1. The term “policy development” in this article follows its use by Paul Pierson and refers to the historical processes, mechanisms, and changes involved in the development of poverty or welfare policy over time; thus situating the contemporary welfare policy “moment” within the dynamics of changing partisan politics. See Pierson, Paul, “The Study of Policy Development,” Journal of Policy History 17 (2005): 34–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. The literature on culture and poverty is vast and begins with the “culture of poverty” model of Oscar Lewis, in which he argued that sustained poverty generates a set of cultural attitudes, beliefs, values, and practices, and that this culture of poverty would perpetuate itself over time regardless of possible changes to the original structural conditions. See Lewis, Oscar, La vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York, 1966).Google Scholar Other controversial “culture of poverty” scholarship, all heavily critiqued for “blaming the victim,” include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (Washington D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor 1965); Banfield, Edward, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston, 1970)Google Scholar; Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; and Herrnstein, Richard and Murray, Charles, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994).Google Scholar For a classic critique of the “culture of poverty” thesis as obscuring structural factors of poverty, see Wilson, William Julius, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner-City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (New York, 1987).Google Scholar For illustrations of recent social science work on culture and poverty, more sensitive to the interaction of cultural and structural factors, see, for example, Carter, Prudence, Keepin’ it Real: School Success beyond Black and White (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Lareau, Annettee, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar; Small, Mario and Newman, Katherine S., “Urban Poverty after The Truly Disadvantaged: The Rediscovery of the Family, the Neighborhood, and Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 23–45Google Scholar; Wilson, William Julius, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York, 2009).Google Scholar For a good review of early and recent studies on culture and poverty, see Small, Mario Luis, Harding, David J., and Lamont, Michele, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629, no. 1 (2010): 6–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Smith, Anna Marie, Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, 1997)Google Scholar, and Roberts, , Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Hancock, Ange-Marie, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Abramovitz, Mimi, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston, 1996).Google Scholar

4. Strach, Patricia, All in the Family: The Private Roots of American Public Policy (Stanford, 2007)Google Scholar; Alphonso, Gwendoline, “Hearth and Soul: Economic and Cultural Conceptions of the Family in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920,” Studies in American Political Development 24 (2010): 206–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yamin, Priscilla, American Marriage: A Political Institution (Philadelphia, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovett, Laura, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaretsky, Natasha, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Edwards, Rebecca, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Bardaglio, Peter, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar; Cahn, Naomi and Carbone, June, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (New York, 2010).Google Scholar

5. Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, 2003).Google Scholar On family within partisan politics see Shafer, Byron, The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics (Lawrence, Kans., 2003)Google Scholar; Dowbiggin, Ian, “From Sander to Schiavo: Morality, Partisan Politics, and America’s Culture War over Euthanasia, 1950–2010,” Journal of Policy History 25, no. 1 (January 2013): 12–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp.13–14; Jeffrey Stonecash, Mark Brewer, and Mack Mariani, Diverging Parties: Realignment, Social Change, and Political Polarization (Boulder, 2003); Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).Google Scholar

6. Patricia Strach, “All in the Family,” 40. Strach demonstrates three central ways family is used by policy actors in the policy process: (a) as a criterion of eligibility to determine who qualifies for goods and services; (b) as an administrator that distributes goods and services to its members and; (c) as a normative ideal to gain support for a policy position. (“All in the Family,” 21–35.) By so doing, she suggests that family is central to a span of nonfamily policies, and its significance to public policy is not confined to more explicit “family-oriented” policy issues like welfare or family leave. While I support this position, in this article my focus is on the extent to which family ideals and assumptions about the family permeate policies directed at a single constituency group: the poor. I thus examine all policies that the parties direct at the poor and the needy, including but not limited to welfare, also extending to nonfamily policies such as tariff/taxation, education, and trade policies.

7. See for: (a) Alphonso, “Hearth and Soul,” and Lakoff, “Moral Politics”; (b) Strach, “All in the Family”; and for (c) Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York, 2012), and Edwards, “Angels in the Machinery.”

