The Political Economy of Head Start: Congressional Discourse during the Era of Embedded Liberalism

To date, no literature on the early history of Head Start substantively explores the program’s alignment with the larger national agenda of the U.S. Congress during the 1960s and 1970s. In this study, I apply a conceptual framework purposively designed to situate Head Start in the context of embedded liberalism and Cold War geopolitical strategy. Embedded liberalism, the dominant postwar ideology in Congress, portrayed state investment in the public sphere as a necessary precondition for political stability and economic growth. Drawing from analytic induction, I analyzed the discourse of nine Congressional hearings that took place from 1964 to 1971. This timeframe covers hearings related to passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the legislative basis under which Head Start was created, and extends to hearings on the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, a bill that would have moved the country toward universal high-quality care for young children but was vetoed by President Richard Nixon. Analysis of the Congressional hearings shows the rationale for Head Start was largely consistent with the logic of embedded liberalism and U.S. geopolitical interests. Hearing participants frequently used war as a potent metaphor to galvanize support for social programs and invoke a triumphal narrative of U.S. military intervention. Poverty was portrayed as the “domestic enemy” at home and “the breeding ground in which Communist ideology has typically flourished” abroad, blurring the distinction between the state’s efforts to subvert the growth of radical movements within the United States and the Cold War policy of containment. Congressional discourse framed Head Start as part of an effort to bring more communities into “the mainstream of American life” (i.e., the patterns of familial life, consumption, and productive labor of the White middle class). Contradictorily, a “population crisis” discourse shows members of Congress viewed an expanded middle class as a threat to the environment and social order. Further, this discourse policed the reproduction of racialized subjects and shifted blame for resource scarcity and inequitable wealth distribution away from capital and onto families living in poverty.