Give Us Twenty-Five Years : Florida Seminoles From Near Termination

In the years immediately following World War II, the nation experienced an ultra-conservative reaction to the social and economic policies fostered during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unprecedented four-term presidency. Beginning in the late 1930s a coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats set out to scuttle those aspects of the New Deal which they found most inimical to their ideology. When the Republicans regained control of the Congress in 1946, it signaled the beginning of a concerted effort to dismantle all but the most essential governmental spending programs. One of the federal bureaucracies singled out for annihilation— it did not enjoy the support of a powerful national constituency and therefore became politically vulnerable— was the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A national voice was raised to withdraw federal services to Indians and discontinue the special relationship which had existed between the federal government and tribes since the First Congress passed the initial Indian trade and intercourse act in 1790