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
Thus, in the Depression and midcentury eras, the yeoman farm family 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,
