Republicans’ Calls for ‘Law and Order’ Have Democratic Roots
The 2024 RNC made "law and order" a key theme—a political strategy that goes back beyond Richard Nixon, to FDR.
This year the theme of the Republican National Convention’s second evening was “Make America Safe Again,” spotlighting victims’ harrowing testimonials and the party’s promises of domestic security. Today’s Republican rhetoric echoes the “law and order” language of Richard Nixon, even as the party now lambastes the FBI and dismisses their Presidential candidate’s indictments and felony convictions as examples of politicized “lawfare.” Donald Trump—a crime warrior, criminal defendant, and victim of an assassination attempt—dramatically personifies America’s law-and-order contradictions. The Democrats, in turn, posture against lawlessness even as core constituencies remain radical critics of law enforcement.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Nostalgic Americans understandably find the modern politics of criminal justice disorienting, but they are in fact longing for a law-and-order consensus that did not always exist. It was President Franklin Roosevelt, along with Attorney General Homer Cummings, who in the 1930s first made “law and order” not only a true federal priority but good national politics.
For decades after the Civil War, crime, violence, and disorder seemed to define America. Shootouts and vigilantism throughout the South and West, as well as urban strife and labor unrest in the industrializing Northeast and Midwest, characterized the late 19th century. Progressive-era politicians promised law and order, but stumbled to win Americans’ trust in local and especially national enforcement authority. The distrust peaked with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, as Republicans and Democrats, federal and state officials, blamed each other for failing to enforce a policy that many Americans did not believe in.
Read More: What Prohibition Can Teach Us About Drug and Alcohol Policy Today
This all changed with Franklin Roosevelt. While President Herbert Hoover had waged a war against kidnappers and racketeers, Roosevelt amplified the effort dramatically, pushed it in new directions, and overcame the jurisdictional, racial, partisan, and class divisions that had previously obstructed the law-and-order state.
As New York’s governor, Roosevelt had championed a fusion of penal reform and vigilance against lawbreakers. After surviving an assassination attempt in Miami, he reportedly protected the assailant from the mob, in a show of confidence and resilience. When Roosevelt entered the White House, some Americans demanded new federal powers, even dictatorial ones, while others maintained the traditional distrust of enforcement. The administration undertook enduring institutional changes while claiming the middle ground between authoritarianism and an outdated passive liberalism. In 1934, after Prohibition ended, the New Dealers achieved the largest expansion of the federal criminal code to date, including the first major federal gun control law and new national police powers in the name of interstate commerce regulation.
To aid states in fighting banditry and to deploy domestic surveillance, Roosevelt and the New Deal Justice Department turned the Bureau of Investigation, once a controversial and weak agency, into the modern FBI—a powerhouse with broad investigatory and arrest capacity, automatic weapons and forensic technology, and a seat alongside the top intelligence agencies of the defense establishment.
The New Dealers launched a new war on marijuana, made Alcatraz a federal prison, and put national resources behind both incarceration and rehabilitation. Even after crime rates dropped, Roosevelt’s war on crime raged on and in fact never truly ended. It became absorbed into—though never displaced by—the security state during World War II and then the Cold War. Unlike the relations between law enforcement and security agents that arose during World War I, which collapsed amid scandalous repression and overreach, the infrastructure Roosevelt constructed gained widespread acceptance and institutional permanence. These sweeping transformations left an overlooked but lasting impact on the constitutional relationship between the federal government and the states.
Roosevelt’s law-and-order strategy was successful because of its distinctive place in his overall program of redefining liberalism and the government’s role in Americans’ lives. Roosevelt and Cummings saw the war on crime as critical to their agenda for welfare and security, and networked with progressive criminologists, social workers, and local police. Roosevelt promised an ecumenical and egalitarian anti-crime platform, a “broader program. . . to curb the evil-doer of whatever class.” Along with helping state officials in subduing street criminals, the administration gestured toward the problems of white-collar crime, reactionary vigilantism, and even white supremacist violence. In 1936 it successfully prosecuted a slavery case in Arkansas. The NAACP’s civil rights lawyers and the ACLU’s labor activists began to see the federal government as an ally, with particular hope for the emancipatory prospects of its enforcement powers. White Southerners, Black Americans, and organized labor—three groups who historically distrusted law enforcement—would now count among the Democrats’ most reliable constituencies. This powerful alliance was crucial to building the state in the middle decades of the 20th century.
But the Democrats also reached out to work with Republicans, and helped turn their opponents into junior partners in building law and order. New Dealers worked adeptly with Republican crime warriors like J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI and Harry Anslinger in the Narcotics Bureau. By 1944, the Presidential election revealed the metamorphosis in both parties. In his rise to the Presidency, Roosevelt had touted his anti-crime record as New York’s governor. Now he faced Republican challenger Thomas Dewey, who as the current governor of New York also boasted his war on crime. Local crime fighting had become good national politics.
Read More: The FBI Wasn’t Supposed to Be Political—But It Has Been Since the Beginning
After the Democratic Party became the first party of modern law and order, the Republicans followed. In the longer term, the New Deal’s powerful coalition collapsed, in part because its different constituencies had conflicting expectations for law enforcement, and racial and class divisions reasserted themselves. In 1968, Richard Nixon explicitly ran on “law and order,” which lost its broader liberal meaning and became more distinctively conservative and culturally polarizing. His disgraceful scandals in the ensuing years only contributed to the perception that “law and order” was a hypocritical, even cynical program.
Nevertheless—even as Republicans became known politically as the party of law and order—every major escalation of the war on crime, from the 1960s through the 1990s, brought together both parties. Nixon expanded on Lyndon Johnson’s policies, Bill Clinton expanded on Ronald Reagan’s, and in the longer term the bipartisan overreach and excesses contributed to today’s broad disillusionment with public institutions.
Both parties are facing the same predicament that befuddled Americans before the New Deal. The alliance that enabled Roosevelt’s vision is long gone, and it probably relied on too many historical contingencies to be rebuilt today. Neither party seems likely to summon the kind of war-on-crime coalition that Roosevelt’s Democrats secured in the 1930s. But any successful attempt at national renewal, at least as pursued through electoral politics, must contend with just how difficult it was to achieve law and order in the first place.
Anthony Gregory is the author of New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State (Harvard University Press, 2024).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.