I was reading a piece about Indian call center scammers that had an interesting quote:
The key to the whole thing, Mr. Dubey decided, was a psychological fact: Americans fear their state.
“I think they actually are really afraid of their government,” he said. “In India, people are not afraid of police. If anyone wants to come and arrest, they say, ‘Come and arrest.’ It is easy to get out of anything. But in America they are afraid. We just need to tell them, ‘You are messing with the federal government,’ and that is all.”
I started thinking about this and I noticed things in pop culture that reflect America's fear of its government, like Mr. Smith's appearance in The Matrix, how the government is portrayed in films like the Bourne trilogy, and the idea of things like the Illuminati or Area 51. It's pretty clear we're scared of the government, so when did we become afraid?
A scene from The Grapes of Wrath stands out in my mind. It's a conversation between a nameless farmer and banker, and the banker says something about how the banks (and by proxy the government) are "monsters," that men built them but can't control them and don't like what they do. It's pretty unnerving and you get the sense the farmer feels powerless, which is what really drives our fear of the government today. Was it incidents like these in the Great Depression that made us feel so afraid of our government?
There might be a bit of a misunderstanding of the context of the quote. I will get to the fear of "Big Government" later in the reply.
My interpretation of Dubey's quote in the article is not a fear of shadowy "Big Government," but an understanding that unlike authorities in India, where bribes and corruption are an issue, in the United States law enforcement has a reputation for adherence to rules. What Dubey is saying is that in India people do not fear arrest because they can use bribes to be released, while in the United States if you are arrested there is no such informal recourse, and you must go through the justice system.
This "fear" of inflexible government in the United States could be said to date back to the civil service reform movement in the 19th century, when government jobs were professionalized and removed from the patronage system. Before this time, many civil service and public safety jobs were elected (in Boston in the 18th century, even jobs such as "Hog Reeve" for impounding stray hogs were elected positions), or were political appointees. Either way, these positions were therefore subject to machine politics, and varying degrees of corruption.
The professionalization of the civil service at all levels of government was not a straight-line process, and there were certainly big steps backward during which the reputations of law enforcement units became tarnished (such as during Prohibition, and in the South during the Civil Rights Movement). However, the trend towards professionalism and adherence to formal process over the course of the 19th century and early 20th century would ultimately lead to a general fear of getting in trouble with the law, as casual corruption had been purged through decades of administrative reform.
Lastly, to describe the origins of fear of "Big Government," polling done through the early postwar period showed high levels of trust in the federal government. The rise in anxiety over the power of government was a gradual process, and multifaceted.
Beginning in the 1940s, conservatives in Congress began public investigations of communists and communist sympathizers working within the federal government. This would fuel the anxieties of the far-right John Birch Society, and contribute to a meme that anonymous individuals within an enormous federal system had their own secret agendas, with potentially hostile purposes, and that they were conspiring with each other.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, and conflict broke out between ideologically-opposed government agencies at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, similar anxieties arose on the American left. Fears of government infiltration or surveillance of protest movements, fears of government lies about the war, fears of government lies about the death of their president. Young people resisted the draft, a government program that forced draftees to fight in an unpopular war. When the Pentagon Papers were made public, airing hidden opinions of government analysts, these fears were compounded by the attempts of the government to prosecute and stifle this information.
These anxieties worsened under Richard Nixon, and went mainstream during the Watergate scandal and Congress' investigations of various intelligence operations. At the same time, these anxieties were given voice in Hollywood through "paranoid thriller" films such as The Parallax View.
By the 1970s, fear of "Big Government" had gone mainstream.