The Carceral State and the Crucible of Black Politics: An Urban History of the Rockefeller Drug Laws

2   Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1944608

Introduction The United States is exceptional in the most peculiar way. Since the early 1970s, the American prison population has increased by more than 500%, and now the United States boasts the highest incarceration rates in the world.1 The consequences of this carceral state2 are similarly peculiar—absurd in their unfairness, brazen in their inequity. African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, and Hispanics are incarcerated at almost twice the rate of whites.3 Moreover, mass imprisonment has harmed the life chances—the economic and emotional health—of racial minorities.4 It has hindered democracy: felon disenfranchisement has altered political outcomes, granting victories to Republican candidates when victory was not in fact theirs and removing voice from African Americans when voice was in fact their democratic right.5                                                                                                                 1 Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List. 8th edition,” International Centre for Prison Studies, School of Law, King’s College London, 2009; Sentencing Project, “New Incarceration Figures: Thirty-Three Consecutive Years of Growth,” December 2006; Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration By Race and Ethnicity,” The Sentencing Project, July 2007. 2  The “carceral state” refers to the set of organizations and capacities attached to them that a government employs to administer its monopoly on violence and maintain order within its borders. The carceral state encompasses both policing and penal organizations but is not reducible to either. For an excellent description of the unique contours of the American carceral state, see Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).   3 Mauer and King, “Uneven Justice,” pg. 3. 4 Mary Pattillo, David F. Weiman, Bruce Western, Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004); Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2007) 5 Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Vesla M. Weaver and Amy E. Lerman, “Political Consequences of the Carceral State,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 4 (December 17, 2010): 817-833; Khalilah Brown-Dean, Once Convicted, Forever Doomed: Race, Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement, and Fractured Citizenship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 3   Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1944608

While scholars have, with great vigor and precision, illuminated the effects of mass incarceration on the life chances of racial minorities, the origins of the crime policies that produced these outcomes remain unclear. The obvious answer—increasing crime rates—is insufficient. In his analysis of over-time crime data, Bruce Western finds: 1) “[T]here is good evidence that disadvantaged men are, at a given time, highly involved in crime and that is associated with the high rate of their imprisonment;” 2) “[A]lthough high crime rates among the disadvantaged largely explain their incarceration at any given time, trends in crime and imprisonment are only weakly related over time.”6 Western then turns to politics for a comprehensive account for the mass imprisonment of the “truly disadvantaged.”7 He maintains, “the prison boom was a political project that arose partly because of rising crime but also in response to an upheaval in American race relations in the 1960s and the collapse of urban labor markets for unskilled men in the 1970s.” He adds, “The social activism and disorder of the 1960s fueled the anxieties and resentments of working-class whites. These disaffected whites increasingly turned to the Republican Party through the 1970s and 1980s, drawn by a law and order message that drew veiled connections between civil rights activism and violent crime among blacks in inner cities.”8 Based on his statistical examination of the relationship between political variables (e.g. change from a Democratic to Republican governor) and imprisonment rates, Western concludes, “The effects of partisanship were less ambiguous: there is a strong quantitative indication that Republican governors promoted the growth of the penal system.”9                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Forthcoming) 6 Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2007), pgs. 50-51 7  William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)   8 Western, Punishment and Inequality, 4. 9 Western, Punishment and Inequality, 74. 4  

Though plausible, this political explanation lacks sufficient attention to politics. It leaves several questions unanswered: how did crime reach the political agenda? Why were more punitive solutions selected over the alternatives? What were the alternatives? Who supported the alternatives? Why did they lose? With these concerns in mind, Vesla Mae Weaver offers a useful corrective. First, Weaver refuses to minimize the significance of rising crime rates: “While it is true that criminal justice legislation has not responded mechanically with fluctuations has not responded mechanically with fluctuations in crime rates, in their eagerness to dismiss crime, they have thrown the baby out with the bath water. The above points are useful but not to conclude that crime is wholly inconsequential: a more fruitful discussion is to understand why crime came to be politicized in the 1960s and not before and unearth the full quilt of motivations embodied in its being elevated to the status of a major national problem.” Second, Weaver shifts attention to problem definition: “Without elite goals and shift in power, crime and violence were merely objective conditions. Deep investigation into how the issue was framed and negotiated in the political process provides crucial insights into when and under what conditions crime came to be an urgent social problem.”10 Dissatisfied with the analytic imprecision of prevailing “backlash” explanations for the rise of the carceral state, Weaver’s “frontlash” theory of crime policy development draws attention to strategic political entrepreneurs. “Frontlash” is “the process by which losers in a conflict become the architects of a new program, manipulating the issue space and altering the dimension of the conflict in an effort to regain their command of the agenda.” In the context of crime policy, Weaver argues that rising crime rates and riots created an opportunity for the losers in the Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s to “sharpen the connection of civil rights to                                                                                                                 10 Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21(2007): 230-265, pgs 243 5  

