Family Cycles

Strength, Decline, and Renewal in American Domestic Life, 1630-2000

Allan C. Carlson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351520478
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this paradigm-shifting volume, Allan C. Carlson identifies and examines four distinct cycles of strength or weakness of American family systems. This distinctly American family model includes early and nearly universal marriage, high fertility, close attention to parental responsibilities, complementary gender roles, meaningful intergenerational bonds, and relative stability. Notably, such traits distinguish the "strong" American family system from the "weak" European model (evident since 1700), which involves late marriage, a high proportion of the adult population never married, significantly lower fertility, and more divorces.The author shows that these cycles of strength and weakness have occurred, until recently, in remarkably consistent fifty-year swings in the United States since colonial times. The book's chapters are organized around these 50-year time frames. There have been four family cycles of strength and decline since 1630, each one lasting about one hundred years. The author argues that fluctuations within this cyclical model derive from intellectual, economic, cultural, and religious influences, which he explores in detail, and supports with considerable evidence.

1

The Puritan Family Utopia, 1630–80

In 1620, a group of Christian dissenters, primarily drawn from Scrooby, England, arrived in Cape Cod Bay and established Plymouth Colony. Within six months, half of the colonists were dead. The survivors struggled on, and by 1640 their community had gained “a measure of stability, at least in institutional terms.”¹ A substantially larger and better organized group followed in 1630, led by John Winthrop. Settling to the northwest of Plymouth, the Massachusetts Bay Colony attracted another 25,000 colonists over the next two decades, the legendary “Great Migration.” Settlers soon spread into the Connecticut territory, as well. By 1640, these communities also exhibited a remarkably stable social order.

Such results were not preordained. The English settlement to the south in Jamestown, Virginia, for example, had been launched some years earlier [1607], yet remained fairly chaotic for most of the seventeenth century: disease-ridden; politically unstable; and socially incoherent. The difference derived, in large part, from the success of the New England colonists in creating a strong domestic system, which bound together spiritual, political, economic, and social behaviors in a coherent framework. This distinctive, if often misunderstood, social regime would become a measure or touchstone for subsequent visions of the good community in the New World. Drawn in broad strokes, its foundations were Christian, peasant agrarian, communal utopian, and familial.

Christians on an “Errand”

As Perry Miller has elegantly put it, the Massachusetts Bay Company was “an organized task force of Christians, executing a flank attack on the corruptions of Christianity.” Their “errand into the wilderness” sought not only to please God, but also to turn human history in a new direction by “vindicating the most rigorous ideal of the Reformation.”²

At the formal level, Puritan social theorists relied heavily on early European “federalist” theory. In place of both a deterministic “rule of necessity” or a chaotic “order of aimless motions and inertia,” they sought a fresh human order built on voluntary choice, the willing assumption of duty, the binding force of covenants, and “the sovereign determination of free wills.” In an attempt to free themselves from the grim implications of John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, they also endeavored to create a regime built on the love found among regenerate Saints, God’s elect. As the dutiful Puritan child’s promise nicely summarized, “I will submit to my Elders./I will Love my friends.” Or as Winthrop told his followers aboard the Arabella in 1630: “Each discernes by the worke of the spirit in his own image and resemblance in another, and therefore cannot but love him as he loves himself.” Covenants—understood as contracts enjoying divine blessing—defined religious, social, and political obligations and they produced a reasonably ordered and harmonious community.³

This orientation provided Puritan settlers with a “complete blueprint for a smooth, honest, civil life” and motivated them to risk everything on a journey into the wilderness where they might construct a society based on those plans. Reformed Christians had become “that elect race which the Hebrews once were,” and so inherited a threefold covenant, as individuals, as families, and as a community. Sin could be equated with disorder; divine Grace meant the restoration of order, sometimes described as “the order of creation.”⁴

In addition, Puritan writers put forward a distinctive understanding of liberty. As John Winthrop explained, “natural liberty” was the freedom to do whatever one chose, which was no better than “original sin.” In contrast, “civil or federal liberty” was a freedom to do “that only which is good, just and honest.” In this sense, order and liberty were two sides of the same coin. On a related point, religious liberty did not mean an abstract, empty freedom of conscious; rather, it meant liberty to worship the Bible, as properly interpreted by the Puritan priestly class.⁵

Accordingly, in the Puritan mind, law and religion reinforced each other. In effect, religious and social covenants effortlessly merged. While church and government were formally separated, they were in practice “everywhere intertwined.” The local Congregational church, placed prominently on the village square, “was the center of religious and civic life . . . , the focal point of public piety and the guardian of the community’s values.” Participation in the church’s life, in turn, brought individuals into harmony with community mores, contributing to social order.⁶

A notable feature of seventeenth century Puritan theology, in both England and America, was the frequent use of family imagery to describe the nature of the true church. Found most elaborately in the work of Richard Sibbes, this approach featured God as a stern, disciplinarian father, who nonetheless would never disinherit his true “elected” children. As Sibbes explained, “the word ‘father’ is an epitome of the whole gospel.” Robert Gell described God as a benevolent breadwinner, faithfully providing “an inheritance for his new begotten children.” Meanwhile, Puritan writers cast the Church in the female role. According to Thomas Palmer, “[t]he church is called a woman, a woman in travail.” William Perkins declared the church to be “a mother, which by the ministry of the word brings forth children to God, . . . and after they are born and brought forth she feeds them with milk out of [her] own breasts, which are the scriptures.” Alternately, Puritan writers emphasized the nature of the Church as the “spouse of Christ.” Such “espousal theology” sometimes took on a vaguely erotic tone. As Sibbes preached: “Christ hath never enough of his Church till he hath it in Heaven. In the meantime Open, open still!”⁷

