the New Pantagruel

The War for the Family, page 2

Allan Carlson's The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, reviewedby John Zmirak

Carlson follows the progress of what we might call this “ideology of the hearth” through the 20th century. He shows how it inspired Theodore Roosevelt–himself a passionate opponent of “hyphenated Americanism”–to reject the eugenic and racialist views of “Anglo-Saxon” or “Nordicist” American nationalists. If arriving immigrants could sever their ties of political loyalty to foreign lands and keep their family life to the same moral standard that animated upright Americans, Roosevelt found for them an equal place in the life of the nation. Rather than seeking to sterilize the poor, he urged the successful to have large families, to ensure their own heritage and avoid the moral decadence he associated with “sterility” and “selfishness.”

In the chapter which will most surprise conservatives, Carlson explores the profoundly wholesome domestic agenda of the New Deal. He shows how the welfare and pension policies, labor regulations, and other social interventions enacted by Franklin Roosevelt were focused on a single, overriding goal: preserving and restoring the single wage-earning, intact “patriarchal” family. Restrictions on women’s and child labor, Carlson documents, were inspired and implemented largely by elite, high-minded women who had pioneered private charities organized to help impoverished immigrants assimilate. Their initiatives to “Americanize” immigrants gave first priority to eliminating social pathologies such as alcoholism, illegitimacy, domestic abuse and childhood malnutrition. Their large-scale success helped empty the slums and create the American middle class. These benevolent ladies faced two sources of opposition in their time: the early “equity” feminists who sought to abolish any legal distinction in the status of the sexes, and business lobbyists such as the National Association of Manufacturers, who sought cheap labor at any social cost.

These mostly Protestant “maternalist” social thinkers found their views strongly echoed by the Catholic leaders of their day–who tried to infuse economic reforms with their Church’s social teaching. Roosevelt’s administration even responded to the concerns of the Agrarians, setting up pilot programs to re-settle the urban poor on subsistence farms and prevent the consolidation of agricultural land in the hands of the few. Most of these initiatives did not involve massive government meddling in people’s everyday lives; the real growth of Leviathan came with the vast rearmament and bureaucratic mobilization brought on by America’s intervention in World War II, made permanent by the demands of the Cold War. The needs of war trumped all.

However, for the first two decades of that protracted confrontation with Communism, the vision of American domesticity still served as the locus of loyalty in the rhetoric of politicians and the calculations of policy-makers. Carlson offers a fascinating exploration of Henry Luce and his valiant attempt in the pages of Life magazine to create a visible embodiment of the virtuous, prosperous, enduring American family–even as its cohesiveness was slowly under erosion by the very consumerism and individualism encouraged by unprecedented wealth. Carlson unearths sober analyses by Cold War theorists who examined the implications for national security of threats to domestic harmony, such as “juvenile delinquency.” How quaint a phrase that seems today, it is melancholy to reflect.

Poignantly, Carlson shows the legislative moment when the maternalist idea, and the pro-family policies it had supported, were driven from the public square. By way of bitter irony, it was conservative Southerners who were responsible. In a last-ditch attempt to sink the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Carlson relates, die-hard legislators inserted language forbidding sex discrimination into the Act–thinking that they’d thereby made it so unpalatable it would sink from sight. Instead, the bill sailed through Congress–and in a single stroke, rendered illegal every attempt to provide a working man with a “family wage” that would enable his wife to rear her children at home. Henceforth–with the industrious aid of a reborn feminist movement–the preservation of the family would no longer be the goal of government policy. Indeed, the very definition of “family” would decay into meaninglessness–to the point where today it can equally refer to single mothers, lesbian parents of the artificially inseminated, and two-income suburban households along with their hired surrogate mother. While Carlson does not pretend that all these social changes flowed from a single law, or even from the actions of the government more broadly, he shows the profoundly corrosive influence of the raft of equality laws and court decisions following upon the 1964 Act–which collectively led the state to regard each citizen as an atom, a locus of taxation or subsidies, buffeted by market forces and fluctuating values, spinning through a chaotic social void.

All Pages |  1  | 2 |  3