Policing the Twilight Zone: Federalizing Crime Fighting During the New Deal

Abstract

On 28 July 1994 President Bill Clinton called his $30.2 billion anticrime bill “the toughest, largest, smartest Federal attack on crime in the history of our country.” If Clinton could have turned the clock back sixty years to 18 May 1934, he would have heard President Franklin Delano Roosevelt making similar claims about the nation's first federal anticrime package. In the intervening decades, the federal government's role in crime fighting has become an accepted reality, but in 1934 it was still novel. For most of U.S. history, politicians believed that crime was a local matter. That changed dramatically during the New Deal, when crime became a national obsession, and the Roosevelt Administration developed a sweeping anticrime program that challenged accepted notions of federalism.