm families, seen as “traditional to American life” and as upholding cherished neoliberal values of self-sufficiency, self-regulation, and personal responsibility, Republican platforms thus incorporated the Hearth family approach, and the economic security of these select families was presented as a legitimate national state obligation. In a somewhat paradoxical fashion, they directed their programmatic promises at increasing the autonomy of farm families, strongly condemning Democratic production controls and “extensive … bureaucratic interference,”48 which “limit[s] by coercive methods the farmer’s control over his own farm.”49