During the Civil War of the 1860s, our country mobilized its entire society and economy to wage an epic struggle in which 620,000 people died.
During the Great Depression, with the New Deal and Square Deal, the Roosevelt administration wrestled with the economic meltdown, thus initiating a new era of government interventionism to address a national emergency.
During the 1940s, the United States and its allies confronted fascism in Europe and in the Pacific. While on a wartime footing, the country's entire population cut back, saved, and rationed. Entire industries were converted from civilian to military use (cars to tanks and airplanes).
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States spent $2.4 trillion on the war in Afghanistan (2007 Congressional Budget Office statistics), forced us to take off our shoes to board every plane, and created an entirely new instrument of the government, the Department of Homeland Security.