Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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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
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