The New Deal is primarily remembered for expanding social welfare programs and strengthening national security in the United States. But in New Deal Law and Order, Anthony Gregory contends that its “war on crime” was another core pillar of its state-building agenda. Across twelve chapters organized in five sections, Gregory claims that only by understanding how Roosevelt redefined liberalism to fuse national security, social welfare, and law-and-order politics into mutually reinforcing relationships can we fully grasp the New Deal’s role in reshaping the American state. Ambitious and meticulously researched, Gregory’s book makes a compelling case for how the New Deal’s criminal justice reforms transformed the American government. It is a powerful text that offers valuable, thought-provoking insights for scholars of U.S. crime policy and state power.

Part 1 (chapters 1–2) examines what Gregory calls the “legitimacy crisis” of national law enforcement from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era. Chapter 1 traces how the political dynamics of these eras thwarted the establishment of a law-and-order program. Despite persistent public concerns over lawlessness, irreconcilable political demands among organized labor, Blacks, southern Whites, and others hindered the formation of a nationalized law-and-order agenda. Chapter 2 explores the crisis’s early twentieth-century apex when vigilantism and private forces regularly repressed both labor and political dissent during the Red Scare while lynching enforced racial repression and undermined federal law enforcement authority. Meanwhile, Herbert Hoover’s war on crime floundered amid the turmoil of the Great Depression, growing public disillusionment with law enforcement, and widespread criticisms of Prohibition’s nationalization of criminal law.

Part 2 (chapters 3–4) details how Roosevelt’s coalition resolved the legitimacy crisis. Chapter 3 argues that Roosevelt’s 1932 electoral victory carried dual mandates to pursue economic recovery and crime control as high-profile kidnappings, robberies, and rising homicide rates generated demands for federal intervention. Chapter 4 shows how Attorney General Homer Cummings—a chief architect of New Deal crime policy—championed myriad laws expanding federal power in the administration of criminal justice while carefully navigating or avoiding conflicts that threatened coalitional unity, like stopping lynching. Cummings’s 1934 crime conference presented crime policy as related to the New Deal’s welfare agenda, solidifying national law-and-order’s place within a redefined liberalism.

Part 3 (chapters 5–7) examines how Roosevelt’s crime policies tested constitutional limits by redefining federalism. Chapter 5 maps the legal community’s bipartisan endorsement of New Deal constitutionalism, legitimizing laws that expanded federal jurisdiction over interstate crimes and enhanced federal-state legal coordination. Chapter 6 excavates the origins of the federal War on Drugs by spotlighting the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, which—unlike alcohol prohibition—was enacted without controversy or constitutional amendment and permanently expanded the federal bureaucracy’s drug enforcement authority. Chapter 7 studies the New Deal’s racial contradictions. Black Americans drawn to the coalition were hopeful that federal action could counteract local racial injustices, as exemplified by the Scottsboro case, but southern Whites could see how the federal government continued to legitimize racialized law enforcement via its reliance on local police to administer programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and federal officials’ resistance to anti-lynching legislation.

Part 4 (chapters 8–9) shows how New Deal crime policy intertwined with its welfare agenda. Chapter 8 discusses “carceral liberalism,” Gregory’s term for the New Deal’s balancing of social discipline and rehabilitation. He analyzes how New Dealers constructed punitive institutions like Alcatraz and enlisted federal agencies like the Works Progress Administration in prison-building while simultaneously championing rehabilitation, thus making the carceral state’s growth more tolerable. Chapter 9 shows how the New Deal pursued crime prevention through both socioeconomic and punitive interventions. The Justice Department assessed criminal justice and welfare policies as complementary strategies to address crime’s diverse causes, although Cummings obstructed the creation of a Department of Welfare to systematically oversee crime prevention governance.

Part 5 (chapters 10–12) illustrates the convergence of the New Deal’s national security, economic, and law-and-order agendas. Chapter 10 explores the rise of the “new political economy of law and order” from 1935 to 1945, showing how white-collar criminology, rhetoric critiquing class disparities in crime, improved labor-state relations, and the professionalization of urban crime governance fueled a bipartisan, class-blind law-and-order agenda that, while never fully realized, legitimized New Deal liberalism. Chapter 11 studies how the war on crime facilitated the national security state’s growth during wartime. Roosevelt used the FBI to target extremists, muddying distinctions between national security and law enforcement, and the Bureau became a leader in both national intelligence and domestic policing. Chapter 12 shows how wartime pressures and the war on crime solidified the security state, culminating in Japanese internment, which was implemented through Army-enforced executive orders backed by criminal penalties. In a brief epilogue, Gregory connects his research to subsequent history and discusses its contemporary implications.