crime.” “Strategic policymakers,” she contends, “conflated these events, defining racial disorders as criminal, which necessitated crime control and depoliticized the grievance.” She adds, “Strategic entrepreneurs thus used the crime issue as a vehicle to advance a racial agenda without violating norms, attaching the outcomes of old conflict (Great Society programs and civil rights legislation) to the causes of the new problem—the breakdown of law and order.”11 While Weaver’s persuasive proposition deserves serious consideration, especially given the theoretical imprecision of backlash accounts, her theoretical and empirical account leaves additional questions unanswered. First, while she offers a compelling national account of elite manipulation of the crime issue, it is unclear how her theory applies to governors who are central features of alternative explanations for mass incarceration. The logic of frontlash suggests that Republican governors and other conservative state politicians, who were losers in previous battles over civil rights, used rising crime rates and riots as an opportunity to implement a racial agenda—a plausible proposition if only in some cases. Within the context of southern states, this hypothesis seems intuitive: segregationists that lost previous civil rights battles and were, because of federal intervention, restricted in their ability to implement a racial agenda used rising crime rates and riots as an opportunity to reestablish the previous racial order. The proposition, however, grows tenuous in the North, particularly in states like New York and Illinois, where, because of more liberal racial views and the growing political importance of the urban black vote, many Republican and Democratic politicians adopted moderate, if not liberal stances on civil rights. In fact, although her analysis of the post-Civil Rights explanation for rising crime rates includes politicians from a variety of states and regions, Weaver only focuses on southerners in her description of the early arguments against Civil Rights. Her discussion also                                                                                                                 11 Weaver, “Frontlash,” pg. 237. 6  

reveals that Jacob Javits, Republican Senator from NY, recognized and challenged the southern causal story—the discursive strategy linking crime and civil rights. Similarly, her depiction of Richard Nixon is curious—not for what it asserts but for what it ignores. Nixon certainly pushed an aggressive law and order agenda. Still, Nixon was not a segregationist. In fact, up until the mid-1960s, Nixon held moderate positions on Civil Rights. For example, in order to gain the support of Nelson Rockefeller—the liberal Republican governor of New York—in his pursuit of the presidency in 1960, Nixon forged the “compact of Fifth avenue,” agreeing to push a serious Civil Rights plank at the convention. And he did. The final civil rights plank featured: “an extensive array of civil rights commitments, including support for equal voting rights, establishment of a Commission on Equal Job Opportunity, and a prohibition against discrimination in federal housing and in the operation of federal facilities.”12 This neither implies that racial equality was a central goal for Nixon nor minimizes the electoral imperatives of this compact; it indicates that Nixon was not a southern segregationist and proposes that his law and order rhetoric might have had electoral origins.13 It is at this point that “backlash” arguments—not the top-down arguments Weaver rightly criticizes but those formulated and refined in recent urban and suburban histories14—become                                                                                                                 12 Edward G. Carmines, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 13 This explanatory weakness of the “frontlash” model results from the under theorized concept of elite autonomy at its core. Weaver misses that political elites are “potentially” autonomous and that certain institutional and social conditions can grant elites autonomy. Consequently, the model best explains the actions of southern political elites whose social context along with the organization of the southern Democratic Party granted them substantial autonomy. At the same time, whites political entrepreneurs outside existed within systematically different social and organizational contexts—one that rendered them more susceptible to popular pressures and pressure groups. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949)   14 Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); S. Paul O’Hara, Gary, the Most 7  

useful. Although these accounts do not outline and defend a specific theoretical proposition, they are consistent with the group position theory of racism, “which places a subjective, interactively, and socially created, and historically emergent set ideas about appropriate status relations between groups at the center of any analysis of racial attitudes.”15 Bobo et al. explain, “Under the group position theory, the critical factors are: first, a sense among members of the dominant group of propriety claim or entitlement to greater resources and status and, second, a perception of threat posed by subordinate racial group members to these entitlements.”16 In a rich historical illustration of this dynamic, Thomas Sugrue writes, “As early as the 1940s, white politicians in the urban North began to identify the hot-button issues that motivated urban working-class and middle-class white voters. In the crucible of postwar northern cities undergoing profound racial and economic transformation, they fashioned a new politics that combined racial antipathy with a growing skepticism about liberalism. The white rebellion against the New Deal had its origins in the urban politics of the 1940s and 1950s. The local politics of race and housing in the aftermath of World War II fostered a grass-roots rebellion against liberalism and seriously limited the social democratic and egalitarian possibilities of the New Deal order.”17 Specifically, a critical conjuncture of social and economic forces—the mass                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     American of All American Cities, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 15 Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan Smith, “Laissez-faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, eds. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers), 22. 16 Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith, “Laissez-faire Racism,” 22. 17 Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964” The Journal of American History, vol. 82, no. 2(1995) 551-578, 552. 8  

