The American Way: How Faith and Family Shaped the American Identity, Part I

Allan Carlson

Allan Carlson is Distinguished Fellow in Family Policy Studies at the Family Research Council, and President of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. This is a modified version of a Family Policy Lecture originally presented to The Family Research Council, Washington, DC, October 29, 2003. It is printed here with permission. Part II will appear in the June Issue of the St. Croix Review.

“America . . . is a nation of individuals and individualism,” states an article posted by The Objectivist Center shortly after 9/11. It approvingly calls American individualism “an infuriating obstacle” to “religious traditionalists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell” who “would like to see the entire nation adopt their creed and morality.” A more measured—and classic—affirmation of the same sentiment can be found in Herbert Hoover’s 1922 book, aptly titled American Individualism, where he labels himself “an unashamed individualist” holding to “the ideals that constitute progressive individualism.”

In respect to the dignity and worth of each human life and to the ideal of equal opportunity, this affirmation of individualism as the American creed bears a certain truth. Yet this sentiment also misses other, and perhaps larger, truths. My new book, The “American Way”: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, argues instead that images of family, home, and religiously grounded community have been stronger, and more compelling aspects of the American creed. Time and again during the 20th Century, Americans successfully responded to great crises and challenges—mass immigration, war, economic depression, the rise of Communism, global responsibility—by turning to family, home, and faith as the wellsprings of national identity and unity. These, not individualism, form the “American Way.” Viewed from a different angle, 20th Century episodes of great American failure—such as the fall of Vietnam to Communism—have been directly linked to the temporary abandonment of a family- and faith-centered “American Way.”

In short, my book can be read as a history of the last 100 American years viewed through a social conservative lens. Often, the result is surprising. It turns out, for example, that for a good share of the 20th Century, the Democrats—rather than the Republicans—could be fairly labeled the pro-family party. One broad truth also becomes clear: the pro-life and pro-family movements are not products of just the last several decades. Since 1900, prominent Americans have identified new challenges posed to marriage, family, home, and infant life by the modern world, and they have crafted cultural and political strategies to protect these primary and necessary institutions. The contemporary work of The Family Research Council, and related organizations, builds on this rich, but now largely forgotten-legacy.

This morning I will summarize my argument by telling you the story of seven characters—five men and two women—found in the book. They, and the others described in its pages, are the architects of a modern family and faith-centered American Way.

First, Theodore Roosevelt

Mr. Roosevelt can be fairly labeled the first openly pro-life and pro-family President, attributes that his biographers—including most recently Edmund Morris—largely ignore. U.S. President, from 1901 until 1909, Roosevelt clearly identified the “foes”—his word— of the American family. The practice of “willful sterility in marriage”—or birth control and abortion—was “a capital sin” against civilization, he said, a practice that meant national death. He held liberal reinterpretations of Christian teaching on family and sexuality in particular contempt. Before an audience of liberal Protestant theologians, for example, he blasted sympathies toward birth control and stressed the linkage between family creation and Americanism:

If you do not believe in your own [people] enough to [bear larger families], then you are not good Americans and you are not patriots, and . . . I for one shall not mourn your extinction; and in such event I shall welcome the advent of a new race that will take your place, because you will have shown that you are not fit to cumber the ground.

 

Mr. Roosevelt condemned as fools those “professional feminists” who labeled wives and mothers at home as “parasite” women. The home-keeping mother was not a parasite on society, he countered. “She is society.” Roosevelt also pointed to easy divorce as a foe of the family, calling it

. . . a bane to any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the home, an incitement to married unhappiness, and to immorality.

The “multiplication of divorces” in America, he concluded, meant that “some principle of evil [was] at work.”

Of greater importance, Theodore Roosevelt crafted a positive philosophy of family life. He regularly emphasized the centrality of the child-rich family to American existence as the cell of American society:

[I]t is in the life of the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the nation rests. . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders.

Moreover, a nation existed only as its  

 

. . . sons and daughters thought of life, not as something concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual, but as a link in the great chain of creation and causation . . .

 

a chain forged by the “vital duties and the high happiness of family life.” In this manner, the family was the essential wellspring of American citizenship. Roosevelt’s words again:

In all the world there is no better and healthier home life, no finer factory of individual character, nothing more representative of what is best and most characteristic in American life than that which exists in the higher type of family; and this higher type of family is to be found everywhere among us.

