The American state from the Civil War to the New Deal
Subtitle: the twilight of constitutionalism and the triumph of progressivism
By: Paul D. Moreno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Cambridge, [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 349
ISBN-13: 9781107032958; 9781107655010
Subjects: HISTORY / United States / General; Politics and government; United States; Social policy; Progressivism (United States politics)
Description: "This book tells the story of constitutional government in America during the period of the ,źsocial question.,Ź After the Civil War and Reconstruction, and before the ,źsecond Reconstruction,Ź and cultural revolution of the 1960s, Americans dealt with the challenges of the urban and industrial revolutions. In the crises of the American Revolution and the Civil War, the American founders ,Ŭ and then Lincoln and the Republicans ,Ŭ returned to a long tradition of Anglo-American constitutional principles. During the Industrial Revolution, American political thinkers and political actors gradually abandoned those principles for a set of modern ideas, initially called progressivism. The social crisis, culminating in the Great Depression, did not produce a Lincoln to return to the founders,Ŵ principles, but rather a series of leaders ,Ŭ Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt ,Ŭ who repudiated them. Congress and the Supreme Court eventually followed their lead. Since the New Deal, Americans have lived in a constitutional twilight, not having completely abandoned the natural-rights constitutionalism of the founders, nor having completely embraced the entitlement-based welfare state of modern liberalism"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.