Illustrating a localism that would come to endure in the Soul family approach, these conservatives argued that local entities such as family, locality, and community played a more important role in real-world social behavior, not national-level policies that were based on artificially universal assumptions of human nature.42 Twenty-two percent of family examples invoking the Soul family values frame promoted parental rights, 7 percent of these cases advocated for limited government, and 6 percent supported traditional gender protections.
However, when it came to issues of sex, sexuality, and biological reproduction, highlighted in 24 percent of all Soul family cases (the largest bloc of all Soul family examples), conservative legislators promoted positive state intervention to preserve traditional family practices. Family sexuality concerns were inextricably bound with anxieties over race. The next section reveals the extent to which the emerging Soul family values approach was preoccupied with questions of sex and race, prompting conservatives to call for positive engagement of the national state, a position that ran contrary to their otherwise antistatist and laissez-faire-ist ideology.
Sex and Race—Intermarriage and Other Sexual Questions: A Positive-State Soul Family Approach
For conservatives, family values, not economics or material services, was the rightful focus of policy. White supremacy was central to the traditional family values they sought to uphold and underpinned much of their Soul legislative focus. This was especially evident among legislators from the South. The nineteenth-century South had embraced an organic patriarchal family ideal that was substantively different from the northern, contractual view of domestic relations. The southern family ideal had roots that extended far back into slavery, infusing racial and sexual power dynamics onto the patriarchal authority of male slaveowners over members of their household, free and slave. As historian Peter Bardaglio writes, “The sexual access of slaveholders to their wives and (to their) bondswomen provided the under-girding of patriarchy as a [family] system that shaped both race and gender relations … important as the household was as a private institution in the Victorian South, it was even more important as a political institution in the broadest sense: it not only constituted the chief vehicle for the exercise of power in southern society but also served as the foundation of southern public beliefs and values.”43 The political southern family ideal then was an amalgam of southern racial and gender ideals, whose patriarchal values preserved southern (white male) power, a slave-based economy, and a hierarchical social order.
Yet patriarchal authority of the head of household was not considered absolute or universal in the antebellum South or impervious to state intervention. Instead, there existed a localized southern domestic ideology, wherein the authority of patriarchs over their households was subjected to a metaphorical “social peace,” an overarching public order that permeated all southern private domestic relations.44 Within this framework, the state was indispensable in regulating family behavior in defense of the traditional social order. Southern legal historians describe a “strong element of coercion that enforced inclusion in this system. Although everyone had a place, coercion was essential to keep people in their places.”45 They note the “coercive side of state intervention,” especially for “poor white and free black families,” which continued to prevail despite the eventual introduction of the contractual model of domestic relations into the South in the postbellum period.46
In the Progressive Era, several conservative legislators (mostly southern) now presented white supremacy and patriarchy as American family ideals, whose preservation in the face of nonwhite proliferation similarly warranted positive national state intervention. Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL), for instance, identified “loose morals in the home” as common to nonwhite groups, such as “Asiatics” and “negros,” to justify their active political exclusion as American citizens, claiming, “They have one element in common, and that is they have loose morals in the home. They do not know what home life is as we understand it”; instead, he said, “American civilization is what the American home has made it.”47 For such legislators, values defined a home, and American family values were first and foremost racially inscribed: the values of a white (Christian) family. This racialized Soul ideal and its policy preoccupation with preserving traditional family values persisted and developed in policy discussions, extending beyond its original southern home (although it continued to be most prevalent there) to the agrarian West.
Conservative congressmen from western states, for instance, facing large-scale Asian immigration, attacked the marriage practices of immigrant groups as illustrations of their diminished values and there too presented them as threats to American traditional family values.48 Celebrating marriage as “more than a civil contract,” they underscored its Christian white character, valorizing it as a “public institution established by God himself … recognized in all Christian and civilized nations … essential to the peace, happiness, and well-being of society.”49 These legislators attacked the practice of picture-bride marriages among Japanese farmers, for instance, to advocate for strict policies regulating immigration. Picture-bride marriages were solemnized in Japan between a bride and the picture of a man, the latter residing in the United States and unable to travel abroad without risk to reentry. Legislators using a Soul family approach condemned the practice of marriage sight unseen and its consummation with a surrogate in Japan as abhorrent to the standards of “civilized” white American family morality/values. At other times, legislators highlighted other immigrant/nonwhite family practices, such as the treatment of wives by husbands, birthing practices, and household division of labor, to emphasize these groups’ “dubious” family values as a basis for their active policy exclusion from American political and social life.
Conservative legislators also expressed alarm over changing mores of sexuality in other less racial contexts too, such as in instances of funding of public recreation areas. During the turn of the century, courtship had moved beyond home parlors and parental supervision to dance halls and social clubs for the lesser-affluent, urban, often immigrant families.50 In a hearing on a D.C. appropriation bill, some congressmen, using a more materialist Hearth lens, viewed government funding of such dancehalls benignly as “reaching a class of our people that are unable to provide for themselves.” Others, such as southern Democrat Thomas Sisson from Mississippi, however, were quick to express deep alarm over these “questionable dance halls” because, they said, “girls were not properly supervised,” such that “they were no good for them or their community,” and vehemently opposed the use of government monies for this purpose.51
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