Law and Order

Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s

Michael Flamm

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231509725
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Law and Order offers a valuable new study of the political and social history of the 1960s. It presents a sophisticated account of how the issues of street crime and civil unrest enhanced the popularity of conservatives, eroded the credibility of liberals, and transformed the landscape of American politics. Ultimately, the legacy of law and order was a political world in which the grand ambitions of the Great Society gave way to grim expectations.

In the mid-1960s, amid a pervasive sense that American society was coming apart at the seams, a new issue known as law and order emerged at the forefront of national politics. First introduced by Barry Goldwater in his ill-fated run for president in 1964, it eventually punished Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats and propelled Richard Nixon and the Republicans to the White House in 1968. In this thought-provoking study, Michael Flamm examines how conservatives successfully blamed liberals for the rapid rise in street crime and then skillfully used law and order to link the understandable fears of white voters to growing unease about changing moral values, the civil rights movement, urban disorder, and antiwar protests.

Flamm documents how conservatives constructed a persuasive message that argued that the civil rights movement had contributed to racial unrest and the Great Society had rewarded rather than punished the perpetrators of violence. The president should, conservatives also contended, promote respect for law and order and contempt for those who violated it, regardless of cause. Liberals, Flamm argues, were by contrast unable to craft a compelling message for anxious voters. Instead, liberals either ignored the crime crisis, claimed that law and order was a racist ruse, or maintained that social programs would solve the "root causes" of civil disorder, which by 1968 seemed increasingly unlikely and contributed to a loss of faith in the ability of the government to do what it was above all sworn to do-protect personal security and private property.

1.

Delinquency and Opportunity

In 1958, a white woman in Chicago wrote to Roy Wilkins, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to express her outrage at the rape and mutilation of a white girl by five black teens armed with broken bottles and switchblades. “All you are interested in is getting seats in trains and restaurants …” she asserted. “You never tell your people to be decent and honest when they are among decent white people.” In his careful reply, Wilkins first expressed remorse and regret. But then he added that it was not “fair that every Negro should feel personally hurt when some misguided member of his race commits a crime…. I know of no disposition on the part of our Association or of Negro citizens generally to excuse crime and violence. What we do resent is the smearing of a whole race because of the bad deeds of a few.”¹

The exchange highlighted two important developments that were taking place during the 1950s. The first was the growing fear of a nation-wide rise in the rate and severity of juvenile delinquency.² By the middle of the decade, youth crime had claimed the top spot in public opinion polls of pressing national issues. To many anxious adults, America now appeared on the verge of a clash between generations, between authority and anarchy, respect and rebellion.³ The second development was the increasingly racial cast that juvenile delinquency had assumed by the end of the decade. This trend concerned blacks like Wilkins, who worried that more and more whites might start to perceive a connection between civil rights and urban violence.

During the 1950s, the public perception of youth crime shifted in subtle but significant ways. In the first half of the decade, as prosperity cushioned the social impact of the Great Migration, the national media tended to portray juvenile delinquency as a universal problem with psychological roots. In the second half of the decade, as de-industrialization eroded the economic base of the Great Migration, the national media started to depict juvenile delinquency as an urban problem with racial overtones. As a result, black and white liberals began to debate quietly the explosive equation of race and crime while conservatives moved to take advantage of it.

Amid the growing sense that a racial crisis loomed in America’s cities, the Kennedy administration entered office determined to reverse the seeming passivity of the Eisenhower era. With the critical support of nonprofit institutions like the Ford Foundation, ambitious policymakers in the White House launched a campaign against delinquency that eventually escalated into the War on Poverty, which deployed many of the same soldiers and strategies as the earlier skirmish.⁴ The War on Poverty also led to the War on Crime, which President Lyndon Johnson declared in early 1965. Thus the Kennedy administration’s anti-delinquency mission laid the groundwork for the liberal intervention in the domestic quagmire of law and order.

I

Juvenile delinquency became a pressing problem during World War II. In the first six months of 1943, youth crime jumped by more than 40 percent according to an FBI survey of major cities.⁵ The cause seemed obvious to most commentators. With the Great Migration an unacknowledged reality amid wartime dislocation, race was not a prime suspect. With the Great Depression a fading memory amid wartime prosperity, poverty was not either. The convenient and comforting culprit was the war itself, which seemed to have insidious but temporary effects.

