This principal theme of this elegantly constructed book is the unravelling of liberalism by the perceived threat of crime in the 1960s. Others, of course, have examined the way in which the ghetto riots turned public opinion away from the Great Society and the harassment of Democratic administrations with the issue of “law and order,” but this is the first comprehensive study of the theme. If some of the discrete topics, such as the near obsession with juvenile delinquency in the 1950s and the Democrats' disastrous Chicago Convention of 1968, are familiar, the author ties them together in perceptive ways. The endnotes occupy over a quarter of the book, testifying to exhaustive research in manuscript and printed sources, which the author supplemented by personal interviews with participants in the episodes discussed.

It is an ambitious task to show that “law and order” (or Laura Norder, as some of us remember that figure in the 1960s campaigns) had a role comparable to Vietnam in destroying the ascendancy of postwar liberalism, but Mr. Flamm argues his case with skill and tenacity. He is explicit that law and order was the decisive issue in the outcome of the 1968 election, and if this reviewer is not entirely convinced that Vietnam can be more or less discounted, clearly law and order cannot be. If racism was an element in the exploitation of the issue it was not a sufficient explanation, and the author takes to task those liberals – and subsequent historians – who failed to grasp the genuine worries of many voters for their personal security. At the same time he demonstrates conservative responsibility for the manipulation of the issue, although the crime figures did not unambiguously support their cause. (The murder rate, for example, had been higher in the 1930s.) Liberals, however, were unable to craft an effective response to the charge that they were responsible for the perceived urban chaos, because of their endorsement of civil disobedience during the civil rights campaigns and their tendency to mollycoddle criminals and to throw law-abiding taxpayers' money at the ghettoes. The issue thus played a vital role in ushering in a long conservative ascendancy in American politics.