8. Starch, “All in the Family,” 39–40.

9. Hershey, Majorie Randon, Party Politics in America, 15th ed. (Boston, 2013), 202.Google Scholar Within their platforms, parties conventionally characterize their planks as sets of collective beliefs, such as: “We, as Democrats believe . . .” or “Republicans pledge that . . .” Thus scholars of party platforms view the platform as “the only statement of policy made with authority on behalf of the whole party”; unlike, for instance, addresses and letters by individual party leaders that illustrate that members’ personal policy position. See Budge, Ian and Farlie, Dennis, Voting and Party Competition (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; also Adam Silver, “The Prevalence of Economic Issues Versus Cultural Issues in Nineteenth-Century American State and National Party Platforms,” paper delivered at the annual Policy History Conference, St. Louis, 2008.

10. Gerring, John, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (New York, 1998), 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. See, for example, ibid.; Wolbrecht, Christina, The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, Change (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar; Sanbonmatsu, Kira, Democrats/Republicans and the Politics of Women’s Place (Ann Arbor, 2005)Google Scholar; and Carmines, Edward G. and Stimson, James A., Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, 1989).Google Scholar

12. Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 296–98.

13. Oxford English Dictionary (online edition).

14. Brewer, Mark D. and Jeffrey, M. , for instance, list “poverty” in their index under the listing for “low-income America,” in Dynamics of American Political Parties (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar; 239. Similarly party polarization literature that highlights income inequality as an explanatory variable for party polarization often conflates the low-income with the poor, the “have nots” against the “haves,” i.e., “those experiencing economic stress” versus “the affluent” (see, for instance, , Brewer, and Mariani, Diverging Parties, 64–68).

15. Benford, Robert D. and Snow, David A., “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–39, 619CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Guetzkow, Joshua, “Beyond Deservingness: Congressional Discourse on Poverty, 1964–1996,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (2010): 173.Google Scholar

16. Diagnostic framing entails “problem identification and attributions” (what does it mean to be poor? Poverty as a lack of material welfare or as an absence of affective welfare), Prognostic framing is “what is to be done” (How must policy proceed?—must it focus on enhancing material welfare or affective?). For definition and types of frames, see Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements.”

17. Poole, Keith and Rosenthal, Howard, Congress: A Political Economic History of Roll-Call Voting (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; see also Pool and Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress (New Brunswick, N.J., 2007). McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith, and Rosenthal, Howard, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)Google Scholar; Stonecash, Brewer, and Mariani, Diverging Parties; Larry M. Bartels, “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 31 August–3 September 2005; see also Bartels, , Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York, 2008).Google Scholar

18. Physical assets are the “physical goods or material things that determine our present quality of life, such as housing, food, transportation”; human resources are “those goods that contribute to the development of a human being, allowing participation in the market and making possible the accumulation of material resources that help bolster individuals’ resilience in the face of vulnerability . . . often referred to as “human capital.” “Social assets include ‘social networks (such as the family) from which we gain support and strength’; Ecological resources ‘can be conferred through our position in relation to the physical or natural environments in which we find ourselves’; and Existential resources are provided by systems of belief or aesthetics, such as religion, culture, or art, and perhaps even politics.” See Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” 20 Yale.J.L. & Feminism (2008) 1–23, 21; see also Fineman, “The New Deal: From De-Regulation to Re-Regulation: The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” 60 Emory Law Journal 251 (2010): 271.

19. Recent works illustrating the turn to “affect” in cultural/political studies, include: Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, 2004) and The Promise of Happiness (Durham, 2010); Flam, Helena and King, Debra, Emotions and Social Movements (New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, 2007); Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Halley, Jean O’Malley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoggett, Paul, Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare (New York, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. For example, Soss, Fording, and Schram have argued that the perceived excesses and turbulences of the 1960s resulted in a “disciplinary turn” in poverty governance See Soss, Joe, Fording, Richard C., and Schram, Sanford T., Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For acknowledgment and discussion of this position, see also Mead, Lawrence M., “Neoliberalism, Race, and the American Welfare State,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012): 982–84.Google Scholar

21. For “humanely” reference, see Democratic Party Platform of 1968 (para. 101) Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “The American Presidency Project,” available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu (hereafter cited as “American Presidency Project”). “Fairness” reference (para. 55), and “economic Justice” reference (par. 949), Democratic Party Platform of 1980.

22. Republican Party Platform of 1980, Peters and Woolley, “American Presidency Project” (para. 85).

23. Republican Party Platform of 1980, Peters and Woolley, “American Presidency Project” (para. 95–103), Republican Party Platform of 1984 (367), (375).

