Other
acts of the federal government did much to provide
networks of transportation and to provide access to
higher education. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862
enabled the railroad to span the continent.
Similarly, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956
created the network of great highways that still
bind the nation together. The Morrill Act of 1862
created the land grant colleges, which have educated
millions of Americans; the GI Bill of Rights of 1944
provided free college educations and no-down-payment
mortgages for millions of veterans. In the years
since, the United States has been transformed from a
nation where most people had grade school educations
to a nation where most people attend college, and
from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners.
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In the nation's second century the federal
government developed new forms of economic
regulation and welfare-state protections. The first
moves toward regulation came in the Interstate
Commerce Act of 1887, regulating the railroads, and
the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, prohibiting
monopolies. Enlargement of the federal government
was made possible by the passage of the 16th
Amendment, authorizing the federal income tax, in
1913. During the Depression of the 1930s, New Deal
legislation expanded federal regulation and
responsibilities--the National Recovery Act of 1933
and the National Labor Relations and Social Security
acts of 1935. Not all these measures have endured.
The Interstate Commerce Commission was abolished in
1996, and the National Recovery Act was ruled
unconstitutional by a unanimous Supreme Court in
1935. But some have been broadened. Medicare was
enacted in 1965, and both houses of Congress have
passed bills adding prescription drug coverage this
year. George W. Bush has proposed adding individual
investment accounts to Social Security.
It is
often thought that the United States during its
first century pursued an isolationist foreign policy
and was disengaged from the rest of the world. Not
so. The archives documents include the 1778 treaty
of alliance with France, which was essential to
American success in the Revolutionary War, and the
1783 Treaty of Paris, in which Britain recognized
the new nation. Early on, American presidents
asserted a sphere of influence in the Western
Hemisphere. James Monroe in 1823 said that the
United States would oppose new European colonies in
Latin America--the Monroe Doctrine--and Theodore
Roosevelt in 1905 stated that the United States
would preserve order and protect life and property
there--the Roosevelt Corollary.
But as the
nation grew to become the world's largest
industrial power, threats from European powers began
to appear. The archives documents include the de
Lome Letter, in which the Spanish ambassador in 1898
insulted President William McKinley, and the
Zimmermann Telegram, in which the German foreign
secretary in 1917 proposed a military alliance with
Mexico directed against the United States--two
documents that, when published, prepared the way
respectively for the Spanish-American War and
American entry into World War I.
World at
war. The first world war established the United
States as one of several Great Powers. World War II
narrowed the field to two great powers. American
presidents insisted that the United States'
interests were not selfish but were directed toward
establishing a peaceful world. You can read their
words for yourself, in Woodrow Wilson's 14
Points of 1918 and Franklin Roosevelt's
proclamation of the Four Freedoms in 1941. The Lend
Lease Act of March 1941 made the United States an
effective ally of Britain in its struggle against
Nazi Germany; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
brought the United States fully into the war against
that day's axis of evil. That war transformed
the world, as noted in the archives documents,
including a Manhattan Project notebook recording the
world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain
reaction, the surrenders of Germany and Japan, and
the United Nations Charter.
