How FDR Built the the American Security State
New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State, by Anthony Gregory, Harvard University Press, 512 pages, $45
The United States is notorious both for mass incarceration and for militarized police forces. The U.S. Border Patrol lends unmanned drones to police around the country, who use them to surveil ordinary citizens. Intergovernmental task forces and fusion centers coordinate cooperation among law enforcement officers at all levels of government. Years after COINTELPRO, the FBI is still spying on dissenters. The United States professes a commitment to liberal values, individual rights, and equal protection, but it combines this rhetoric with a muscular security state.
How did we get here? Many focus on the ways Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton escalated federal police power. But in his new book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State, historian Anthony Gregory emphasizes how an earlier president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, built up policing, incarceration, and the modern security state. Liberalism, Gregory shows, can be used to build an apparatus of repression.
To set the stage, Gregory explores a series of struggles over both real and perceived “lawlessness” in the period from the Civil War through the beginning of the Great Depression. This included the lawlessness of white Southerners who engaged in racial terror and lynching. It also included labor unrest, where both the actions of strikers and the actions of strikebreaking private security forces were frequently framed as lawless. It included bank robberies and gang violence. It included the Prohibition-fueled growth of organized crime. It included kidnappings and human trafficking across state lines.
In America’s federalist system, designating all these problems as “lawlessness” rather than merely “crime” served an important function. Ordinary crimes were understood as problems for local and state authorities. The notion of “lawlessness” was used to argue these were national problems that called for federal intervention. Yet attempts to create a nationwide basis for enforcing law and order all failed until Roosevelt built a durable nationwide apparatus of crime control—an apparatus quickly used for repression as well.
To do this, officials such as Attorney General Homer Cummings worked with state and local governments, offering incentives to expand policing and incarceration in line with the administration’s goals. Gregory calls this mutually beneficial arrangement among state, local, and federal officials to expand their power “war-on-crime federalism.”
Roosevelt and his allies engaged in a tricki
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