24. Paired sample correlation = .564, significant at the .01 level (two-tailed).

25. The term “social progressivism” here refers to social movements and ideologies in the Progressive era ‘that worked not primarily for structural reforms in civil service and the parties but mainly for new public measures to improve working conditions, to help families and children, and to ensure better products, services, and environmental conditions for consumers (Skocpol, “Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, “ 265). In this article, reference to progressivism is used in the context of social progressive ideology and not civil reform ideology.

26. Alphonso, “Hearth and Soul”; Mink, Gwendolyn, Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, 1995)Google Scholar; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

27. Republican Party Platform of 1920, Peters and Woolley, “American Presidency Project” (para. 252); for other references to conservation of human resources and national strength, see Democratic Platform of 1920, (para. 57); Democratic Platform of 1916 (para. 99) and Republican Party Platform of 1916 (para. 112).

28. Democratic Party Platform of 1919, “American Presidency Project” (para. 111).

29. Laura Lovett has shown a similar preoccupation with physicality, health, and the reproduction of “fitter families” or healthy “American stock” in progressive pronatalist policies, which encouraged the reproduction of Anglo-Saxon families of Northern European descent, over those of immigrant families considered physically deficient. See Lovett, “Conceiving the Future.”

30. Republican Party Platform of 1900, “American Presidency Project” (para. 22).

31. Brookings Institution Report, from Mintz, Steven and Kellogg, Susan, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1988), 135.Google Scholar

32. Trattner, William, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 3rd ed. (New York, 1984), 278.Google Scholar

33. On 4 March 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Philadelphia had exhausted all available funds for poor relief, Detroit had been forced to strike a third of its families from its relief rolls, New Orleans refused to accept new applications for relief, and more than a hundred cities were unable to provide any relief at all. See Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 144.

34. Democratic Platform of 1936, “American Presidency Project” (para. 42).

35. Ibid. (para. 13).

36. Ibid.

37. Mettler, Suzanne, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, 1998).Google Scholar

38. A similar emphasis on providing “living” or “real” wages specifically to male workers, as assumed breadwinners of their families, can be found in the platforms. For example, Republicans in 1928 proclaimed, “Through the saneness and soundness of Republican rule the American workman is paid a ‘real wage’ which allows comfort for himself and his dependents, and an opportunity and leisure for advancement. It is not surprising that the foreign workman, whose greatest ambition still is to achieve a ‘living wage,’ should look with longing towards America as the goal of his desires.” See Republican Party Platform of 1928, “American Presidency Project” (para. 142).

39. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 144.

40. Republican Party Platform of 1944, “American Presidency Project” (para. 56).

41. Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 125–256; Gerring identifies antistatism as the central defining feature of the party’s new neoliberalism, which first emerged in the election campaign of Herbert Hoover in 1928. Neoliberalism differed from the party’s previous statist liberalism; instead of anarchy or civil disorder as the central threat to individual liberty and freedom, the state was now the primary threat and all protection of individual freedoms entailed opposition to the state and its machinery (125). James Sundquist similarly identifies a new line of cleavage in party competition beginning in the 1930s, for and against “activist domestic measures,” which, he argues, replaced the previous line of cleavage since the 1890s, then “for and against the money issue.” See Sundquist, James L., Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1973), 183–217.Google Scholar For the connection between antistatism and welfare policy development, see Quagdano, Jill and Street, Debra, “Ideology and Public Policy: Antistatism in American Welfare State Transformation,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 1 (2005): 52–71.Google Scholar

42. Hoover, speech, 4 October 1932, cited in Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 134.

43. When used without qualification, I use the term “Republicans” in this article to refer to the national party and its position, as revealed through its platform statements. However, I should note, that in the Depression and postwar periods, there was considerable disagreement between the congressional and presidential “wings” of the party. The more affect-focused, conservative faction of the Republican Party were members of Congress whose own electoral success did not depend on acquiescing to the larger project of the welfare state; whereas the faction focused on capturing the White House from the Democratic Party were a lot more moderate, tempering the Party’s nascent antistatism with (tempered) support for the welfare state. See Shafer, Two Majorities; Brewer and Stonecash, Dynamics of American Political Parties; Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System, 183–217.

44. Republican Party Platform of 1936, “American Presidency Project” (para. 20); similarly, Republicans also qualified “need” for public assistance by making the first mention of the importance of the principle of encouraging a self-supporting ethic when administering relief: endorsing federal grants-in-aid to the states while the need exists upon compliance of the condition that “adequate provision be made for the encouragement of those persons who are trying to become self-supporting.” See Republican Party Platform of 1939 (para. 70).

