Unit 14:: Conservatism and Reaganism

It may seem strange today, but America did not have a selfconscious conservative movement until well into the twentieth century. The priorities that we most often associate with conservatism—limited government and the free market, in particular —were the priorities of liberals into the nineteenth century, in that they preserved people’s liberty. Developments of the early 1900s began the process that resulted in an identifiable conservative movement by midcentury. The Progressives of the early decades and the New Deal liberals of the 1930s sought to preserve the liberty of regular Americans in a new industrial economy. They did this by establishing unprecedented authority for the federal government to check the power of corporations and to redistribute wealth to protect the vulnerable. Some Americans thought these solutions threatened the American economic or social order at least as much as the problems they tried to solve. By the end of World War II a selfconscious conservative movement offered competing voices to the dominant liberalism of American politics.