All the acrimony over federal aid running short for Helene’s victims raises a question: Just how did Uncle Sam get himself tangled up in the disaster relief business? It certainly wasn’t envisioned by the Framers as a federal responsibility. In 1887 President Cleveland vetoed an aid bill for drought-stricken Texas farmers because the spending — a staggering $10,000 for seed — “has no warrant in the Constitution.” That’s a far cry from today’s expectations.

It’s not our intention here to give short shrift to the suffering residents of Appalachia, including the doughty North Carolinians, struggling to rebuild after the hurricane’s devastation. It is our intention, though, to mark how a harmless-seeming concept like disaster relief has devolved to become a new variety of spending by the leviathan, adding tens of thousands of employees to the federal payroll and generating billions in costs to taxpayers.

The presumption that the Feds should play the leading role in responding to and managing natural disasters would have flummoxed earlier generations of Americans. The first federal disaster aid emerged in 1803 to help Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after a fire. For decades, historian Timothy Kneeland writes, such help from Uncle Sam “was ad hoc rather than routine.” As a result,  he explains, “the general public did not expect federal assistance.”

That spirit of individualism animated Cleveland’s veto of the bill to send aid to the Lone Star State after a drought. He noted the absence of Constitutional authority, adding that “The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune.” He feared “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.”

“In these days of unconstitutional  sentimentalists and of centralizing Republicanism,” the Sun wrote then in an editorial, “Mr. Cleveland’s veto sounds like a fog horn in a misty night.” The Sun’s editorial hailed as a “solemn truth” Cleveland’s statement that “Though the people support the government, the Government should not support the people.” The veto, the editorial said, was “like an artesian well suddenly bursting out upon a sandy desert.”

Yet Cleveland’s respect for the Constitution would be supplanted by post-disaster pandering and the rise of the Nanny State. The disaster-industrial complex blossomed under FDR, as “Alphabet Agencies” sprouted up to dole out dollars from D.C. In 1950, the Disaster Relief Act gave presidents “broad power,” Mr. Kneeland says, to declare a “major disaster” and to lavish the taxpayers’ money, giving Uncle Sam a permanent role in disaster management.

Dispensing federal aid after disasters soon became part and parcel of pork-barrel politics. After Hurricane Betsy ravaged Louisiana in 1965, Senator Long urged LBJ to come on down for a tour. It was a state Johnson had lost in 1964, Long pointed out. “You could pick it up” in 1968, Long said, by just “looking at it right now, by going down there as the president.” Hence the rise of the post-disaster presidential photo op, long on publicity and short on substance.

Plus also, too, LBJ escalated federal disaster assistance “to an entirely new level,” Mr. Kneeland writes, “by providing direct assistance to individuals” from Uncle Sam. He “understood,” Mr. Kneeland says, that “he was making disaster relief an entitlement on par” with his Medicaid and Medicare programs. He originated the role of the president as a benevolent “responder in chief,” Mr. Kneeland says, when natural disasters strike. 

Which brings us back to the millions rebuilding from Helene. As our Hollie McKay reports, denizens of Todd, North Carolina are not waiting for federal help. The town is “filled with sweating yet smiling faces,” as “dozens of volunteers work tirelessly” to share aid. “Residents and strangers labor side by side,” she writes, “clearing debris.” The scale of suffering is vast, yet Americans’ pluck reflects what Cleveland called “the satisfaction attending deeds of charity.”