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Hearth and Soul: Economics and Culture in Partisan Conceptions of the Family in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2010

Gwendoline Alphonso
Gwendoline Alphonso*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
gma22@cornell.edu
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Abstract

Both political scientists and popular commentators have reacted to the culture wars of the 1990s as something new in American politics, a deviation from the durable grounding of politics in economic interests. However, as recent work, along with many of the classic treatments of the Populist and Progressive eras demonstrate, American politics has long been infused with both culture and economics. The interesting question is thus not “which one” but rather “how” these two dimensions of political value have intersected through time and what the dynamics of those intersections reveal. The paper uses congressional family policy debates to demonstrate two alternative policy frameworks during the Progressive Era, each with its own alignment of the two dimensions and one emerging as a harbinger to the New Deal welfare state. Through systematic discursive analysis of committee hearings transcripts of the Fifty-sixth to Sixty-sixth Congresses, it assembles two dominant conceptual frameworks of family as illustrative of the two approaches. The progressive understanding viewed family economics as foundational, circumscribing its cultural qualities and legitimating state intervention. In contrast, the traditionalist conception privileged self-regulating families' cultural qualities as more fundamental, only loosely related to economic condition, such that active state intervention into family economics was seen as inappropriate and ineffective. These alternative approaches to state and family relations viewed culture or economics alternatively as foundational or epiphenomenal, if related at all. As history unfolded, the progressive conception ultimately prevailed in New Deal and postwar social policies, which continued to emphasize the economic dimension as subsuming the cultural one. Investigating the dynamics of intersectionality between economics and culture is suggested as a potential pathway to bridge work emphasizing durable economic interests in politics with other work focused instead on the endurance of moral conflicts in political deliberations, implying that in the Progressive Era the parties were not only divided in terms of which set of issues were more important but also over how the two dimensions of political value related to each other, if at all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , October 2010 , pp. 206 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1. The term “culture wars” was first used by sociologist Hunter, James D, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991)Google Scholar who asserts the presence of a new cultural division between (religious) “orthodox” and “progressive” political and social elites. Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, while not expressly discounting the salience of cultural issues, nevertheless demonstrate the enduring significance of ideological differences over economic redistribution as organizing (and polarizing) politics (see Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006]). For a similar position emphasizing the durability of economic interests to politics, see Larry M. Bartels, “What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?” (paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, 31 Aug–3 Sept. 2005.) See also Bartels, Larry M., Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008)Google Scholar. For an influential popular treatment of the emerging political significance of cultural issues, as obfuscating economic ones, see Frank, Thomas, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004)Google Scholar.

2. Miller, Gary and Schofield, Norman, “The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.,” Perspectives on Politics 6 (2008): 433–50Google Scholar; Brewer, Mark D. and Stonecash, Jeffrey M., Split: Class and Cultural Divisions in American Politics (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, RichardAge of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1955)Google Scholar. On the persistence of cultural battles within American political history, including but not limited to the Progressive Era see: Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; also Layman, Geoffrey, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Young, Michael P., Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006)Google Scholar; specifically on previous partisan conflict over family, see: Edwards, Rebecca, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

3. Feminist scholars have highlighted the gendered, racial, and cultural qualities of social policies instituted during the Progressive Era; see Mink, Gwendolyn, Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the welfare state, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; also, Mink, , “The Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Gordon, Linda (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Abramovitz, Mimi, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Nelson, Barbara, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen's Compensation and Mother's Aid,” in Women, Politics, and Change, eds. Tilly, Louise A. and Gurin, Patricia (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 413–35Google Scholar.

4. See, as seminal treatment of the Progressive-Era roots of social policies, Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992)Google Scholar

5. This includes literature on the durability of the economic frame: McCarty et al., Polarized America; Bartels, “What's the Matter?” and Unequal Democracy. See those focused on culture, such as: Morone, Hellfire Nation, Layman, The Great Divide, and Edwards, Angels in Machinery.

6. Realignment literature, in particular, demonstrates the pivot of race in the realignment of party systems. See Key, V. O. Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics 17 (1955): 3–18Google Scholar; Key, , “Secular Realignment and the Party System,” Journal of Politics 121 (1959): 198–210Google Scholar; Burnham, Walter Dean, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970)Google Scholar; Black, Earle and Black, Merle, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003).Google Scholar However, for a concise and stringent refutation of realignment theory, see Mayhew, David R., Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Parties' reversal on women's rights issues is found in the work of Wolbrecht, Christina, The Politics of Women's Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

7. The choice of 1900 and 1920 as the start and end of the period of investigation was primarily based on the fact that the first two decades of the twentieth century are collectively regarded as the “Progressive Era.” (See Chambers, John Whiteclay II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era 1890–1920 [New Brunswick, NJ, London: Rutgers University Press, 2000], 133.)Google Scholar Despite some debate regarding this, the historical accuracy of the start and/or end years is not relevant for my purposes; it is sufficient that the chosen period was large enough to encompass a sample of political issues and practices representative of that era.