migration of African Americans from the South as well as deindustrialization which limited availability of jobs—placed two key features of the New Deal coalition into conflict over work and housing. As a result, many whites, as Bobo et al. suggest and Sugrue demonstrates, revised American conservatism into its new laissez-faire form to provide a philosophical defense of their privilege and philosophically defensible justification for black disadvantage: racial inequality did not result from structural forces but from values and behavior. Still, revised backlash arguments do not completely satisfy, as they fail to provide a clear explanation for the particular transformation of crime policy from the late 50s and early 60s to the 1970s. In many states outside of the South, the goal of criminal policy was “correction” and “rehabilitation.” Western notes, “If sentenced to prison, the offender’s release was typically decided by a parole board that would consider the circumstances of individual’s crime, criminal history, and measure the potential for rehabilitation. Parole supervision itself was intended to reintegrate criminals into society.”18 This was especially the case in narcotics control. In 1962, for example, Gov. Rockefeller signed Metcalf-Volker into law, a piece of legislation that “provided for addicts voluntary commitment to a state hospital and allowed users arrested for possession to substitute hospitalization and aftercare for jail time.”19 Over ten years later, the same governor signed the most punitive narcotics control legislation in American history into law—the key provisions of which required a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years to life for the possession or sale of two ounces of a hard narcotic. While offering convincing interpretations of other forms of mid-century ideological and policy change, group position theory does not provide a clear explanation for particular paths of crime policy development,                                                                                                                 18 Western, Punishment and Inequality, 57. 19 Eric Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) 9  

such as the shift from rehabilitation to incarceration in New York. Based upon his urban history of Atlanta, Kevin Kruse concludes, “Traditional conservative elements, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent fundamental transformations. At the same time, segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, tax revolt, and the privatization of public services.”20 Following the logic of group position theory, whites began to support policies and embrace ideologies that were closely connected to their interests within specific policy arenas, like schools, housing, and public services. Government intervention on behalf of racial minorities in certain policy domains undermined white privilege. Whites then crafted policies prescriptions and developed causal stories that guarded that privilege and justified black disadvantage within particular policy domains. The group position framework, however, does not offer an equally parsimonious explanation for the design of punitive policy proposals. Although some imprecise backlash theories may fold punitive policy proposals into a broader account of the white defense of the racial status quo, group position theory, within this policy domain, does not yield clear predictions, as whites and blacks are not clearly in competition over a specific scarce resource. Some of this confusion results from the loose operationalization of crime policy. When reporting crime trends and political responses, analysts frequently lump conceptually distinct crimes (e.g. violent crime, property crime, and drug crime) together. While aggregating crime data may serve as a useful descriptive tool, reliance on such an operationalization may ignore the unique political implications of particular crimes. Property crime and drug crime, for example, may possess different analytic properties and hold different theoretical implications. For instance, group position theory may predict a clear connection between the group interests of                                                                                                                 20 Kruse, White Flight, 10. 10  

urban whites and more punitive approaches to property crimes. Perhaps rising crime rates among African Americans prompted whites to consider them threats to their privilege as manifested in material items. The circumstances of drug crimes, however, are not so clear-cut. In his history of the heroin epidemic, Eric Schneider notes, “The white populations in major cities began declining after 1950, the trend being most notable among middle-class families. Parents who moved to the nation’s burgeoning suburbs did not have protecting their children from heroin in mind when they did so, but that was the effect. Suburbanization, at least initially, effectively separated white middle-class adolescents from the urban ills of crime and drug abuse. African-American and Latino populations, located in neighborhoods where drug trading occurred, enjoyed no such immunity.”21 Given the growing spatial separation between Whites and racial minorities and the concentration of the drug problem within minority communities, the material white group interest in harsher drug penalties, though conceivable, is not readily apparent. Social Change, Black Politics, and Crime Policy Development Schneider’s observation also draws attention to a serious gap in the literature on race and crime policy development: the absence of minority voices. In many accounts, African-American voices are rendered mute, African-American agency stripped, African-American urban history summarily ignored. Both frontlash and backlash explanations of contemporary crime policy portray African Americans as victims of an unyielding racial order, diminished during the mid60s but not deterred. Whether the account treats the carceral state as a product of the efforts of political entrepreneurs devoted to white supremacy themselves or the consequence of political entrepreneurs following, for electoral gain, a grassroots, populist, racial animus, the assessment                                                                                                                 21 Schneider, Smack, pg. 99. 11  

