The Lost Memory of a Limited Republic
No American alive today remembers life before the 1930s, when the federal government’s reach into local and private life was still visibly restrained, though even then, much had already been eroded under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. History books portray the late 1920s and 1930s as a morality tale of capitalism’s greed producing the Great Depression. Yet that narrative itself was shaped by progressive revisionism, magnifying crisis to justify the centralization of power in Washington.
Some contemporaries warned of the danger…