Social Sciences and History / Unit 2 SSH 0140 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Government's Reach, 1877–2008: One Thread
The idea
The exam's questions on the century after Reconstruction return again and again to one variable: how far the federal government reached into economic life, and who pushed it further or pulled it back. Reading the period on that thread turns a list of administrations into a single argument. In the Gilded Age the reach was slight. The anchor calls federal politics ineffective, dominated by patronage and machine graft, with laissez-faire feeling in the public and only weak measures like the Sherman Acts. The Populists asked for more, a subtreasury and silver, and lost. Progressives got more. Roosevelt's Square Deal confronted trusts and preserved land; Wilson's New Freedom passed the legislation grassroots reformers had wanted; initiative, referendum and recall gave voters new levers. The Great War extended the reach further, into railroads, bonds, propaganda and the policing of dissent, and then closed the wartime agencies at once. The twenties pulled back: normalcy, business-friendly government, isolation. The Depression made the largest change. Hoover's individualism resisted intervention; Roosevelt's hundred days, the Second New Deal, Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act built a permanent structure, and the anchor's own line is that the question after nineteen forty-one was no longer whether government would regulate and provide but how much. The Second World War and the Cold War added rationing, the military-industrial complex, containment's spending and the Marshall Plan. The Great Society added a war on poverty and three civil rights acts. Then the thread reversed. Reagan's cuts to taxes and social spending, the New Right, and Clinton's move to the center pulled the reach back in domestic policy while defense grew. The financial crisis of two thousand eight pulled it forward again with TARP and the Affordable Care Act.
In practice
One line, forward and back: slight, then Progressive expansion, wartime surge and retreat, the New Deal's permanent step, postwar additions, the Reagan reversal, the crisis response.
Where people slip
The thread is a reading aid, not a verdict. The anchor offers verdicts on several of these administrations, and the course does not repeat them; whether each expansion or retreat was for the better is the historians' debate the anchor itself names for the New Deal. What the exam tests is the direction and the instrument: which measure expanded federal reach, which contracted it, and under whom. Given any program from this unit, place it on the line by asking whether it added a federal rule, a federal payment or a federal agency, or removed one.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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