45. Republican Party Platform of 1936, “American Presidency Project” (para. 3–4).

46. Republican Party Platform of 1944, “American Presidency Project” (para. 48).

47. Republican Party Platform of 1948, “American Presidency Project” (para. 4).

48. 1988 May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), 17–18.Google Scholar

49. Ibid., 19–20.

50. See, for example, Democratic Party Platform of 1948, “American Presidency Project” (para. 128); Democratic Party Platform of 1952 (para. 286); Democratic Party Platform of 1954 (para. 204); Democratic Party Platform of 1956 (para. 216 and 244); Republican Party Platform of 1956 (para. 165 and 115).

51. Roosevelt, Franklin D., State of the Union Message to Congress, 11 January 1944Google Scholar. See the Democratic Party Platform of 1960 (para. 370), Peters and Woolley, “American Presidency Project,” available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518.

52. In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR claimed that in the current, industrial modern economy political freedoms and rights were not feasible without economic freedoms: “This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. . . . As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” See Peters and Woolley, “American Presidency Project,” available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518. See also Democratic Party Platform of 1968, “American Presidency Project” (para. 030 and 031) (“Economics . . . involves people and it means people.”

53. Democratic Party Platform of 1952, “American Presidency Project” (para. 276).

54. “The ‘Poorhouse State’ Is the Right Name for It,” Saturday Evening Post, 19 November 1949, 10, 12, cited in Michael B. Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York, 2004), 4. During the postwar, midcentury decades (up to the mid-1960s), the Democratic Party dominated American politics and Democratic leaders effectively used government institutions to keep policy debate focused on material welfare (Byron Shafer, Two Majorities, 19). As Shafer states, economic welfare was the primary focus of partisan politics due to the fact that the extensive electoral success of Democratic New Deal Coalition was based on the public’s widespread support of its welfare programs initiated in the wake of the Great Depression and since expanded in the postwar years. Electoral contests focused on welfare continued to yield the impressive Democratic victories, as preserving and protecting welfare programs against Republican erosion had much continuing popular appeal.

55. Democratic Party Platform of 1952, “American Presidency Project” (para. 446); also (432–42); 1956 Democratic Party Platform of 1956 (para. 426).

56. Democratic Party Platform of 1956, “American Presidency Project” (para. 202).

57. Democratic Party Platform of 1956, “American Presidency Project” (para. 218).

58. Democratic Party Platform of 1960, “American Presidency Project” (para. 731, 732).

59. For example, see Republican Party Platform of 1960, “American Presidency Project” (para. 450): “Government’s primary role is to help provide the environment within which the individual can seek his own goals. In some areas this requires federal action to supplement individual, local and state initiative. The Republican Party has acted and will act decisively, compassionately, and with deep human understanding in approaching such problems as those of the aged, the infirm, the mentally ill, and the needy.”

60. Republican Party Platform of 1968, “American Presidency Project” (para. 174).

61. Republican Party Platform of 1960, “American Presidency Project” (para. 252).

62. Republican Party Platform of 1968, “American Presidency Project” (para. 092).

63. Republican Party Platform of 1960, “American Presidency Project” (para. 211, 421).

64. Rossiter, Clinton, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion, 2nd ed. (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, as coining the term “laissez-faire conservative.” Congressional Republicans were much more apt to focus on neoliberal principles and affective welfare rather than the Republican presidential administrations of Eisenhower. At this time there were considerable factional differences within the Republican Party, between conservative and moderate Republicans, the former primarily found in the party’s congressional wing and the latter in their presidential wing. A primary example was the policy battle over a national health program. Many Republicans vehemently protested national policy proposals for health and welfare services that did not incorporate a means test. In their own proposal for a national health program, congressional Republicans instead were much more concerned with preserving “personal choice,” “individual initiative,” and “responsibility” as the American way of life: “While society has a moral obligation to help the destitute and the disabled in matters of health protection, it has an even greater obligation to do this in a way that will increase the individual’s appreciation of his own obligations and by methods that will not make him increasingly irresponsible and dependent on the state. . . . Voluntary methods might be excruciatingly slow but at least they do not destroy human values such as freedom and personal responsibility and they do develop the capacity for cooperation and thus strengthen human character.” Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, National Health Program (Part 1), 80th Cong. 1st sess., 1947, pp. 565–66 (see also pp. 550–51).

