Populist Pronatalism

Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938

Laura L. Lovett, 2007

The 1998 UC Berkeley dissertation underlying this book was originally subtitled “Nostalgic Modernism, reproduction, and the family in the United States, 1890-1930”. This idea of nostalgic modernism seems more representative of the whole work. In the introduction to the book, Lovett said the United States “invested heavily in the reproduction of its citizenry during the early twentieth century.” She labelled this covert, relatively non-coercive public policy focus “pronatalism” and suggested the government “promoted reproduction indirectly.” But the argument seemed to circle back on itself, and at times it was unclear whether these reformers promoted families, motherhood, and reproduction for its own sake or as a means to another end. Setting aside the pronatalist framing she introduced in the book, Lovett’s study of five reformers showed how they all used symbols and images of family and rural life, and asked important questions regarding the power these symbols had over the reformers as well as their audiences.

Idealization of rural family life was complicated by the two distinctly different uses Lovett showed it put to: for Mary Elizabeth Lease, “political decisions had effects on the daily lives of women and children,” whereas for urban reformers like Theodore Roosevelt and Edward Ross, family and the rural home were tools for “controlling and directing a changing social order.” In the two other cases (George H. Maxwell’s national irrigation plan and the Arts and Crafts movement that grew around it, and Florence Sherbon’s popular eugenics), the motivations of the principals seemed much less straightforward. All the cases were interesting and seemed to scream for more attention. Other attractive ideas for further study include the deployment of a “Jeffersonian” agrarian ideal and how its definition and use may have changed over time, a broad reassessment of Populism in both its positive and negative incarnations, a closer look at Edward A. Ross (especially his relationships with Rita Hollingworth and Charlotte Perkins Gilman), and an investigation of the Craftsman and Back-to-the-Land movements. And, as Lovett said, the use by reformers of nostalgia and especially of rural nostalgia.

Racism and fear of white “Race Suicide” seemed to have been an important motivator for some reformers. Lovett and David B. Danbom seem to agree that urban activists had agendas beyond the good of country people, when they advocated for “Country Life” improvements. The chapter on Mary Lease extended the story by beginning to look at what country people themselves thought. Lovett enriched this story further by creating continuity from the populist era into the progressive (Danbom began his study around 1900 and ignored rural agitation in the 1890s, implying that those issues had been resolved and the Country Life issues were new and unprecedented). When Mary Lease saw “the spread of Iowa evictions as a clear omen that English-style landlordism was establishing itself,” and when she further noted that the evictions “coincided with the government giveaway of 300,000 square miles of public domain land to railroad corporations,” the rural critique of the system took on dimensions of intelligence and sophistication lacking in some depictions of populism. Lease’s charge that Theodore Roosevelt’s “Progressive party stole the Populist Platform plank by plank, clause by clause, without casting even the faintest shadow of a word of credit” also suggested a closer look at politics across this transitional period might be a good idea.

Another unexpected idea was that although Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed, George Maxwell “spent much of his time arguing that...it was merely underwatered.” The National Irrigation Association and railroad sponsorship of the water projects that reshaped settlement and agriculture deserves more attention. James Jerome Hill’s role as an “empire builder” might be worth a closer look, as well as the Little Landers, the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement; especially William Morris’ London “Red House” and the connection to anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Finally, the thinking of E. A. Ross seemed to have continued to develop through the years, unlike that of Roosevelt. Ross might be a subject for closer study.

Similarly, the racism of the Country Life movement (and also in the idealization of “Yeoman” rurality in general?) might be something to look at more closely. If the “Huck” accounts in Shutesbury Massachusetts were actually fabricated and if classification of Swift River Valley people as “degenerates” helped Boston condemn their homes and build the Quabbin Reservoir, there might be a story there. In the popular eugenics chapter, the AES seems to have had a grasp on the need to make rural life more “economically and culturally attractive.” Their identification of the automobile’s ability to enhance “access and mate selection in rural communities” goes a long way to explaining the dramatic increase in rural cars in the 1920s noted by Danbom.

Jennifer Fronc reviewed Conceiving the Future for Reviews in American History (at the time, Fronc was at Virginia Commonwealth University -- when I was a grad student they had become colleagues at UMass/Amherst). Fronc said the book’s greatest strengths “rest in Lovett’s perspective on the problems created by urbanization and her analysis of the gendered implications of pronatalist thinking.” I found the argument for pervasive pronatalism less convincing than the argument for pervasive racism, when it came to the motivations or hidden agendas of these people and groups. For example, even  accepting the sincerity of Roosevelt’s “indictment of childless women,” his pronatalism seemed to be in service to his fear of “race suicide.” For me, the stronger arguments concerned racism and nostalgia.