8. I used the GPO (OCLC FirstSearch) and Lexis Congressional Universe databases to generate a list of all committee and subcommittee hearings for the years 1900–1920 that contained the search words: “Family” OR “Families” OR “Wife” OR “Husband” OR “Wives” OR “Housewives” OR “Infant” OR “Child” OR “Children” OR “Orphan” OR “Widow” OR “Parent” OR “Maternity” OR “Maternal” OR “Father” OR “Mother” OR “Marriage” OR “Morals” in “All fields except full text” and obtained 230 published and serial set hearings for the 56th to 66th Congress. My objective was to obtain hearings that would address family and policies related to families, so as to discern partisan ideological patterns if any.

9. For detailed descriptions of the rituals of legislative practice, see Hall, Richard, Participation in Congress (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 139–174Google Scholar and Oleszek, Walter, Congressional Procedures and Policy Process (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2001), 86–95Google Scholar.

10. As an excellent example of the use of congressional committee hearings starting in the Progressive Era and the recurrent impact of interest group lobbies and institutional structures on policy agendas, see Hansen, John Mark, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919–1981 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Also, for the use of committee hearings to study the significance of women's lobby groups on policy through the twentieth century, see Kristin Goss, “The Language of Citizenship: From Responsibility to Rights in Women's Policy Claims” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 30 Aug. 2007, paper accessed with permission of author).

11. The use of stories (“narratives with heroes and villains”) as a mechanism by which political actors define policy problems and contextualize (and justify) preferred policy actions, has been identified as a key strategy of political decision making. See Stone, Deborah, Policy Paradox: the Art of Political Decision Making (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), 138–145Google Scholar. Stone argues that the underlying model of reasoning in political decision making is “reasoning by metaphor and analogy … it is trying to get others to see a situation as one thing rather than another.” (Ibid., 9). Within this framework, anecdotal family narratives present concrete analogous situations through which political participants engage in the strategic process of political reasoning, ultimately for the sake of making (or persuading) policy decisions.

12. The model of policy making developed by Stone (and followed here) asserts that “the essence of policy making [is] the struggle over ideas. Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money and votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to action and meld individual striving into collective action. Ideas are at the center of all political conflict. Policy making, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideas that guide the way people behave,” (Stone, Policy Paradox, 11). Family stories are such means through which political actors engage in this struggle over ideas, which define the category of the “family,” as policy subject. Also, on the importance of personal influences (experiences, traits, values) on representatives' ideologies and policy-making decisions, see Burden, Barry C., Personal Roots of Representation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Following Burden, members' descriptions of their own personal experiences of families and/or their experiences of interaction with witness testimony in committee hearings, are assumed as cues to their own ideological preferences.

13. Each case is coded for “active MC,” “policy issue” referenced, “policy category,” “Congress,” “Party of Active MC,” “State of Active MC,” and “Region of Active MC.” (Regional categorization follows Census regional divisions. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Regions and Divisions of the United States,” U.S. Department of Commerce, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/us_regdiv.pdf.) Because the object is to study the ideology/activity of MCs (as expressed through family cases) and not the family cases per se, the same family story in which different MCs make reference to (the same and/or different) policy issues is coded as a different case in the dataset.

14. For the list of policy issues that recurred in members' questions/testimony regarding families and that were therefore used to code each family case, see the Appendix, Table B. Through a process of inductive reasoning and extensive familiarization with the cases, the policy issues were coded as “economic” or “cultural” on the basis of whether they were used to refer to primarily material conditions or cultural, non-material family aspects (Tables A(i) and (ii) in the Appendix). Similarly through induction, the issues were found to contain four different aspects of the family, forming the above-mentioned four policy categories. The cases were then separately coded for these policy categories, independent of the policy issue. Table B in the Appendix summarizes the distribution of policy issues and categories. Certain policy issues overlapped, being used in different cases to discuss different family aspects, thus falling into more than one policy category. The organization of policy issues into the four overarching policy categories (see p. 213 of this text) relied on the majority distribution of policy issues.

15. Polarization scholars such as McCarty et al. (Polarized America, 3–10) and Stonecash, Brewer, and Mariani (Stonecash, Jeffrey M., Brewer, Mark D. and Mariani, Mack D., Diverging Parties: Social change, Realignment, and Party Polarization [Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2003] 1–11Google Scholar), have measured high levels of polarization at the start and end of the twentieth century. Party polarization takes the form of a U-shaped curve, with high polarization at the two poles and decreased polarization levels during the postwar mid-century decades.

16. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 263; also Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and The American State, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 160–61Google Scholar; Brewer, Mark D. and Stonecash, Jeffrey M., Dynamics of American Political Parties, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 58–59Google Scholar.

17. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 263–64.

18. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 39Google Scholar. On electoral partisan politics leading up to the Progressive Era, also see Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change, 41–44.

19. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 265. Eileen L. McDonagh similarly describes what she calls the “institutional axis” of progressivism as “a reform orientation that seeks to implement the power of state authority and government institutions—in contradistinction to dependence upon private, philanthropic institutions—to solve social and economic inequalities viewed as the source of societal ills.” (“Race, Class, and Gender in the Progressive Era” in Progressivism and the New Democracy, eds. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999], 147.) See also Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, 133–71. This paper follows such an intervention-focused definition of progressivism (lower case). For description of various reform groups and the progressive impulse, see also Wiebe, “The Search for Order;” Hofstadter, “Age of Reform;” Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; also see: Sanders, “Roots of Reform,” 164–65, as a farmer-based refutation of the Hofstadter- Wiebe elite-based interpretation of progressive reform actors.

20. The strain of mobilization that combined public protest with specialized sins has been traced back to the antebellum period; see, Young, “Bearing Witness.”

21. Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977) 8Google Scholar.

22. Ibid. Also see Mintz, Stephen and Kellogg, Susan, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, London: The Free Press, 1988) 109–13Google Scholar.

23. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 109–13.

24. Harrison, Robert, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 13–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. “Social progressivism” refers to social movements and ideologies in the Progressive Era “that worked not primarily for structural reforms in civil service and the parties but mainly for new public measures to improve working conditions, to help families and children, and to ensure better products, services, and environmental conditions for consumers.” Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 265. As an effective specification of the concept of “social progressivism,” Skocpol cites Yellowitz, Irwin, Labor and the Progressive Movement in New York State, 1897–1916 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. In this paper progressivism is used in the context of social progressive ideology and not civil reform ideology. Typically, “social justice” or “social welfare” is mentioned as one, distinct aim of the progressive reform agenda alongside civil reform and direct democracy—see: Milkis and Mileur, Progressivism, 8–10; also Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, 141–42. A fuller and more detailed definitional outline of the progressive ideology of the family, specifically, follows later in the paper (see Table 6 in this paper).

26. Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, 138–39.

27. Divisions in family ideologies were apparent in the party system as early as the 1840s; for this, see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in Machinery, 17–35. The question of which one, region or party, was more influential (or co-equal) in accounting for ideational differences is not one that space constraints allow me to address; instead I merely restrict my focus to aggregate party differences, paying attention to regional anomalies within and across parties.

28. This distribution broadly matches Sanders's distribution of overall delegations in the House for the Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Congresses; (See “Table 5.1: Regions and Parties in the Progressive Era in the House of Representatives” in Sanders, Roots of Reform, 162–63.); in so doing, the regional distribution of members who were active in family cases reflects the broader sectional distributional clusters in Congress at the time.

29. See Tables A (i) and (ii) in the Appendix for coding of cultural and economic issues.

30. Column proportions tests (z-tests) and tests of independence (chi-square) confirm that there are statistically significant differences in the use of cultural and economic issues within the traditional and progressive frameworks. Pearson's Chi-square = 141.72 is significant at the .05 level (p =.00). Results of comparisons of column proportions are based on two-sided tests, also significant at the .05 level.

31. See note 14 for method of organization of this schema, and accompanying Table B in the Appendix.

32. The four policy categories were classified (as cultural and/or economic) from the Clausen and Peltzman issue coding schemes as described in Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 259–60Google Scholar.

33. Regulation issues in particular evidence the interrelationship between culture/morality and economically determined state intervention during the Progressive Era. Family Regulation at this time, as espoused by progressive Republican members, was deeply entwined with issues of family morality. For example, Republicans called for congressional regulation of uniform marriage and divorce laws, which they advocated to address moral laxity, as reflected in the growing divorce rates across the country. Some Republican members also used family cases to detail the deleterious effect of alcohol and gambling on the family and called for restrictive federal and local (District of Columbia) legislation. However, as we shall see, a vital distinction remained even when it came to the cultural or moral aspects of the family: Republican members viewed family morals also within a progressive framework, the result of larger socio-economic conditions necessitating state intervention; whereas Democratic members conceived of family values traditionally, as more “natural” or “innate” and independent of socio-economic structures. (See, for example, the following committee hearings: House Committee on Military Affairs, To Restore the Canteen in the Army, 62nd Cong., 3rd sess., 1913, 7–8 (position of Julius Kahn (R-CA); Senate Committee on District of Columbia, Sale of Intoxicating Liquors in the District of Columbia, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess 1912 3–5, 46–47, 52–59, 148–9, 158–61, 246–51 (position of John D. Works (R-CA) and witnesses); and House Committee on Judiciary, Enforcement of Prohibition Part 2, 66th Cong., 1st sess.,1919, 86–89, 102 (contrasting positions of Chairman Andrew Volstead (R-MN) and John F. Fitzgerald (D-MA)); Senate Committee on Judiciary, Prohibiting Intoxicating Beverages. Part 1, 66th Cong., 1st sess., 1919, 4–13,20–25 (contrasting positions of Thomas Sterling (R-SD), on the one hand, and William H. King (D-UT) and Samuel Gompers, President of American Federation of Labor, witness, on the other.)

