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Chapter 2

The Progressive Era: In the Path of the Juggernaut

In 1893, ten-year-old Flossie Moore’s life changed irrevocably. On the brink of insolvency, her family had been farming on rented land in the Piedmont countryside in North Carolina when her father died unexpectedly at the age of forty-three. Suddenly, her mother found herself in dire circumstances and responsible for eight children whose ages ranged from infancy to nineteen. After harvesting that year’s crops and seeking the advice of kin, Mrs. Moore moved her family to the textile mill in Bynum; as Flossie remembered, “there were several of the men that come out and met first, trying to decide what to do…. They knew about Bynum, and it was a good little place to live.… And of course the cotton mill was running here then. And the ones that was old enough…. Well, I went to work at ten years old.”¹ So began the Moores’ new life as wage laborers in the mills, living in a company house in the mill village, with younger children earning alongside their widowed mother and older siblings. The Moore family experience was similar to that of millions of families in the Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s), caught in the midst of “the juggernaut,” the turbulent tide of industrialization that was then engulfing the nation, with families experiencing upheavals and massive change in their struggle to survive and keep afloat.²

The structural transformation accompanying the move from a rural, agrarian-based economy to an urban, industrialized one had marked effects on all families, not merely those on the brink of destitution. Rising divorce rates, falling birthrates among the so-called better sort of people, the changing position of women, and a revolution in morals caused great alarm,³ as did rising family poverty, child and adult mortality, and death and disease in urban families.⁴ The economic and cultural dislocations accompanying the nation’s industrialization were mirrored in the microcosm of family’s shifting dynamics.

Family economy moved beyond the household, with several family members now employed in factories, canneries, and textile mills across the nation. Burgeoning labor markets as well as the transitory nature of several establishments meant low and sporadic wages for most working-class fathers. Mothers supplemented the family income either by home work (such as piecework, taking in laundry, boarders) or increasingly through wage labor outside the home, working as domestics and charwomen in private homes, office buildings, or railroad cars or in laundries or garment, textile, or cigar factories.⁵ Children often worked—boys as messengers, newsboys, or factory hands and girls in department stores and textile factories. Dangerous and harsh industrial conditions, rising mortality and disability, and crowded urban and unsanitary living conditions all meant that most working-class families could expect to lose at least a few members, adding to the family’s economic vulnerability.⁶

More affluent families also underwent transformations. Women began to move out of sheltered Victorian home life; they received higher education in growing numbers and challenged traditional gender roles by joining social clubs, engaging in voluntary and/or professional work, and becoming more politically active.⁷ Children were no longer mini-adults; instead, through a variety of social movements—for compulsory schools, playground creation, and child labor regulation—childhood began to be viewed as a separate time of innocence, play, and leisure, distinct from the demands of adulthood.⁸ Aided by technological advancements in transportation, fathers often traveled great distances to work and so spent many more hours outside of the home. With fathers now more rigidly associated with breadwinning, childrearing came to be firmly relegated to the sphere of mothers.⁹

Policy changes accompanying these family shifts were embedded within prevailing party politics, which was also in a state of embroilment.¹⁰ The election of 1896 had marked the beginning of the Fourth Party System, in which Republicans were favored nationally but dominated in industrializing northeastern and midwestern states,¹¹ and Democrats were elected primarily from agrarian states in the South and West.¹² This emerging alignment marked a new era of Republican-dominated party competition, replacing the preceding “state of courts and parties” in which either party could equally hope for victories after every election.¹³ As entities with distinct regional bases, political parties by and large channeled sectional interests. The Republican agenda was informed by the northern core’s manufacturing interest, and the Democratic agenda was shaped by the southern and western periphery’s agrarian interest. These commitments, however, were not rigid; instead, each party’s ideology was more an amalgam of various positions, formed from a looser, more shifting coalition of interests than what came to be the norm later and into today.¹⁴

The political climate in the Progressive period was notably infused with the fervor of reform. Reformist groups decried the excesses and vagaries of the patronage-based political and laissez-faire economic systems and advocated instead widespread civil and social reform. Interest groups were active and attempted to press their agenda on the electorate, Congress, and state legislatures.¹⁵ In a style of politics reminiscent of the late twentieth century, cultural and moral issues roiled a variety of social movements, such as temperance and women’s suffrage, regulation of child labor, and prevention of white slavery, among others.¹⁶ Other groups, such as Settlement House activists and the National Consumer League, railed against conditions of widespread economic deprivation—family poverty, low wages, failing health, and workplace casualties.