Gregory’s book is a thorough account of the New Deal’s impact on American crime policy that offers valuable insights into the New Deal’s vital role in building the carceral state. However, some aspects of the analysis could benefit from further exploration. Below, I highlight two points that invite additional discussion.

First, Gregory persuasively details the unique alignment of political, structural, and contextual factors that enabled Roosevelt to resolve the law-and-order legitimacy crisis, while showing how Hoover’s conservative approach failed and that key features of New Deal crime policy garnered bipartisan support. But given this framing, it is unclear what alternatives the New Deal coalition might have had to resolve the law-and-order legitimacy crisis. By highlighting the fortuitous coalescence of structural conditions that enabled New Deal law and order to emerge and win bipartisan support, the text sometimes leaves an impression that its arrival was almost inevitable. A more sustained exploration of alternative routes might reveal meaningful disagreements over New Deal law and order while highlighting the viability of paths not taken, further underscoring the roles of agency and contingency in this history.

For example, Gregory outlines the bipartisan support for New Deal law-and-order constitutionalism. But the Louisiana populist, Sen. Huey Long—whom the Roosevelt coalition saw as a major political threat—receives sustained discussion for just one paragraph, with Gregory explaining that his assassination rendered his ideas moot (p.135). Similarly, Gregory only briefly and generally discusses the politics of Roosevelt’s first nominee for Attorney General, Thomas Walsh (p.80). Walsh died before his confirmation, and his replacement, Homer Cummings, became a pivotal player in the war on crime. Perhaps Long’s law-and-order agenda showed how popular demands could have justified a different path, or maybe Walsh’s two-decade record in Congress indicates he would have blazed a different trail than Cummings. Further discussion in these regards might have provided added clarity into the contingent factors that brought about the development of New Deal law and order.

Similarly, in chapter 10, Gregory emphasizes the bipartisan consensus around the “new political economy of law and order” (p.265). Yet as Kim Phillips-Fein shows in her 2009 book, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, business forces like the Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Chamber of Commerce quickly mobilized in opposition to New Deal political economics in the 1930s, endorsing instead the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises while laying the groundwork for future conservative challenges to Roosevelt’s legacy. Attention to such business groups may have brought additional nuance to the argument. If such business forces raised little resistance to the political economy of law and order, it would have reinforced Gregory’s claims of consensus, whereas signs of resistance would reveal cracks in that consensus.

Second, Part 4 offers provocative insights regarding the intersection of welfarism and law-and-order policies that challenge conventional understandings of New Deal liberalism. However, Gregory’s fascinating and convincing argument that New Deal politics linked welfare and carceral strategies to pursue crime prevention has intriguing implications that are not fully explored. He contends that no viable form of New Deal politics defined crime prevention as solvable via economic welfare alone; all possible versions of a crime prevention program tethered welfarism and state repression (p.258). This compels us to confront the uncomfortable reality that the New Deal’s welfarist and punitive agendas developed as inseparable facets of state power. But this leaves the reader wondering whether the framework of modern liberalism, as shaped by the New Deal, leaves room for disentangling these two approaches. Many readers of Gregory’s book may be critics of carceral punitivism hoping to rescue New Deal welfarism as a non-punitive crime control strategy, and while Gregory seems to indicate that doing so might be difficult without replicating the New Deal’s punitive impulses, he stops short of saying so outright.

Here, Gregory’s argument about the interconnected politics of welfarism and law and order can be contrasted with his discussion tying national security with law-and-order agendas. There are durable institutions traceable to the New Deal that keep the latter spheres intertwined today—such as the FBI’s leadership roles in both national intelligence and law enforcement—and that are difficult to imagine undoing. But it is harder to pinpoint enduring institutional dynamics that keep punitivism and welfarism locked together in a similarly inextricable relationship. It thus seems more plausible to advance welfare reforms as crime prevention without necessarily reinvigorating punitive policies. For instance, in their 1967 policy document “A Freedom Budget for All Americans,” civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph positioned expansive economic welfare policies—like public jobs programs and a guaranteed income—as key planks of the Poor People’s Campaign, praising their crime-prevention benefits without calling for punitive measures. Had the Poor People’s Campaign succeeded, would it have been doomed to resurrect the punitive controls New Deal liberalism hitched to crime-preventative welfarism, or could they have broken from this framework? It is not entirely clear whether Gregory believes such a separation is possible within modern liberalism, or whether certain conditions must exist for it to occur. But the New Deal legacy binding welfarism and punitivism seems more malleable than that linking national security and law-and-order politics.

Nonetheless, New Deal Law and Order is an outstanding contribution to multiple fields. Scholars of American political history, incarceration, welfare, national security, and law will all find valuable and powerful insights in Gregory’s book. This comprehensive account is a must-read for scholars interested in the development of America’s carceral state.