34. Alston and Ferrie have shown that welfare benefits in the South were long used to maintain a system of paternalism, wherein benefits (such as medical care and protection from violence) were used instrumentally by white planter elites to maintain control over black and poor white agricultural workers. See Alston, Lee J. and Ferrie, Joseph P., Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 1865–1965 (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Historians and legal scholars have also demonstrated that ideals of households and families among the political elite of the South (white planters), stressing the importance of harmony, dependency and hierarchy, were at odds with the more egalitarian family ideals of the increasingly bourgeois northern elite Bardaglio, Peter W., Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (North Carolina and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995Google Scholar). Also see Edwards, Angels in the Machinery.

35. Pearson's chi-square statistic (137.05) is significant at the .05 level for “Party of Active MC” and “Policy Category.” Results of comparison of column proportions (z-tests) for the same two variables show significant differences in the proportion of family cases used to discuss Ascription and Autonomy issues by Democratic members, and Welfare and Regulation issues by Republicans. Results are based on two-sided tests with a significance level .05(See Table 3). Democratic members disproportionately focused on the specific Ascription and Autonomy policy issues of: sexuality and reproduction, family lineage and “blood” affiliation in Native American and also foreign families, and parental rights and limited government intervention into the family. They also disproportionately raised race-based issues and intermarriage concerns and espoused the maintenance of traditional gender roles. Republican members, on their part, focused on the particular Regulation and Social Welfare issues of: child labor, juvenile institutions, family property and wealth, immigration/Americanization of foreign families, gender equality, and uniformity in marriage registration and divorce laws across the country (see Tables E (i) and (ii) in the Appendix).

36. In the other tables, the unit of analysis is the family case referenced by the MC.

37. The Democratic embrace of a traditionalist family ideology, as asserted here, resembles that found by Edwards in the mid-nineteenth century, when “Democrats shared …… a defensive ideology linking white men's political right to their household authority… … [in which] all [white men] were masters in their homes.” (Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 19.) Edwards argues that in contrast to Whigs' “maternal” domestic ideology advancing state power and women's political participation, Democrats “tended to describe extensions of government power [into the household] as usurpations of the rights of white men.” (Ibid., 17.) Also, on the reliance of white southern elites on welfare benefits to maintain a racialized and classist social structures, see Alston and Ferrie, Southern Paternalism.

38. Column proportions (z-tests) at a significance level of .05 confirm that among the regional Democratic delegations, midwestern Democrats alone referred to economic family issues in significantly greater proportion than cultural ones (see Table C in the Appendix).

39. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Proposed Changes in Naturalization Laws, Part 2: Registration and Americanization of Aliens, 66th Cong., 2nd sess.,1920, 3–7, 10–11, 20–23, 26–35 (position of Benjamin F. Welty (D-OH).

40. Tables E (i) and (ii) (in the Appendix) do not aggregate perfectly to Tables 5(a) and (b) because coding for policy issues and aggregate policy categories were done independently of each other. Thus certain policy issues—such as family lineage—were not automatically coded as falling in the Ascription category. Instead, I used the most obvious rationale offered by the MC in using the family case to code for policy category. Thus those cases emphasizing family lineage and the importance of it to national interest, that is, family lineage as a “public” aspect, were coded as Regulation cases; whereas other family cases focusing on family lineage as a “biological” reproductive quality of family were coded under Ascription. Table 4, which summarizes the categorization of policy issues, describes the dominant (majority) usage of the issues, that is, the way in which they were predominantly used in a vast majority (but not all) of the cases. See Table B in the Appendix for majority usage of policy issues in terms of policy categories.

41. See for example: House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Relating to Expatriation of Citizens, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1912, 22–23; House Committee on District of Columbia, Intermarriage of Whites and Negroes in D.C. and Separate Accommodations in Street Cars for Whites and Negroes in D.C., 64th Cong., 1st Sess.,1916; see also remarks by Seaborn Roddenberry (D-GA), 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 49 (December 11, 1912): H 502-04; on Native Americans and blood rules, House Committee on Indian Affairs, Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1912, 3–13, 106.

Also, from the party splits in the roll call votes on an anti-miscegenation bill [To Prohibit the Intermarriage of Persons of the White and Negro Races within the District of Columbia., HR 1710, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess.,(1915), Congressional Record 52 (January 11, 1915): H 1362] we see that of the 239 yeas, 103 came from southern Democrats (100 percent of that delegation), while the 60 nays were distributed between northern Republicans (who voted 50 nays to 36 yeas) and a few northern Democrats (who voted 7 nays to 95 yeas). (Data for Roll Call No. 236, 63rd Cong., obtained from the World Wide Web at:http://www.voteview.com/partycount.htm.)

