The Triumph and Crisis of Vital-Center Liberalism

A significant aspect of the history of the United States in the twentieth century has been the expanding power of the state and the eroding autonomy of the private economy and civil society. Although the transition from an essentially unregulated capitalism to a mixed economy began even before the turn of the century — witness the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 — and gathered pace through years of Progressive reform, “war collectivism”, and the twenties’ corporatist experiments, quite arguably the true watershed came with the triumph of reform liberalism in the thirties. With the Great Depression acting as a catalyst, New Deal liberals established what the political scientist Michael D. Reagan has called the “halfway house of American political economy” — residing “somewhere in the middle, between pure capitalism and pure socialism.”1