of African-American politics is the same: it lost. Yet these accounts never resolve the following paradox: why African-American activism defeated the old Jim Crow22 but failed to stay the advance of the “New Jim Crow.”23 This paradox inspires this history. It motivates my central claim that an examination of African-American activism within crime policy during the 1960s and early 1970s will not confirm the failure of black politics. It will expose its breakdown, by which I mean the inability of African Americans to mobilize collectively against punitive criminal policies that would have disproportionate and pernicious effects on racial minorities. I argue that, while mid-century political and socioeconomic transformations instigated new forms of conflict between African Americans and whites in certain policy arenas, these shifts also provoked new forms of conflict within the African-American community over drugs and crime. The Civil Rights movement and structural economic shifts (e.g. deindustrialization, technological changes, and the suburbanization of work) sparked the movement of middle-class, African American families out of inner cities and concentrated populations of the chronically jobless. 24 Because of these transformations, William Julius Wilson proposes that, “the life chances of individual blacks have more do with their economic class position than with their day-to-day encounters with whites.”25 Wilson’s theory yields a convincing explanation for both rising crime rates and the breakdown of black politics. In terms of the former, economic and social shifts created the “truly                                                                                                                 22  Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).   23  Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010),   24 William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997). 25 Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race, pg. 1. 12  

disadvantaged” and generated “ghetto-related behavior,” including drug trafficking and addiction. As the proportion of jobless adults in a neighborhood increased, the social organization of communities—those institutions (e.g. churches, businesses, and recreational organizations) that could curb the negative social effects of periodic economic downturns— weakened. “As these organizations decline,” Wilson contends, “the means of formal and informal social control in the neighborhood become weaker. Levels of crime and street violence increase as a result, leading to further deterioration of the neighborhood.”26 Wilson is perhaps most explicit on the issue of drugs: “The presence of high levels of drug activity in a neighborhood is indicative of problems of social organization. High rates of joblessness trigger other problems in the neighborhood that adversely affect social organization, including drug trafficking, crime, and gang violence.”27 In regards to the latter, the chronic joblessness of the black underclass and concomitant “ghetto-related behavior” conflicted with the material interests (e.g. property values) and life chances (e.g. personal safety and children’s futures) of the black middle class. Still, if the black middle-class exited inner cities like their white counterparts, then this spatial separation would have frustrated the development of group conflict. Yet Wilson and others also reveal that 1) that small groups of working and middle-class African Americans remained in the inner city; 2) those that moved were not fully detached from the lives of the urban black underclass.28 As the increasing population of African-American migrants from the South, declining resources, and the growing inability of political machines to control racial tensions ignited conflict between whites                                                                                                                 26 Wilson, When Work Disappears, 44. 27 Wilson, When Work Disappears, 59. 28 Wilson, When Work Disappears; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 13  

and blacks, I argue that rising populations of jobless adults, the emergence of ghetto-related behavior, and the decline of forms of social organization that could manage these problems sharpened class boundaries and fostered intra-group antagonism within the African-American community. For example, many interviewees in When Work Disappears lament the transformation urban ghettos, specifically regretting its effects on their personal safety and the life chances of their children. A 40-year old of mother of six living on Chicago’s South Side remarked, “So you have to be in some kind of environment where the kids are more, you know, ready to go to school to get an education instead of, you know, droppin’ out to sell drugs because they see their friends, on the corner, making money: they got a pocket fulla money, you know. They got kids walkin’ around here that’s ten years old selling drugs.”29 In her ethnographic study of middleclass African-American families in a Chicago neighborhood, Mary Pattillo-McCoy, during a discussion of black middle-class attitudes towards drug dens, illuminates the contours African American, middle-class consciousness: “The examples of houses that were once owned and kept by respectable neighbors being transformed into drug houses represent extreme cases of threat created by the occurrence of downward mobility and inheritance.”30 Given this class dynamic (i.e. the potential for the African-American middle class to view ghetto-related behavior as threats to their interests), I hypothesize that the working and middle-class African Americans that remained in inner cities during the political, economic, and social changes of the 60s and 70s began to view the black underclass as a threat to their interests and began to lobby white political leaders for action—increasingly drastic action.                                                                                                                 29 Wilson, When Work Disappears, 30 Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 14  

