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Income Tax, the Federal Police Powers, and the Precedent of World War I

Congress undertook other regulatory and protective legislation that belies the laissez- faire label so frequently attached to the era's legal history. Some measures, such as the federal income tax passed in 1894, combined elements of both regulation and promotion. The Union government had passed an income tax to finance the Civil War, but it was abolished at the end of the conflict. Populists in the 1880s and early 1890s urged passage of a new tax, both as a means of reducing the tariff, which fell most fully on consumers, and as a device to redistribute corporate wealth. Historically, the federal government had paid its bills through the tariff, but in the 1890s the government was running large surpluses, a condition that heightened demands for the income tax as a means of reducing the tariff. The states had long relied on taxes on property to finance government, but the federal income tax was a dramatic and controversial innovation that many members of Congress voted for in the expectation, as with the Sherman Act, that the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional. This time the justices did not disappoint them, striking down the law a year after it was passed. Agitation for a new law carried over into the Progressive era, and in 1913 the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting Congress power to impose an income tax.

The national government also responded to complaints for greater regulation of the working and living conditions of labor. In 1884, for example, it mimicked the state experience by establishing a Bureau of Labor, which issued reports about the impact of industrialization on workers. The demands of window-glass workers in 1885 resulted in a prohibition on the importation of contract labor. Safety practices on interstate railroads also came in for scrutiny, and Congress in 1893 imposed a clutch of regulations on interstate carriers that provided, among other things, for grab irons and handholds in the ends and sides of each car and couplers that worked automatically

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upon impact. In 1898 Congress, in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, made it a criminal offense for railroads engaged in interstate commerce to discharge workers under "yellow dog" contracts that pledged them as a condition of employment not to join a union. The Federal Employers Liability Act of 1908 did away with the fellow- servant rule for interstate railways.

An important component of the Progressive movement involved a resort to federal authority on a large scale. In part, Progressives relied on the commerce power, creating from it the concept of federal police powers. For example, Congress invoked this authority to pass the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or fraudulently labeled foods and drugs in interstate commerce; during the same year Congress also passed the Meat Inspection Act, which provided federal inspection of all companies selling meats in interstate commerce. The Keating-Owen Child Labor Law of 1916 barred from interstate commerce the products of child labor, although the act was ultimately declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.



The Progressives greatly extended the legal and constitutional bounds of national involvement in the economy and, more generally, in social relations. The Progressive amendments (the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth) to the federal Constitution testify eloquently to this change. The Sixteenth in 1913 granted Congress power to impose an income tax. The Eighteenth Amendment, which became part of the Constitution in 1919, prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages. The other Progressive constitutional amendments aimed to weaken the hold of political parties over the body politic. The Seventeenth, ratified in 1913, broke one of the strongholds of the party bosses by requiring the popular rather than the state legislative election of U.S. senators, and the Nineteenth, ratified in 1920, prohibited discrimination in voting based on gender.

World War I enhanced the Progressives' faith in bureaucracy, administrative agencies, and expanded federal lawmaking authority. Just as had the Civil War seventy years earlier, the nation's entry into world conflict provided the rationale on which to escalate federal involvement in the economy. Congress, for example, clothed the War Industries Board ( 1917) with broad powers to determine economic priorities and to allocate resources. The Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of the same year empowered the president to make regulations and issue orders to stimulate production and control the distribution of foods and fuels necessary to the war effort. These and a host of other wartime regulatory measures were repealed or lapsed after the conflict ended, but they were powerful precedents for the future penetration of federal lawmaking authority into the day-to-day lives of Americans.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 715


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