ComradeHuxley
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http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/home-economics/The Family Policy We Almost Had
While the tussle over the worker’s time is evergreen, the starting point for today’s debates can be traced to 1971. That year, Congress passed a bill that would have created a network of child care centers, funded nationally but run locally. The program had a budget five times the size of today’s Head Start program, which provides preschool for very low-income children.
For decades, the American Wife gave businesses a big, fat bonus. Her time at home made possible the American Worker’s time at work.
A political argument about the proper role of women in society ensued—and prevented the enactment of this child care program. At the outset, there was every indication that President Nixon would sign the bill into law. In his autobiography, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics, Walter Mondale, who was at the time a senator from Minnesota leading the fight for the bill, writes about how Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot Richardson had “conducted several quiet meetings with [Mondale’s] staff and Representative John Brademas [of Indiana], the lead sponsor in the House, to find common ground.”
Richardson went so far as to send Mondale a letter “outlining the administration’s general support to consolidate and coordinate federal child-care programs” and to have Ed Zigler, from the Office of Child Development, testify in support of the legislation in 1969 hearings in front of the Subcommittee on Children and Youth. Nixon himself had come out in favor of child care, saying, “So crucial is the matter of early growth that we must make a national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life.”
Washington insiders were thus shocked when, on December 9, 1971, Nixon not only vetoed the bill but repudiated its aims. “We cannot and will not ignore the challenge to do more for America’s children in their all-important early years,” he said. “But our response to this challenge must be a measured, evolutionary, painstakingly considered one, consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization” (emphasis added).
Nixon went on to say that the proposed law would be “truly a long leap into the dark” for America. How did Nixon and his team come to believe that a policy that would have helped tens of millions of families would do the very opposite? Nixon’s speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, proudly takes credit for pushing for the veto and, specifically, for encouraging the President to include the scathing statements portraying a federal child care program as anti-family.
Buchanan saw an active policy of providing government support for child care as the federal government effectively encouraging women to be workers rather than supposedly traditional stay-at-home moms. (I say “supposedly” because this idealized American Wife never existed in many families.) In his view, the poorest mothers deserved a handout—an act of charity—because they couldn’t afford to pay for private child care. For other families, child care wasn’t so critical to their well-being that the government should step in to help.
By Heather Boushey Spring 2016, No. 40
Based on the events described in the article. What would the effects of a POD be, that prevents Nixon from vetoing the bill?
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