The answer lies in the ideology of the welfare state. First, in the years preceding World War I, and then again in the 1930s, American intellectuals and politicians undertook grand experiments in social engineering. The Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the New Deal days of Franklin D. Roosevelt were the crucial decades for the implementation of the politics of government intervention and economic regulation. It was the duty and responsibility of the state to manage, oversee, and control the social and economic affairs of the citizenry.
