Abstract
The U.S. government's response to the Great Depression and World War II represented a compromise between those who hoped to expand the powers of the state and American citizens' traditional distrust of the government. Evaluate the evidence for this statement.
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Those are the words the revolutionary Thomas Paine published in his book Common Sense, in January 1776, a few months before the American insurgents proclaimed independence from the British Crown. The sentence was to become a fundamental principle in U.S. political thought for centuries, as an illustration of how peculiar the relationship between the American people and their government would be. This idea that the “government is best which governs least” – a phrase often attributed to Adams, Jefferson or Paine – shows quite well American citizens' traditional distrust of the government, a legacy from the founding fathers. Yet, major twentieth-century crises such as the Great Depression and World War Two would question that original conception of the government in the United States, at least to a certain degree. To what extent did the U.S. government's response to the Great Depression and World War II represent a compromise between those who hoped to expand the powers of the state and American citizens' traditional distrust of the government?
