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Chapter 1

The Partisan Turn to Family Values: An Overview

During a news conference in December 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked a question on birth control, to which he responded, “I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility.”¹ More than fifty years later, in 2011, Rick Santorum, a presidential candidate also from the GOP, avowed to “defend America” from those who “say we need a truce on social issues.” Said Santorum, “At the heart of this country … America is a moral enterprise and we are sick at the heart of our country—when we see millions of children aborted and marriage not being defended.” A “truce,” Santorum thus asserted, would amount to “surrender.”²

Eisenhower and Santorum illustrate the transformed role of family in American party politics over the twentieth century. Until the late 1960s, most Republicans and Democrats considered family—its sexuality, poverty, health, formation, and childrearing—a state or local issue, firmly within the purview of the internal police and economy of the respective states or else wholly private, under the domain of the (male) head of household. Historically, of course, contestations over family episodically roiled national party politics. The issue of polygamous marriage, for instance, engrossed national debate in the nineteenth century; miscegenation embroiled the two parties during the Reconstruction and Progressive Eras, invoking doomsday predictions of “race suicide” and declining national greatness,³ and with the onset of industrialization, child labor, mothers’ working conditions, infant and maternal health, and hygiene aroused national attention and enlisted partisan consideration. However, the late twentieth century stands apart in the fact that family came to play an unprecedentedly large and more durable role in structuring party polarization, with Republicans and Democrats assigning it greater than ever political value. Even when viewed narrowly, merely as part of a larger constellation of “cultural” or “social” concerns, family issues began to decisively shape nationwide and statewide electoral outcomes, also playing a steady, durable role in legislative politics.

The year 1980 was decisive to the increased prominence of family to party competition. In that year, the Republican Party launched a new ideology, a repudiation of the Democratic-led progressive agenda that had long dominated since the New Deal.⁴ The revised Republican ideology, which continues to prevail today, pivoted on two central themes: first, “antistatism,” through which the party highlighted local institutions and emphasized their “private-ness” in opposing the liberal state, and, second, “traditional values,” by which the party began to stress what political scientist Byron Shafer has termed “valuational” concerns, highlighting proper behavioral norms within which social life should proceed.⁵ Family emerged as the primary issue through which Republicans combined their longer-term antistatism, on one hand, with their newfound emphasis on traditional values, on the other.⁶

Democrats responded to the late twentieth-century Republican focus on families by similarly elevating family within their own policy discourse but rejecting Republicans’ antistatism and traditional values emphasis. For Democrats, “putting families first” meant more effective material/distributional benefits to encourage family strength regardless of diverse family forms and an enhanced, not reduced, state-family partnership. They claimed that families now came “in all different shapes and sizes,” yet “they all face[d] similar challenges,”⁷ and that the emphasis on family values by Republicans was a smokescreen masking state inaction and neglect. In this way, the late twentieth-century Democratic conception of family retained its New Deal and post–World War II focus, continuing to stress the material circumstances of families, as well as their economic stagnation or mobility, while also explicating the values underlying their economics-centered approach.

For Democrats, the family values they thus came to claim were progressive, secular-humanist values, not traditional or moral ones; these included values such as equality and equal protection, fairness, and individual self-determination. At the 2012 National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, told a classic Democratic tale of family values when she recounted the “unflinching sacrifice,” “unconditional love,” and hard work of her father, a pump operator at a city water plant, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and often “struggle[d] to make it out of bed” but never missed a day of work. Mrs. Obama described how her father steadfastly pursued the dream of giving his children the “chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.” “Dignity, decency, gratitude, humility, fairness and compassion,” she said, are “who we are”; they are the “values Barack and I are trying to pass on to our children.”⁸ On the face of it, the content of these values is not dissimilar from values often claimed and championed by Republicans, yet for Democrats alone, these values remained firmly imbricated within family economic conditions and state-regulated markets, and familiar arguments for state programmatic assistance based on family economic need were recast as programs that ensured fairness, inclusivity, and equality.

The two partisan approaches to family and their disparate alignments of values and economics align alternatively with a burgeoning “vulnerability” scholarship, most notably developed by feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman. Fineman points to five types of resources or assets that could mitigate human (including family) vulnerability and enhance resilience; these assets are identified as physical, human, social, ecological or environmental, and existential.⁹ These posited resiliency resources, resources by which families may successfully resist hardships that come their way, can be broadly categorized into external/material assets, on one hand, and internal/valuational or psychological assets, on the other. The two political parties have similarly largely divided over family in policy, diverging over which of the two kinds of assets are central to policy and thus to projected family success. They either focus on the external, economic resources of families, such as their income, wages, jobs, and taxes, promising to improve them in some way, or highlight the internal—valuational or behavioral—assets of a family, such as a family’s discipline, self-reliance, and responsibility. Family policy agendas thus either primarily aim at supporting the material character of families, bolstering their material resources (their Hearth), or have a more internal focus, directed at a family’s Soul, purporting instead to enhance its values resources—its self-reliance, personal responsibility, commitment to marriage, and so on.

At the core of Hearth policies is thus a Hearth family ideal that assumes that a family’s economics, its income, wages, material access to housing, health care, and such, is central to its flourishing and its values secondary, even if very important. And Soul policies assume a Soul family ideal that imagines family as essentially a valuational unit, loosely connected—if at all—to its economic circumstances. The two are poles, or central tendencies, within partisan policy framing of family, overlapping but also certainly distinctive.