The negative impact most often cited by observers was the wartime disruption of families—and the lack of parental supervision that resulted from it. With fathers at war and mothers at work, older children were now exposed to the temptations of war. “Every day,” reported Newsweek, “more teenage-girls, deprived by the draft and industrial needs of parental guidance, are drawn to the side-street shadows and park benches of the nation lured by the glamour of uniforms.”⁶ Younger siblings were also at risk. According to the president of the American Legion Auxiliary, American “latch-key children” had the potential to “make the Russian wolfpacks look like kittens.” She and other conservatives were quick to accuse working mothers of neglect—a charge liberals were equally quick to reject. Women in the paid workforce remained, however, a popular target of blame, particularly when youth crime and divorce rates rose again in the early 1950s.⁷

Despite the return of many fathers from the military and mothers from the factory, juvenile delinquency worsened after the war, particularly in working-class neighborhoods like the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where economic decline both hastened and reflected demographic shifts. As the number of white ethnics (especially Jews) declined in absolute and relative terms, the Puerto Rican and African American population expanded dramatically.⁸ According to official figures, the new arrivals provided a disproportionate number of perpetrators as well as their victims.⁹ In response, the New York Police Department (NYPD) began in 1948 to target selected neighborhoods for additional patrols by special units. But the effort was unsuccessful in Brownsville, where the delinquency rate rose by 400 percent between 1951 to 1958. Over that same period, it rose by 100 percent in the city as a whole.¹⁰

Liberals contested the validity of the statistics, as they would in the 1960s. Sociologist Daniel Bell of Columbia University contended that the crime rate as calculated by the FBI was of dubious value because it was based on outdated census data. It also relied on local crime figures, which were manipulated by individual police departments or compiled by new reporting systems whose surprising results cast doubt on earlier tabulations.¹¹ The academic critique gained anecdotal support from some officers, who claimed that “as far as general delinquency on the part of the kids committing more crime, or offenses, it isn’t any greater than it was 20 years ago.”¹² But professional reservations could not alter the public perception that delinquency was escalating beyond control.

The perception drew strength from two main sources. The first was the emergence of black and Latino youth gangs, whose racial identity added a troubling dimension for ethnic whites.¹³ The second was the growth of a popular media dedicated to the graphic depiction of violent crime and the cultural blurring of class lines in films and on television. According to Bell, the convergence of mass media and mass audience had combined to open “windows” into areas of human behavior heretofore unseen by middle-class Americans. “Hence if violence, once bounded, has flowed over the walls,” he wrote, “it is not true that the amount of violence has increased.” Drawing on a historical perspective, he further contended that urbanites in the 1950s faced less violence than a century ago.¹⁴ The point had merit. But it was also irrelevant, for it failed to address the real fear many felt.

Bell was nonetheless correct to stress the impact of the media, which reflected and reinforced public unease over the direction and pace of cultural and social change. “Youths more than adults bore the imprint of these changes,” suggests one historian. “They were the harbingers of a new society, and adults were prepared to punish the messengers so much did they wish to avoid the message that the family was rapidly changing, that affluence was undercutting old mores, that working women were altering the sexual politics of the home and workplace, and that the media were transforming American culture into a homogenized mass that disguised local distinctions and prepared the way for a new social order.”¹⁵ Public reaction to the delinquency scare of the 1950s thus coincided with shifting attitudes toward the place of youth culture in American society.¹⁶

II

At the national level, the media treatment of juvenile delinquency went through two stages. In the early to mid-1950s, the emphasis was on the universality of the problem, which affected every community and all teens regardless of race, class, and locale. By the late 1950s, the changing face of America’s cities, coupled with the emergence of the civil rights movement, led to a greater focus on the racial composition of youth crime. No longer could liberals, black or white, ignore the perception that race and crime seemed intertwined. Now the difficult and delicate task was to explain how discrimination contributed to lawlessness—without appearing to deny or condone it.

