That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [22]
Abraham Lincoln is best known, of course, for presiding over the federal government during the Civil War, but during that conflict his administration passed several landmark pieces of legislation that spurred America’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. One was the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up the West for settlement by anyone who had not fought against the Union. Another was the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864, which connected the eastern to the western part of the country and so laid the basis for a truly national economy. A third was the Morrill Act of 1862, which established a system of land-grant colleges, giving rise to institutions of higher education from Georgia to California and from Minnesota to Texas. States received federal land to establish colleges or vocational schools for educating students in agriculture, science, engineering, and other skills the country as a whole needed. Lincoln signed the National Academy of Sciences into being on March 3, 1863, to bring together America’s best researchers to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government. Remarkably, all of this happened while we were fighting a civil war.
Theodore Roosevelt secured his place on Mount Rushmore chiefly through his contributions to the American formula. His experience as a reformist police commissioner in New York City, leader of the Civil Service Commission, and governor of New York taught him that for business to thrive it required consistent and transparent rules, as well as regulators authorized to prevent abuses and hold businesses accountable. As president, he took on large business monopolies in order to foster the free competition on which economic growth depends. American business was often unhappy with the rules and regulations that Roosevelt championed, but the competition, the transparency, and the public confidence that his handiwork helped to foster probably benefited business and investors more than any other group in the country. His concept of the vital role government had to play to regulate markets, as well as to protect public health and safety, not to mention to safeguard our nation’s wilderness, laid the basis for America’s Progressive era.
In 1907, the next-to-last full year of Roosevelt’s presidency, 1,285,349 people came to the United States from other countries, the largest single annual intake in American history to that point. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, descended as it is from the earliest European settlements in North America in what became Virginia and Massachusetts. In the first half of the nineteenth century, most immigrants came from northern Europe. In the second half and the early decades of the twentieth, a great many originated in southern and eastern Europe. America became a great industrial power after the Civil War by capitalizing on the rapid population growth due to immigration. Many of the people who manned the factories that entrepreneurs built and dug the coal that powered these factories came originally from Europe.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal built dams, levees, roads, parks, airports, power stations, reservoirs, tunnels, auditoriums, schools, and public libraries. These public investments in infrastructure and education gave a huge boost to the American economy during the Great Depression, during World War II, and in the years that followed. With the Securities Act of 1933, often referred to as the “truth in securities” law, and the re-regulation of the banking system, FDR stabilized the country’s finances, and these measures may well have saved capitalism in the United States. Moreover,