Under the 10 th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, powers are divided between the federal government and the states. This is known as the principle of federalism. The 10 th Amendment reads “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” What this means is that the federal government only has power over the areas specifically mentioned in the Constitution as belonging to the federal government. However, federalism is an evolving principle, not a static one. Most of the constitutional powers of the federal government have remained unchanged on paper. Despite this, the influence of the federal government greatly expanded in the 20 th century. The federal government now exercises powers in areas that would have been regarded as clear state issues a century ago. In recent years, this has led to a movement by some conservatives to “devolve” power from the federal government and move it back to the states. This paper will discuss the changes in federalism over the 20 th century along with the devolution movement. It will also analyze the intervention of the federal government during the civil rights movement. Over the 20 th century, power has strongly moved toward the federal government and away from the states. In many ways, this movement has been directly proportional to the increased spending and taxing by the federal government. During the 19 th century, most revenue raised by the federal government came from tariffs on imports. However, the 16 th Amendment, passed in 1913, created the federal income tax. There were several reasons the amendment was passed. Corporations had been growing rapidly in the previous decades, and many people felt that the federal government was the only entity with the power to check some of their worst abuses. In order to check the abuses of corporations, though, the federal government needed to raise much more revenue than it previously had. The 16 th Amendment gave the federal government much more potential power. The Great Depression and the election of Frankin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932 gave the federal government the will to exercise that potential power. By this point, the economy no longer consisted mostly of small local actors (farmers, shopkeepers, etc.), but rather massive corporations with presences throughout the entire country. Individual states had little ability to regulate large multi-state corporations, and when the Great Depression hit states were powerless to try to improve the economy. This state of affairs set the stage for the New Deal. President Roosevelt and the federal government intervened in the economy to a degree unprecedented in American history. The federal government passed legislation establishing Social Security, protecting the right of workers to join labor unions, and even imposed limits on how muck wheat farmers could grow (Lowi 17). The federal government justified this intervention on the grounds that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution gave it the power to intervene in any matters involving interstate commerce, and after some hesitation the courts eventually agreed. Whether this interpretation of the Commerce Cla