Social progressivism raised the economic Hearth approach as a viable solution to growing family problems, its appeal not confined to one party but somewhat dispersed across the two.¹⁷ Other cross-party factions invoked Soul family values concerns, emphasizing values such as parental autonomy and the morality of white families, as threatened by increasing immigration and by a more active national state.¹⁸ Despite some notable ideological overlaps across parties, this chapter reveals that even in this initial period of modern American politics, there were emerging partisan-sectional differences in how legislators approached family. More Republicans, from northern and midwestern regions, used the economic lens (the Hearth approach) to frame their family policy agenda, while southern (and some western) Democrats were more apt to use values and cultural qualities (the Soul approach) to craft their own policy visions.¹⁹

The prevailing strict constitutional division between national and states’ powers significantly influenced the development of the two partisan family agendas at this time. It circumscribed the efforts of more liberal Hearth advocates, who attempted to deploy national state machinery in service of family material well-being. Nonetheless, these legislators laid the groundwork for a more full-blown Hearth position that came to define the New Deal Democratic agenda. The existing constitutional strength of states also engendered a relatively strong Soul position, allowing Soul-leaning legislators to use parochial, localistic family values to resist the interventionism of economic Hearth policies more successfully in the Progressive Era than in later periods.

However, existing constitutional boundaries in the Progressive period did not deter Soul legislators from using family values to also call for positive engagement of the national state (much like in the late twentieth century), to preserve and protect certain values of so-called traditional white family structures. The Progressive Era thus not only reveals the antecedents and origins of late twentieth-century Hearth and Soul family policy ideals and approaches but also demonstrates their mutability and nascent flexibility as they came to be deployed by the two parties to further their own agendas.

The chapter examines the characteristics, contexts, and conditions of the emerging family party alignments in the Progressive Era, demonstrating the developing sectional polarities of northern Republican-Hearth and southern Democratic-Soul alignments at this time.²⁰ The first two sections primarily rely on congressional debates over woman suffrage and miscegenation to assemble legislators’ differential conceptions of family, following which the chapter analyzes the policy configurations advanced to instantiate these family conceptions into legislation; the final section turns to the demographic conditions and characteristics of northern and southern families that underpinned the emerging Hearth and Soul family party coalitions, arguing that the partisan embrace of one or the other family frames was strongly tied to differences in the material lives and values of the parties’ constituent bases.

Emerging Conceptions of Family, Gender, and State as Seen in Debates over Woman Suffrage

This section unpacks the conceptions of family and gender that were widely debated amid the era’s social and political turbulence. How ideational divisions over family and gender interacted to uphold alternative state ideologies is most clearly seen in debates over “woman suffrage,” a prominent policy concern of the time. These disagreements would come to be embedded in the emergent national state and serve as the latent ingredients for future partisan battles to follow.

For all members of Congress at the start of the twentieth century, family inhabited a domestic, private sphere that was in many ways distinct from the public one. The prevailing “separate-spheres ideology” divided public and private spheres by gender: women embodied moral qualities, purity, and nurturing abilities associated with the home, while men possessed physical qualities, aggressiveness, and firmness, seen as essential for the public spheres of work and politics.²¹ A carryover from the nineteenth century, separate sphere ideals endured in the early twentieth century. However, the traditional separation of male and female gender roles and the exclusivity of their spheres were starting to be strongly challenged, dividing members of Congress accordingly. The more progressive faction applauded new developments in work and family that melded domestic and public spheres, and more conservative delegations opposed them. Underlying legislators’ differences over the shifting boundaries between public and private were their strongly embedded ideas of family as foundationally economic and/or valuational.

Progressive members of Congress who supported women’s suffrage attacked the traditional separateness of domestic and public spheres by using a predominantly economic family framework. They advocated an intertwined relationship between government, economy, and home, arguing that laws should actively intervene to improve primarily economic and, second, valuational conditions of home life. Senator Robert Owen (D-OK), for instance, approvingly recounted a long list of legislation enacted in Colorado when women were allowed to vote, citing “the most highly perfected school system that any State in the Union has,” “laws taking care of defective children, laws punishing those who contributed to the delinquency of a child; laws taking care of the weaker elements of society, of the deaf and dumb, the blind, the insane, the poor; laws beautifying the cities and improving many other conditions of life,” along with more values-laden laws, such as those “establishing the curfew to prevent children being exposed to temptation at night,” also asserting that “women can not be persuaded to favor the liquor traffic, the white-slave traffic, gambling, or other evils of society.”²²

