Carlson – The Social Conservative Case for the New Deal

The

Social Conservative Case for the New Deal

Allan Carlson*

Regional

Meeting of The Philadelphia Society

October 8, 2005

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Pfister Hotel

Recklessly, perhaps, I rise this day to say good things about the New

Deal: not as an economic project, for I will readily grant all the criticisms

that might be offered on that count; nor as a recovery project, for I concede

that the New Deal may actually have delayed national recovery from the Great

Depression. However, I will examine

today the New Deal as a successful project of social

reconstruction, one with arguably conservative goals and results.

The industrial collapse of 1929-33, we need remember, was as much a

social crisis, as an economic one. The

U.S. Marriage and Birth Rates both fell by 20 percent during the Herbert Hoover

years, reaching record lows.

_____________________________________________________________

*Allan Carlson is President of The

Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and author, most recently, of Fractured

Generations (Transaction 2005).

Of

the 15 million workers unemployed in March, 1933, a third of the workforce, the

vast majority were from the industrial sector and constituted formerly

breadwinning men. Desperate

fathers, abandoned mothers, and frightened and sometimes hungry children filled

the landscape.

The New Dealers also had to overcome the immediate legacy of the Hoover

technocrats, progressive sociologists such as William Ogburn of the University

of Chicago.

Writing for Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends,

Ogburn concluded: that “the

factory had [irreversibly] displaced the home;” that American homes had

already become “merely ‘parking places’ for parents and children who spend

their active hours elsewhere;” that working mothers represented the future;

and that ever more children should be moved into collective care.

Wise social policy, Ogburn said, should now be directed toward “the individualization

of members of the family.”

In contrast, the conservative, or perhaps better put, the reactionary New

Deal social project aimed at rebuilding American families, albeit on

a distinct model: breadwinning men married to homemaking women in free-standing,

child-rich homes.

Every significant New Deal domestic program assumed

and reinforced this family type. The

New Dealers openly opposed working mothers, day care, equity feminism, and

gender equality. They denounced the

Equal Rights Amendment as a trick by industrialists to snatch mothers out of

their homes and to lower wages. They

favored marriage, motherhood, the home care of children, distinctive gender

roles, family homesteads, and the “family wage.”

In this regime, market forces would be channeled to deliver to each male

householder an income sufficient to support a wife and their children at home.

The architects of the domestic New Deal included the so-called

Maternalists. This movement had its

roots in the often misunderstood Settlement House campaign launched by Jane

Addams during the 1890’s.

Committed

to the assimilation of new immigrants into American life, the maternalists saw

immigrant women as a critical lever. They

held that all women had “a common identity as nurturers and a common gift for

caring,” and that assimilation into the American way could be achieved through

this focus on one motherhood.

Representative was Julia Lathrop, actually the daughter of a Republican

Congressman from my hometown of Rockford, Illinois.

In 1912, she became the first woman to head a Federal government agency:

the newly created Children’s Bureau. Lathrop’s

views on family structure were clear. As

she told a conference on children:

The

power to maintain a decent family living standard is the primary essential of

child welfare. This means a living

wage and wholesome working life for the men, a good and skillful mother at

home to keep the house and comfort all within it.

Society can afford no less and can afford no exceptions .

This is a universal need .

Her

projects at the Children’s Bureau included the “Baby Saving” campaign.

With the goal of reducing infant and maternal mortality, the initiative

spawned National Baby Week in 1916, involving over 4,000 communities, and “The

Year of the Child” in 1918, which mobilized an amazing 11 million American

women. Lathrop also promoted the

training of girls in home economics, child allowances for military families, and

maternal breastfeeding. Under her

agency’s influence, the U.S. Congress created Mothers Day in 1914.

Lathrop’s greatest policy victory, though, was the Sheppard-Towner Act

of 1921. Passed over the fierce

opposition of the American Medical Association, Sheppard-Towner provided federal

funds for state programs in maternal and infant hygiene, pre-natal clinics, and

visiting nurses for pregnant and new mothers.

