Federalism: The Lost Tradition?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American historians decided that the accounts by which people in the United States understood their past were unrealistic, subject to romantic distortions, and chauvinistic. Even though some stories were well intentioned, they were false and must be rejected. One well-known example is Parson Weems' story of George Washington as a boy cutting down the cherry tree and, when questioned by his father, saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” In the process of “realistic” reinterpretation and muckraking, however, these historians threw out many real babies with the surplus of romantic bath water. A case in point is the tradition of federalism that shaped American history, permeated the experience of the men who wrote the United States Constitution, and underlay every facet of our social order. The so-called “realists” went too far and tossed out an important part of the reality that is America. Can the federal tradition be recovered and placed again at the focus of American political thought, or is it a lost tradition? Copyright , Oxford University Press.