Midget on Horseback

by Jeffrey L. Pasley

Modern American political culture has no greater shibboleth than Big Government, that un-American serpent who slithered into our garden around the time of FDR, wrapping American society in its coils. “Isn’t our choice really not one of left or right, but of up or down?” Ronald Reagan once asked. “Down through the welfare state to statism, to more and more government largesse accompanied always by more government authority, less individual liberty and, ultimately, totalitarianism.” Nothing was more certain to conservatives like Reagan than that their vision of a government that did little but plan and fight wars was the original American model, “the dream conceived by our Founding Fathers.”

Though probably only a minority of professional American historians ever voted for Ronald Reagan or any politician like him, they have generally told a similar story about government’s role in the early American past. Despite the fact that this government was what the Founders chiefly worked to create, the institution itself gets almost no play in typical historical narratives once the founding documents are signed. Typical historians’ attitudes are well summarized by Princeton historian John Murrin’s quip that the early U.S. government was “a midget institution in a giant land,” an insignificant force “with almost no internal functions” and no ability to effect major changes or drive historical trends. “Its role scarcely went beyond . . . the use of port duties and the revenue from land sales to meet its own expenses.” Murrin was building on a long tradition of scholarly riffing at the expense of the American state. Political scientist James Sterling Young’s Bancroft Prize-winning study of Jeffersonian Washington, The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (1966) cast a long shadow. “The early government was . . . a small institution, small almost beyond modern imagination,” Young wrote, and size mattered, he thought: “Small size indicated slightness of function.”

This “myth of statelessness,” as University of Chicago historian William Novak calls it, was a comforting and ideologically convenient interpretation for Cold War era historians eager to turn American history into a story of expanding individual freedom that could be contrasted with Soviet authoritarianism. It proved equally convenient for so-called “new political historians” whose number-crunching approach treated voting statistics as social data and consistently concluded that antebellum politics was best understood in terms of competing religious values and ethnic identities rather than the policy debates and economic issues that previous scholars had emphasized. A weak or nearly non-existent early American state also made an indispensable contrasting benchmark for political scientists eager to show a transformation in American governance at some later period. According to pioneering “new institutionalist” scholar Stephen Skowronek, the operations of “the early American state were all innocuous enough to make it seem as if there was no state in America at all.”

So everyone agrees: Yet for a political historian who has grown up, so to speak, after the great post-1960s expansion of mainstream history beyond its former social and racial boundaries, a question naturally occurs: how could any scholar claim to have seriously interpreted the history of the American state, without foregrounding the experience of those peoples who were first, most frequently, and most punishingly targeted by government policy in the United States? Those peoples would be the American Indians, who were subjected to U.S. government policy before the U.S. even had the power to levy taxes or an executive branch.

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