The Raising of America Episode 2: Once Upon a Time

Episode 1 of the 5-part series The Raising of America

Childcare in America is a patchwork - uneven in quality, unaffordable to most and failing many of our youngest children and their families.

Once Upon a Time allows us to imagine how things might be different if all the nation’s children had access to high-quality early care and education for the past four decades. That’s because we almost did.

During WWII, the Lanham Act funded a national network of child development centers which served 600,000 children whose mothers, known as Rosie the Riveters, were turning out armaments in the nation’s factories. But when the War ended most of the women were terminated and, despite protests, the childcare centers shut down.

In 1971 the number of working mothers was growing rapidly once again. The U.S. Congress, pushed by the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements and Pres. Johnson’s earlier Great Society successes, including Head Start, passed a bill providing high-quality childcare and early ed, home visiting and other services for each and every family which wanted them, all on a sliding scale. It was called the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA).

But for the bill to become law, it needed Pres. Nixon’s signature. The White House was split and no one knew what Nixon would do.

Patrick Buchanan, a young White House speechwriter at the time, reveals how a group of powerful conservatives went to work behind the scenes to secure the president’s veto, re-casting the bill as government intrusion in the family.

On camera, Buchanan reads the veto message he wrote for Nixon. It tarred the CCDA as “a communal approach” to child rearing. Two of the bill’s authors, then-Senator and former Vice President Walter Mondale and Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, explain how Nixon’s veto was the first time ‘family values’ were invoked to undermine families and marked a seminal inflection point from our nation’s progress towards a more inclusive society to the ‘fend-for-yourself’ America of today.

But there is a federally-funded childcare program serving the nation’s largest employer: the U.S. Military. The armed forces’ childcare was once as abysmal as the rest of the nation's. In 1989, 18 years after Nixon’s veto, Congress mandated that the military provide child-centered care to any family that wanted it. At Camp Pendleton Marine Base we witness some of the best childcare in the country, all of it affordable and strictly regulated.

If those who provide for our military security can have universal childcare, what about those who provide our economic security, our civilian workforce? We came achingly close once. What will it take to enact effective child and family policies today?