When Everything Changed (40 page)

Of course, most women couldn’t afford to pay for help, and communities made up of friends tended to break apart or fail to meet all the needs of young mothers struggling to balance work and child rearing. In Baltimore, when the Pollards divorced, Vicki was left alone in the row house with Tanya and a small son. Despite that network of neighbors, she felt she was struggling alone. “I remember one time when my little son and I were both incredibly sick,” she said. “I just didn’t know what was going to happen. I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.” She was deeply moved when a friend dropped by with some chicken soup. “It was one of the beginnings of our relationship,” she said of the man who later became her second husband.

The poorer a woman was, the more fraught the child-care problem. “You learned how to manage, you learned how to scrape by,” said Virginia Williams, whose little girl once became ill and had to be hospitalized. “I would go to that hospital to see my baby every day. I would leave the hospital; I’d go to work. I’d come home, I’d take a nap, I’d go back to the hospital,” she recalled. “And they threatened me with taking my child away. They’re saying, ‘You don’t spend enough time.’ Well, hello, I work every day.” The social worker, she said, insisted that she was neglecting her maternal duties, so rather than risk losing her child, Williams went on welfare for the only time in her life.

“…
THE
S
OVIETIZATION OF
A
MERICAN CHILDREN
.”

While a number of developed countries provide early child care the same way they provide kindergarten, most Americans take it as a given that they are on their own; that the government has never seriously considered offering anything more than a patchwork system to help the very poor. But back in the early ’70s, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and representatives actually
passed
legislation that would make child care available to every family that wanted it. “My idea was first of all that it would be national,” Walter Mondale recounted. “Impoverished to middle class, and any others that wanted to participate. I was trying to avoid typing it as a poor person’s program.”

Representative John Brademas, a Democrat from Indiana who had a long-standing passion for education issues, was the chief sponsor in the House, but the bill had strong Republican support as well. “We had to recognize that more and more married women were continuing to work,” said Martha Phillips, who worked for the Republican Research Committee in the House. “Having been a working mother, I knew what day-care problems were like.” The legislation aimed at establishing early-education programs in every community in the country, as well as after-school care for older children. The federal government would set standards and provide support services such as meals, medical and dental checkups, and counseling. There was money to train staff and acquire buildings. The services would be free for lower-income people, and most middle-class families would qualify for at least subsidized tuition. Households whose income was in the top 25 percent would be charged the full fee. No families were required to participate, but everyone would be eligible.

Congress passed the bill in 1971, after what the people working on it felt was a great deal of discussion and a large number of hearings. But the general public actually knew very little about it. “The news media pulled away from covering social issues of that nature,” said Jack Duncan, who was the counsel for Brademas’s education subcommittee. “They went for big things—Vietnam, Watergate.”
Actually, the child-care
bill was pretty big in itself. It was budgeted at $2 billion for the first two years, the equivalent of about $10 billion today. That was a huge amount of money at a time when the economy was beginning to falter, but it was also far less than would have been required once the system was up and running. “We were hopeful,” said Duncan. “The first step was to make sure there was a program.” The bill passed the Senate easily and made it through the House by a narrow margin after fights over what kind of community groups should be able to participate. But there seemed to be far less disagreement about the basic concept. “It was the high-water mark for the notion that our country would be far better off if we gave children in the earliest years a chance to get the skills and emotional strength they need to make it later on,” said Mondale.

The water receded very quickly. President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, claiming it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing” while undermining “the family-centered approach.” It was a slashing message, denouncing the act as “radical” and likely to “diminish both parental authority and parental involvement—particularly in those decisive early years when social attitudes and a conscience are formed and religious and moral principles are first inculcated.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Martha Phillips. “We all thought it would be signed. We had been working with the administration. They were helping draft it. There’s this disbelief that your own team had done it to you.”

Mondale had been consulting “almost daily” with Elliot Richardson, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, in an effort to get the White House’s approval. It was generally known that Nixon had ordered up both a veto message and a signing message, keeping his options open until the last minute. But Congress was stunned by the president’s tone, which seemed to suggest that the legislative backers of the bill were in cahoots with the Communists to destroy the American family. “It was one of the most irresponsible and demagogic veto messages,” said Brademas, who kept the message in his office for a long time, along with the alternative one Nixon would have used if he had decided to sign the bill.

Few people believed the bill had been vetoed because of its cost—although the cost was high. “I don’t think it was an entitlement issue,” said Brademas. “It was a cultural issue, a values issue.” Elliot Richardson said later that he believed Nixon, who was preparing to leave for his famous trip to China, wanted to throw a bone to the right wing of his party, which was outraged by his efforts to establish diplomatic relations with the Communist government.

The child-care bill was passed during the same period that the Equal Rights Amendment was approved with such overwhelming support—that moment when the two parties were changing sides on so many social issues and spent a brief time together in a place we might now define as a kind of establishment liberalism. The New Right was still in its infancy, but some of the people who would lead the culture wars later in the decade were on the White House staff, and the destruction of the child-care bill was one of their first big victories. The veto was actually the work of Howard Phillips, who was perhaps the most conservative member of the administration. Phillips, who would later run for president as the candidate of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, was gunning for the child-care bill, and he enlisted the help of Pat Buchanan, then a special assistant to the president. Buchanan recalls that they had to overcome the White House’s preference to simply veto the bill on the basis of its cost. “We wanted to go at it philosophically. We didn’t want this in the United States of America. The federal government should not be in the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological ideal of great importance,” he said.

