No, they were the equivalent of the libertarians.
DO you honestly think someone 100 years ago would have let the government say they couldn't build a house on their own land? Couldn't drink milk from their cow or give it to the neighbors?
Couldn't spank their kids when they needed discipline?
We have far too danm many laws covering far too much scope, and most of them have been federalized.
Not only is that totalitarian, it's expensive, too.
As for building the country, those who built and built well succeeded, and those who didn't, didn't, and for the most part, the Government wasn't in the way of either.
Ditch the laws, end the second least successful war in our history (and end the War on Poverty, too, at the same time), and let the chips fall where they may.
If you raise your kids right and help keep their heads out of their arses, you and yours will be fine, and if not, at least it will be out in the open and give you a chance to intervene if they make the wrong choices.
I have no use for any of that crap, and I don't drink either, but we might as well roll back the rock and look at the bugs underneath as get our doors kicked in at 4AM, the dogs shot, or pulled over and our stuff taken through a presumption of guilt (something which would have been called 'highway robbery' back when) over someone else's irresponsibilities.
The people who built this country understood their Rights, and the fact that sometimes with Rights come behaviours they'd rather not have around. They used social means to deal with those problems, not laws, back when the sign in the back of the counter said "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" and they meant it.
Oh, the Government outlawed that, too.
In the meantime, I know a couple of young men who just lost their growing retail business and are facing charges for failure to pull bath salts off the shelves the day before the ban went into effect.
I feel SO much safer now. (/s)
Underneath the veneer of respectability and security lies the festering rot of corruption; there is no other reason our border has remained porous since Eisenhower's 'Operation Wetback'. Enough money to buy smaller countries has left ours, untaxed, because of the clandestine nature of the trade. You can't seriously tell me or anyone else that some of that money hasn't corrupted at least some of the selfsame officials who are supposed to be enforcing the very laws which make the trade so profitable.
Enough is enough.
They were social conservatives and religious zealots first.
Making hand washing mandatory for food employees was easy to explain to them, convincing them to allow Islamic polygamy, and homosexual marriage as being “constitutional” was impossible.
Their state churches wouldn’t allow it for one thing.