The American Way:

How Faith and Family Shaped

The American Identity, Part II

 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. It is printed here with permission. Part I appeared in the April issue of the St. Croix Review.

My Fourth Character Is Molly Dewson

A graduate of Wellesley College, Molly Dewson is sometimes called “America’s first female political boss.” In 1933, she gained appointment as head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee; in 1937, President Roosevelt appointed her to the Social Security Board, where she also played a key role in shaping the 1939 Amendments.

Like all other maternalists, Molly Dewson was a fierce foe of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As actual or potential mothers, women needed special legal protections, she thought. She also endorsed the “breadwinning” role of men. Regarding the 1939 Amendments, she explained:

Men who can afford it always consider it their first duty to provide insurance protection for their wives and children. Survivor benefits extend the same kind of protection to families who need it most and can afford it least.

In addition, Molly Dewson underscored the importance of strong traditional families to the nation as a whole:

[W]hen you begin to help the family to attain some security, you are at the same time beginning to erect a national structure for the same purpose. Through the well-being of the family, we create the well-being of the nation. Through our constructive contributions to the one, we help the other to flourish.

The curious fact about Molly Dewson was that she was probably a lesbian. She never used this word to describe herself, but the facts of her life do suggest that it may be an accurate modern label. Whatever we might say about her private life, though, her public advocacy was consistently and fervently pro-family.

My Fifth Character Is Henry Luce

The founder of Time, Inc., and editor-in-chief of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, Henry Luce exerted an extraordinary influence on American life in the middle decades of the 20th Century. Born in China to Presbyterian missionary parents, Luce was a God-driven man, an optimist informed by Christian hope.

His weekly picture journal, Life, first appeared in 1936. It was the most successful new publication in American history; by 1945, 15 million American families read Life each week.

Luce used his influence to try to build and shape a better America. For example, it was in Life that he first used the phrase, “The American Century,” in 1940 to highlight this nation’s emerging global responsibilities, and his own task of nation building. As he told his editors a few years later:

I have a faithful belief that the American that we work for will win in this time and age, if we do our part. . . . [I]n a sense, everything does depend on you. If we persevere, our lifetimes will see not the peace of God, but certainly the truce of God won by American fortitude, energy, generosity, and ideals.

As Luce surveyed the world of post-World War II America, he placed his greatest hope on the renewal of American family life. His vision of a family-centered and faith-centered nation received dramatic visual confirmation in a 1947 promotional campaign for Life, called “The New America.” Life photographers, using special panoramic cameras, welded 14,000 new photos into 27 sequences. Using five synchronized projectors, a new fade-in-and-out technique, and a forty-foot-high screen, and featuring a fresh, stirring musical score, “The New America” was shown to 175,000 carefully selected national leaders in sixty cities.

The presentation’s central theme was that the America of 1947 and the America of the mid-1930s were “almost two different countries, so huge are the changes that have increased our national stature.” The components of this “New America” included:

The Baby Boom: The script celebrated the return of population growth to America, the surging American birthrate. Since 1940, the U.S. population had grown by ten million, providing new customers with “greater wants and greater buying powers.” At county fairs, there were “great new crowds of people being happily taken in by the preposterous exaggeration of the alluring and glittering midway.” On “Main Street, we cannot fail to see that there are many more of us, more people in stores, more people with more money.” The glitter everywhere proclaimed “how many more Americans there are to enjoy the pleasant things of our national Life.” There were mushrooming numbers of new suburban grade schools, too. College enrollments were at an all-time high. Everywhere there was growth.

The New Family: Since 1940, the presentation reported, five million new families had formed in America, an increase of 15 percent in only seven years. Moreover, vast numbers of families were climbing into the middle class. In consequence, “we see all around us the pleasant homes of American citizens” and “one of the greatest reasons for our confidence in future prosperity lies in the number of homes that must be built, furnished and equipped.”

Spiritual Reawakening: The new America also had a “significant spiritual quality,” manifested “in our devotion to many religions . . . our love of our country, and respect for our national decency, our love of our children, and our grandchildren, and our faith in the American way of Life.” These values undergirded “our newfound confidence, our awakening to the new and almost limitless opportunities which lie within our power.” The new America had rediscovered the nation’s historic “mission of freedom.” The American nation stood at “the dawn of its greatness.”

