The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal

The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism

Paul D. Moreno

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781107032958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781107070097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book tells the story of constitutional government in America during the period of the 'social question'. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, and before the 'second Reconstruction' 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 - and then Lincoln and the Republicans - returned to a long tradition of Anglo-American constitutional principles. During the Industrial Revolution, American political thinkers and 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' principles, but rather a series of leaders who repudiated them. Since the New Deal, Americans have lived in a constitutional twilight, not having completely abandoned the natural-rights constitutionalism of the founders, nor embraced the entitlement-based welfare state of modern liberalism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes
• AcknowledgmentsI
• Introduction
• Part I The Old Regime: 1870–1900
• 1 The Post-War Constitution
• 2 The Judiciary and Private Rights
• 3 The Crisis of the 1890s
• Part II Early Progressivism: 1900–1913
• 4 The New Jurisprudence
• 5 The Due Process Dialectic
• 6 Toward a Federal Police Power
• 7 Rooseveltian Progressivism
• 8 The Lochner Incident
• 9 Court and Constitution in Crisis
• 10 Taft and the Republican Crackup
• Part III Late Progressivism: 1913–1933
• 11 Wilsonian Progressivism
• 12 The New Freedom
• 13 The New Wilson
• 14 The Great War
• 15 The Return of the Regular Republicans
• 16 The Taft Court
• 17 The Last Progressive
• Part IV The New Deal: 1933–1940
• 18 The Hundred Days
• 19 To the Brink
• 20 The Second New Deal
• 21 The Court Fight
• 22 The Abortive Third New Deal
• 23 The New Deal Court
• Appendix A Multipliers and Multiplicands: Hours v. Wages Laws
• Appendix B Losses in the Gold Clause Cases
• Primary Sources
• Index