A historian traces the origins of the modern law-and-order state to a surprising source: the liberal policies of the New Deal.
Most Americans remember the New Deal as the crucible of modern liberalism. But while it is most closely associated with Roosevelt's efforts to end the Depression and provide social security for the elderly, we have failed to acknowledge one of its most enduring legacies: its war on crime. Crime policy, Anthony Gregory argues, was a defining feature of the New Deal. Tough-on-crime policies provided both the philosophical underpinnings and the institutional legitimacy necessary to remake the American state.
New Deal Law and Order follows President Franklin Roosevelt, Attorney General Homer Cummings, and their war on crime coalition, which overcame the institutional and political challenges to the legitimacy of national law enforcement. Promises of law and order helped to manage tensions among key Democratic Party factions-organized labor, Black Americans, and white Southerners. Their anticrime program, featuring a strengthened criminal code, an empowered FBI, and the first federal war on marijuana, was essential to the expansion of national authority previously stymied on constitutional grounds. This nascent carceral liberalism both accommodated a redoubled emphasis on rehabilitation and underwrote a massive wave of prison construction across the country. Alcatraz, an unforgiving punitive model, was designed to be a "symbol of the triumph of law and order." This emergent security state eventually transformed both liberalism and federalism, and in the process reoriented the terms of US political debate for decades to come.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Argues that the law-and-order coalition built by FDR and his allies laid the foundation for New Deal liberalism and the modern American state...compelling and detailed. -- Elizabeth Dale * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books * In New Deal Law and Order, Anthony Gregory shows that the American 'war on crime' did not start with the politics of the 1960s. Rather, it began with Franklin Roosevelt's declaration of his own war on crime in the midst of the New Deal. Analyzing this extraordinary political moment, so often caricatured as a simple shootout between gangsters and the feds, Gregory reveals how the security state and the social welfare state were built together. -- Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century</i> This is essential reading for understanding the foundations of the American state. Anthony Gregory reveals that the consensus around law and order, rather than contentious economic policies, epitomized twentieth-century liberalism. -- Sarah A. Seo, author of <i>Policing the Open Road</i> This richly informative book shows how vigorous efforts to reduce crime in the 1930s and 1940s helped expand government's powers by reshaping ideas, policies, political coalitions, and constitutional doctrines. New Deal Law and Order offers a fresh and provocative interpretation of liberal state formation and its conceptions of social welfare and national security, each enlarged through modernized crime-fighting. -- Ira Katznelson, author of <i>Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time</i> What made the New Deal coalition so powerful and its legacy so enduring? In this sweeping reexamination of the Roosevelt administration's policy priorities and constitutional vision, Anthony Gregory explains that the war on crime was fundamental to the modern state-building project. This important book reveals 'law and order' as a central pillar of twentieth-century American liberalism. -- Laura Weinrib, author of <i>The Taming of Free Speech</i> The New Deal has long been considered a pivotal moment in the construction of a new kind of liberalism, oriented around welfare, redistribution, and protection for organized labor. In this splendid book, Anthony Gregory shows how the Roosevelt administration built the New Deal state on a radical expansion of federal policing as well. Gregory convincingly and eloquently demonstrates that coercion, along with a broadened conception of 'security,' lay at the heart of both mid-century state-building and liberalism as a governing ideology. -- Jonathan Obert, author of <i>The Six-Shooter State</i>
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Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Illustrationen
4 photos, 6 illus., 1 table
Maße
Höhe: 244 mm
Breite: 172 mm
Dicke: 40 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-674-29030-3 (9780674290303)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Anthony Gregory is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He is the author of The Power of Habeas Corpus in America and American Surveillance.
