H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by  HYPERLINK "mailto:H-1960s@h-net.msu.edu" H-1960s@h-net.msu.edu
(August 2005)

Michael F. Flamm. _Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of
Liberalism in the 1960s_. Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History
Series.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ix + 296 pp. Photographs,
notes, bibliography, index. $34.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-231-11512-1.

Reviewed for H-1960s by Timothy N. Thurber, Department of History, Virginia
Commonwealth University

It’s Security, Stupid

When George W. Bush won re-election in November 2004, many pundits initially
pointed to social/cultural issues such as gay marriage as the decisive factor.
Others have more recently stressed the centrality of the war on terrorism.
They insist, persuasively, that Bush was able to convince enough people he
would do a better job than John Kerry of protecting the nation from additional
terrorist attacks.  Talk of “soccer moms” gave way to analysis of “security
moms.” The commander in chief became protector in chief.

John Kerry thus joins Michael Dukakis, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson in a
line of prominent Democrats whose political fortunes ran aground on the shoals
of personal security.  Indeed, as Michael W. Flamm cogently argues in his brisk
and engaging book, Republicans used the issue of personal safety to revive
their sagging party following after Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat in 1964.
Over the next four years they made law and order a rallying cry that undermined
liberalism and helped “usher in a new age of American politics, in which
nightmares of criminal chaos replaced dreams of a Great Society” (p. 180).
Republicans succeeded because they clearly identified a cast of villains--the
Supreme Court, Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society, and radicals such as
Stokely Carmichael--and offered such straightforward solutions as tougher
punishment of criminals, exhortations from the White House for traditional
values, and cutting or ending government programs that allegedly encouraged
rioting and crime.

In contrast, Flamm observes, Democrats were never able to persuade a sufficient
number of voters that they could be trusted on this issue.  Democrats denounced
crime, of course, but at the same time they talked about the need to uphold
civil liberties and maintained that violence stemmed from social ills such as
poverty and discrimination.  What Democrats considered sophisticated analysis
of complex problems, many voters saw as misguided and dangerous indulgence of a
social menace.

Flamm rightly focuses his analysis on the period from 1964 to 1968, but he
offers a compelling look at the emergence of disorder as a public policy issue
in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  National media became interested in
juvenile delinquency in the mid-1950s, as movies such as _Blackboard Jungle_
and _Rebel Without a Cause_ painted a disturbing picture of alienated youth
free from parental or social control.  The topic took on a racial dimension as
newspapers and magazines began to write about growing numbers of African
Americans in large urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest engaging in street
violence.  The Eisenhower administration paid little attention to this matter,
but the Kennedy team enthusiastically plunged into a flurry of activity.  John
F. Kennedy established a Commission on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime,
and signed the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act, while his
brother Robert launched a special delinquency program at the Justice
Department.  More important, the Kennedy administration crafted an intellectual
legacy from which Johnson and his aides would draw in conceptualizing the Great
Society.  Youth violence, according to these policymakers, stemmed not from
individual moral failings or broken families, but rather a lack of opportunity
to fulfill middle-class aspirations.  The solution--using government to open up
educational and economic avenues for advancement--seemed obvious.  Some
scholars looking for the roots of the Great Society have emphasized Johnson’s
personal sympathy for the less privileged and his need to identify an issue and
make it his own to establish himself as a legitimate president.  Others claim
that the Great Society stemmed from the desire of liberal Democrats to buy off
African-American voter or the enormous confidence of social scientists in their
ability to remake the world.  In stressing policymakers’ worry over urban
disorder, Flamm adds an important and underappreciated variable to this debate.

Crime surged to the fore of public debate in 1964 as both George Wallace and
Barry Goldwater sought to use the issue to undermine Johnson.  Running in the
Democratic primaries in the North that spring, Wallace shamelessly exploited
white working-class fear of crime.  ”If you are knocked in the head on a street
in a city today, the man who knocked you in the head is out of jail before you
get to the hospital,” he declared (quoted, p. 35).  Such rhetoric propelled him
to strong showings in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland.  That summer, race
riots broke out in Harlem, Rochester, and New Jersey. Violence, the Johnson
campaign worried, was the one issue that could cost the president the election.
 Goldwater tried to capitalize on voter anxieties that fall by attributing the
rise in violence to the welfare state’s undermining of personal responsibility
and liberals who were, he claimed, “concerned over the criminal and careless
for his victims” (p. 42).