Mr. Roosevelt also painted a remarkably fresh and compelling portrait of marriage. The good marriage, he argued, was a full partnership, in which “each partner is honor bound to think of the rights of the other as well as of his or her own.” The way for men to honor “this indispensable woman, the wife and the mother,” was to insist on her treatment as “the full equal of her husband.” Regarding the rearing of offspring, “[t]here must be common parental care for children, by both father and mother.”

Roosevelt’s view of marital partnership, though, went beyond the vision of shared responsibilities. On the emotional and spiritual side, he said that a true marriage would be “a partnership of the soul, the spirit and the mind, no less than of the body.” The “highest ideal of the family,” he wrote, could be obtained “only where the father and mother stand to each other as lovers and friends.”

On the practical and material side, Roosevelt believed in early marriage, as a counter to temptations toward immorality. More profoundly, he believed that the successful marriage, “the partnership of happiness,” must also be a “partnership of work.” Anticipating the later insights of micro-economists, Roosevelt understood that the strong family must be a true economic unit. “Our aim,” he wrote “must be the healthy economic interdependence of the sexes.” Attempts to craft the “economic independence” of the sexes would create “a false identity of economic function” and result in national ruin.

Accordingly, Roosevelt called for public policies that would encourage young couples to marry and—if possible—to bear at least four children, and hopefully more. “Motherhood should be protected” from immersion into industry, he wrote. Income and inheritance taxes

. . . should be immensely heavier on the childless and on the families with one or two children, while an equally heavy discrimination should lie in favor of the family with over three children.

For example, Roosevelt suggested that the couple should receive an income tax exemption of $500 (current value about $10,000) for each of their first two children, and $1,000 (current value about $20,000!) for each subsequent child. Roosevelt also argued that government pay scales should give preference to the parents of larger families:

In all public offices . . . the lowest salaries should be paid the man or woman with no children, or only one or two children, and a marked discrimination made in favor of the man or woman with a family of over three children.

I wonder what the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees would think about that idea today?

My Second Character Is Julia Lathrop

Miss Lathrop was the first woman to head a federal government agency. In 1912, President William Howard Taft—a Republican—appointed her as chief of the new U.S. Children’s Bureau. The following year his successor, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, reappointed Lathrop to the post, as did Wilson’s successor in 1921, Republican Warren G. Harding.

I have a special fondness for Julia Lathrop, in part because her family home is in the very neighborhood in which I have lived for the last 22 years: Churchhill’s Grove in Rockford, Illinois. Her former residence stands three short blocks from my own home; three blocks in the other direction can be found her grave in Greenwood Cemetery.

The daughter of a Republican Congressman from Northern Illinois, Miss Lathrop began her work in the 1880s at Hull House in Chicago, alongside another former Rockford resident, Jane Addams. Like other “settlement houses,” Hull House aimed at encouraging and easing the assimilation of new immigrants into American life. Between 1880 and 1914, an average of one million new immigrants arrived each year. Relative to existing population, this migratory flow occurred at nearly three times the current rate. Unlike earlier periods in American history, moreover, majorities of these newcomers neither spoke English nor practiced the Protestant faith. Many observers worried that the rise of “hyphenated” cultures—such as German-American or Italian-American—threatened the nation’s cultural coherence and unity.

Lathrop concluded that the immigration problem was, in fact, a problem of homes. “Americanization”— meaning assimilation and unity— could best be secured by focusing on a common motherhood, using images of marriage, children, and home to represent the “American Way of Life.” Along with fellow activists such as Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, Mary Anderson, Josephine Baker, and Frances Kellor, Lathrop forged a worldview sometimes called “social feminism,” but better labeled “maternalism.” As described by historian Gwendolyn Mink, maternalism offered a new vision of citizenship, built on

. . . one motherhood from diversely situated women. . . . The[se] reformers believed that all women shared the maternalist vocation and therefore all women controlled the future of the Republic.