This chapter analyzes party platforms and bill sponsorships to present an overview of family political development from 1900 to 2012, revealing the twists and turns of Hearth and Soul family ideals within party dialectics and demonstrating how, since the late twentieth century, there is a stronger than ever political assertion of a distinctive Soul family ideal.¹⁰ In so doing, three significant periods of family partisan development are identified: (a) the Progressive Era (1900–1920), (b) the post–World War II period (1945–1955), and (c) the late twentieth-century period to the present (1980–2012). The current chapter demonstrates that through the three periods, family steadily grew in political importance while the parties reversed their family ideologies and began to increasingly polarize over Hearth and Soul, in contrast to earlier periods such as the postwar era, when the two family ideals were more overlapping and shared across the two parties. The three identified periods are then analyzed separately, as case studies, in the chapters to follow that unpack the precise interaction of family and party in each historical phase and analyze the historically contingent conditions that shaped how the parties treated family as they did, simultaneously revealing how family, in turn, shaped party developments in each of the three eras.

The Family in Party Platforms, 1900–2012

The parties have increasingly addressed the family in their platforms. Controlling for the total number of paragraphs in each platform, three distinct periods stand out in the parties’ address of family (Figure 3): an initial period of low salience in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when both parties made reference to family in only 2 percent of their platforms on average; a second period following the Depression through post–World War II (1930s–1964), when the parties occasionally increased their attention to family, with family paragraphs forming 3 to 8 percent of their platforms; and a final period of a durable, sharp increase, starting from 1968 and extending into the twenty-first century, when the parties tripled their attention to family.

Later platforms are also distinctive insofar as more pledges were directed at family as a unit rather than targeting individuals or other collective groups. For example, the parties’ pledges on taxes moved away from solely addressing individual citizens or corporations to also focusing on families; tax pledges shifted from their previous focus on “low-income Americans” and “workers,” for example, to address “low-income families” and “working families.” Since the start of the twentieth century, the percentage of tax pledges that invoked family first doubled and then tripled, from about 6 percent between the 1940s and 1960s to 15 percent in the 1970s, further increasing to upward of 20 percent in the twenty-first century (Figure 4).

Figure 3. Family paragraphs in party platforms, as a percentage of total paragraphs, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs. Data compiled by author.

Similarly, welfare and antipoverty promises, long directed only at children, the disabled, and the elderly with no reference to their families, have focused sharply on family units since the 1970s, invoking families as critical to the success or failure of antipoverty measures. From about 15 percent of all welfare paragraphs that invoked family from the 1940s to 1950s, this rose first to 25 percent in the 1970s and then to 43 percent of all welfare paragraphs in the twenty-first century (Figure 4).

Another central feature of family politics since the 1970s has been the increased prominence of the valuational, Soul family ideal. Whereas the parties increased both types of family references (economic and valuational) significantly from the late 1960s to 1970s, the upward trend is much more pronounced in the case of the Soul family approach, with pledges aimed at family values and character bursting onto the political stage, overtaking economic-based Hearth pledges, then falling but maintaining a heightened presence since (Figure 5). Compared to the 1950s and 1960s, party platforms of the 1970s doubled all references to economic family aspects, but they quadrupled the number of their references to family values and its nonmaterial character.

Figure 4. Percentage of tax and antipoverty pledges that cite the family in party platforms, 1900–2012.

Figure 5 also reminds us that despite the current ubiquity of family values in party rhetoric, it was largely a subterranean feature of partisan policy discourse in earlier decades. The two parties previously invoked family more consistently in an economic sense, pledging to and primarily dividing over the distribution of economic welfare and benefits to families. Yet the Soul family values focus is not entirely new either. It persisted throughout the past century, with both parties alternatively emphasizing family values at differing points in history. In the early twentieth century (first two decades), the Democratic Party, for instance, stressed family morals and values in addition to family economics (see Figure 6), so distinguishing itself from the more progressive, exclusively economic-focused Republican Party. However, following the Great Depression and with the emergence of the New Deal, the Democratic Party altogether eschewed the Soul family valuational approach, emphatically addressing the family through its economics alone. In contrast, Republicans, in their opposition to the rising New Deal coalition, began to stress family values in the 1940s and 1950s even while accepting the dominant Hearth approach, only to strongly repudiate family economics in favor of family values in their concerted bid for electoral dominance in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, the Democratic Party also has incorporated a Soul family values approach, albeit in a more secular-humanist, not traditionalist, sense, while nevertheless continuing to assert its own economics-based Hearth family focus as well.

Figure 5. Hearth and Soul family paragraphs as a percentage of total paragraphs, party platforms, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs. Data compiled by author.

The ebb and flow of the political salience of an economic Hearth or valuational Soul family focus is thus part of a partisan dialectic. One is advanced by one party at any given time and used to repudiate the other, as the out party seeks to distinguish itself from the dominant party. The following section analyzes the specific issues and ways by which the two parties in different eras have utilized the Hearth and Soul family frames in their policy agendas, also demonstrating the ideals of state and, to a lesser extent, economy that have underpinned the shifting family conceptions.

Figure 6. Hearth and Soul paragraphs as a percentage of total paragraphs, Democratic and Republican Party platforms, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs. Data compiled by author.