Johnson largely avoided a direct debate over crime and coasted to an easy
victory, but events over the next four years proved him prescient about the
political dangers the issue posed for liberal Democrats.  The president helped
dig his own (and liberalism’s) grave in announcing a War on Crime in the fall
of 1965.  He won congressional approval for the Law Enforcement Assistance Act
and established the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the
Administration of Justice.  Like the War on Poverty, the War on Crime drew fire
from both conservatives and leftist radicals.  The former criticized it for
ignoring the role of recent Supreme Court rulings protecting the rights of the
accused and for having too much faith in government’s ability to solve
problems, while the latter blasted it for offering timid solutions to the
social roots of crime and for avoiding the problem of police brutality.
Moreover, as Flamm astutely notes, the War on Crime elevated the issue in
importance, thus giving Johnson’s enemies a target and raising public
expectations to a level that could not be met.

Flamm explores how the crime issue played out locally as well.  He chronicles
how Ronald Reagan rode the issues of the 1965 Watts riot and ongoing trouble at
Berkeley to win the governorship of California.  Fear of crime was also evident
during the fall of 1966 in the successful effort to repeal a civilian police
review board in New York City. The board’s opponents played upon gender
anxieties in distributing a poster showing a woman exiting the subway system
into a dark and deserted street; the caption read “the Civilian Review Board
must be stopped!  Her life ... your life ... may depend on it” (p. 76)!  In an
ominous sign for the Democrats, support for abolition was solid among Jews and
white working-class voters.  Worse, the law and order issue resonated strongly
with voters in areas where crime and unrest were not prevalent.  Many whites
were not yet ready to jump to the Republican party, but they were having more
doubts about Democrats.

The racial unrest of 1967 dealt crippling blows to the Johnson administration.
The riot in Detroit, a city widely believed to be making solid progress in
dealing with racial tensions and other social ills, especially took the
administration by surprise.  Some officials assumed a nefarious conspiracy was
to blame; others, such as Attorney General Ramsey Clark, found this explanation
unconvincing.  A sense of frustration pervaded the White House.  ”We talk about
the multitude of good programs going into the cities, and yet there are riots,
which suggests that the programs are no good, or the Negroes past saving,”
observed presidential aide Harry McPherson (p. 94).  Attacks from conservatives
and radicals on the Left mounted, as each contended that liberalism was
contributing to social chaos.  Liberals weakly responded by first trying to
claim that statistics showing a rise in violent crime were misleading and by
pointing out that white-collar crime (“crime in the suites”) was also a serious
matter.  They continued to talk about root causes.  Those points had varying
degrees of intellectual merit, but a public increasingly afraid to walk the
streets at night had little patience for such arguments.  Liberals, Flamm
convincingly maintains, were too wrapped up in a rational analysis of the
problem. They underestimated the depth of raw emotion on this issue and were
unable to craft a clear voice to address very real fears.  In contrast,
conservatives connected with voters emotionally through the direct language of
law and order.

Johnson tried to gain control of the issue by naming the Kerner Commission to
study the causes of the riots and offer solutions.  This effort failed badly
when the Commission submitted its report in the spring of 1968.  Instead of
building support for the Great Society, the Commission went well beyond
Johnson’s expectations.  Citing white racism as the central cause of the
problems, the Kerner Commission called for massive new government spending,
much more than Johnson, who had made Vietnam his chief priority, wanted to
allocate.  Thanks to strong research in primary material from the Johnson
Library, Flamm weaves a compelling story of an administration coming apart.

