Daniel Kevles: It’s Time America Makes Good Again on Its Belief in Public Works and Public Spirit
Daniel Kevles is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. His works include the coauthored Inventing America: A History of the United States.
In late June my wife and I drove to Cape Cod, crossing one of the two highway bridges that arch over the canal separating the Cape from the mainland. A large metal sign permanently affixed to the superstructure reminded us that we were on the “Sagamore Bridge, 1933-1935.” Both spans—the other is the Bourne Bridge, a mile and a half to the west—were New Deal projects, bridges to somewhere that transformed the economy of the region. A few days before we had been at the Library of Congress in Washington, attending a celebration of the sesquicentennial of the Morrill Act of 1862 (named for Congressman Justin S. Morrill of Vermont), which established the nation’s land-grant colleges and universities. Morrill’s measure was no less a bridge than the spans at Sagamore and Bourne–a bridge of opportunity to the somewhere of a better life.
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, avowed enemies of big government, would likely have blocked both initiatives. In Norfolk, Va., on being introduced as Romney’s running mate, Ryan proclaimed to adoring cheers that “our rights come from nature and God, not from government," a point that Romney riffed on a few hours later in Manassas and in his acceptance speech in Tampa. Perhaps unknowingly, they were echoing one of the famous truths that Thomas Jefferson asserted in the Declaration of Independence--that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Having first declared themselves a duo in Jefferson’s state, they might also have taken account of the Declaration’s immediately subsequent and no less self-evident truths—“that among these [rights] are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In Jefferson’s day, the essential right at issue was freedom from autocratic rule, but as the nation developed and diversified, its conception of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inexorably expanded, and so—in the North and Midwest, though not in the slavery-enchained South—did expectations of the federal government’s role in securing these aims. The Morrill Act, vetoed before the Civil War by President James Buchanan, a staunch defender of limited government, sailed through Congress after the South seceded and was enthusiastically approved by President Abraham Lincoln, the exemplar of the then-new Republican Party that in its enthusiasm for the federal government’s promotion of opportunity and growth was far different from today’s GOP....