Family in Partisan Agendas, the Early Years (1900–1932): Limited Salience, Marginal Polarization

During the Progressive Era (1900–1920), the social progressive reform movement focused much attention on the impoverished economic conditions of families. Social progressives advocated new public measures to improve working conditions, to economically assist families and children, and to ensure better products, services, and environmental conditions for consumers.¹¹ They targeted growing poverty as a product of rapid industrialization and urbanization, as well as unregulated markets and monopolies, invoking themes of nation building and tying the economic assistance of children and their families to the long-term success of the nation.

The social progressive project resonated with the state-centered ideology of national republicanism advocated by Republicans in this time.¹² Social progressives urged a variety of programs for children and their families, such as mothers’ aid, children and women’s labor regulation, compulsory public schooling, and maternal and infant health care programs. Much of this agenda was child (not family) centered and directed at state governments, as the constitutional boundaries circumscribing the national state were still rigid and social welfare matters fell predominantly within the purview of states. Even when the two political parties accommodated progressive policy planks in their national platforms, very rarely did they place them within a family context, invoking families in only about 2 percent of their pledges (see Figure 3). Nevertheless, in their few family-directed pledges, both parties typically addressed families’ economic conditions, utilizing a Hearth family approach. The parties differed, however, in whether or not they used that family ideal to obligate the national state.

Of the two parties, Republicans were (then) more comfortable with the use of centralized state machinery and regulated markets for public welfare, including for child and family welfare. In 1908, they pledged support for child labor regulation in factories, provision of widows’ pensions, and safety legislation for firefighters and railroad engineers, all of which they described as “wholesome and progressive … acts conserving the public welfare.”¹³ Also in pledges to veterans’ families and their dependents, Republicans more than Democrats viewed that commitment to mean an expansion of national state obligations¹⁴ by promising to harness federal state machinery to compensate veterans’ families through promises of employment in the public service.¹⁵

Both political parties viewed veterans’ families as legitimate subjects of national policy attention, acknowledging, for example, that the nation “owes [them] a debt of profound gratitude,”¹⁶ and addressing veterans’ families exclusively (in contrast to any other family) through pledges for pensions and other material support. However, in this case too, Democratic platforms were more hesitant to engage the federal state, for instance pledging support for widows’ pensions only to “relieve the country of the necessity of a large standing army,” rather than as a bona fide national public responsibility.¹⁷ In planks addressing homesteader families as well, Republicans approached the provision of public lands as an independent obligation of the national state,¹⁸ pledging to it as a “constant policy of the Republican party to provide free homes on the public domain.”¹⁹ In contrast, Democrats framed their homestead policies only as part of a larger struggle against land monopolies,²⁰ also promising to free the homesteader from unnecessary state intrusion and regulatory constraints.²¹

However, in the late Progressive Era, as a harbinger of a tide soon to develop in the New Deal and perhaps in response to women winning the vote, Democratic platforms began to shift in their address of families, promising to obligate the national state more fully for family material support. In 1920, for example, Democrats pledged to support increased appropriations for the “Children’s 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 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 did not play a significant role in the emerging Republican neoliberal values agenda of the midcentury. Whereas Democrats increased sixfold their pledges to families in 1936, Republican platforms through the 1930s and 1940s only marginally increased reference to families: from 2 percent to only about 4 to 5 percent of all their pledges. Nevertheless, Republican platforms through the 1950s also accepted the Hearth family approach to an extent, devoting some pledges to the provision of family economic security. In planks often entitled “Security,” Republicans promised economic assistance to families in familial situations such as maternity and child health,⁴¹ public assistance of dependent children,⁴² and in the provision of low-cost and low-rent housing.⁴³ Both parties acknowledged the family’s changing needs in light of wars (World War II, the Cold War) as creating further national state obligations.⁴⁴ Since 1936, Republican platforms also have promised their own safety net programs, cautiously admitting “society has an obligation to promote the security of the people, by affording some measure of involuntary unemployment and dependency in old age.”⁴⁵ Republicans circumscribed that commitment to family economic security within their prevailing paradigm of individual self-initiative and free-market values, asserting that these programs would only “supplement … the productive ability of free American labor, industry, and agriculture.”

Republicans also began to derive values from a special class of families—farm families—and asserted the achievement of these families’ well-being as a “prime national purpose.”⁴⁶ In the case of farm families, Republicans pledged much economic assistance and material benefits: farm subsidies, commodity loans, farm credit, crop research services, development of rural roads, and rural electrification services were promised in order, they said, to “make life more attractive on the family type farm.”⁴⁷ When it came to farm families, seen as “traditional to American life” and as upholding cherished neoliberal values of self-sufficiency, self-regulation, and personal responsibility, Republican platforms thus incorporated the Hearth family approach, and the economic security of these select families was presented as a legitimate national state obligation. In a somewhat paradoxical fashion, they directed their programmatic promises at increasing the autonomy of farm families, strongly condemning Democratic production controls and “extensive … bureaucratic interference,”⁴⁸ which “limit[s] by coercive methods the farmer’s control over his own farm.”⁴⁹

Thus, in the Depression and midcentury eras, the yeoman farm family was the first to be extolled by Republicans as a traditional, iconic, “American values” family inasmuch as it displayed free-market values of self-sufficiency and autonomy. In this way, economics-focused family pledges also began to promote neoliberal values, intertwining, for the first time, the Hearth and Soul family approaches within partisan (Republican) agenda and presaging a dynamic soon to come. On their part, Democratic platforms, much like the Republican ones in the Progressive Era, did not address family values but concentrated on addressing bare economic need, eschewing the Soul frame for the Hearth.⁵⁰ “Family need” was a prominent theme running through Democratic platforms of the 1950s, serving as the premise for multiple promises of state-provided material help, such as through the Food Lunch and Food Stamp programs⁵¹ and numerous child welfare programs and services.⁵² In this way, Democrats after the Depression and after World War II revived the earlier social-progressive creed that obligated the national state to achieving material family well-being, the Hearth ideal.

