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

7. American Pronatalism

7 AMERICAN PRONATALISM In all viable societies social control has operated to organize human beings into childbearing and childrearing groups—families —that, by definition, have proven to be highly e≈cient reproductive machines. judith blake, ‘‘Coercive Pronatalism and American Population Policy,’’ 1974 164 American Pronatalism On October 18, 1940, the Leathers family of Clarendon, Texas, became the ‘‘nation’s most typical American family’’ as judged by a committee at the New York World’s Fair. White, with two children, nineteen-year-old John and sixteen-year-old Margaret Jean, the Leathers were described as ‘‘champion stock farmers’’ living on a ‘‘200-acre homestead’’ in Texas. A photograph in the Christian Science Monitor showed them gathered around the family tractor. The Leathers had been chosen in May by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as part of a contest to represent the typical American family from West Texas. Like forty-seven other families from across the United States, when the Leathers won their state contest, they received an allexpense paid trip to the New York World’s Fair, where they stayed for a week in a house built by the Federal Housing Authority on the fairgrounds . When they were selected the ‘‘most typical’’ of the typical American family winners, they received another trip to the fair, a new sedan from the Ford Motor Company, a trip to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, and a meeting with President Roosevelt.∞ The criteria by which any of the ‘‘typical American families’’ were judged is not entirely clear. Historian Robert Rydell sees this competition as a continuation of the eugenic fitter family contests popular at state fairs throughout the 1920s.≤ However, there is no evidence of a direct link between the typical family contests and any eugenics organization. Indeed it is doubtful that the kinds of detailed physical, mental, and genealogical information collected in the fitter family contests entered into the deliberations of the various committees appointed by local newspapers that judged the families. Rydell notes that a questionnaire supplied by the World’s Fair requested information on race and sought two-child families , since only four people could fit into the fha houses at the fairgrounds .≥ Not surprisingly, then, the ‘‘typical families’’ all were white and had children, usually one boy and one girl. The fha houses were added to the Town of Tomorrow section of the fair. The Town of Tomorrow itself had been planned to represent ‘‘a rebirth in modern form of new type of the old New England type village, which, it is universally conceded, was as perfect a form of democracy as the world has known.’’∂ The fha model homes represented more than a recommendation for a better built environment; they also conveyed the belief that Americans should live as families—fha housing was family American Pronatalism 165 housing. Unlike the fifteen houses built for the Fair’s opening in 1939, the fha houses were a√ordable to lower- and middle-class families. Built to meet fha guidelines, these two-bedroom houses would have sold for between $2,500 and $3,500. Paul Roche, a developer from Long Island, New York, built both houses in a colonial style characteristic of the Stephen Manor development that he was then constructing.∑ The fha homes were intended to promote home ownership, support the construction industry, and advertise the new ‘‘green cities’’ being planned and built as part of the New Deal. The green city model was more explicitly articulated by the Regional Planning Association of America’s (rpaa) film, The City, written by Lewis Mumford and produced by Pare Lorentz for the World’s Fair. Contrasting rural idyll with urban industry, the film begins with a retrospective on rural life set in the Shirley Shaker Village north of Boston. Rural life close to the land is dramatically contrasted with the industrial landscape of Pittsburgh. Over images of smoke-covered houses rising up the hillside above the factories, the narrator intones that there are prisons that o√er better living conditions than those that these workers can o√er their children. Motivated by urban conditions, the opening titles in the film proclaim that ‘‘we must remold our old cities and build new communities.’’ These new communities were ‘‘green cities—built into the countryside’’ and represented by images of Radburn, New Jersey—a new suburban community planned by members of the rpaa. Billed as a ‘‘modern city’’ that worked as well as...