However, conservative legislators opposed to women’s suffrage, distinctively many from the South, warned that the progressive conjoining of hitherto separate spheres would result in the degradation of the domestic sphere and debasing of traditional family values, such as the sanctity of marriage. For instance, Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL) asserted the higher than average incidence of divorce in all the equal-suffrage states,²³ claiming, “Pretty soon after woman suffrage came, divorce would be as respectable as marriage.”²⁴ These members opposed the political inclusion of women by extolling the virtues of the antisuffragette as “the woman who yet believes that the home and the child are her sphere and that politics and business are the sphere of the man.”²⁵

In their antisuffrage remarks, conservative southern legislators used a Soul approach to focus policy attention on preserving patriarchy as the dominant family form. The southern patriarchal family structure, they insisted, engendered a “chivalrous attitude” of men, such that women exercised far greater power indirectly through men than they would independently. Senator John Williams (D-MS) claimed to speak for “other Senators from the cotton States” when he asserted that “women have more influence with regard to public measures in Mississippi and those States to-day than they have in any suffrage State in this Union.” When women “put themselves behind anything in the State of Mississippi,” he said, “that thing the men vote for, and the politician who dares oppose it gets defeated by the other men. Let it be prohibition; let it be anything else; if the women of Mississippi say to the men of Mississippi in sufficient tones, so that the men can understand them, ‘we want this thing,’ the men give it to them.”²⁶ Using racially charged language to impugn the virtue of suffragettes, suffrage opponents claimed that these women looked upon the “indissoluble Christian marriage” as a “slave union” and were seeking to upstage it;²⁷ this, they warned, would lead to a precipitous decline in male authority, “a state of society where man will not figure except as the father of her child.”²⁸

For prosuffrage legislators, the conservative emphasis on preserving patriarchal families and hierarchical gender values was an illegitimate, sectional concern, an innate southern “prejudice” against women that must be “overcome.” Senator George Chamberlain (D-OR) offered his own personal story as an example of this, recounting how he was born and reared in “a Southern State” and went to the “western country” with “a feeling, which many southern men had of antagonism to the propriety of enfranchising women.” Yet, he said, he was able to “overc[o]me the prejudice, which was inborn in me, and which still lurks in the bosom of nearly every southern man, I am sure,” and became “an ardent supporter of the doctrine of equal suffrage.”²⁹

Illustrating the gender liberalism that would come to persist within the Hearth family approach, prosuffrage legislators instead emphasized the desirability of moving toward egalitarian gender ideals. They presented an egalitarian family view, centered on companionship, nurturing, and affection, instead of on chivalry and hierarchy—a family ideal that could be best realized, they said, if women were granted suffrage. Senator Everis Hayes (RCA), for example, celebrated “the ideal of a home where human nature can develop to the full,” saying, “you who have never enjoyed the privilege of going to the polls, our most sacred shrine, in company with your mother and your wife, as I have done, can not realize the supreme pleasure of sharing with your nearest and dearest the highest of privileges, that of full American citizenship.”³⁰

Yet, their support for progressive gender relations and more active participation of women in politics did not stop those in favor of suffrage, like their colleagues on the other side, to continue to view the domestic sphere as feminine and women as first and foremost mothers. For them too, women’s moral capacities flowed from their familial roles, interests, and qualities, as mothers, wives, and daughters and not as independent actors. Far from being gender neutral, the Hearth family economics approach in the Progressive Era specifically targeted women as mothers and housewives. In numerous policies for the encouragement of “American” dietary norms, food and clothes consumption, and family health-related practices, mothers were seen as central to family behavior, and Hearth policies devised to improve material family practices were expressly directed at them. In so doing, legislators were echoing the prevailing ideologies of “maternalism” and “civic housekeeping” advocated by prominent female reformers of the time. Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House settlement in Chicago, popularized “civic housekeeping,” arguing that a city ought to be conceived as a household needing continuous housekeeping, cleanliness, and caring to rectify social problems, tasks for which women were especially suited.³¹ Characterized as “maternalists,” female reformers used their position as mothers to seek social reform of primarily Hearth (but some Soul) problems such as increasing poverty, full female citizenship, labor unrest, runaway crime, high levels of child mortality, and public health issues such as increasing workplace injuries and spread of epidemic diseases—all while seeking more egalitarian gender relations and the political inclusion of women as bureaucrats, administrators, and voters.³²