In sum, in the midcentury decades of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, family came to slowly inform party competition and political development in new ways. Under the pall of the Great Depression and led by the New Deal Liberal-Labor Democrats, the economic security of families was elevated in the parties’ agenda, now viewed as an “inescapable obligation” of the modern national state. Policy attention to family was no longer confined to “special” family categories, such as the families of veterans, workers’ families, or immigrant families; instead, parties began to assert national state responsibility for a safety net for family as a more universal category. Democrats approached family as an economic distributional unit, a way to classify, direct, and target specific national programs to families based on their material need or income but also as the collective material context of the experience of human vulnerability.

Republicans at this time, more resembling Democrats of the earlier Progressive Era, were less committed to the economic family ideal as a lasting obligation on the national state. Instead, they circumscribed these pledges to their support of free markets and associated values such as private initiative and self-reliance, harnessing individualist market-based values to oppose the expansion of the national state. Although families remained incidental to Republicans’ emerging neoliberal agenda, in pledges aimed at protecting the autonomy of the yeoman farm family, they began to construct neoliberal family values. The values of self-reliance and free enterprise were asserted as traditional American values, part of the “American method” to resolve all economic and social problems, and gained some traction with the onset of the Cold War and the battle against communism in the 1950s. In this way, family began to gain Republican attention as the potential locus of valuational, antistatist, market-based solutions to national and international problems.

The 1960s: Expansion of the Hearth Approach

Through the 1960s, Democrats continually promised to provide “a better life for all families,” steadily pushing the bounds of national state obligations and its machinery to include more economic needs of families and individuals. In their 1956 platform, Democrats had made the first of many pledges to the elimination of poverty, avowing to increase all family incomes, especially of those earning the least.⁵³ In 1960, they went further, pledging to the “Economic Bill of Rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience [in 1944],” many of which provided for family (not just individual) material welfare: promising “the right to earn a minimum wage sufficient for families basic needs (clothing, shelter, recreation)”; the right of a farmer to “give him and his family a decent living”; and “the right of every family to a decent home.”⁵⁴

Low-income families, in particular, received heightened attention, and the party pledged expanded programmatic assistance to them in the form of housing, city revitalization and slum clearance, public assistance benefits, community programs, and so on. To this end, Democrats called for further expansion of the national state, condemning “the present inequitable, underfinanced hodgepodge [of] state (welfare) plans.”⁵⁵ Republican platforms in the 1960s also addressed families’ material well-being, particularly in the case of low-income families.⁵⁶ They pledged support for special education programs for poor preschool children,⁵⁷ help to low-income farm families,⁵⁸ and housing programs for low-income families.⁵⁹ Like Democrats, they too began to address poverty as a scourge capable of directed policy elimination, making references (albeit in a more subdued tone) to “our crusade against poverty” and to “conquering disease, poverty and grinding physical demands.”⁶⁰

Republicans, however, also continued to oppose the Democratic expansion of the national state on the grounds of free-market values and principles. In their pledges to address human needs and assist low-income families, they relied on monetary and fiscal policies and privatization, rather than only entitlement programs and bureaucracies. In the case of housing for lower-income families, they proposed a system of economic incentives to attract private industry to the low-cost housing market.⁶¹ They condemned the Kennedy-Johnson administration for having “refused to take practical free enterprise measures to help the poor” and vehemently opposed the Democratic war on poverty insofar as it “would dangerously centralize Federal controls and bypass effective state, local and private programs.”⁶² Republican platforms thus did not elevate family economic need to the level of a right obligating the national state but addressed it more as a matter of compassion, repeatedly stating that “there are many things a free government cannot do for its people as they can do them [and] [t]here are some things no government should promise or attempt to do.”⁶³ Despite these prevailing differences over the national state, in the long period from the New Deal through the Great Society, both parties increasingly converged in pursuing a Hearth family approach, focusing on a family’s economic security as an important policy concern.

At the same time, Republican platforms—much more than Democratic ones—continued to also highlight market-based values. Initially, the Republican Party had embraced such values wholly as centered on the individual, and family was incidental to this focus. In the 1960s, this began to change. Republican platforms began their long turn toward a Soul family approach, now connecting “family” to free-market “values” first in planks on poor families and welfare reform. In planks on juvenile delinquency, the Republican Party began to call for federal programs to “strengthen family life.”⁶⁴ The party also openly condemned Democratic welfare programs not only on the usual grounds that they created “debilitating dependence which erodes self-respect” but now also that the programs “discourag[ed] family unity and responsibility.”⁶⁵ By 1968, the Republican Party was calling for revision of existing welfare programs to “encourage and protect strong family units.”⁶⁶ It was on planks regarding welfare and the poor that the party first experimented with and developed what was to become a durable Soul family approach, crystallizing their broad valuational approach with a new focus on the family, connecting social traditionalist values such as family strength and stability to neoliberal, free enterprise values. The fact that the Republican Soul family approach was first politicized in welfare policy as a central ground to limit state involvement underscores the strongly uneven and punitive character of that approach that continued to apply to exclude certain categories of families from programs and benefits even while it created other programs to enhance the rights and autonomy of other kinds of families.