42. See House Committee on District of Columbia, School and Home for Feeble-Minded Persons, 64th Cong., 4th sess., 1916, 16–17, 25.

43. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relative to Chinese Immigration into Hawaii, 65th Cong., 2nd sess., 1918, 12–13, 28–39; House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Japanese Immigration. Part 2, . 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1919, 3, 21, 32–33, 48–51, 196–99, 228–29, 246–69, 304–07, 450, 472–73, 527–73, 592–95.

44. For example, equal voting rights for women was seen as enabling better domestic relations in the home, see remarks by Senator Chamberlain (D-OR) 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 51 (March 4, 1914): S 4276–4280; also, naturalization through marriage for foreign women was claimed to encourage improved (Americanized) home conditions, see John D. Raker (D-CA), House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Proposed Changes in Naturalization Laws, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, 6–11; and, constitutional amendments conferring on Congress the power to regulate uniform standards of divorce across states were asserted to improve the moral lives of people across the nation, House Committee on Judiciary, Uniform Laws as to Marriage and Divorce, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, 10–23.

45. Significant differences (at .05 level) are found between midwestern and northeastern Republicans versus western Republicans in the high proportion of welfare issues they raised; whereas western Republicans are significantly different from other factions in the high proportion of regulation issues they raised. See Table D in the Appendix.

46. For example, they called for reform of citizenship rights, to attach to women independently irrespective of their marital status, as a means to keep families together, see statement of Jeanette Rankin (R-MT) and invited witness, Mrs. Ellen S. Mussey, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Relative to Citizenship of American Women Married to Foreigners, 65th Cong., 2nd sess., 1917, 3–16, 19–20, 28–29; also, they invoked national government intervention to foster ‘family dignity’ as integral to national reputation, through the protection of the lives of mothers and children, see inter alia statements of Horace Towner (R-IA) and witness Julia Lathrop, Chief, Children's Bureau, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Public Protection of Maternity and Infancy, 66th Cong., 3rd sess., 1920, 5–12, 18–19, 43–45, 87, 127–133.

47. The above claim that Progressive era family ideologies resemble contemporary, but switched, partisan family ideologies centers on two central themes/metrics: (a) that family is or is not determined by its economic condition, and (b) that the appropriate policy response is state intervention or not. This is not to say that in other aspects the two pairs of cross-epochal ideologies were devoid of any differences. For example, Milkis and Mileur (Progressivism) trace the antecedents of contemporary liberal and conservative constitutional ideologies back to progressivism and note that “individual responsibility” was a central theme of progressive reform interventionism; this is unlike the “entitlements” approach in liberal Democratic ideology (Milkis and Mileur, Progressivism, 10–11). Moreover, contemporary conservativism is unlike the whiggish ideology of erstwhile conservative challengers to progressivism. The latter's advocacy of judicial conservative constitutionalism embraced an established body of law and upheld the right to property to resist popular solutions to social discontent; this was a “‘defensive’ strategy in the war against the progressive state.” (Milkis and Mileur, Progressivism, 25.) In contrast, current conservative constitutional ideology is “radical rather than conservative, proactive rather than defensive” and “a large number of contemporary conservatives have concluded that government—even the federal government—has the responsibility to shape proper habits and behavior; this may be seen in conservative proposals to restrict abortions, require work for welfare, enforce child support, and supervise unwed teen mothers.” (Milkis and Mileur, Progressivism, 25). My focus is on family ideologies and not on constitutional ideologies as in Milkis; even so, these cross-epochal differences in the type of interventions advocated introduce an important caveat in my second metric of reversal, that is, in the reversed partisan positions on ideologies of state intervention into the family. However, the first metric—the interrelationship between family and economy (that is, family as determined by its economics or not)—can be more clearly identified as having reversed in its partisan proponents. The family as determined by economic condition is a crucial aspect of the ideologies of both progressives and contemporary liberals, whereas the reverse is true for traditionalists in the Progressive era as well as contemporary conservatives.

48. See: Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions; see also Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World, 7–8.

49. On gendered separate spheres and its importance to social policy, see: Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion. Also for the seminal explanation of the concept of “separate spheres,” see Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the moral politics of purity and women's separate sphere in the Progressive era, see Morone, Hellfire Nation, 222–56.

50. See, among others, Skocpol Protecting Soldiers, 408–409; Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, 66–67.

