Overview

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. 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. 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.

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Anthony Gregory is the author of The Power of Habeas Corpus in America and American Surveillance. He has taught courses at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. After thirty-two years serving in the Intelligence Community using his voice for different purposes, Bob Johnson decided to continue that passion narrating audiobooks, still bringing stories to life and as different characters. While he still enjoys a good spy thriller, he is equally thrilled to narrate mysteries, true crime, romance and, of course, nonfiction. When he's not in his home studio in Reston, Virginia, you can normally find Bob either behind the mic announcing Maryland sports or in the stands cheering on the Terps.

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