This measure was pro-life, pro-baby, and pro-family and it did lead to a

45 percent drop in infant deaths due to gastrointestinal disease.

The maternalists of the New Deal built on this legacy.

Representative here was Frances Perkins, who served as U.S. Secretary of

Labor from 1933 to 1945. The labor

historian Philip Foner correctly reports that she “was never the radical that

conservatives accused her of being.” It

is true that Perkins strongly favored the regulation of factories; after all,

she had directly witnessed the legendary Triangle Shirtwaist fire which saw 146

teenage girls perish in a New York factory, the windows and doors of which were

locked from the outside. However,

Perkins also promoted family wages for men, homemaking training for women, and

measures to encourage marriage and larger families.

Other New Deal maternalists included:

Grace Abbott ,

a forceful advocate for the mother at home, who was Chief of the Children’s

Bureau through 1934 and a member of the Council which drafted the Social

Security Act;

Katharine Lenroot ,

a product of the University of Wisconsin and a strong foe of day care, who

succeeded Abbott as Chief of the

Children’s Bureau;

Mary Anderson ,

head of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, who opposed the Equal Rights

Amendment as dangerous and single-handedly prevented the League of Nations from

endorsing it;

and the remarkable Molly Dewson ,

head of the Women’s National Committee of the Democratic Party, who believed

and acted on the premise that “through the well-being of the family, we create

the well-being of The Nation.”

These

women conspired to make the “Family Wage” for men the central pillar of the

New Deal. As Katharine Lenroot

explained, “the primary essential of child welfare [is] a living wage for the

father.” Mary Anderson declared

that the problems of working women would all disappear “if the [male] provider

for the family got sufficient wages. Then

married women would not be obliged to go to work.”

Some feminist historians have argued that these “unconsciously

conservative” views of family life were based on unexamined, antiquated

assumptions about the domestic role of women.

They imply that the New Deal women would have become conventional

feminists if only they had thought about it some more.

This is surely untrue. The

maternalists were fully aware of equity feminism; indeed, they engaged in

frequent, open warfare with the arch-feminist National Woman’s Party.

Founded by Alice Paul in 1917, with secret funding from the National

Association of Manufacturers, the National Woman’s Party drafted the proposed

Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923.

On occasions, its members flagrantly disrupted events organized by the

maternalist-controlled U.S. Women’s Bureau, running up and down the aisles at

one conference “shouting like children having tantrums.”

Importantly, National Woman’s Party opposed much of the New Deal.

How did the Maternalists actually shape New Deal policies?

Examples include:

The National Industrial Recovery

Act of 1933 aimed in part at securing

“living wages” for male industrial workers.

NRA relief projects hired only men; “women were ignored.”

A clear majority of NRA Codes fixed minimum wage rates for women up to 30

percent lower than those for men doing the same job.

NRA officials explained these differentials as the result of “long

established custom.”

The Subsistence Homestead

Program grew out of the agrarian

“back to the land” movement, a desire—in one Senator’s words—to

restore “that small yeoman class which has been the backbone of every great

civilization.” The New Deal

initiated nearly 400 of these new rural villages, in order to recover for

thousands of Americans “the hearth where the family gathers and where

neighbors are welcomed.”

The Works Progress

Administration , the largest of the

federal work relief programs, employed over 2.5 million persons by early 1939.

WPA regulations limited enrollment to one breadwinner per household,

adding that “a woman with an employable husband is not eligible for referral

as the husband is the logical head of the family.”

Even so, about 15 percent of WPA workers were women.

Still, maternalist assumptions shaped the program.

Over half of WPA women worked in “sewing rooms” where they repaired

clothing or made new items from scrap. All

WPA women also took mandatory instruction in child care, home health, and food

preparation.

The Social Security Act of 1935

also presumed a very traditional family structure.

As articulated by Abraham Epstein, one of the measure’s architects: “ the

American standard assumes a normal family of man, wife, andÖthree

children, with the father fully able to provide for them out of his own income.

This standard presupposes no supplementary earnings from either the wife

or children.” As Grace Abbott,

explained: “the mother’s services are worth more in the home than they are

in the outside labor market.”