51. Supra Tables 5a and b of this paper.

52. The main highlights of the legislative history of the Child Labor Act of 1916 are briefly as follows:

The first national legislative proposal to prohibit child labor was introduced in Congress by Senator Albert J. Beveridge (R-IN) in December 1906; it provided that carriers engaged in interstate commerce would not be permitted to transport products of any factory or mine that employed children below 14 years of age. At that early stage, the proposal had mixed, and lukewarm, support. Many businesses opposed the bill, but manufacturers subject to state child labor laws supported a national law to reduce the advantages of their competitors; national labor groups were uncommitted, and social groups like the National Child Labor Committee formed in 1904 were as yet undecided about whether national legislation was the best course for their objective, namely to eliminate child labor in the United States. Since then, the Beveridge bill, or its equivalent the Kenyon bill introduced by Senator William S. Kenyon (R-IA), was introduced in every Congress from 1906 to 1914. In the Sixty-third Congress (1914), the Copley–Poindexter and the Palmer–Owen bills were considered, which defined child labor as “antisocial” and shifted the burden from the carrier to the employer, respectively. Although the latter was passed by the House on 15 February 1915 by a vote of 233 to 43, it was killed in the Senate on the last day of the session. Finally, in the Sixty-fourth Congress, the Keating-Owen bill, which repeated the substance of the former Palmer-Owen bill (that is, onus/liability on employer) was signed by President Wilson on 1 September 1916. However, the law was soon challenged and in 1918 in Hammer v. Dagenhart, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. See Pickerell, Michael J., Constitutional Deliberation in Congress: the Impact of Judicial Review in a Separated System (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 75–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novkov, Julie, “Historicizing the Figure of the Child in Legal Discourse: The Battle over the Regulation of Child Labor” American Journal of Legal History 44 (2000): 369–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Raymond G. Fuller Child Labor and the Constitution (New York: Thomas Y Crowell, 1923), 236–38.

53. For example, as early as 1892, the National Democratic Convention adopted a plank that read, “We are in favor of the enactment by states of laws … prohibiting the employment in factories of children under fifteen years of age.” (Fuller, Child Labor and the Constitution, 236.)

54. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), available from the Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu, 1908 Republican Party Platform.

55. Ibid., 1908 Democratic Party Platform.

56. Fuller, Child Labor and the Constitution, 237.

57. John Gerring lists these as part of the “Nationalism” phase in Republican Party ideology that lasted from 1828–1921. See, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 16, 57–124.

58. Woolley and Peters, “American Presidency Project,” 1912 Republican Party Platform.

59. Gerring emphasizes the centrality of order in the Republican Party's ideology, which caused Republicans to embrace active policy intervention: “The unity of the National Republican period (1828–1924, that he identifies as a coherent stage in Republican Party ideology) is perhaps most visible in light of this party's incessant search for social, political and moral order [original emphasis] – a search that animated its Protestant, mercantilist, laborist, nationalist, and statist perspectives. A symbiotic relationship was thus established between the demonology of anarchy and the mission of state building.” (Gerring, Party Ideologies, 123.)

60. See Gerring on the “Populism” phase in the history of the Democratic Party ideology that lasted from 1896–1948. (Gerring, Party Ideologies, ch. 6.)

61. Others included a living wage and “provisions for decency, comfort and health in the employment of women as should be accorded the mothers of the race” among others. (Woolley and Peters, “American Presidency Project,” 1916 Democratic Party Platform). Notably, unlike the Republican platform of that year, the 1912 Democratic platform did not mention child labor.

62. Woolley and Peters, “American Presidency Project,” 1920 Democratic Party Platform.

63. President Wilson in his acceptance speech (1 Sept. 1916) in “ministerial garb” stated, “I am much more interested in the fortunes of oppressed men and pitiful women and children than in any property rights whatever.” (Cited in Gerring, Party Ideologies, 213.) As Gerring has observed, the national reform policy agenda of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century (also) had a distinct moralistic tone, that was “clothed … in a language of righteousness derived from a diverse set of historical sources, including Protestantism, humanism, and civic republicanism …… that provided a moral lever against the injustices of the marketplace.” (Ibid.)

64. By “family economic structure” I mean that, in order to provide for their material support, some members in the family must labor in the market and receive wages, whereas others produce goods within the family for household consumption. All members of the family are consumers of wages and internally produced goods. Families thus necessarily have an economic structure in which some members are external wage earners, others internal producers, and still others are dependents. See Wallerstein, ImmanuelWorld-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 32–36Google Scholar; see also Smith, Joan, Wallerstein, Immanuel, and Dieter-Evers, Hans, eds., Households and the World Economy (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1984)Google Scholar.

65. Statement of Mr. Lewis Parker of Greenville, S.C., in House Committee on Labor, Child Labor Bill[Part 1], 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1914, 86.

