Politicians Have Always Paid Lip Service to Families. This Year Was Just a New Low.
Politicians and political organizations offering empty, hand-waving support for family values while doing relatively little to actually deliver tangible support to families is a political cliché. But just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised by this sort of hypocrisy, I saw that FRC Action PAC (an affiliate of FRC Action, itself an affiliate of the Family Research Council) — an organization that says it “gives our members the ability to support deserving, pro-family statesmen” — endorsed Herschel Walker for Senate.If you missed it somehow, earlier this month, a woman reported to be the mother of one of Walker’s children said he’s hardly been a part of the child’s life, paid for her to have one abortion and urged her to get a second. In June, it was reported that Walker fathered two children he had not previously spoken about publicly. Walker’s adult son Christian recently tweeted, “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”On his campaign website, Walker says he’s pro-family but doesn’t specifically cite any parent-friendly policies, like paid family leave, that he might champion. His family-friendly bona fides, apparently, are simply his professed “personal faith” and “pro-life” convictions.Yet he claims to “put Georgia families first.”This kind of contradiction can be jarring. It can make the 1992 contretemps between Vice President Dan Quayle and the character Murphy Brown seem almost quaint. Bottom line: This sort of thing isn’t new in American political history. For example, I was spelunking through The Times archives and found this short article from 1915: “KEEP ON BEING A MOTHER”: This Is Roosevelt’s Advice to Parent of 7 Little Ones, Facing Hunger.” And while I wouldn’t equate Walker with Theodore Roosevelt (win or lose in November, Walker’s image won’t be added to Mount Rushmore anytime soon), a thread of hollow family values talk connects them.According to that article, a Mrs. McHonney, whose husband had lost his job and had no means to support their large brood, wrote to Roosevelt, asking:Do you advocate raising children for country charges, the poor house, or what? I am a mother of seven children and feel that I have a right to ask. Perhaps you have never had the experience of raising seven children on $80 a month and then suddenly losing the position and have your house threatened with foreclosure.Roosevelt answered:We are, any of us, liable to run into hard luck, but that does not by any manner of means lessen our duties to ourselves and to society. I am sorry for Mrs. McHonney, who seems to be having a hard time through no fault of her own, or of her husband. It seems to me that the only answer to her question is to tell her to keep right on being a mother, the best, highest, most worthwhile job on earth, no matter what the temporary conditions that surround it may be.Unfortunately, you can’t feed a family with the sanctity of motherhood, which was a hobby horse of Roosevelt’s — specifically, the sanctity of white motherhood. In his 1905 remarks to the Mothers’ Congress, Roosevelt described the desire to have only two children as “race suicide” and said that if any man or woman chose not to have children, “such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle.”If there’s doubt about what “race” meant in that context, the author Christopher Klein notes that more generally, “Roosevelt believed fundamentally that American greatness came from its rule by racially superior white men of European descent.” According to the historian Thomas Dyer, when Roosevelt left office, he counted a low fertility rate among this group as one of the “very big problems” the incoming president William Howard Taft would need to recognize. According to Dyer in his 1980 book, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race”:The fervor with which Roosevelt hawked the virtues of increased fertility for the better classes increased after he left the presidency. To the familiar calls for large families and the ceaseless invocations of women’s racial duties he now added diatribes against birth control, family planning and the “science” of eugenics.So Roosevelt discouraged family planning, but even in his post-presidential fervor he seemingly had no practical solutions for Mrs. McHonney — though perhaps she didn’t fit his definition of the type of person he hoped would go forth and multiply.As with the incongruities of today’s politics, more than one person called out Roosevelt’s thinking — including his own children. His daughter Alice, who would have only one child, through an affair with Senator William Borah of Idaho, “rebelled against the humiliation of her father’s attitude toward, as she put it, ‘large families, the purity of womanhood and the sanctity of marriage,’” according to the biography “Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker” by Stacy Cordery. Alice and three friends secretly founded a tongue-in-cheek “race suicide club,” Cordery writes, “so named because of T.R.’s speech condemning white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women who were derelict in their primary duty of producing sufficient numbers of children to keep America strong.”One woman gave a scathing riposte to Roosevelt’s callous advice to Mrs. McHonney, writing in an open letter: “Mr. Roosevelt’s teachings are rather horrible. Let us increase and multiply blindly until the country is overrun with a half-nourished, ignorant population, and then joyously take the slightest excuse to turn some of our surplus citizens into cannon’s meat.”While the historical details are fascinating — if revolting — I wish we didn’t have to keep repeating this tiresome cycle. In general, I try to remain hopeful about forward progress for America’s families, and no doubt things have improved since Teddy’s day. But sometimes the dissonance between “family values” and valuing families is so extreme — as many on the political right line up behind Walker despite report after report of abhorrent behavior toward his own family — that it’s hard to remain optimistic.There’s a line from Ann Crittenden’s book “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued” that I quote in my forthcoming book, and which applies here: “All of the lip service to motherhood still floats in the air, as insubstantial as clouds of angel dust.”Mrs. McHonney, they’re still blowing smoke in your face.Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.My 4-year-old’s bedtime involved lots of cajoling and repeating myself: “Lay down, please” when she would rather be doing anything else. I eventually started voicing her round doughnut pillow to talk to her. “Waaaah! I’m so saaaad! I need a nice fuzzy head to lay on me!” Interested, she scooted right over and laid down. “Aaaah! A nice heavy head with lots of brains!” And the bonus is I only need to say it once.— Eric Schares, Ames, IowaIf you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories; email us; or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page. Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us. More
