The deluge of criticism that followed Senator John McCain’s nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate was at least ostensibly about her lack of experience, her parochialism or her strong pro-life stance. It was said that she simply lacked the political résumé to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. However, her pro-life views were no different from McCain’s (or George W. Bush’s or Ronald Reagan’s), and her political experience was not noticeably less than that claimed by the top of the Democratic ticket—which amounted to some community organizing and brief stints in the Illinois legislature and U.S. Senate—nor less than that of many past vice-presidential candidates. Without rehearsing the entire Palin brouhaha, I would suggest that the subtext of the most virulent of the Palin animus was simply that she was the mother of five children.

Mother of five: This was something the national media and intelligentsia could barely fathom, much less abide. It was to them beyond the pale of the socially acceptable. Sally Quinn, the Washington Post writer and society doyenne, gave the game away in several blog posts in which she referred to Palin’s “particular family situation” and, in case we didn’t get that hint, Quinn reminded us that Palin—for God’s sake!—“is the mother of five children.” The ever sober columnist Ruth Marcus, also of the Washington Post, complained that “many working moms wince at the thought of a vice-presidential mother of five.” In a day and age when college-educated women born between 1960 and 1964—the cohort, along with their husbands, who comprised the most vocal opposition to Palin—are having a mere 1.6 children on average, it must have seemed as though a barbarian from the hinterlands was poised to storm the gates of their rationally planned families and upset the equipoise of their idyllic suburban existence.

Yet as difficult as this is for the prim and well-educated to believe, it may precisely be large families not entirely unlike the Palins who safeguard this country’s vitality. At least that was the position of the late Carle Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist whose treatise Family and Civilization, first published in 1947, was recently reissued by ISI Books. Zimmerman argued that larger families foster the ideal of “familism”, which by providing a stable social structure enables a civilization to flourish. And he worried that family breakdown and low birth rates ultimately endangered Western civilization.