66. Ibid., statement of Mrs. Florence Kelley, general secretary, National Consumer's League, 35.

67. Child labor, as part of other social and civic reform in the Progressive era, was accompanied by a strong sense of “moral outrage” on the part of progressives (Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, 7). Struggles over normative moral structures underpinned progressive reform. For the influence of morality on progressive thought, see, Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Standing in Armageddon: Morality and Religion in Progressive Thought,” in Progressivism eds. Milkis and Mileur, 103–25. For a description of progressive reformers as “crusaders with a moral mission,” see Alonzo L. Hamby, “Progressivism: A Century of Change and Rebirth,” ibid, 43. Also for a critical analysis of maternalist social welfare policies as imbued with progressives' elitist and white values of domesticity, see Mink, Gwendolyn, Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

68. Statement of Florence Kelley in House Committee on Labor, Child Labor Bill. [Part 1], 35 See also Mrs. E.K. Bushee, executive secretary, Juvenile Protection Association, description of the case of a family who, despite their relative affluence (“ha[d] a piano”), applied for a permit to put their minor son to work, Senate Committee on District of Columbia, Child Labor in D.C., 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, 27. See also Bushee's statement before the House of Representatives in: House Committee on District of Columbia, Regulation of the Employment of Minors Within D.C., 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, 55.

69. See, for example, the exchange by Representatives Edward Keating (D-CO) and William Kitchin (D-NC):

Mr. Keating: what is the percentage of the male employees that have their children working with them in the mills?

Mr. Kitchin: I could not tell you. We have a law to this effect: That there grew up a habit of some of the men moving to the mills and working their children in the mills while they were loafing. In Roxboro (NC) we indicted some of the loafers around there and broke up that condition … There is no mill owner in the State who wants a male loafer loafing around the mill.

Mr. Keating: That is a very pathetic case … there are similar cases throughout the country.

Mr. Kitchin: [No,] It is a peculiar condition. (House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, 13–14.)

70. Progressives had a new appreciation of adolescence, as a time devoid of the pursuit of adult work (Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, 92–93). The progressives' “belief that the human spirit of conscience, guided by social science, could eventually create a vast and brotherly republic of public-spirited citizens” and their attempt to deliberately construct common good was also evident in reforms aimed at the “re-education” of parents to what they paradoxically conceived as value-neutral, empirical, good parenting (McWilliams, Progressivism, 104).

71. Mrs. Pauline Goldmark, Child Labor Survey of the District of Columbia, submitted material by the Juvenile Protection Association to the House Committee on District of Columbia, Child Labor in D.C., 37.

72. Mrs. Walston Hill Brown, whose husband was a financier from Westchester, NY.

73. Statement of Miss Elizabeth Watson, International Child Welfare League, House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 307–308.

74. For example, “The most important effect of street trades has been shown to be that upon the character of the boys …… the children do not contribute very much of their earnings, because they get in the habit far more than children who are not working on the streets, of spending their money for the movies and in gambling. There is a great deal of gambling among the newsboys.” The witness goes on to list cases in Chicago where “children have slept out all night because they did not dare to go home on account of having lost all their money at craps.” Statement of Mrs. La Rue Brown, House Committee on District of Columbia, Child Labor in D.C., 19–21. James Morone also illustrates the preoccupation with childhood in peril and the perceived contagion posed by street urchins who were (seen as) “super predatory” teenagers who came out of bad neighborhoods and broken homes to prey on the rest of us.” Morone, Hellfire Nation, 232.

75. Eunice Sinclair, report submitted to Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce in Products of Child Labor, Parts 1, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, 183. Crowded residences (especially tenements) were the target of the larger progressive preoccupation with urban reform. Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, 17–19.

76. Statement of Florence Kelley in House Committee on Labor, Child Labor Bill [Part 1] 34. Similarly, A.J. Mckelway, Secretary of Southern State, National Child Labor Committee, approvingly cited the case of the mill owner who enforced child labor regulations and “saw that the seven younger children under legal age (of a widow who worked in the mill) were sent to an orphanage.” “Every one of those children was illiterate. If we allow that situation to go on, what do we do? We are simply multiplying poverty and ignorance for another generation to take care of. We are simply condemning these children to unskilled employment, and they go on and marry, and they have children, and we have a greater problem in the next generation than we have now.” (Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 229).

77. In addition to family Regulation policy, the object of reform of unhealthy economic and living conditions and encouragement of desirable family values was also used to advocate state laws of Social Welfare in the form of “mother's pensions” policies. These relief laws were propagated to maintain the pre-industrialization, Victorian family ideal in which (widowed) mothers and their minor children would not be forced, and thus would not be exposed, to the moral hazards of child labor. See, for example, Senator Edward Keating (D-CO), House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 63–64.

78. Edward J. Maginnis, an open letter to the legislators of Pennsylvania, material submitted in hearing. (Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 82).

79. House Committee on District of Columbia, Regulation of the Employment of Minors, 59.

80. Statement of Mr. J. M. Davis, superintendent Newberry Cotton Mills, Newberry S.C. (Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 54).

81. Statement of Mr. S.F. Patterson, treasurer and general manager of Roanoke Mills, Roanoke, N.C. (House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 62).

