welfare and antipoverty promises, long directed only at children, the disabled, and the elderly with no reference to their families, have focused sharply on family units since the 1970s, invoking families as critical to the success or failure of antipoverty measures. From about 15 percent of all welfare paragraphs that invoked family from the 1940s to 1950s, this rose first to 25 percent in the 1970s and then to 43 percent of all welfare paragraphs in the twenty-first century (Figure 4).
Another central feature of family politics since the 1970s has been the increased prominence of the valuational, Soul family ideal. Whereas the parties increased both types of family references (economic and valuational) significantly from the late 1960s to 1970s, the upward trend is much more pronounced in the case of the Soul family approach, with pledges aimed at family values and character bursting onto the political stage, overtaking economic-based Hearth pledges, then falling but maintaining a heightened presence since (Figure 5). Compared to the 1950s and 1960s, party platforms of the 1970s doubled all references to economic family aspects, but they quadrupled the number of their references to family values and its nonmaterial character.
Figure 4. Percentage of tax and antipoverty pledges that cite the family in party platforms, 1900–2012.
Figure 5 also reminds us that despite the current ubiquity of family values in party rhetoric, it was largely a subterranean feature of partisan policy discourse in earlier decades. The two parties previously invoked family more consistently in an economic sense, pledging to and primarily dividing over the distribution of economic welfare and benefits to families. Yet the Soul family values focus is not entirely new either. It persisted throughout the past century, with both parties alternatively emphasizing family values at differing points in history. In the early twentieth century (first two decades), the Democratic Party, for instance, stressed family morals and values in addition to family economics (see Figure 6), so distinguishing itself from the more progressive, exclusively economic-focused Republican Party. However, following the Great Depression and with the emergence of the New Deal, the Democratic Party altogether eschewed the Soul family valuational approach, emphatically addressing the family through its economics alone. In contrast, Republicans, in their opposition to the rising New Deal coalition, began to stress family values in the 1940s and 1950s even while accepting the dominant Hearth approach, only to strongly repudiate family economics in favor of family values in their concerted bid for electoral dominance in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, the Democratic Party also has incorporated a Soul family values approach, albeit in a more secular-humanist, not traditionalist, sense, while nevertheless continuing to assert its own economics-based Hearth family focus as well.
Figure 5. Hearth and Soul family paragraphs as a percentage of total paragraphs, party platforms, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs. Data compiled by author.
The ebb and flow of the political salience of an economic Hearth or valuational Soul family focus is thus part of a partisan dialectic. One is advanced by one party at any given time and used to repudiate the other, as the out party seeks to distinguish itself from the dominant party. The following section analyzes the specific issues and ways by which the two parties in different eras have utilized the Hearth and Soul family frames in their policy agendas, also demonstrating the ideals of state and, to a lesser extent, economy that have underpinned the shifting family conceptions.
Figure 6. Hearth and Soul paragraphs as a percentage of total paragraphs, Democratic and Republican Party platforms, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs. Data compiled by author.
Family in Partisan Agendas, the Early Years (1900–1932): Limited Salience, Marginal Polarization
During the Progressive Era (1900–1920), the social progressive reform movement focused much attention on the impoverished economic conditions of families. Social progressives advocated new public measures to improve working conditions, to economically assist families and children, and to ensure better products, services, and environmental conditions for consumers.11 They targeted growing poverty as a product of rapid industrialization and urbanization, as well as unregulated markets and monopolies, invoking themes of nation building and tying the economic assistance of children and their families to the long-term success of the nation.
The social progressive project resonated with the state-centered ideology of national republicanism advocated by Republicans in this time.12 Social progressives urged a variety of programs for children and their families, such as mothers’ aid, children and women’s labor regulation, compulsory public schooling, and maternal and infant health care programs. Much of this agenda was child (not family) centered and directed at state governments, as the constitutional boundaries circumscribing the national state were still rigid and social welfare matters fell predominantly within the purview of states. Even when the two political parties accommodated progressive policy planks in their national platforms, very rarely did they place them within a family context, invoking families in only about 2 percent of their pledges (see Figure 3). Nevertheless, in their few family-directed pledges, both parties typically addressed families’ economic conditions, utilizing a Hearth family approach. The parties differed, however, in whether or not they used that family ideal to obligate the national state.
Of the two parties, Republicans were (then) more comfortable with the use of centralized state machinery and regulated markets for public welfare, including for child and family welfare. In 1908, they pledged support for child labor regulation in factories, provision of widows’ pensions, and safety legislation for firefighters and railroad engineers, all of which they described as “wholesome and progressive … acts conserving the public welfare.”13 Also in pledges to veterans’ families and their dependents, Republicans more than Democrats viewed that commitment to mean an expansion of national state obligations14 by promising to harness federal state machinery to compensate veterans’ families through promises of employment in the public service.15
Both political parties viewed veterans’ families as legitimate subjects of national policy attention, acknowledging, for example, that the nation “owes [them] a debt of profound gratitude,”16 and addressing veterans’ families exclusively (in contrast to any other family) through pledges for pensions and other material support. However, in this case too, Democratic platforms were more hesitant to engage the federal state, for instance pledging support for widows’ pensions only to “relieve the country of the necessity of a large standing army,” rather than as a bona fide national public responsibility.17 In planks addressing homesteader families as well, Republicans approached the provision of public lands as an independent obligation of the national state,18 pledging to it as a “constant policy of the Republican party to provide free homes on the public domain.”19 In contrast, Democrats framed their homestead policies only as part of a larger struggle against land monopolies,20 also promising to free the homesteader from unnecessary state intrusion and regulatory constraints.21
However, in the late Progressive Era, as a harbinger of a tide soon to develop in the New Deal and perhaps in response to women winning the vote, Democratic platforms began to shift in their address of families, promising to obligate the national state more fully for family material support. In 1920, for example, Democrats pledged to support increased appropriations for the “Children’s