The goal was not just to kill the bill but also to bury the idea of a national child-care entitlement forever. “I insisted we not just say we can’t afford it right now, in which case you get pilot programs or whatever,” Buchanan said. The veto message was actually a toned-down version of what Buchanan had suggested—he wanted to accuse the bill’s drafters of “the Sovietization of American children.” But it did the job Buchanan and Phillips had hoped it would do. It delivered the message that it was much more politically dangerous to work in favor of expanded child care than to oppose it. Meanwhile, the other side was sending no message at all. There was no outcry about the veto from the electorate—virtually no talk about it at all. The child-care community, which would have had to lead the charge, was actually divided over the bill. Some groups worried that the huge Child Development Act would drain money away from programs such as Head Start—those set up for the poorest children who needed help most.

Among the people who were not giving up was Margaret Heckler, the Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts. Heckler was determined to put an early-child-care plank in the Republican Party’s platform for the 1972 presidential election.
One reporter noted, in wonder
, that she “worked over a staggering total of ninety-six drafts on child care. For two hours she argued for the inclusion of a single word: ‘quality.’ ” Heckler won the battle of the platform but failed to get the hoped-for bill in the next session of Congress. Supporters went underground, fearing another veto.

After Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford became president, Brademas and Mondale resurrected their plan in 1975, renaming it the Child and Family Services Bill in order to make it clear that they were in favor of families, and starting it off with a modest appropriation of $150 million for the first year. But the economy was growing worse, the new administration was demanding budget cuts, and in the summer the two sponsors sat down for breakfast and agreed that they should withdraw the bill and wait until after the 1976 presidential election, when a more friendly Democrat might be in the White House.

“What happened next,” Brademas said, “was remarkable.”

Members of Congress started getting thousands of near-hysterical letters demanding that they kill the already-moribund legislation. “
Seldom does a bill
that is going nowhere, by all informed accounts, arouse such stridency,” reported the
Chicago Daily News.
Illinois senator Charles Percy, the story said, had gotten eight thousand letters in 1975. The writers appeared to believe that the Child and Family Services Bill would allow children to organize labor unions, to sue their parents for making them do household chores, and make it illegal for a parent to require their offspring to go to church.
One letter writer
said Brademas was trying to create “a breakdown in family order, increase in delinquency, and a godless Russian/Chinese type regimentation of young minds.” Another said that he “should be deported to Russia.”

Many of the letters had been inspired by a flyer, circulating around the Midwest and South, that confused the Child and Family Services Bill with a bill of rights for children that had been once proposed—but never seriously considered—in England, and which an opponent of Mondale’s original bill had referred to darkly during the debate in 1971. The leaflets were also picked up by conservative editorial writers and radio commentators;
they created such a stir
that a reporter for the
Houston Chronicle
tried to trace them back to the source. He found a retired director of a Bible camp in Kansas who said he had written the leaflet based on a pamphlet a relative had received at a revival in Missouri. He said that he was “sort of sorry” he had distributed it, since he had learned that virtually everything in it was untrue.

Although Jimmy Carter did bring Democratic control back to the White House, with Mondale as his vice president, the new administration had little interest in creating expensive new government programs. Brademas, who had become part of the Democratic leadership in the House, was busy on other projects. And, as Jack Duncan said, nobody really “wanted to go through that again.” Although Congress would keep fiddling with preschool programs to help poor children, there was never another serious attempt to create a national answer to the problem of who took care of the kids in an economy that now depended on women to work.

“I still hope we can get ourselves organized,” said Mondale recently, not sounding all that hopeful. “I tried everything.”

“People always think there will be another day,” said Duncan. “Well, there might be another day, but not in my lifetime.”

12. The 1980s—Having It All

“W
AY TO GO
, M
OM
!”

T
he 1970s ended badly for June LaValleur, the wife of a gas-station owner who was raising three sons in a small town in Minnesota. Wanting work more ambitious than her job as a lab technician, she had qualified to become a physician’s assistant but then lost her job. She and her husband were fighting all the time. Unsurprisingly, she felt depressed. “I went to a therapist. I felt like my whole world was caving in on me.”

When she tried to envision a way out of her dark hole, one idea that kept coming up was medical school. Working with doctors, she had often thought, “You know, I can do what they do. I just need to get trained to do it.” But it seemed like an impractical dream. It would take two more years just to get the necessary undergraduate credits. There was no medical school nearby, and even if she did somehow make it through, she would be 50 by the time she finished her training. Plus, her husband was totally opposed to the idea: “He thought it would ruin our marriage.”

But, she told herself, the marriage was in trouble anyway. She felt compelled to try.

Since both her husband and her sons regarded cities as alien territory—“too many people and too many cars”—there was no question of their moving. Instead, June began a Herculean effort to become a doctor at the medical school in St. Paul, 120 miles away, while taking care of her family back home. “I would drive to Twin Cities either late Sunday night or get up at three a.m. and go down Monday morning, then work very hard during the week,” she said. “I would go home on the weekends to be home with my family. I had a dual life. I just didn’t talk about one when doing the other.” On weekends, she tried to spend as much time as possible with her boys and do the household chores. “I did all the laundry, prepared food for the next week. I made pancakes and put them in bags so all they had to do was put them in the microwave. I made hot dishes that could be popped into the oven.” She also hired a woman to do “day-to-day cleanup” and to be at the house between the time the boys came home from school and her husband’s arrival from work.