Urban Upheaval and the Enduring Appeal of Law and Order

It is difficult to overstate the political impact of the urban unrest of the 1960s. The explosions in Newark and Detroit fifty years ago devastated those cities and sent shock waves across the country. The “long, hot summer” of 1967 also eroded popular faith in activist government and the Great Society, which never recovered from conservative claims that liberal programs had stimulated the civil disorders by encouraging the irresponsible and “rewarding the rioters.”

The first major rebellion or riot of the decade erupted in July 1964, two weeks after President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. On the same day that Arizona senator Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination for president and presented the incendiary issue of law and order to a national audience, a white off-duty police officer in New York shot and killed a black teenager under controversial circumstances. Forty-eight hours later, a peaceful demonstration evolved into violent clashes and led to six nights of rioting and looting in Harlem and Brooklyn. Although historians have paid little attention to this pivotal moment until recently, the racial unrest in the symbolic heart of black America generated headlines across the nation and the world.¹

In the White House, the president was deeply concerned about the future—of other cities, the freedom struggle, the Democratic Party, and the upcoming election. “Where all this Harlem stuff comes from,” he told a Texas congressman, “is that they’ve got no jobs. They can’t do anything and they’re just raising hell.” Johnson stressed that it was a local, not federal, responsibility—the liberal mantra on law enforcement—but promised that “I’m going to take tax-eaters and make tax-payers out of them, and I’m going to stop these damn riots.”² To make good on his pledge, the president made three fateful choices in the fall of 1964. First, he declared a War on Poverty, vowing that it would address the “root causes” of urban unrest and constitute a “war against crime and a war against disorder.”³ Second, Johnson authorized the FBI to offer riot training to local police and ordered the Defense Department to do the same for the National Guard. The nationalization and militarization of riot control were underway.⁴

In response to Goldwater’s call for law and order, the White House also had the Justice Department prepare an in-depth study of “Riots and Crime in the Cities” in September 1964. A year later—and a month after the Watts Riot in Los Angeles—the president launched the War on Crime by establishing the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA), which enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, though for different reasons. Liberals believed that it would modernize local law enforcement and improve police-community relations. Conservatives believed that the agency would strengthen riot-control techniques and discredit false charges of police misconduct. As urban unrest mounted in coming years, the OLEA assumed an antiriot focus, widened the federal role in local policing, and set the stage for the War on Drugs.⁵

Johnson’s actions in the mid-1960s left him vulnerable to a crossfire of criticism from conservatives and radicals, who charged the administration with ignoring the structural inequities of the capitalist system and constructing a police-industrial complex. But liberal logic about the relationship between poverty and lawlessness, combined with the gathering storm in America’s cities and the growing strength of the conservative movement, forced the president’s hand. Contrary to what other scholars have asserted, he reluctantly—not eagerly—endorsed a War on Crime based on police modernization and professionalization because he saw few viable alternatives.⁶ Johnson then eroded his political credibility with rhetorical oversell, promising to make the streets safe for all despite warnings that he had to lower expectations or face the consequences. As Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sagely advised in December 1965, “It makes no political sense for the president annually to engage in an all-out war on crime and annually lose.”⁷

But the rush of events was inexorable—as was...