Conservatives are supposed to cherish tradition, to draw on customs and policies which worked well in the past to guide what office-holders ought to do in the future. So it is ironic, if not hypocritical, that they constantly peddle a notion about the separation of business and government that has no basis in American history. “The voters,” asserted Mitt Romney, after his victory in the Washington caucuses, “want a conservative businessman who understands the private sector and knows how to get the federal government out of the way, so that the economy can once again grow vigorously.”

In fact, the Republican nominee-to-be is distorting a long and bipartisan tradition of government support for big business in America. Conservatives now object to “crony capitalism,” but for much of U.S. history, businessmen have been hungry for it. Since the early nineteenth century, the government has helped fuel economic growth and corporate profit-making, and savvy businessmen and, recently, businesswomen have lobbied hard to keep those benefits coming.

Public money and support were essential to creating the nation’s infrastructure in the decades before the Civil War. State and federal funds helped build every major turnpike, canal, bridge, dock, and railroad line. As the historian Steve Fraser writes in The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, all these enterprises were thus “quasi-public creations … Governments granted them franchises, incorporated them, lent them money, invested in them, provided them with tax exemptions and subsidies and land grants, and even, at times, shared in their management.” And where would Sears and Roebuck or the publishers of books and magazines have been without the postal system? The efficient and egalitarian federal mail knit American manufacturers and consumers into a continental market.

All this was merely a prelude to the Gilded Age, when the U.S. government boosted industrial growth, and corporate profits, in a multitude of ways. Congress appropriated over half the capital for the transcontinental railroad and donated huge land grants to the companies which built it. That famous golden spike might as well have been stamped with the words, “Made in D.C.” At the same time, Republican majorities in both Houses subsidized American industrialists by erecting high tariffs on goods made by their European competitors.

The federal executive was also a trusted ally of employers who faced labor unrest. When railroad workers went on strike across the nation in 1877, President Rutherford Hayes, a Republican, dispatched the army to put them down. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, sent the troops to crush another uprising by the men who built and operated the trains. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court obligingly brushed aside legislation by states to rein in big business by ruling that such laws violated the rights of corporations to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been enacted to give citizenship to freed slaves. This was how corporations, in Romney’s memorable phrase, became “people too.”