This Confederate resurgence also created a political alignment of sorts between the unreconstructed South which resented federal interference and the North's new industrialists who opposed government efforts to regulate commerce.
Though Lincoln's presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullet, his contribution to the country cannot be overstated. Through the carnage of the Civil War, he finally addressed one of the nation's founding crimes, the slavery of African-Americans.
In doing so, he corrected some of the distortions that Jefferson had inserted into the national narrative. But Lincoln's death -- at the start of his second term -- left much of the business unfinished and enabled the states' rights rationalizations to reemerge through the era of Jim Crow and the Gilded Age.
One of the Best: Franklin Roosevelt
The problems created by the resurgence of Jefferson's restrictive view of the Constitution, which jointly served the interests of white supremacists in the South and rich industrialists in the North, contributed to gross inequalities across the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In the South, blacks were oppressed and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan; across the nation, factory workers and small farmers were exploited by the Robber Barons. America may have been a land of opportunity, but it was increasingly a place where most of that opportunity ended up in fewer and fewer hands.
This combination of unregulated capitalism and the stunning disparity in wealth that it created contributed to boom-and-bust cycles that wreaked further havoc on average Americans who found their small businesses shut down, their farms foreclosed on, and their jobs often gone.
This cascade of panics, shocks and various recessions finally culminated in the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of 1929 and reverberated across the country in the form of bank runs, massive layoffs and lost farms.
It was Democrat Franklin Roosevelt who, after winning a landslide election victory in 1932, threw the weight of the federal government behind an array of initiatives to put people back to work, to invest in the nation's infrastructure and to stabilize the financial system through regulation of the banks. In effect, what Roosevelt did was to finally give meaning to the constitutional mandate that the national government "provide for ... the general Welfare."
Not every one of Roosevelt's ideas worked perfectly -- and he arguably pulled back on government stimulus too soon allowing the country to slide back into recession in the late 1930s -- but his New Deal, including passage of Social Security for the elderly, laid a strong foundation for the creation of America's Great Middle Class, which was essentially a product of a series of federal laws over several decades: from union protection to transportation projects to safer banking to the minimum wage to the GI Bill to technological research and development to conservation and environmental safeguards.
Despite facing fierce political opposition himself -- from an old guard that still pushed Jefferson's constitutional revisionism of "strict construction" -- Roosevelt eventually fashioned a consensus around the necessity of federal government activism, which continued through the next seven presidents, both Democrat and Republican.
Besides pulling the United States out of the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt guided the country through World War II, coordinating a sometimes fractious alliance that defeated fascism in Europe and Asia. Despite a shameful decision to intern many Japanese-Americans during the war, the Roosevelt administration also began the gradual movement toward the federal government taking a more supportive position in favor of civil rights for minorities.
Among the Best: John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
The post-World War II presidents -- including Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and continuing through John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson -- are all marred by excesses of the Cold War, even as they deserve credit for building on Roosevelt's New Deal legacy.
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson also grappled with the terrible legacy of slavery and segregation. These presidents advanced the civil rights cause in fits and starts, fearing the political consequences of offending the Old South and the many white racists throughout the country.
But what distinguishes Kennedy and Johnson in this regard is that they finally brought the federal government down decisively on the side of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement to end segregation and Jim Crow.
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