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I consider 1913 to be a very bad year for liberty because in that year the 16th and 17th amendments were both passed. Each of these amendments is a lever that loosened the moorings that had limited the power of the federal government for 126 years to that point. It’s true that before either of those amendments were passed the actions they authorized were already in use but by codifying the legality of an unlimited income tax and the direct election of senators removing even the appearance of states as sovereign political entities it became nearly impossible to lend any credence to the notion of limited national government held in check by the interests of state and local governments as well as the prevailing interests of the body of voters.
There are many conservative pundits calling for a scaling back of government. From what I have observed most of them seem to want to go back 30 or 50 years. Some may even be bold enough to suggest going back 80 years before the New Deal and the great depression. Very few understand that to truly have a limited government again we must go back at least 96 years to rest the two levers that were thrown in 1913.
Without those two levers being thrown (in 1913 or at some other time) there is no way that our federal government could have grown to completely ignore the perspective of state governments nor to control an ever expanding share of the national economy. There is a decent chance that without these changes the people of this nation would not yet have learned to look to the federal government to solve all the problems that they see around them.
We would still need to address the issues being faced at that time – the government had a legitimate need (as far as I can tell) for greater revenue than they were able to acquire without an income tax and the senatorial selection process was compromised and sometimes dysfunctional – but looking at the widespread misunderstanding about what government can and should do that is pervasive among politicians and voters alike means that I am more fearful of the consequences of our current problems and “solutions” than I am of the problems that were meant to be addressed by the adoption of those two insidious amendments.
2 replies on “Bad Year for Liberty”
I think you’d have to go back even further. While many revere Theodore Roosevelt (and no doubt he was an incredibly remarkable individual), he did much to expand government and to more firmly implement the idea that Americans should look to Washington, D.C. to solve their problems rather than relying on good old American self-reliance and independence. He significantly expanded the power of the executive branch and brought on the era of the celebrity politician. (One of the reasons we remember him so well is that he was a shameless self promoter that even managed to get his visage permanently etched into a mountain along side much greater greats.)
Not only did TR’s government expansions set the stage for the passage of the two amendments you mention, he fully bought into the idea of transferring significant arbitrary powers to unelected appointees so that government programs would be implemented through departments that could never die and that would continue nearly unchecked with only expansions and few if any reductions from administration to administration, regardless of who held Congress or the White House. He bought into the concept of the administrative state–a concept popular in Europe at the time, that found its fruition in Germany of the 1930s and 1940s.
TR’s expansions were assiduously carried on by Taft, who was TR’s hand picked successor. This massive government encroachment also set the stage for the progressive expansions (and thuggish treatment of administration opponents) of the Wilson years. And in fact, TR was directly responsible for the election of the progressivist Wilson. TR’s actions directly caused a decades long split of the Republican coalition and paved the path to the New Deal and the intense encroachments by his cousin during the 1930s and 1940s.
TR was a tremendous celebrity. But he was an unabashed progressive and champion of aggregation and use of centralized government authority. Of course, he felt that this power would always be used for good. Ah, but we know which road is paved with good intentions.
Even after more than a century it is easy to be blinded by the free-wheeling rough-rider cowboy image that Teddy Roosevelt cultivated so that we forget how much power he added to the executive branch specifically and the federal government generally. It’s amazing how much one family (the Roosevelts) could do to permanently warp the government that the founders so carefully crafted.