The new Social Security system covered only industrial

workers, overwhelmingly male. So-called

“female jobs”—including teaching, nursing, and work for charities—were

all exempted. Indeed, women gained

Social Security benefits primarily through their ability to conceive and bear

children, including Title V measures providing pre-natal and maternal programs

and the Aid to Dependent Children provision.

Home owner programs

established by the New Deal sparked the drive to the suburbs, so inaugurating a

great expansion of the ownership society. The

Home Owners Loan Act of 1933 and The National Housing Act of 1934 invented new

forms of long-term mortgages and resulted in 90 percent of new

residential construction occurring in the suburbs during the 1930’s, compared

to only 60 percent during the prior decade.

According to one historian, “focusing on the suburban residence

heightened the importance of women’s domestic contributions [and] the home as

the woman’s proper place.”

Finally, the Social Security Amendments of 1939 —the crown jewel

of the New Deal—impressed family values deeply onto the emerging American

welfare state. Specifically, the

1939 Amendments directly incorporated the family responsibilities of men into

the four-year-old system: first , aged women married at least five years

to eligible men would now receive an extra “homemakers” pension equal to 50

percent of their husbands’ benefits; divorced women were excluded; second ,

widowed mothers with children in the home were removed from ADC, receiving

instead a monthly survivors benefit equal to 75 percent of the pension their

husbands would have received, so long as the women earned no more than $15 per

month and did not remarry; and third , surviving children received a

benefit equal to half that which their father would have received.

Overwhelmingly popular, passed with strong bipartisan support, the 1939

Amendments firmly established marriage, the “family wage,” the stay-at-home

mother, and the large family as the favored objects of public policy.

Any deviation from these values—divorce, illegitimacy, working mothers,

deliberate childlessness—faced financial disincentives.

If

you refuse to believe my account of the New Deal, listen to what feminist

historians have to say about this era:

Lois Scharf emphasizes the

“victimizing effects” of New Deal actions, the way in which “female

dependency” was “institutionalized in sweeping legislation;”

Mimi Abramowitz deplores the way

the New Deal “upheld patriarchal social arrangements;”

Gwendolyn Mink grouses that “the

1939 Amendments spelled out the gendered basis of social insurance and spread

gender bias throughout the welfare state.”

Winifred Wandersee laments the

“damage that must have been done to this generation of women”—a

catastrophe so great that it “can never be measured.”

And Alice Kessler-Harris condemns

the New Deal for “locking men and women into rigid attitudes” and for

“stifling a generation of feminist thought.”

What

were the real results?

I would argue that the New Deal laid out the policy framework

that encouraged the dramatic, unexpected social developments that followed World

War II. For the first time in over

100 years, four things happened simultaneously in America: the marriage rate

rose; the average age of first-marriage fell (indeed, to record lows, age 20 for

women and 22 for men); the divorce rate declined; and fertility soared in the

celebrated American “baby boom.” Buoyed

by VA and FHA mortgage guarantees, young Americans poured into the new suburbs

and revolutionized American home-ownership patterns, creating a true ownership

society. Feminism went into

eclipse. Indeed, one popular book from 1948, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia

Farnham’s

Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, concluded that feminism was “a

deep [mental] illness.” The

American homemaker reigned, alongside her family-wage-earning husband.

Children seemed to be everywhere and the construction of new churches and

schools proceeded at a record pace.

An

editorial in Life

magazine from 1960 captured the moment. Appearing

on the eve of the Republican Convention, it noted that President Dwight

Eisenhower had given “the latent unity and goodwill of the American people a

chance to recover and grow.” His

administration had helped finance the building of eight million new family

homes. Standardized school test

scores were rising. The birth rate

was at a record high. “The

American people did all these things—and more.

They did them under the benign and permissive Eisenhower sun.”

The Kennedy or Nixon era, the editorial continued, would be different.

Yet it could “scarcely be more sunny or fruitful than these Eisenhower

years, in which so many age-old visions of the good life first became real.”