For the next fifteen years, Luce used Life magazine, in particular, to celebrate and encourage the Baby Boom, the breadwinner/ homemaker/ child-rich family in its new suburban locale, and the spiritual renewal of American churches. By 1960, he took satisfaction in the results. In an editorial on President Dwight Eisenhower’s pending retirement, Life praised him for giving “the latent unity and goodwill of the American people a chance to recover and grow.” The editorial celebrated the construction of eight million new family homes, rising scholastic test scores, and a record high birth rate.

The American people did all these—and more. They did them under the benign . . . Eisenhower sun . . . [when] so many age-old visions of the good life first became real.

My Sixth Character Is Walt Whitman Rostow

M.I.T. economic historian Walt Rostow became a key architect of American national security policy during the 1960s. Intelligently and fiercely anti-Communist, Rostow urged that the Vietnam War be fought to a successful end. Unlike most of his colleagues in the Lyndon Johnson administration, he never wavered in his faith that America could bear this burden and see the result: a Southeast Asia and world free of Communist tyranny.

Undergirding this conclusion was his confidence in the American family. In the mid-1950s, with a Carnegie Foundation grant, he had conducted “a fundamental re-examination” of American values and institutions. As reported in his long 1957 essay, “The American Style,” he found these values to be strong. In contrast to aristocratic old Europe, he wrote, the American style included “a narrower but perhaps more intense family” and “a tendency overtly to conform to the will and manners of the political and social majority.” America’s families, churches, and voluntary association wove “a highly individualistic and mobile population into a firm social fabric” exhibiting “a widening area of common values.” Under the strain of the Cold War against Communism, Americans had “retained the old link between nationhood and ideal values.”

Indeed, Rostow said, recent developments had only strengthened the American social order. Higher incomes allowed “increased leisure, earlier marriages, and more children.” The insecurity of the Cold War had increased Americans’ “concern with values which transcend the vicissitudes of a life span--notably family and religion.” Even the emerging Social Security system had contributed to the Baby Boom, he thought. In short, Rostow held that the social stability, return to religion, and reinvigorated family life evident in 1957 showed the solidness and vitality of the American identity and character. Americans with these values would be able to bear the burdens of a foreign policy that would defeat Communism, he argued. As he wrote in the document, “Basic National Security Policy,” in 1962:

The success of the whole doctrine and strategy developed in this paper . . . depends on the capacity of the U.S. to sustain a performance at home which reaches deeply into our domestic arrangements and which requires widespread . . . assumption of responsibility and sacrifice for public purposes by our people.

Then came what we now call simply “the 60s.” An array of ideologues launched assaults on the American family system. Neo-Malthusians—the partisans of population control--attacked the Baby Boom mentality. Equity feminists denounced the mother-at-home and the maternalist public policies that affirmed that role. Sexual revolutionaries blasted the cultural assumptions that still tied appropriate sex to marriage and procreation. The new Left condemned virtually every institution of “the New America,” from suburbs and shopping malls to large families and optimism about growth. These ideas quickly gained ground inside the Federal government. Their partisans drove the “maternalists” out of policy positions and out of the Democratic Party. The “pro-family” welfare state was turned on its head, and became destructive of families. Not coincidentally, the American cause in Vietnam stumbled, and failed, ushering in that period of malaise known as “the 70s” and symbolized by the floundering Jimmy Carter presidency.

Which Brings Me to My Seventh, and Final, Character: Ronald Reagan

Recovering the voice of Theodore Roosevelt, President Ronald Reagan worked to resurrect the American identity built on religious morality and shared family life. “[It is] time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength,” he stated in his famed 1981 speech at Notre Dame, “a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.” In time of crisis and challenge, Reagan said elsewhere, families kept “safe our cultural heritage and reinforce[d] our spiritual values.” He added: “it is time to recommit ourselves to the concept of the family--a concept that must withstand the trends of lifestyles and legislation.”

From 1986 until the end of his presidency, Reagan gave mounting attention to strengthening the nation’s family system. “The family provides children with a haven of love and concern,” he told the Student Congress on Evangelism.

For parents, it provides a sense of purpose and meaning in life. When the family is strong, the nation is strong. When the family is weak, the nation itself is weak.