82. Mr. S. F. Patterson (ibid.) observed, “I have seen a great many people smile when the word ‘widow’ and her children are mentioned. Unfortunately it is true that we have widows in the South, and in a canvass or census that was taken just before the last legislature in North Carolina, we found that we had almost one-third of all houses occupied by the families of widows. It is the most natural thing in the world if a farmer who is living on rented land dies, especially if his family consists of frills and he leaves no estate, it is the most natural thing in the world that that widow should seek a place where her children could make a livelihood, and the place where they can make the best livelihood is in the cotton mill … we do have widows in the cotton mills and lots of them, and we take care of the people as well as we know how.”

In contrast, progressives such as Edward Keating (D-CO) pointed to the widow example as a universal condition not limited to the South, and he instead advocated state assistance—such as mother's pensions—for dependent widows and their families. Southerners contended that this was impossible for the poorer states of the South. [See House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 63–64].

83. Statement of Mr. S. F. Patterson, treasurer and general manager of Roanoke Mills, Roanoke, N.C. (House Committee on Labor Child-Labor Bill, 62).

84. Numerous examples illustrating the value of work for older children dotted the testimony of witnesses. Mill management, particularly those who were themselves “mill boys,” often pointed to the long-term usefulness of having acquired the habit of work in their childhood that had allowed them to avoid idleness and to succeed later in life, habits which they now avowed to instill among their own children. See for example supt. David, Newberry Cotton Mills (Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 51); also Mr. Lewis Parker, Greenville, SC (House Committee on Labor Child-Labor Bill, 95).

Other witnesses, such as Mrs. Mary Garrett who worked with poor and disadvantaged children, similarly argued against the “habits of laziness” and the mischievous behavior of idle children, favoring instead the “educative value of work” among the poor and idle. (Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 292–97.)

Members of Congress, such as Republican John I. Nolan (CA) recounted their own childhood experiences as illustrations of the value of work in molding a child's character: I had to go to work when I was 5 or 6 years old, and I had to work all the time, and the boys who grew up around in my country, more of them went to the bad from not working than those who had to work. (House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 65.) (italics added)

85. Statement of Mr. J. M. Davis, superintendent Newberry Cotton Mills, Newberry S.C (Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 52).

86. Statement of Mr. Lewis Parker of Greenville, S.C., in House Committee on Labor, Child Labor Bill, 102–103.

87. Statement of Mr. S. F. Patterson, treasurer and general manager of Roanoke Mills, Roanoke, N.C. (House Committee on Labor, Child-Labor Bill, 63).

88. Statement of Florence Kelley in Committee on Labor, Child Labor Bill [Part 1], 34.

89. Maginnis, Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Interstate Commerce, 81–82.

90. See, for example, Woolley and Peters, “American Presidency Project,” The Family: Home of Freedom, 1992 Republican Platform: “[The family] is where each new generation gains its moral anchor. It is the school of citizenship, the engine of economic growth progress, a permanent haven when everything changes.” Also, for a popular, but influential, work on the natural traditional family from a Christian conservative perspective, see Dobson, James, Marriage under Fire: Why We Must Win this War (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2004)Google Scholar. On the importance of the natural family from a Libertarian perspective, see Nisbet, Robert, “Foreword” in The American Family and the State, eds. Peden, Joseph and Glahe, Fred (San Francisco, CA: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1986) xix–xxviGoogle Scholar.

91. Contemporary (liberal) Democrats stress “ultimate family values” as essentially economic, “… those that sustain the family (economically),” such that for many Democrats “… the entire [Republican-led] debate (over family values) serve[s] as a diversion to debating the real issues … what kind of help families need and government can provide.” Patricia Schroeder (D-CA), House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, Investing in Families: a Historical Perspective, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1992, 2. Also on the diversion of family values from legislative commitment to family economic policy, see Democratic 1996 Platform: “After 12 years of all family-values-talk and no family-values-action by the Republicans, President Clinton took office determined to put families first. We support the fundamental themes of …… promoting paycheck, health care, retirement, and personal security; creating greater educational and economic opportunity; and requiring greater responsibility from individuals, businesses, and government.” (Woolley and Peters, “American Presidency Project”).

92. For example, see Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Key, “Secular Realignment and the Party System,” and Burnham, Critical Elections.

93. See note 6.

94. Shafer, Byron E., The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003)Google Scholar.

95. It would be helpful to compare the roll call votes of my sample MCs on key pieces of legislation to their votes on family policy issues. By so doing, we would, firstly, be able to discern the illustrative or exceptional character of family policy in terms of the ideological patterns evidenced. Secondly, this could add strength to my claim that an analysis based on roll call votes yields a picture of polarization that is very different from an account based on committee hearings. However, given space considerations this analysis has not been undertaken here but is, instead, included in the larger project of which this article forms a part.