The Soul-aligned conservative faction in Congress, however, viewed such modern women reformers as women who chose to abandon the hearth and their domestic responsibilities. For instance, Representative Jerome Donovan had the following exchange with maternalist witness Lillian Williamson, from the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, who was testifying before the Committee on Education in favor of Federal Aid for Home Economics. Doubting the need for federal government programs in home economics, Congressman Donovan (D-NY) asked, “How was it that the mothers whom you have so pictured … that were the ideal mothers and were the ideal home builders, how was it that they did not have the advantage of these things: and yet that they attained a great strength of attainment which they did as home builders and mothers?” To which Ms. Williamson replied by emphasizing the economic transformations in family lives, saying, “The mother that trained her children 200 years ago had different processes to deal with … there was no great number of things that engaged her outside of the home. All the household tasks were in the home.” Congressman Donovan used Williamson’s words to instead extoll traditional separate-sphere motherhood, saying, “In other words, her life and duties were concentrated upon her home, were they not? She attended to what was her business.”³³

In addition to gender, the debates over women’s suffrage also reveal diverging, often sectional, ideologies of state, which were deeply imbricated with the gender and family ideals of the Hearth and Soul family approaches. Illustrating a more conservative ideal of state, conservative legislators opposed to women’s suffrage condemned reformers’ faith in government as a cure for social ills. One such example can be found in the words of southern Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL), deriding the position of suffragist Senator Henry Ashurst (D-AZ) in this way: “[According to Ashurst] just so surely as at midnight there is a centrifugal force which in due time will whirl the world into the gladsome presence of the morning, just that surely in the fullness of time will poverty be abolished. Sweatshops, crowded slums, and starving children will be only a horrid memory … the extension of the ballot to women will be a helpful influence in assisting to solve this great problem in the future.” “Politicians who promised the negroes of the South, immediately after the war, that they, each one, should have 40 acres and a mule,” said Senator Bryan, “were pikers alongside the Senator from Arizona.”³⁴ Opposing a redistributionist state, Bryan challenged the support given to the suffrage movement on the basis that such “people have actually believed that the Government will fix the wage they shall receive; that the independent, upstanding citizen, who has heretofore relied upon his own intelligence and brawn and muscle, and asked no favors of the Government or of anybody, will pass away, and, instead, the State will support everybody and will fix the wages by law.”³⁵

Antisuffrage opposition to government involvement in home involved upholding certain traditional and laissez-faire values over state assistance: parental independence and (male) individual autonomy above all else. In several committee hearings, particularly on regulatory issues such as vaccination and disease control, child labor regulation, compulsory schooling, and the establishment of juvenile courts and other state institutions, witnesses and members of Congress using a Soul family values framework used language reminiscent of late twentieth-century neoliberalism to argue that “no one has such vital interest and concern in the welfare of the child as the parents themselves.”³⁶ Witnesses espousing parental autonomy and responsibility often testified in favor of business and industries. They even testified against federal censorship of the budding motion picture industry, chiding parents for shirking their responsibilities and placing an “impossible undertaking” on the federal government “by having it attempt to look after the proper upbringing of their own and everybody else’s children and grandchildren.” The federal government, they said, “would not only be required to keep the children from all contamination while the parents allowed them to wander about the community but it would have to come closer home and take up the matter of the wearing of Indian suits by children and the playing with toy pistols and pop guns.”³⁷

Progressive arguments for intertwined domestic and political spheres among suffrage supporters were part of the emerging social-progressive faith in an interventionist state. These legislators asserted a Hearth family framework insofar as they claimed that the national state had a legitimate responsibility in child (and therefore family) economic welfare, particularly when parents were incapacitated; they used the state’s interest in child welfare to justify regulatory measures directed at employers and industry, as well as delinquent parents, and to provide assistance to dependent families, all of which sought to re-create the “ideal of home life” for vulnerable children.³⁸

During congressional hearings, the Hearth family economics framework was thus referred to in many more examples of lower-income rather than higher-income families, a large proportion of the former also cited as single-mother families. Moreover, in 23 percent of family examples that focused on family economic conditions, legislators raised family health and living conditions as well as child labor regulation in 19 percent of these cases, women’s equality in 10.5 percent of cases, and juvenile institutions such as work homes and orphanages in 9 percent of such Hearth family cases.³⁹

Progressive legislators championed enhanced federal government involvement on grounds that unlike individual parents, local communities, and even state governments, the federal government alone could conduct large-scale investigations, gather data, coordinate policy efforts, and thereby stimulate state action on several issues, critical to the welfare of families.⁴⁰ Conservative legislators more concerned with family values, such as family self-regulation and parental autonomy, were openly critical of the reformist faith in centralized planning, redistribution, scientific inquiry, and universal standards and instead valued local knowledge and the right of communities to regulate themselves.⁴¹ 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