Hull House, for example, featured a Labor Museum for children to reveal “the charm of women’s [traditional] tasks”—“the milking, the gardening, the marketing”—which “are such direct expressions of the solicitude and affection at the basis of all human life.” The maternalists also viewed the modern homemaking class as “the fulcrum” of their Americanization strategy. Among their policy victories, the Smith-Lever Extension Act of 1914 and the Smith Hughes Vocational Training Act of 1917 funded home economics teachers and curricula across the county to train young women as future mothers and homemakers.

More broadly, Miss Lathrop and her maternalist allies sought to restore healthy families among all Americans. Speaking in 1915 to the graduates of Vassar College, she called on university women to create “a single center of training for research in the problems of the family” in order to give the woman in the home “the status of a profession” and to “elevate into a national system, strong, free, elastic, the cult of the American family.” Central to maternalist thinking was the concept of a family wage. Pointing to research showing that as the father’s average income doubled, the infant mortality rate was more than halved. Julia Lathrop concluded that

. . . a decent income, self-respectingly earned by the father, is the beginning of wisdom, the only fair division of labor between the father and the mother of young children, and the strongest safeguard against a high infant mortality rate.

At the Children’s Bureau, Miss Lathrop held that “the first and simplest duty of women is to safeguard the lives of mothers and babies.” Condemning birth control and abortion, her goal was to encourage maternity through better health care for all mothers before, during, and after pregnancy. She called the campaign “Baby Saving.” The Bureau published books on Prenatal Care and Infant Care, distributing 1.5 million free copies of the latter by 1925. It encouraged the formation of Little Mothers Leagues; by 1915, the Bureau counted over 50,000 member girls—mostly immigrant children—in 44 cities. The Bureau relentlessly promoted breastfeeding and discouraged early weaning and infant formula use. In 1916, it crafted a “National Baby Week.” Over 4,200 communities took part through lectures, baby-care seminars, and parades. “Best Mother Contests” tested mothers’ knowledge. Orators celebrated motherhood as a vital vocation. “[M]others with infants in arms paraded down Main Street to the applause of flag-waving townspeople.” At the Bureau’s request, Congress declared 1918 to be “The Year of the Child.” Its campaign to promote good mothering and reduce infant mortality involved an amazing 11 million women.

Miss Lathrop’s greatest policy achievement, though, was probably passage of The Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921. In 1918, maternal deaths in childbirth still numbered 23,000 in the U.S., up from 16,000 two years earlier. And the infant mortality rate that year still stood at 100 deaths per 1000 live births, about twice the level found in Western Europe. Sheppard-Tower would provide funds for state-level programs of instruction in maternal and infant hygiene, prenatal child-health clinics, and visiting nurses for pregnant and new mothers. In Miss Lathrop’s words, Sheppard-Tower encouraged “the Americanization of the family.” It “is not to get the Government to do things for the family,” she said. “It is to create a family that can do things for itself.”

The American Medical Association fiercely opposed Sheppard-Towner, calling it “German paternalism,” “socialism,” and “sob stuff.” All the same, the law appears to have worked. Infant deaths due to gastrointestinal diseases—the ones most preventable by education—fell 45 percent by 1928. As the first federal social “entitlement,” without means test, Sheppard-Towner was notably and successfully pro-life and pro-family.

My Third Character Is Arthur Altmeyer

Only recently have American historians come to appreciate how religious communitarianism, born in Europe, took root in America during the late 19th Century. In his important volume, The Minds of the West, Berkeley historian Jon Gjerde shows how

. . . the flowering of intellectual movements carried from Europe . . . built upon fears of familial and social decline.

In response, these idea movements in America sought to privilege “natural institutions,” such as the family and community, and to protect them from “artificial” structures, such as great corporation and state. Gjerde emphasizes that this new communitarianism especially “flourished in German-speaking areas” of America, “where romantic notions of an organic society composed of people enveloped by groups” took root. German Roman Catholics in America drew encouragement from Pope Leo XIII’s great 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, and from the Irish-American advocate of the family wage ideal, Father John Ryan.

German Protestants showed a similar turn toward communitarian thought. Among Lutherans in the conservative Missouri Synod, the theological leadership of C. F. W. Walther emphasized the priority of the congregation and the family over the individual and state. Indeed, Walther said, the family was “The Foundation not only of the Church but also of the State.” Meanwhile, many German and Dutch Calvinists in America embraced the anti-liberal thought of Abraham Kuyper, who characteristically wrote:

The Home! Wonderful creation of God! . . . As for the individual the proceeds of life are from the heart, so for society are the proceeds of life from the Home.