For its part, the Democratic Party too began to develop its own set of values in the 1960s, in this case incorporating values to extend material benefits to more families than ever before. Values of personal dignity, inclusion, and equity permeated its platforms and were increasingly applied to assert the inclusion of (economically) disadvantaged and vulnerable families. With the growing prosperity of the 1960s, the 1964 Democratic platform stressed the “common good” principle by entitling the platform “One Nation, One People.” In that platform, Democrats asserted that the well-being of each American depends on the prosperity and (economic) well-being of all.⁶⁷ The party thus continued and expanded its focus on the poor and disadvantaged, condemning “the inequity and waste of poverty” and asserting that its national purpose was not only to “continue the expansion of the American economy” but also to “exten[d] the benefits of this growth and prosperity to those who have not fully shared in them.”⁶⁸

Equity, equal protection, and inclusion of marginalized families permeated Democratic platforms of the 1960s, where they asserted the ongoing necessity of federal programs in order “to assure that every American, of every race, in every region, truly shares in the benefits of economic progress.”⁶⁹ The party thus opposed state eligibility restrictions, which denied assistance to children of unemployed parents or those that prohibited all assistance when the father was in the home; sought repeal of the “arbitrary limit” on the number of children who could receive assistance; and opposed the provision requiring mothers of young children to work in order for children to be eligible for aid.⁷⁰ The party also pledged a revamping of federal taxes “to make them more equitable as between rich and poor and as among people with the same income and family responsibilities.”⁷¹

Thus, in the 1960s, both Republicans and Democrats began to increasingly invoke values in their pledges to American families. Democrats stressed secular-humanist values such as “inclusion” or “equal protection”/“equal access” and “personal dignity or fulfillment” in their promises for enhanced Hearth family policies. They did not formulate a valuational Soul family ideal distinct from material security but instead asserted the valuational structure underlying their economic approach. Republicans, on the other hand, were beginning to formulate a wholly noneconomic Soul family ideal: the “traditional family” as a fundamentally moral and valuational unit, assembling a valuational policy agenda that began to combine ideational elements of both a neoliberal and a social traditional cast. This approach would soon come to permeate and challenge the very essence of the longdominant economic family approach, championed by New Deal Liberal-Labor Democrats.

Late Century to the Present, 1968–2012: Invigorated Soul Family Ideal and Enhanced Polarization

The year 1968 marked a decisive turn in partisan politics, with far-reaching effects on family political development. In the midst of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the tight grasp of the postwar Democratic Coalition over national politics began to loosen, making way for a shift in policy—away from economic security toward values and cultural battles.

Following riots at their National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Democrats adopted a series of changes to their nomination and convention rules, accommodating cultural progressives into their ranks and ensuring significant change to the party’s ideology. In 1972, the Democratic platform avowed an agenda that was more attentive to values and postmaterial concerns than merely economic redistribution. The party described three things that “people want” as an interplay between secular-humanist values and material needs: “They want a personal life that makes us all feel that life is worth living,” “a social environment whose institutions promote the good of all,” and “an opportunity to achieve their aspirations and their dreams for themselves and their children.”⁷² This was a far cry from the agenda contained in the Economic Bill of Rights to which Democrats had long pledged, in which they had asserted hard economic rights, concerned only with a family’s material life, such as “the right to earn a minimum wage,” “the right of every famer … to earn a decent living,” and the “right to a decent home.”⁷³

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Democratic platforms, however, continued to emphasize the postwar Hearth focus on family economics, attributing family change and “disintegrating families” not to changing cultural values or family norms but to disadvantageous economic conditions, such as poverty and unemployment. In their family pledges, they promised to hold families together by “provid[ing] the help a family needs to survive a crisis together.”⁷⁴ Still concerned that “prosperity will not be evenly distributed among regions and communities,” they pledged “special efforts to help families in economic transition who are faced with loss of homes, health benefits, and pensions.”⁷⁵ In their family pledges, Democratic platforms expanded and made explicit their postwar commitment to values of equality, fairness, and inclusion underpinning their economic Hearth policy approach rather than develop anew their own valuational Soul family one.

