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.

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.

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.

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.

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.