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 and Woman’s Bureaus,” vocational training in home economics, and “education in sex hygiene.”22 In pledges to limit the hours of work, 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