The phrase was strategically lobbed into presidential politics for the first time in 1964, when candidate Barry Goldwater used it against the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson.
At the apex of the civil rights movement, as White voters saw the familiar social order attacked and upended, Goldwater and other conservative politicians needed a way to tap into these voters’ fears without appearing to talk about race, say political scientists and historians. “Law and order” was “a strategy for reaching suburban voters without having to say the ugly part out loud,” says Leah Wright-Rigueur, a political historian and public policy professor at Harvard University.
“Choose the way of this present administration and you have the way of mobs in the street, restrained only by the plea that they wait until after election time to ignite violence once again,” Goldwater said in a 1964 speech launching his campaign.
During the 1960s, violent crime in America increased. Prior to that decade, the federal government had rarely concerned itself with crime, seeing it as an issue best left to the states.
But opponents of the Civil Rights Act, stymied by the act’s passage, looked for another way to oppose Black civil rights without saying so. The act, which ended Jim Crow and outlawed job discrimination on the basis of race, was signed into law by Johnson in 1964 after a bitter battle in Congress.
It was no longer socially permissible for polite White people to say they opposed equal rights for Black Americans. Instead, they began “talking about the urban uprisings—Blacks’ response to political and economic exploitation—they start attaching it to street crime, to ordinary lawlessness,” says Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
Playing upon stereotypes about Black criminality, a chorus of public figures—from senators to presidential candidates to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—loudly and effectively drew a line from civil disobedience to violence and anarchy on the streets. “I am greatly concerned that certain racial leaders are … suggesting that citizens need only obey the laws with which they agree,” said Hoover in 1965. “Such an attitude breeds disrespect for the law and even civil disorder and rioting.”
Goldwater lost the presidency by a landslide, but he succeeded in transforming “law and order” into a political issue that Johnson and subsequent Democratic presidential candidates have had to answer for—and he laid the groundwork for Richard Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968, which came as people in Watts and over 100 other cities protested police brutality and inequality.