That is why it is the origin of big government. After tasting it, some found it to their liking, and the government simply grew larger and more intrusive thereafter.
That’s all progressivism, and doesn’t appear until the age of Theodore and Woodrow at the turn of the century.
On our national scale, it started with a race obsessed Liberal Lawyer from Illinois. Lincoln grew the Federal government into a monster. Woodrow Wilson simply nourished the little monster that Lincoln had birthed.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. You object to anyone having combated slavery, and derisively call that effort “progressive.” Southrons are so easy to spot, and such an embarrassment to this forum.
This is simply not accurate. Even at best, if we point to the first bureaucracy, the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was birthed two decades after the war in 1887(but was practically toothless at the beginning) we can only find scant evidence of a full-throated drive toward big government for big government’s sake. The ICC was in many ways a compartmentalized department which was thought to deal with one single(set of issues) issue.
The fact remains that the first big government president who loved big government as his beginning, and loved big government as his end, who loved big government as his beloved all, his beloved everything, was Theodore Roosevelt.
There wasn’t one aspect of life that TR didn’t want to see government involved in. There wasn’t one aspect of life that TR and his followers didn’t think that long term, government shouldn’t be involved with. Government must meddle in all. Government must control all. That’s progressivism.
There’s 1081 executive orders with TR’s name on them to prove it. Big government for as far as the eye could see, and for longer than the human lifespan, that’s what the ideology is all about. There’s nothing like it prior in any chapter of American history. None.