Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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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