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Via Marsall Poe's New Books in History Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “things held in common.” The “founding fathers”–all “Classical Republicans”–designed a form of government that, though “checked and balanced,” gave the federal government significant powers. And throughout the 19th-century Americans asked the federal government to use those powers to do all kinds of things, many of them profoundly self-interested.
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Historian Brian Balogh was recently interviewed on With Good Reason, discussing the (surprisingly) active 19th century government that laid the foundation for America’s rise. Listen >>
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Oddly, both conservatives and progressives agree that nineteenth-century Americans embraced the free market. Neither ideological perspective takes seriously the possibility that Americans turned regularly to the national government throughout the nineteenth century, or that it played a crucial role in shaping what Americans then and now regard as the “natural” market.
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