In the decades after World War II, the demographic landscape underwent a tectonic shift. As the suburbs boomed, doubling in population between 1950 and 1970, the central cities stagnated, losing millions of residents.¹⁷ At the same time, the complexion of urban life changed. As millions of middle-class whites moved to suburbia in pursuit of the ranch home and picket fence of their dreams, millions of working-class blacks migrated to the urban North in search of work and a better life after the collapse of the sharecropping system in the rural South.¹⁸ It was a dramatic development. But in the early 1950s it was invisible to most Americans—especially the new suburbanites.

Accordingly, the media concentrated on the universal nature of the delinquency crisis. In the popular press, troubled teens came from all walks of life, all types of communities, and all parts of the country. Most articles were careful to cite examples from large cities, affluent suburbs, and small towns. Poverty and race were rarely mentioned. The focus instead was on the decreasing age and increasing violence of the offenders. A 1952 incident in Arkansas in which two boys, ages seven and nine, looted a gas station while their parents were at a night club attracted national attention. The press also publicized the 1953 case of a female teenager in Utah who, after exchanging gunfire with police, reportedly said, “I hate cops; I wish I had got me one.”¹⁹

The universalist interpretation received intellectual support from Benjamin Fine, education editor of the New York Times. In 1,000,000 Delinquents, a nonfiction best-seller in 1955, he used the Cold War and a disease metaphor to emphasize how delinquency, like cancer, was a serious threat that could easily spread and infect all of society. In particular, it could warp young minds, threatening the “American way of life,” weakening democracy, and aiding the spread of communism. But despite the sometimes overheated rhetoric, Fine offered on the whole a restrained, thoughtful, and balanced critique.²⁰ A supporter of slum clearance, he nonetheless stressed that no direct correlation existed between youth crime and urban poverty or poor housing—witness the explosive growth in suburban delinquency. In more than 350 pages of anecdote and analysis, he also mentioned race only once—as an identifying adjective.

Fine advocated an expanded role for government, with political control at the local level, expert guidance and financial assistance at the federal level. Above all, he sought more spending on public schools, “the first line of defense,” including improved teacher education and expanded psychological services. But for the most part Fine accepted the findings of Professor Sheldon Glueck and Dr. Eleanor Glueck, authors of Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, who placed primary emphasis on family cohesiveness and effective parenting. The Gluecks acknowledged that physical poverty, coupled with job insecurity and residential instability, imposed severe strains. They placed greater weight, however, on emotional deprivation. “In almost every respect,” wrote Fine in agreement, “the delinquent is an unhappy and dissatisfied person; he is emotionally disturbed.”²¹

Hollywood lent popular support to this interpretation with a pair of films. Blackboard Jungle was a box office success when released in 1955, even though it was banned in Memphis, reviewed harshly by many critics, and condemned by numerous organizations (including the Parent-Teachers Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Girl Scouts, and the American Legion).²² The film also launched Sidney Poitier’s career and broadened the appeal of rock music (through the soundtrack’s use of “Rock around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets). Most important, it provided implicit support for the idea that delinquency was primarily a product of the home, not of poverty or race.

Blackboard Jungle opens on a note of somber realism, with a written disclaimer expressing support for America’s schools and youth. The first scene displays the entrance to North Manual High School, a run-down vocation school in New York City where a new and idealistic young teacher named Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) confronts a class of demographically diverse delinquents led by Gregory Miller (Poitier) and Artie West (Vic Morrow).²³ But the film does not portray the two in equal terms. West is a one-dimensional figure whose sociopathic behavior stems from his fear of military service and an early death. By contrast, Miller is a multidimensional character whose love of spirituals (he sings in the Christmas Pageant) and dedication to work (he is a mechanic after school) counterbalance his delinquency. Not surprisingly, ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Delinquency and Opportunity
• 2. Law and Order Unleashed
• 3. The War on Crime
• 4. The Conservative Tide
• Illustrations
• 5. The Politics of Civil Unrest
• 6. The Liberal Quagmire
• 7. The Politics of Street Crime
• 8. Death, Disorder, and Debate
• 9. Law and Order Triumphant
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List