New Deal Law and Order

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>