Overheard Misuse of History – Opinion

Yesterday while walking around the city I overheard two young students engaged in a debate over their ideal visions of the role of the US government in the lives of its individual citizens.  What struck me in this classic debate was the comment made by one student, a young man dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt, and ball cap, that in his ideal vision of the United States: “the federal government would let me live my life they way I wanted to live it, let me do what I wanted, like in the 19th century, before the US government became all Socialist in the 20th century.”  It is a rare moment in my life when I want to walk up to a fellow human being and smack them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper while exclaiming “Bad human, tell me who taught you this drivel so that I may strike them as well.”

The problem with this young man’s outlook on the role of the federal government in the 19th century is that it is, quite simply, incorrect on many levels.  First off there is no ideal period in the 19th century in which the US government on a federal level did not pass legislation that directly impacted or curtailed elements of an individual citizens “freedoms” – doubly so if that citizen was from a minority segment of the population or female in gender.  A simple examination of the major ideological battles of this period refutes the young man’s argument, the controversy over slavery, in fact the very institution of slavery, negates the idea of minimal federal involvement in the lives of individual citizens.  (For example the admission of new states to the Union was fraught with controversy and federal action to maintain the Free/Slave balance of power.)  The institution of the National Bank of the United States, in its various incarnations, was seen as a direct force intervening in the daily lives of citizens across the nation and was directly linked to the US federal government.

Even the “golden” period of non-intervention in private lives by the federal government from the late 1860s through the 1890s, the Gilded Age, actually featured regular federal statues regulating immigration, interstate commerce, and direct intervention by the federal government in numerous labor disputes and moments of civil insurrection.  In fact this period featured a US effort to suppress anarchists movements and insurrections throughout the United States, as well as federal regulations prohibiting the distribution of pornographic or dangerous materials through the US mail system, a direct assault on freedom of speech and publication by the federal government.  (To remind people this was the period in which the US government directly prohibited the distribution of educational material on contraception and the distribution of contraceptive devices through the US mail.)

Never mind the fact that the period of late 1860s through the 1880s was also the height of Reconstruction, a period of incredible direct intervention by the federal government in the lives of southern US citizens.  When Reconstruction ended the Progressive movement was gaining influence among the citizens of the United States, leading to reformist (or probably for this young man “Socialist”) legislation such as the various Anti-Trust Acts, Food and Drug Purity Acts, and regulations to curb the abuses of industry throughout the United States.

But from other comments that I overheard this young man making I quickly gathered that his comment centered upon the institution of federal income tax, collected by the federal government and redistributed/spent by the federal government.  This young man wished to return to period when the US government did not directly tax the personal income of its citizens, and in that regard he is mostly correct.  Efforts by the federal government to impose an income tax in the 1860s to finance the Civil War were ended in 1872 and future efforts to impose federal income tax in the 1880s through the 1910s were blocked by the Congress or the Supreme Court, on the grounds the power to impose such taxes was not Constitutionally permitted to the federal government.  This argument ended in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th amendment.

But this young man fails, in his understanding of history, to understand the system by which the US government raised revenue from the 1860s through the 1910s, excise taxes and import tariffs.  Excise taxes are taxes imposed upon the consumption of items by private citizens and import tariffs are taxes imposed upon items imported into a nation that are manufactured abroad.  Import tariffs are particularly critical to this equation because they artificially raised the cost of imported items that were cheaper to manufacture then US domestically produced items to give US produced items an artificial market parity or even edge over cheaper foreign imports.  What this meant was that the federal governments tax structure directly impacted your fiscal freedom in the 19th century in a manner incomprehensible to most modern Americans – imagine going to a store and finding that each pair of shoes, made in the US or abroad, cost roughly the same amount.  No competitive forces to lower costs and allow your money to go to the most efficient producer, instead efficiency in manufacture is not rewarded, the ability to bribe legislatures to impose duties is rewarded.  This issue was highly controversial in the 19th century and remains highly controversial today.  Excise taxes hold the same bane today, we argue about taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, in the 19th century citizens argued about taxes on recreational facilities, chewing gum, and heavy taxes on alcohol.  As well in the 19th century it was felt that excise taxes and high import tariffs hurt the poorer members of our citizen base more then the rich and a fairer system of revenue collection was needed.


What our young man sought was a system that simply did not exist in the 19th century and, honestly, has never existed in US history.  The nature of personal intervention into average citizens lives held by the US government has changed over the last two centuries, as well as the level of direct intervention, but there has been no time in which the hand of the federal government of the United States has not directly touched some or all of its governed population.

Source: US Treasury Department Fact Sheet on Income Tax History