65. Republican Party Platform of 1956, “American Presidency Project” (para. 203).

66. Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), Statement, Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, “National Health Program (Part 1),” 50.

67. In the late 1940s through the 1950s, conservative thinkers, such as William F. Buckley, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, began to write influential works expounding conservative principles of government. These works greatly contributed to the positions articulated by the growing conservative faction within the Republican Party, which was opposed to government intervention and more interested in preserving the fundamentals of American character and affect. Phillips, Kevin, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1969)Google Scholar; Black, Earl and Black, Merle, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).Google Scholar

68. Republican Party Platform of 1960, “American Presidency Project” (para. 451).

69. Republican Party Platform of 1960, “American Presidency Project” (para. 491) (emphasis added).

70. “Senators to Hold Teen Age Hearings,” New York Times, 19 September 1953.

71. On working mothers as the cause of juvenile delinquency and other social problems, see Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S. of the Committee on Judiciary, Juvenile Delinquency (Television Programs), 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1954, pp. 82, 112; Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S. of the Committee on Judiciary, Juvenile Delinquency (Obscene and Pornographic Materials), 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955, pp. 5–6. See also Senate Committee on Appropriations, Labor-Health, Education, and Welfare Appropriations for 1955, 1954, pp. 465–66. On strong, responsible fathers as cures for juvenile delinquency among other ills, see Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S., “Juvenile Delinquency (Television),” p. 40; Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the U.S, “Juvenile Delinquency (Education),” pp. 358, 360.

72. Anderson, Karen, “Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II” (Westport, Conn., 1981)Google Scholar.

73. Statement of Mrs. B. H. Dillard, East Knoxville County Democratic Women’s Club, Juvenile Delinquency (Education), Hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 10–12 August 1955, p. 108.

74. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 203.

75. Ibid.

76. Coontz, Stephanie, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005).Google Scholar

77. Robert Self, All in the Family, 5–6.

78. Ware, Alan, The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877–1962 (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shafer, Two Majorities.

79. Phillips, Kevin, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY, 1969)Google Scholar. Neoliberal “values” of freedom, self-sufficiency, self-reliance although distinct from the more moralistic/faith-based “values” of the cultural traditionalists/evangelicals nevertheless share a common focus on affective policy, how policy should make you feel, internally, rather than how it should “fix” external, material conditions.

80. Shafer, Two Majorities; Dionne, E. J. Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Religion, Faith, and Politics After the Religious Right (Princeton, 2009)Google Scholar.

81. Layman, Geoffrey, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jelen, Ted G., “Religion and Public Opinion in the 1990s: An Empirical Overview,” in Understanding Public Opinion, ed. Norrander, Barbara and Wilcox, Clyde (Washington, D.C., 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82. Shafer, Two Majorities, 31.

83. Republican Party Platform of 1980, “American Presidency Project” (para. 245).

84. Self, All in the Family, 309–10.

85. Republican Party Platform of 1976, “American Presidency Project” (para. 235–37).

86. Republican Party Platform of 1968, “American Presidency Project” (para. 198); see also Republican Party Platform of 1972 (para. 617–21).

87. Republican Party Platform of 1972, “American Presidency Project” (para. 619).

88. Republican Party Platform of 1972, “American Presidency Project” (para. 627).

89. Republican Party Platform of 1992, “American Presidency Project” (para. 246); Republican Party Platform of 1996 (para. 703).

90. Republican Party Platform of 1984, “American Presidency Project” (para. 387).

91. Republican Party Platform of 1984, “American Presidency Project” (para. 365).

92. Blankenhorn, David, Fatherless America: Confronting our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York, 1995), 218, 221Google Scholar.

93. Republican Party Platform of 2000, “American Presidency Project” (para. 1158); see also previous iterations: Republican Party Platform of 1992 (para. 062), and “Family the Home of Freedom” (para. 078).

