sault on social adjustments in all spheres of life. A New York reformist, Teddy Roosevelt's forceful personality powered the first nationwide social welfare programs in the United States - at the expense of states' rights.
Still, it was not until the devastating crisis of the Great Depression that the states' power over their own futures went into a political tailspin. It is difficult to say which was the major cause, the event itself or President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat. Certainly it was not FDR's predecessor, Republican Herbert Hoover. A man of great personal integrity and compassion, whose post-presidential career was a paragon of public service selflessness, President Hoover was ideologically unprepared to combat the slide into the Depression that began during his term of office with the Wall Street "Crash of '29." In a reversal indicative of the change in conservative thinking since Teddy Roosevelt's presidency two decades earlier, Hoover was a laissez-faire economist in his administrative thinking. He firmly believed that the federal government was constitutionally powerless to meddle in the market forces spiralling the American economy downward. Nor did he believe that a free and democratic federal government could attempt to direct and control the social upheaval that was occurring concurrent with the downward fall.
Hoover was not alone in this belief. The U.S. Congress watched helplessly as well during the years preceding Franklin Roosevelt's election - with one major exception: the protectionist legislation of America's Hawley-Smoot Act of 1931 is credited as one of the aggravating factors of the Great Depression.
Sometimes the temper of the times inspires great opportunities; sometimes those opportunities are missed. Federalists seeking to regain states' rights control over their economic and social welfare sectors had every opportunity to do so during the Hoover presidency. With the colorf...