Coronavirus crisis is redefining the role of government

Americans increasingly feel there is a role for big government. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll reports that fully 50 percent of the country believes that the government should do more to solve national problems — particularly in the face of the COVID-19 virus pandemic — while only 40 percent say it is doing too much.

This is a marked contrast from 1995, when 60 percent in a Gallup Poll said the government was trying to do too much, and from 1996 when President Bill Clinton declared in his State of the Union address that “the era of Big Government is over.”

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, of course, Americans subscribed to the notion of limited government. During the Gilded Age, the great robber barons had a free hand to do whatever they wanted, often with government assistance, and much of the body politic was left to fend for itself. But then in the 1930s, in the face of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal took the view that the role of government was to help those who could not help themselves.

With unemployment at 25 percent, with another 25 percent underemployed, and with virtually no national unemployment insurance program, the federal government responded. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration, to mention but a few, changed the national sense of what the government could and should do.

The New Deal, of course, built on the reforms of the Progressive era in the early 20th century, with its commitment to the notion of regulation, and also the role of scientific expertise in establishing national policies and priorities.

The American experience in World War II only underscored those powerful trends. When President Roosevelt declared that the United States would be the “arsenal of democracy,” he committed the full force of the American government to do whatever was necessary to win the war. He brought in experts from the business community to staff the many federal agencies that oversaw production and made the implements necessary for military success. He brought members of both political parties into his Cabinet. Everything was regulated, in a process that ensured that raw materials and resources went where they were needed most. The nation’s best scientific minds were enlisted and helped produce such inventions as the proximity fuse, used in bombing, and the nation’s first atomic bomb, in the largest scientific effort of all time.

The basic assumptions about the role of government persisted after the war. When Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, he was determined to act less aggressively, and did, but significantly maintained some of the big government actions of the New Deal — such as Social Security — and accepted the need for such a safety net.

Big government flourished again in the 1960s as President Lyndon B. Johnson embarked on what he called the Great Society, and then took the notion of the imperial presidency one step further by embarking on what became a hopeless war in Vietnam.

And so the reaction to both the chaos of the 1960s and then the Watergate affair that showcased President Richard Nixon going too far led most Americans to embrace the notion that perhaps government activism was going too far.

But all that was before the nation found itself in the midst of the health crisis that today affects the entire globe. And even as ordinary Americans have had to curtail their normal activities, to wear masks, to stay at home, and to work, if at all, in totally different ways, there has begun to be an awareness that perhaps there is a necessary role for an active government role after all. Even as the states and localities are doing more and more, there is a growing recognition that the federal government could and should do more.

Whether that is possible, in this age of political polarization, remains to be seen. But more and more Americans are beginning to recognize that this may be the only answer to the crisis that plagues us all.

Allan M. Winkler is University Distinguished Professor of History (Emeritus) at Miami University in Oxford.