94. Moynihan, “The Negro Family.” In his report, Daniel P. Moynihan, Assistant Labor Secretary to the Johnson administration, highlighted the link between family deterioration and poverty, asserting that the vast expansion of public assistance rolls in the 1960s “can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States” (14). Moynihan presented several indicators of unconventional family behavior (mainly high rates of extramarital fertility and absentee fathers) to demonstrate a “self-perpetuating” “tangle of pathology” among state-dependent black families. Although the promotion of “racial equality” was the stated objective of the report, it resulted in a firestorm of controversy by civil rights leaders and academics on several grounds, mostly that it “blamed the victims” and diverted attention away from the extreme structural and economic disadvantage facing poor black families. See Graebner, William, “The End of Liberalism: Narrating Welfare’s Decline, from the Moynihan Report [1965] to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act [1996],” Journal of Policy History 14, no. 2 (2002): 170–90.Google Scholar For a concise history on the impact and ensuing political controversy generated by the report from 1965 to 1975, see Kevin Mumford, “Untangling Pathology: The Moynihan Report and Homosexual Damage, 1965–1975,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 1 (2012): 53–73, 61–65.

95. The literature on this racialized transformation from worthy widow to welfare queen is vast. See, for example, all references (Roberts, Smith, Gordon) in note 3 above; in addition, see Gwendolyn Mink, Welfare’s End, rev. ed. (Ithaca, 1998); Quadagno, Jill, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Sidel, Ruth, Unsung Heroines: Single Mothers and the American Dream (Berkeley. 2006).Google Scholar For a good overview of literature, see Cassiman, Shawn A., “Resisting the Neo-liberal Poverty Discourse on Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens,” Sociology Compass 2, no. 5 (2008): 1690–1700.Google Scholar

96. See note 82 and accompanying text.

97. See Robert Self, All in the Family, 309–38, also 8–9.

98. Democratic Platforms now direct pledges to “all” American families, most particularly dual-earner families, promising to “Empower Families in a New Era” when “the face of American families is . . . changing, and so are the challenges they confront.” See, for example, Democratic Party Platform of 2008, “American Presidency Project” (para. 62), also (para. 10, 18).

99. Democratic Party Platform of 1996, “American Presidency Project” (para. 179).

100. Democratic Party Platform of 2000, “American Presidency Project” (para. 347).

101. Democratic Party Platform of 1996, “American Presidency Project” (para. 177).

102. On the widespread adoption of the neoliberal value of “personal responsibility” into national consciousness, see Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod, “Neoliberalism, Race, and the American Welfare State,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 4 (December 2010): 989–92.Google Scholar

103. The theme of “fairness” and programmatic assistance of families who “play by the rules” continues to feature prominently in the discourse of Democratic leaders in the twenty-first century. See, for example, William J. Clinton: Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council, 12 January 2000: “The main idea here is still the old idea of the American dream, that if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one.” Peters and Woolley, “American Presidency Project,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58331&st=play+by+the+rules&st1=#ixzz2fGvzez8t]. See also Barack Obama, “Presidential Debate in Hempstead, New York,” 16 October 2012: “I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that’s how our economy is grown.” Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=102343.

104. Democratic Party Platform of 1996, “American Presidency Project” (para. 163).

105. For “fighting poverty as a national priority,” see Democratic Party Platform of 2008 (para. 125) and Democratic Party Platform of 2012 (para. 339), “American Presidency Project.”

106. Democratic Party Platform of 2012, “American Presidency Project” (para. 551).

107. See, for example, Democratic Party Platform of 2008, “American Presidency Project” (para. 125 and 130): “the majority of adults in poverty are women. . . . We recognize that women are the majority of adults who earn the minimum wage, and are particularly hard-hit by recession and poverty.” See also Democratic Party Platform of 2012 (para. 343): “We understand that poverty disproportionately affects communities of color.”

108. Democratic Party Platform of 2008, “American Presidency Project” (para. 513–15).

109. In its most recent platform, the Republican Party highlights the “American family” as a fundamentally affective unit, whose “daily lessons” are again described in terms of generating positive affective resources among “independent individuals” such as “cooperation, patience, mutual respect, responsibility and self-reliance- fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.” Republican Party Platform of 2012, “American Presidency Project” (para. 479), see also the part of the section entitled, “Renewing American Values to Build Healthy Families, Great Schools, and Safe Neighborhoods” (para. 479–80).

110. Republican Party Platform of 2012, “American Presidency Project” (para. 480): “We are the party of independent individuals and the institutions they create—families, schools, congregrations, neighborhoods—to advance their ideals and make real their dreams. Foremost among those institutions is the American family. . . . Government can never replace the family, That is why we insist that public policy, from taxation to education, from healthcare to welfare, be formulated with attention to the needs and strengths of the family.”

111. Republican Party Platform of 2012, “American Presidency Project” (para. 485–86).

112. Shafer, Two Majorities, 20.