“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 an 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 labelled 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.

Mr. Roosevelt can be fairly labelled 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 labelled 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?

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 1880’s 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 labelled “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 breast feeding 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 child birth 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.

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 1930’s.  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.

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.

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-1930’s 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 new-found 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.”

M.I.T. economic historian Walt Rostow became a key architect of American National Security Policy during the 1960’s.  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-1950’s, 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 Sixties.” 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 ‘70’s” 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 sixty-six-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?”; and “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.  Pesident Bill Clinton rescinded it on April 21, 1997.

What then should we now do?  I close the book 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 twenty-first-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 “deindustrialization” 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.