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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, May 3, 1968
Politics in America-1968
Race issue illustrates move toward federalism
(Editor's note: This is the second of a five part series exploring political differences and their effects on the presidency, Congress and public policy making.)
By Arnold B. Sawislak
WASHINGTON—(UPI) During the first century of U.S. independence, the ordinary citizen's life was far more likely to be touched by state or local government than by faraway Washington. The men who wrote the Constitution in 1789 probably intended it that way.
The federal government was important on the frontiers and beyond, but once the settlers came to stay, the focus was on such state and local responsibilities as education and law enforcement. Not until the second half of the 19th century did the national government really assert itself.
One measure of this situation is in the fact that only three of the 22 presidents who served during the 19th century—Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln — usually are ranked among the "great" chief executives.
Most of the rest were passive proprietors of a federal establishment that was overshadowed in all but times of war or national peril.
During this period, Congress dominated the federal government, and it reflected a provincial rather than a national viewpoint. The Civil War, of course, was the exception for Congress as well as for the presidency.
In blood, the Civil War established Lincoln's belief that the national government could not be dissolved at the whim of the states, but it was later in the century that Washington began to address itself to problems that had been the sole province of the states.
Then, with the nation's booming financial and commercial interests threatening to dominate government at all levels, Congress and the executive responded with federal business regulation. It was timid at first, but it was the start of something big.
About the same time, the United States embarked on its first adventures as a world power. At first American interest was on its own hemisphere, but it grew to encompass the world.
The change in the federal role took a long time. It was more than a century before the United States outgrew its wilderness and agricultural character and began assuming the role of an industrial, city-centered society.
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The transformation required a delicate political process of constitutional reinterpretation and amendment, but it was done without changing the basic forms of U.S. government.
The race issue, still plaguing the country, illustrates what happened. The original Constitution recognized human slavery as legal. But forces in the industrial North, which did not need slaves, soon began attacking the practice as immoral. The abolitionists were blocked by political power and legal precedent in Congress, the White House and the courts.
The balance tipped with the election of Lincoln and the new antislavery Republican party. The South, sensing sure defeat on the basic issue of state sovereignty as well as the specific matter of slavery, seceded. The Union won the war that followed and the national
executive branch and Congress began to try to redeem the legal pledges made in constitutional amendments put on the books after the Civil War.
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government forced the states to give up slavery.
But the national government was not prepared to permanently supersede the states. In order to restore political stability, it let former slaveholding states establish racially segregated societies that all but returned the Negroes to their previous status.
Not until the mid-20th century, when Negroes had become an important voting bloc in the northern cities, did the pendulum swing again. Then, the courts, the
In a dictatorship, all of this might have been accomplished much faster. But in the United States, with its constant jousting for power among the various branches and levels of government, the process of changing slaves to free citizens has taken more than 100 years, and still is not finished.
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