they tied national security and safety to the “conservation of the strength of the workers and their families in the interest of sound-hearted and sound-headed men, women, and children” and proclaimed that labor laws “are just assertions of the national interest in the welfare of the people.”23 They now acknowledged the protection of children as “an important national duty.”24
Despite the attention to economic family conditions in the early platforms, both parties in their policy agendas also used a moral tone, invoking values more generally. Keeping with their focus on nation, Republican platforms displayed strong nationalistic values, stressing common American patriotic ideals.25 Although the early Republican platform referenced values unconnected to families, when Republicans did connect values to family (first in 1924), they did so again by referencing nation and common national ideals—for instance, they condemned “international traffic of women and children” as a “universal concern … affecting public health and morals”26 and made reference to the national importance of preserving women’s reproductive health.27
On the other hand, Democratic family values were organic and traditional, more focused on preserving and reproducing traditional families and values of white supremacy. For instance, Democrats vehemently opposed “amalgamation,” the mixture of races, in repeated planks that stressed the problem with “Asiatic” immigration, arguing that “Asiatic immigrants … can not be amalgamated with our population, or whose presence among us would raise a race issue.”28 Democratic platforms also included planks demanding “the extermination of polygamy” and supporting legislation regulating the labor conditions of women, to maintain “the decency, comfort, and health” of “the mothers of our race.”29
In sum, in the early twentieth century, family was mostly incidental to the agenda of the national parties and was invoked indirectly: primarily as the context for the well-being of children. Social progressives, also known as “child savers,” were child focused, and family matters, family material, and cultural contexts were still within local or state authority. Republicans 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