Starting in 1976, the Republican Party on its part thoroughly revised its platform ideology and welded Judeo-Christian constructions of family values more centrally onto its neoliberal approach of free markets and private initiative.⁷⁶ In a large plank entitled “American Family,” the Republican Party in that year asserted that “families must continue to be the foundation of our nation” and emphasized its role in preserving a traditional (social and economic) valuational order: “Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure … our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.”⁷⁷ As part of the pledge to create a “hospitable environment for family life,” the Republican platform committed to several policy positions regarding taxation, economic policies, education, employment, reproductive rights, and welfare. The preservation of the nuclear (heterosexual) family emerged as a central organizing feature for many Republican social and economic policies.⁷⁸

In 1980, the Republican platform used the rejuvenated Soul family ideal to launch its strongest repudiation yet of the postwar Democratic agenda. Family and its (independent social and economic) values were declared as “fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.”⁷⁹ The platform asserted that “all domestic policies, from child care and schooling to social security and the tax code, must be formulated with the family in mind.”⁸⁰ In the immediate postwar period, free market–based Republican family values such as self-reliance, found in pledges on the family farm, were directed at opposing the liberal administrative state. However, starting in 1976, Republican platforms thereafter made the preservation of “the traditional family” and “traditional family values” a positive goal of public policy requiring not only the dismantling of existing Democratic programs but also the creation of new programs, to enhance and support traditional families in perpetuating traditional social-moral values.

Regardless of substantive differences in partisan family values, the difference over the relative role and extent of values (as major or minor) in defining the parties’ late twentieth-century approach to families is evident from the extent to which both addressed values in their family pledges. Starting in 1976, Republicans far outpaced Democrats in their references to values in their platforms (Figure 7). Democratic platforms embraced values less and with greater inconsistency in their family pledges. Although Democrats invoked values more in family planks in 1972, under the influence of the New Left during the McGovern election, this did not result in a durable shift toward a Democratic (secular) valuational family approach. Instead, Democratic family pledges in the 1980s were much less preoccupied with values than their Republican counterparts. Values then began to feature more prominently in Democratic family pledges in the 1990s, falling in 2004, only to rebound during the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

In terms of substantive differences, each party turned to family to highlight its own social vision. Republican family pledges sought to restore a conservative social order, consistently invoking neoliberal-traditional values of strong family life, faith/traditional moral values, family self-determination, and self-reliance (Figure 8). On the other hand, the Democratic Party in its family pledges engendered a more progressive social order by repeatedly making reference to secular-humanist values of diversity, equal protection, fairness, the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and individual self-determination.⁸¹

Figure 7. Sum of values invoked in family paragraphs, Democratic and Republican platforms, 1968–2012. Data compiled by author.

Figure 8. Values in Democratic and Republican family paragraphs, 1968–2012.

There were commonalties too, evidencing greater cross-party appeal of certain (Republican) values. First, the value of hard work was highlighted initially only in Republican planks on welfare reform but has since been embraced by the Democratic Party. Starting in 1992, Democratic platforms also began to tie eligibility for numerous social programs to work. Families “who work hard and play by the rules,” they said, were entitled to the American Dream and to their share of the American pie.⁸² As proxies embodying neoliberal qualities of hard work, self-reliance, and personal responsibility, “working” families now became the central focus of Democratic social policies, as opposed to poor families in a state of need. Democratic platforms embraced welfare reform, pledging “to make work and responsibility the law of the land.”⁸³ The adoption of conservative neoliberal values, such as hard work, qualified but did not replace the Democratic focus on (national) state-provided family economic assistance. Their platforms continued to affirm the party’s commitment to “match parents’ responsibility to work with the real opportunity to do so, by making sure parents can get the health care, child care, and transportation they need.”⁸⁴

Moreover, Democratic family pledges in the 1990s also began to advocate the GOP’s late twentieth-century value of parental responsibility (in addition to, but not instead of, state responsibility).⁸⁵ In its preamble, the 1992 Democratic platform called for a “Revolution of 1992,” committing the party to a “new social contract … a way beyond the old approaches,” which it described as putting “government back on the side of citizens who play by the rules” and “abandoning the something-for-nothing ethic of the last decade.”⁸⁶ Democratic platforms through the 1990s and 2000s repeatedly directed re-distributionist policies, such as increased minimum wage, child credit extensions, and earned income tax credits only to “parents who … take the responsibility to work full-time.”⁸⁷ Like Republicans, Democrats characterized the failure of the AFDC welfare system as undermining values of “work, family, and personal responsibility,” aiming assistance now to help only “[those] people who want to help themselves and their children.”⁸⁸ Democrats in the 1990s thus, more than ever, embraced culturally conservative family values such as personal responsibility and strong family life (Figure 9).

In the twenty-first century, however, Democrats eschewed these conservative traditional family values and refocused their family pledges on underlying secular-humanist values: equity, fairness, self-determination, fulfillment, and choice. Democrats once again highlighted family “economic security” at the center of their agenda, now pledging to restore values of opportunity and fair and equal access “for everyone who works hard and plays by the rules.”⁸⁹ By using a language of redistributionist values far more pervasively than in other eras, Democrats now continue to highlight the valuational structure of their own Hearth family approach while avoiding an approach that is centered on more independent, traditional, market-based values. Yet, as if to counter Republicans’ “traditional family values,” Democrats express the underlying (secular) values of their Hearth approach with greater alacrity and frequency than in previous eras (see Figure 7).

Figure 9. Types of values in family paragraphs, Democratic and Republican platforms, 1968–2012.