In this way, the Puritans actually moved beyond the emphasis of Luther and other continental Protestants on revitalizing the family as the basic cell of society. They shared in the strategy of shrinking the role of the parish church while elevating the household into a “family church.” However, by focusing on the familial aspects of the Godhead and with practical emphasis on family prayer, home Bible study, and family sermon discussion, the Puritans hoped to regenerate English society through internal moral governance. Accordingly, the family became for them “the nucleus of moral armament and social stability,” the foundation of ordered liberty. As William Gouge neatly summarized in 1622, “a family is a little Church, and a little Commonwealth . . . whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or Commonwealth.”⁸

Distinctive to the Puritan religious polity was the requirement that members have a clear conversion experience: “. . . the Lord’s quickening of the spirit.” As good Protestants, Puritans held that justification before God lay entirely in His hands. Men and women were altogether passive in the process; salvation was a gift of God’s grace. However, where Luther saw baptism alone as a sufficient channel of this grace, the Puritans insisted on a clear sign of life-changing sanctification, where the individual confronted the overwhelming burden of his or her sins, followed by an inrush of God’s saving Grace. When seeking membership in a congregation, the candidate had to identify and define that moment. He or she also faced examination by the brethren over matters of doctrine and moral behavior as well as their willingness to embrace “the covenantal principles of charity, love, and fraternity.”⁹

Controversy surrounds certain changes over the course of the seventeenth century in the meaning and process of church membership. Some see the adoption of the “Half-Way Covenant” by the 1662 General Synod in Boston as a measure of weakness. Those under this new dispensation were persons who were baptized as children, understood and publicly affirmed “The Doctrine of Faith,” and were “not scandalous in life and solemnly owning the Covenant before the church”; however, they were not required to give evidence that they had attained saving grace through a conversion experience. They were recognized as members and their children could be baptized. Yet they could not partake in the Lord’s Supper nor vote in church affairs. All the same, there is good evidence that, for at least several decades, the Half-Way Covenant operated primarily to resolve certain practical difficulties facing local congregations and did not widely dilute membership standards.¹⁰

In his important book The Puritan Family, Edmund Morgan traces the decline of the Puritan commonwealth to what he calls “Puritan Tribalism.” Faced by the appearance of ever more ungodly men in Massachusetts Bay after 1650, the Puritans—he says—turned away from evangelism among the unsaved toward a protection of their own children. Morgan suggests that their theology shifted as well. “Love thy neighbor” became “love they family.” In place of the message of Thomas Hooker—“a man who spoke his words to sinners rather than saints”—came the message of Increase Mather: “God hath seen meet to cast the line of election so, as that generally elect Children are cast upon elect Parents.” As nicely rephrased: “God casts the line of election in the loins of godly parents.” Morgan sees the Puritans turning their church into “an exclusive society for the saints and their children,” a “hereditary, religious aristocracy.” He concludes that this strategy failed, as the children of the elect proved insufficient to the task; grace did not prove to be hereditary. The consequence was a crisis in the Puritan spirit, evident starting in the 1680s.¹¹

However, in their study Religion, Family, and the Life Course, Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis persuasively argue that this turn by the Puritans toward protection of their children was not the cause of subsequent troubles. Rather, they maintain that “the family served a positive religious function in New England, preserving and protecting Puritan values and culture across generations.” Seventeenth-century families in Massachusetts “were more resilient and creative in the face of change” than depicted by Morgan. The Puritan family was in fact “an active agent,” showing greater strength and adaptability in the face of challenges than originally depicted. The crisis of the 1680s, including its family components, actually had other causes [a matter to be explored in the next chapter].¹²

Medieval Peasants in a New Land

A most striking, yet commonly forgotten, attribute of the Puritan settlers in seventeenth-century Massachusetts was that all were farmers. Even pastors, shopkeepers, and artisans spent a substantial portion of their time tilling the soil and tending animals. When asked to identify their vocations, most chose “yeoman” or “husbandman.”¹³ This meant, in turn, that they lived by nature’s clock. “As spring came,” writes John Demos, “life moved outdoors and the urgent business of planting gave point to a broad range of individual and community energies.”¹⁴

In this New World, land was abundant. Historians long thought that the average landholding in early New England was 25 to 50 acres; more recent data covering the period 1636–90 suggests an average of 150 acres per family.¹⁵ All the same, these were not commercial farms hiring labor and producing specialized crops for sale. Much of the land actually remained fallow or forested, reserved for children or grandchildren. In good peasant fashion, the Puritans instead committed themselves to subsistence agriculture, or self-sufficiency. In place of production for sale, they focused on production for use, supplemented by communal sharing. They found security in diversified production and family labor involving adults and children.¹⁶

Indeed, the seventeenth-century Puritans were “more medieval than modern.”¹⁷ These were “open-field men,” out to replicate a communal life that went back to the Saxons and Celts. Families clustered together in villages, while the land was divided into narrow strips distributed equitably among the households. Common fields and shared work brought men and women alike into daily contact with their neighbors. As Sumner Chilton Powell describes the town of Sudbury, founded in 1638: “. . . each field, each furlong, each cottage, each family [fit] into a traditional set of relationships which had been handed down, generation to generation, without serious questions.”¹⁸ While it turned out that American conditions ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Puritan Family Utopia, 1630–80
• 2 The Time of Troubles, 1680–1730
• 3 Five Systems . . . One Pattern, 1730–1780
• 4 Post-Revolutionary Crisis, 1780–1830
• 5 Building “Victorian” Families in America, 1830–80
• 6 The Unraveling, 1880–1930
• 7 The Surprise!: Family Renewal, 1930–70
• 8 The Whirlwind, 1970–2000
• 9 Lessons?
• Index