"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."
~~~ Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate and one of the founders of the ACLU.
More like since Wilson, that's when they got the power to fund all this through the income tax (which would of course only apply to The Rich, and even then rates would never except a few percent). Also they began the destruction of federalism, via direct election of Senators. Later, under FDR, they decided that actually amending the Constitution would usually be too difficult, and so they packed the Court to interpret the Interstate Commerce clause to mean they could do whatever the heck they wanted.