In the twenty-first century, Republicans, in contrast, continue to use family to stress their late twentieth-century Soul approach, focusing first on the values and nonmaterial qualities of families in their pledges. In its 2012 platform, the Republican Party extolled the private valuational function of the “American family” and reaffirmed its 1980 assertion that a family’s “daily (values) lessons” such as “cooperation, patience, mutual respect, responsibility and self-reliance” are “fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.”⁹⁰ In many ways, the party, in its 2012 platform, reasserted its 1980 family approach, reasserting a free-market values initiative instead of its 1990s, Christian-dominated, traditional (religious) family values. Avowing to “Renew American Values” “to build healthy families, great schools, and neighborhoods,” the platform reemphasized family values such as autonomy and self-reliance. In so doing, the Republican Party moved back to its market-based antistatist center of gravity, less concerned with religious moralism. In 2008 and 2012, the party invoked family and described “strong family life” in terms of free enterprise, not religious, values of “responsibility” and “self-reliance.”⁹¹ Yet for Republicans, family continues to be the repository of essentially private values, a means to oppose redistribution, such that preserving family values continues to frame much of their social policy agenda.

Family in Partisan Legislative Behavior: Progressive, Postwar, and Late-Century Eras

Developments in partisan family ideologies across the twentieth century were not reflected in the parties’ national platforms alone but permeated down to the legislative behavior of members in Congress. An analysis of the kinds of family-related bills sponsored and/or cosponsored by members of Congress reveals the far-reaching impact of shifting family ideologies on individual partisans’ legislative behavior and policy framing through time.

Bill sponsorship and cosponsorship are similar in important ways to party platforms. As political scientist Christina Wolbretcht writes, both “represent positions with which an individual or party wishes to be identified, even if in neither case does the member or party necessarily follow through by devoting energy or resources to making the bill or pledge a reality.”⁹² Unlike platforms, however, congressional data such as bills sponsored and/or cosponsored can be traced to individual members, allowing analysis of how much the ideological positions contained in national party platforms trickle down or are mirrored by individual members and their personal ideologies.⁹³ Moreover, as representations of ideological positions, sponsored and cosponsored bills have an advantage over other forms of legislative data such as roll call votes in that they are much more extensive. Numerous bills do not make it to the roll call stage, many are introduced but only a few are reported out to the floor by committees, and still others are killed through a variety of procedural maneuvers that may require unrecorded voice, not roll call, votes.⁹⁴

For the three significant periods of family political development as identified through platform analysis in the previous section—Progressive (1899–1920), postwar (1946–1954), and late century (1989–2004)—2,004 family bills were identified and coded.⁹⁵ In all three periods, legislators introduced disproportionately more economics-centered Hearth bills than Soul ones, with this disparity being most apparent in the post–World War II era.

In the postwar period, almost all family bills (96.7 percent) had an economic Hearth focus, much more than the 86.4 percent or the 60.9 percent of family bills in the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods, respectively. A large proportion of family bills following World War II were concerned with the welfare of dependents of returning and fallen veterans and proposed expanded housing, educational, social security, insurance, and pension benefits for them. Postwar legislators also used an economics-focused Hearth approach in family bills to liberalize immigration and citizenship, provide for the admission and naturalization of war brides and families of war veterans, and, when addressing the growing phenomenon of women in the workforce, provide tax and social security changes to accommodate them and their families.

In contrast to the economics-dominated postwar period, in both the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods, congressional members also sponsored sizable proportions of bills that focused on family values (the Soul approach). In the Progressive Era, members sponsored several Soul-focused family bills in the 61st, 62nd, and 63rd Congresses (1909 to 1914; 39 percent, 20 percent, and 16 percent of all bills examined, respectively). Many of these bills were directed at preserving the sanctity, values, and morality of the white family structure, for instance, by condemning and criminalizing white slave traffic and intermarriage.⁹⁶ By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, however, legislators began to introduce larger proportions of bills that had a Hearth focus: on average, seventeen Hearth-focused family bills were introduced for each Congress from 1899 to 1909, and this number rose to approximately thirty per Congress during the second Progressive decade, from 1910 to 1920. Members of Congress used the Hearth economic approach in veterans’ pension bills—to provide relief to their widows, children, and dependents—also invoking family economics to call for regulation of marriage/divorce, care of abandoned children, provision of public lands/homesteads to families, and child support, many of which were not mentioned in party platforms at the time.

The late twentieth-century period stands apart in its unprecedented proportion of Soul family values bills, particularly during the 104th (1994–1995) and 105th (1996–1997) Congresses, even though economics-focused bills continued to otherwise prevail. During the Contract with America Congresses (104th and 105th Congresses), for the first time, legislators sponsored more Soul family bills, even exceeding the proportion of Hearth bills, a phenomenon that remained unmatched in any of the other congresses investigated.⁹⁷

Moreover, in this more recent period, many more legislators clustered their support through cosponsorship around valuational Soul bills, evidencing the increased political salience of family values following the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Of the 1,009 family bills examined in the period from 1989 to 2004, almost identical proportions of Hearth and Soul bills were cosponsored.⁹⁸ However, in the period following the 104th Congress, Soul bills began to attract more cosponsors (32.2 cosponsors per Soul bill) than Hearth ones (22.9 cosponsors).⁹⁹

Thus, the late twentieth-century period is distinctive to family political development not only in terms of the increased proportion of Soul bills (despite the ongoing higher proportion of Hearth bills) but also because many more legislators began to attach their names, in larger numbers, to Soul family values bills rather than to Hearth ones. This development was put into play, beginning with the 104th Contract with America Congress in 1995 (Figure 10).

