Limiting Government's Power

Throughout American history, the federal government has generally grown larger and more powerful as the nation and its economy have grown. From its beginning in 1787, however, some Americans sought to limit the government's power. First, and most notably, the Bill of Rights (proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1791) spelled out the rights of citizens and established clear limits on government's power. The Fourteenth Amendment ratified in 1868, added to the federal government's power, but did so in order to enable the government to protect the rights of black Southerners (generally, from laws passed by Southern state governments) in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Supreme Court generally limited government's power to regulate private enterprise. In the twentieth century, the power of big business had grown so immense that many Americans came to believe that only the federal government could regulate the economy and protect the public's interest against corporations. Especially during the New Deal of the 1930s and World War II (1941-45), the federal government grew tremendously.