Liberalism’s travails, of course, were on full display in 1968.  For Flamm, a
growing concern for law and order formed the decisive factor behind Richard
Nixon’s victory that November.  Voters, Flamm maintains, perceived little or no
difference between Humphrey and Nixon on the Vietnam war, but they saw a huge
gap on law and order. Wallace once again helped force the issue onto center
stage, and so created a golden opportunity for Nixon.  The Republican nominee
could occupy a middle ground between Humphrey, whom voters found too weak on
law and order, and Wallace, whom many considered too punitive.  Like Johnson
before him, Humphrey was trapped between a broader public fed up with social
chaos (a Harris Poll reported that 66 percent of the public approved of the way
the Chicago police handled protesters at the Democratic convention) and the
Democratic base, which continued to call for more spending on social programs.
Humphrey tried to bridge the gap with an “order and justice” theme, but that
approach fell flat.  Meanwhile, Nixon regularly attacked the Supreme Court and
the attorney general, insisting, “Let us recognize that the first civil right
of every American is to be free from domestic violence” (pp. 177-178).

Other examinations of the political history of the 1960s have noted the
importance of law and order, but Flamm is the first to place it center stage.
He not only presents a wealth of information about the evolution of this issue,
but his interpretations are sensibly balanced. This is most evident in his
careful treatment of race.  Conservative claims that race was peripheral or not
related at all to law and order, he shows, are unconvincing.  Many in the
Goldwater campaign knew full well the racial implications of law and order
rhetoric and the film _Choice_, which included images of rioting blacks.  At
the same time, Flamm wisely rejects a reductionist view that any concern over
civil unrest was tantamount to racism.  Many African Americans, after all, were
deeply worried about crime as they were most likely to be victims of violence.
One could support racial justice while also expressing opposition to rising
violence.  While acknowledging the role of race as a critical variable in the
era’s politics, Flamm distances himself from works by Thomas Sugrue and Thomas
and Mary Edsall.  These authors, he contends, overstate the role of race in
liberalism’s demise and underplay the significance of the broader theme of
security.  Race and security overlapped, but they were not identical.[1]

Gender was also an underlying issue.  Conservatives frequently couched the
virtues of law and order in language of male protection of females and
children.  The Nixon campaign, Flamm points out, ran an ad showing a white
woman walking down a deserted street while a male announcer relayed crime
statistics.  Flamm makes effective use of campaign commercials to illustrate
this and other points throughout the work.

He also strikes a nice balance in focusing on both the demise of liberalism and
the rise of conservatism.  Flamm shows how Johnson, Humphrey, and other
Democrats struggled in vain to manage the issue.  He appropriately criticizes
them for numerous failings, but at the same time emphasizes the underlying
“solidarity of conservatives, who capitalized on a climate of crisis and turned
the politics of street crime to their lasting advantage” (p. 125).  In looking
so closely at Goldwater, Nixon, and other Republicans, Flamm offers a strong
complement to the rapidly expanding list of works exploring the rise of
conservatism in the 1960s.[2]

Law and order largely retreated from national debate for much of the era from
the 1970s through the 1990s, but it remained central in state and local
politics as Republican governors and mayors, such as Rudolph Guiliani, vowed to
get tough on crime.  Flamm provocatively concludes his work by suggesting the
centrality of “security” to national politics since the 1930s.  The New Deal
offered economic security, while World War II and the Cold War made external
enemies the chief threat to Americans’ safety.  The 1960s witnessed a return to
a domestic emphasis, but, after a couple of decades in which security slipped
to a secondary role nationally, it made a dramatic and surprising return with
the attacks of September 11.  Mugging or car theft is not the same as a
terrorist attack, of course, but, thanks in part to events from the 1960s, Karl
Rove, George W. Bush, and other Republicans could tap into a deep reservoir of
public doubt about the Democratic Party’s ability to keep citizens safe from
harm.

This book will be of interest to anyone who teaches and/or writes about the
politics of the 1960s.  It deepens our understanding of the era, and will spark
heated discussion on a wide range of controversial issues which continue to
resonate in contemporary politics.

Notes

[1].  Thomas Sugrue, _The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in
Postwar Detroit_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and, Thomas and
Mary Edsall, _Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American
Politics_ (New York: Norton, 1991).

[2]. See, for example, John Andrew III, _The Other Side of the Sixties:  Young
Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics_ (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1997); Mary Brennan, _Turning Right in the Sixties:
The Conservative Capture of the GOP_ (Chapel Hill:  University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Matthew Dallek, _The Right Moment:  Ronald Reagan’s
First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics_ (New York:
Free Press, 2000); and, Lisa McGirr, _Suburban Warriors:  The Origins of the
New American Right_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).



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