In terms of patterns of partisanship, the Progressive and late twentieth-century periods resemble each other in contrast to the postwar era. In these two periods, party affiliation of the legislator (as Democratic [coded as 0] or Republican [coded as 1]) was strongly correlated with the kinds of family bills he or she introduced (as Hearth [1] or Soul [0] (see Table 2).

Party attachment to kind of family bill also demonstrates a clear reversal in party family ideologies through the twentieth century. Whereas more Republicans sponsored Hearth bills in the Progressive Era, by the late twentieth-century period, more Republicans introduced bills with a Soul focus.¹⁰⁰ In the Progressive Era, the majority of Soul family bills (57.4 percent) introduced was sponsored by Democrats, while the majority of Hearth family bills (69.7 percent) was introduced by Republicans.¹⁰¹ By the late twentieth century, however, Republicans introduced the vast majority of Soul bills (80.5 percent), and Democrats introduced many more Hearth ones (68.7 percent).

Figure 10. Mean number of cosponsors, Hearth and Soul bills, 1989–2004.

The increasing polarization in Hearth and Soul family ideologies is clearly evidenced in cosponsorship patterns as well. An average 17.1 percent of the congressional Republican delegation cosponsored a Soul family values bill in the late twentieth century compared to only 3.29 percent of the Democratic delegation.¹⁰² In contrast, an average 12.8 percent of the congressional Democratic delegation cosponsored a Hearth family economics bill in contrast to 4.3 percent of the Republican contingent. For Republicans in Congress, cosponsorship percentage and Soul family bills bore a statistically significant relationship (at the .05 level) starting from the 104th Congress (1995–1996) through to the last Congress examined (the 108th [2003–2004]).¹⁰³ This was so for Democrats starting in the 105th Congress, when the size (percentage) of Democrats cosponsoring a bill and its Hearth ideology became statistically significant (at the .05 level). At this time, partisanship and the kind of family bill introduced (its ideology) thus became much more strongly correlated than ever before.

Table 2. Correlation Between Ideology of Family Bill and Party Membership of Sponsor

^a Correlation is significant at the .01 level, two-tailed.

In sum, whether in the kinds of family bills sponsored or the extent and content of bills cosponsored, since the 104th Congress, party affiliation has significantly divided Congress members in their family-related legislative behavior. Republican victory in the election of 1994 was followed by a dramatic overall increase in the proportion of Soul family values bills introduced in Congress; this coincided with the sharp rise in the percentage of the Republican delegation that began to cosponsor Soul bills. Among Democrats, while the relationship between cosponsorship percentage and bills’ family ideology was not significant in the 104th Congress, since then—starting from the 105th Congress—this relationship has become statistically significant, with significantly greater proportions of Democrats sponsoring Hearth family economics bills. Legislative behavior on family-related bills thus came to be strongly correlated with family ideology for both parties following the Republican takeover of the House in the mid-1990s.

Conclusion

There have been three historical periods marking partisan family development: the Progressive Era, in which Republicans embraced a Hearth family economic ideology and Democrats were more aligned to the Soul family values approach; a midcentury, post–World War II period in which the Hearth ideology emerged as clearly dominant across both parties; and finally, the late twentieth-century period, when the Republican Party championed the Soul family ideology as never before. The period since the 104th Congress is especially significant because of the strong partisan character evidenced in the introduction and cosponsorship of Hearth and Soul family bills since then. Sponsorship and cosponsorship of Hearth bills were now much more strongly correlated with Democratic members of Congress, while bills espousing the Soul family values approach were much more correlated with Republicans. The polarization in family ideology, as evidenced in bill sponsor/cosponsorship data as well as party platforms, is thus both a recent phenomenon as well as one reminiscent of an earlier, albeit more muted, period at the start of the twentieth century.

This chapter’s assembly of the historical development of the two parties’ family ideologies over time is important for at least three reasons. First, unlike issues of race or gender, the parties’ shifting (and reversed) position on the family has gone largely unnoticed in political science literature, and the description and classification of this empirical phenomenon are therefore necessary and worthwhile. Second, this assembly situates the more recent partisan focus on the American family within a larger historical frame, demonstrating that the two parties have long relied on family economics and values as discursive frameworks to address and approach family in policy. Third, the chapter also reveals specific dynamics that engender empirical puzzles: Why did family burst into political significance in the late twentieth century? Why did the Soul ideal gain unprecedented political traction in the late twentieth century despite being unable to gain a strong foothold previously? More generally, why have the parties framed and adopted their approaches to family differently in different eras?

The phenomenon of partisan family ideational development illustrates broad mechanisms in the dialectical nature of party ideologies themselves. The historical development of family party development is thus also important in that it begs investigation into the precise dynamics that shape the emergence of distinct party family ideologies—why the parties separate or converge on family. By so doing, it is possible to address the larger question of why parties adopt the ideologies and positions that they do and identify the conditions and contexts in which parties change and sometimes reverse their ideologies. The next three chapters do this. As in-depth case studies, they reveal the contexts and conditions under which Democrats and Republicans formed their family ideals in the Progressive, post–World War II, and late twentieth-century periods. Cumulatively, the chapters demonstrate the ongoing relation between state and society as the parties interact with demographic family change and shifts in lived families’ experiences and attempt to translate them into coherent policy ideologies, to attract constituents and gain electoral traction and success.