Speaking in Chicago, Reagan echoed the words of Molly Dewson:

[T]he family is the bedrock of our nation, but it is also the engine that gives our country life. . . . It’s for our families that we work and labor, so that we can join together around the dinner table, bring our children up the right way, care for our parents, and reach out to those less fortunate. It is the power of the family that holds the nation together, that gives America her conscience, and that serves as the cradle of our country’s soul.

Now echoing Julia Lathrop, Reagan also hinted that the family could again serve as a force for assimilation and national unity in a time of mass immigration. “We have all been enriched by the contributions of Hispanics in every walk of American life,” he told an audience in the White House Rose Garden. Most characteristic of Hispanic culture, he continued, was “the casa, the almost mystical center of daily life, where grandparents and parents and children and grandchildren all come together in the familia.” He added:

But I fear that too often, in the mad rush of modern American life, some people have not learned the great lesson of our Hispanic heritage: the lesson of family and home and church and community.

The most coherent effort by the Reagan Administration to resurrect a traditionalist family policy was the 66-page report developed by an interagency working group on the family, chaired by Under Secretary of Education Gary Bauer. Entitled “The Family: Preserving America’s Future,” and released in November 1986, the document blasted the “abrasive experiments of two liberal decades” such as day care, population control, no-fault divorce, sex education, and values clarification in the schools. In their place, the report affirmed “home truths”:

Intact families are good. Families who choose to have children are making a desirable decision. Mothers and fathers who then decide to spend a good deal of time raising those children themselves rather than leaving it to others are demonstrably doing a good thing for those children. . . . Public policy and the culture in general must support and reaffirm these decisions.

President Reagan signed Executive Order 12606 on September 2, 1987. A direct consequence of the Bauer report, this order required federal agencies to develop family impact statements when crafting and implementing regulations and policies. Specific criteria included: “Does this action by government strengthen or erode the stability of the family and, particularly, the marital commitment?” “Does this action strengthen or erode the authority and rights of parents in the education, nurture, and supervision of their children?” “Does this action help the family perform its functions, or does it substitute governmental activity for the function?” However, largely ignored by the permanent government of bureaucrats, the executive order had little real effect. President Bill Clinton rescinded it on April 21, 1997.

What then should we now do? I close my book, The American Way, by stressing the continuing, even urgent need for a national identity rooted in family and faith. Only natural and internalized restraints—respect for motherhood, sanctification of marriage and family, concern for the home economy, esteem for the natural communities that shelter families—can hold the modern American state in balance with human values, in domestic matters as well as in foreign adventures and trade. The Reagan administration’s concept of a “family impact statement” was a frail approximation of the proper role to be played by such a shared national identity. But it did not go far enough.

What language about family and community might be fit for 21st-century Americans? These qualities, at least:

•  Affirmation of the family as the natural and irreplaceable human community, one defined as a man and a woman living in marriage for the purposes of propagating and rearing children, sharing intimacy and resources, and conserving lineage, property, and tradition;  
  
  

• Recognition that men and women should be equal in legal, political and property rights, but are different in reproductive, economic, and social functions, differences which ought to be accommodated in policy and law;  
  
  

• Encouragement for “de-industrialization” and the return of vital functions to the family circle, with “home schooling” as the most practical and successful recent model;
  
  

• Respect for the ancient and still most honorable skills of “housewifery” and “husbandry” and their grounding in a vital home economy;  
  
  

• Celebration of the birth of new babies and cultural and policy encouragement to the child-rich family; and  
  
  

• Protection from political interference and economic exploitation for those spontaneous communities, religious and secular, that nurture and sustain families.  
  

In the European Union of 2003, these values are openly rejected. A common “democratic socialism” quietly snuffs out remaining pockets of traditional European family life. One consequence of this post-family environment is the accelerating depopulation of the old continent.

While a cultural offshoot of Europe, America has always been different. Even in the degraded times of the early 21st Century, Americans talk of “marriages,” “babies,” “mothers,” and “fathers” in ways that make sophisticated Europeans cringe. “These are American questions which do not concern us,” a Swedish welfare official replied when asked a few years back about his nation’s marriage rate. Indeed, these are “American questions.” With some unnecessary accretions, the qualities just cited once served as “the American way.” They should, and they can, again.     *

“Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.” –Augustine

* The quotes following each article have been discovered by The Federalist Patriot, which can be reached at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.