History of the United States II / Unit 18 USH2 2568 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Federal Role Grew Steadily
The idea
The course's first cross-theme twin is that the federal role grew steadily across these decades. It did not. It grew in bursts, each driven by a crisis, and between the bursts it was held, contested and in places redrawn. The first burst was the Progressive state of unit six, entries 0779 to 0790, and the war economy of unit eight, entry 1074, when four agencies directed industry, food, transport and opinion. Hoover's voluntarism in unit ten, entries 1360 and 1368, held the line against direct relief. The New Deal of unit eleven crossed it, and by nineteen thirty-eight the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act had made the new role permanent.
In practice
A line that jumps in nineteen seventeen, holds through the nineteen twenties, jumps again after nineteen thirty-three, rises in nineteen sixty-five, and bends back in the nineteen eighties and nineties.
Where people slip
The shape to remember is set, kept and contested. The settlement was set by the late nineteen thirties, kept by a Republican president, Eisenhower, who expanded Social Security, entry 1830, extended by Johnson's Great Society, entry 1967, and contested from nineteen eighty-one, when Reagan's tax cut and a new conservative coalition challenged it, entries 2256 and 2252. It was redrawn by a Democratic president in welfare reform, entry 2301, and returned in force in the crisis of two thousand eight, entries 2423 and 2439. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first sees a steady climb, which cannot account for the reversals of the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The second sees the whole settlement undone after nineteen eighty-one, which cannot account for the Yawp's finding in entry 2307 that the programmes survived, battered but intact.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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