MICHAEL W. FLAMM. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 294. $34.50

Abstract

If you live long enough, you will eventually discover that what still seem like current events to you have somehow become grist for the historian's mill. Michael W. Flamm's excellent book provided an uncomfortable reminder of that certainty to this reviewer, who as a young military officer in the late 1960s did civil disturbance intelligence analysis for the Army. It is a little disconcerting to read Flamm's account of events one witnessed while they were unfolding, as if it were a narrative of some Civil War battle. But it is also quite informative. For Flamm has done an excellent job, not only of describing the tumult of those years but also of explaining, in a way that is most enlightening even to a minor participant in some of the events he discusses, how law and order became the dominant political issue of the day. This book is, as Flamm explains, “a work of political culture. By weaving an analytical narrative around selected events, campaigns and legislation of the 1960s,” he “examines the impact that law and order had on an ideological watershed in American history” (p. 5). That watershed is the 1960s. Rather than another disillusioned liberal lament over what went wrong during that pivotal decade, Flamm endeavors to provide his readers with a conservative perspective on the 1960s. In order to do that, he has made heavy use of Barry Goldwater's papers at the University of Arizona and has also consulted Ronald Reagan's papers at the Hoover Institution and Richard M. Nixon's at the Nixon Library. Flamm also seeks to amplify the voice of those Nixon called the “silent majority.” Because of his heavy utilization of collections at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, his book inevitably provides the liberal viewpoint on the events of the 1960s as well. But it competes with the outlook of those who used the law and order issue to capture the White House in 1968.