This religious background to pro-family social reform helps explain a curious fact: Recent feminist historians loathe the New Deal constructed during the 1930s. They do not object just to some of its parts. They condemn the broad domestic policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration precisely because it favored the traditional family. It is important to note here that the Great Depression triggered in 1929 was more than just an economic crisis. It was also a crisis of the family. The vast majority of the newly unemployed 15 million workers were once “breadwinning” men in the industrial sector. Not by coincidence, the U.S. marriage and birth rates both tumbled by 20 percent during the short 1929-33 period, the opening years of the Depression.

The roots of the New Deal in religiously communal thinking and the actual “pro-family” nature of many New Deal projects converge in the story of Arthur Altmeyer and the Social Security Amendments of 1939. Born and reared in small town Wisconsin, Altmeyer was the descendant of Christian German immigrants. At the University of Wisconsin, he was a student of John Commons, who emphasized ways for government to protect families and communities from so-called “predatory special interests.” According to historian Linda Gordon, most members of this “Wisconsin School” of social reform “took their Christianity very seriously and considered their reform work part of a Christian moral vision.”

Altmeyer’s opportunity came in 1937, when the new Social Security system was on the point of collapse and repeal. The initial Act of 1935 was actually quite limited in scope. The government began collecting payroll taxes in 1936, but no old age benefits would be paid out until 1942. Moreover, workers were covered solely as individuals; dependents were considered irrelevant.

In 1936 the Democratic Platform pledged “the protection of the family and home.” Republicans ran for Congress in 1938 criticizing the recent Social Security Act as too stingy, and gained over 80 seats in Congress. When the Senate Finance Committee created the Federal Advisory Council to recommend reforms, Altmeyer and five other University of Wisconsin graduates won appointments. These six represented a full 25 percent of the panel. As historian Larry Witt reports.

The Council’s report, which tracked Altmeyer’s agenda almost perfectly . . . fundamentally altered the nature of the program by adding survivors and dependent benefits. . . . This changed Social Security from a program focused on the economic security of the individual worker and made it a program focused on the economic security of the family unit.     *

“The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” –King Solomon

We would like to thank the following people for their generous contributions in support of this journal (from 1/12/2005 to 3/10/2005): Lee R. Ashmun, Dirk A. Ballendorf, Bud & Carol Belz, Aleatha W. Berry, Jan F. Branthaver, David G. Budinger, D. J. Cahill, Frances G. Campbell, John Alden Clark, William D. Collingwood, Samuel J. Criscio, Nancy W. Davis, Michael D. Detmer, Nicholas Falco, Nansie Lou Follen, James R. Gaines, Robert Gates, Gary D. Gillespie, Philip Gilmore, Mr. & Mrs. Lee E. Goewey, Joseph H. Grant, Kelly A. Grant, Joyce Griffin, Alene D. Haines, Ted L. Harkins, Thomas E. Heatley, Quentin O. Heimerman, John A. Howard, Thomas E. Humphreys, Dr. & Mrs. Patrick R. Huntley, Mr. & Mrs. David Ihle, Arthur H. Ivey, Burleigh Jacobs, D. Paul Jennings, Louise H. Jones, Robert E. Kersey, Robert M. Kubow, James A. Lee, Francis P. Markoe, Curtis Dean Mason, Paul W. McCracken, W. K. McLain, Roberta R. McQuade, Aubrey A. Melton, Walter M. Moede, Robert A. Moss, Tom S. Murphree, Joseph M. Murray, Larry A. Olsen, Frederick D. Pfau, David Pohl, Donald J. Povejsil, Walter B. Prentice, Garland L. & Betty Pugh, Shirley W. Roe, Howard J. Romanek, Morris R. Scholz, Mr. & Mrs. Richard P. Schonland, Irene Schultz, L. Sideris, Joseph M. Simonet, Ben T. Slade, Norma H. Slade, Norman Stewart, Daniel J. Torrance, Eugene & Diane Watson, Robert D. Wells, Richard B. Wenger, James J. Whelan, Gaylord T. Willett, Max L. Williamson, Eric B. Wilson, Lowell M. Winthrop, Piers Woodriff.