Abstract :
Both political scientists and popular commentators have reacted to the culture wars of the 1990s as something new in American politics, a deviation from the durable grounding of politics in economic interests. However, as recent work, along with many of the classic treatments of the Populist and Progressive eras demonstrate, American politics has long been infused with both culture and economics. The interesting question is thus not "which one" but rather "how" these two dimensions of political value have intersected through time and what the dynamics of those intersections reveal. The paper uses congressionalfamily policy debates to demonstrate two alternative policy frameworks during the Progressive Era, each with its own alignment of the two dimensions and one emerging as a harbinger to the New Deal welfare state. Through systematic discursive analysis of committee hearings transcripts of the Fifty-sixth to Sixty-sixth Congresses, it assembles two dominant conceptual frameworks of family as illustrative of the two approaches. The progressive understanding viewed family economics as foundational, circumscribing its cultural qualities and legitimating state intervention. In contrast, the traditionalist conception privileged self-regulating familiesʹ cultural qualities as more fundamental, only loosely related to economic condition, such that active state intervention into family economics was seen as inappropriate and ineffective. These alternative approaches to state and family relations viewed culture or economics alternatively as foundational or epiphenomenal, if related at all. As history unfolded, the progressive conception ultimately prevailed in New Deal and postwar social policies, which continued to emphasize the economic dimension as subsuming the cultural one. Investigating the dynamics of intersectionality between economics and culture is suggested as a potential pathway to bridge work emphasizing durable economic interests in politics with other work focused instead on the endurance of moral conflicts in political deliberations, implying that in the Progressive Era the parties were not only divided in terms of which set of issues were more important but also over how the two dimensions of political value related to each other, if at all.
