I won't be as complete as you all have been, but that is because I realize that my knowledge and understanding of history is completely dwarfed by that evidenced from the earlier posts.
1. Louisiana Purchase (Jefferson, 1803)
2. Trail of Tears (Jackson, 1828-1838)
3. Military Response to Ft. Sumpter (Lincoln, 1861)
4. Atomic Bomb (Truman, 1945)
5. Signing the Civil Rights Act (Johnson, 1968)
As yet unmentioned notables: Appointment of Earl Warren (Eisenhower, 1953); Creation of the EPA (Nixon, 1970).
1. Louisiana Purchase. Concur with what is written so far.
2. Trail of Tears. So, the United States of America could have become an assimilated people merging with the native people over time. We also could have avoided, or perhaps reversed what is the greatest shame on our nation's history. Also, this is about raw power of the executive. In 1832 the Supreme Court said the Cherokee were a nation that could only be moved with a treaty and the President said "whatever."
3. Military Response to Ft. Sumpter . I'm one of those old school types who believes that the Civil War was only about slavery. That's because of the numerous compromises leading up to the war dealing with slavery; the fact the only state's right at issue was the possession of slaves; the supreme court case about slaves; etc. Lincoln was an abolitionist and a politician. Those two things cause me to not believe him when he said that the war was about keeping the union together. So, I think the Emancipation Proclamation was the forgone conclusion after the decision to fight to keep the Union together.
4. Atomic Bomb. So, we walk right up to the point of developing the weapon and don't use it, and I think the world is very different. Unimaginably different. Perhaps we don't have the arms race right away, maybe MAD only happens after Stalin uses his bomb, for example. It was the first act of the Cold War, yes?
5. Signing the Civil Rights Act . Johnson made this happen. Or, as other point out, MLK made Johnson make this happen. It finsihed the work of experience turmoil for the sake of what was right. It also had lasting consequences of ending the era of Democratic-populist politics started by the Great Depression.
Earl Warren. This resulted in a reassertion of Judicial Power. It is not like there weren't any decisions between Worster v. Georgia (1832) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but it certainly brought us into a new era.
Creation of the EPA. This really depends on how important it is to save the planet and how successful we are. This was an agency that pushed back, hard, on immediate business gains. It has also been a tool of executive might--see Reagan & Bush verses Clinton & Obama.
2 comments:
Trail of tears -- I like it. It's hard to imagine that path not taken there, since it's so very very far from the America that we got.
In law school we study an early property decision where the court basically says it is okay to take away the indigenous people's land. In reading the decision, you realize that the behavior was contrary to clearly established law. In 1790, if France took over Germany, the German citizens kept their private property. The decision to take the property away from the Cherokee and Iroquois and other was explicitly justified by a holding that they were savages and unlike White people.
Post a Comment