Politics also matter. Drawing upon John Kingdon’s theory of agenda setting,31 I hypothesize that the conservative turn in American politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s, opened a policy window—an opportunity for action on punitive criminal policies.32 Once opened, ambitious politicians “joined” the drug problem with a very punitive policy solution. Still, Kingdon’s garbage can model does not offer a precise explanation for policy selection. Policy change, Kingdon argues, “usually comes about in response to development in the problems and political streams… [Political and policy windows] call for different borrowings from the policy stream.” He explains, “If decision makers become convinced a problem is pressing, they reach into the policy stream for an alternative path that can reasonably be seen as a solution. If politicians adopt a given theme for their administration or start casting about for proposals that will serve their reelection or other purposes, they reach into the policy stream for proposals.”33 Policy solutions and the “causal stories” on which they depend do not always experience a clear, straightforward selection process: all solutions are not created equally. Rather than floating in a “policy primeval soul”34 until selected by a policy entrepreneur, some policy solutions reach the top of the agenda because they are simple and consistent with the dominant causal story attached to problem.35 In the case of narcotics control policy, I argue that a simple causal explanation for the drug crisis developed indigenously within the African American community. The African-American middle class, in response to the perceived                                                                                                                 31 John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: Longman, 2003) 32 Kingdon, Agendas, pg. 166. 33 Kingdon, Agendas, pg. 174. 34 Kingdon, Agendas, 116. 35 Stone, “Causal Stories.” This proposition mirrors Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones’ theory about the relationship between “policy image” and “policy venue.” Essentially, I claim that the emergence of a new causal story necessitated a new policy model. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 15  

escalating and intractable threat that drug addicts and dealers posed to their material interests and life chances, crafted causal explanations that increasingly ignored the structural causes of drug addiction and crime and focused instead on the moral failings and character flaws of addicts and dealers. As a result, the African-American middle class, I contend, bolstered the rationale for punitive policies and, in doing so, laid the foundation for the American carceral state. In order to adjudicate between contending theories of crime policy development, this paper traces the evolution of narcotics control policy in New York State from Metcalf-Volker to the Rockefeller drugs laws. These cases serve both substantive and analytic purposes. In terms of the former, many scholars consider drug policy in general and the Rockefeller drugs laws in particular the main causes of the mass incarceration of racial minorities. First, the mass imprisonment of racial minorities is fundamentally connected to sentencing policies associated with the “War on Drugs.”36 Second, the Rockefeller drug laws “were the first in their kind at that, and since then, we have had virtually mandatory sentencing of similar nature in every state in the country.”37 Therefore, the passage of the drug laws represents a critical juncture in the expansion of the American carceral state, as the laws—both their policy proposals and the causal story that undergirds them—served as a conceptual precedent for subsequent crime policy formation in states across the country. In tracing the evolution of narcotics control policy in New York State, this study departs from those that lump crime policy trends into one analytic category. Instead, it explores change                                                                                                                 36  Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, “Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System,” Social Research, Vol. 73, No. 2 (2006); Doris Marie Provine, Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); 37 Robert Gangi, “The Rockefeller Drug Laws,” in Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives, eds. Manning Marable, Ian Steinberg, and Keesha Middlemass (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 49; Western, Punishment and Inequality, 64. 16  

in one crime policy domain—illegal narcotics control—over time. It focuses on the development of the following three policies: Metcalf-Volker (1962); the Narcotics Control Commission (1966); and the Rockefeller drug laws (1973). New York State offers additional theoretical leverage for two important reasons: 1) crime rates climbed dramatically from the late 1950s until the early 1970s; 2) one person, Nelson Rockefeller, served as governor during that entire period. The first condition allows me to explore “why crime came to be politicized.” As Weaver suggests, this paper will explore how political entrepreneurs reacted to increasing crime rates, examining their policy solutions and the causal stories from which they were derived. The second condition overcomes some of the weaknesses of large-N statistical analyses of crime policy development. These studies persuasively demonstrate a strong relationship between the conservative turn in American politics (i.e. the election of Republican governors) and various measures of mass imprisonment, but they fail to isolate a particular causal process. Furthermore, contending theories predict similar outcomes (i.e. more punitive crime policy), and, as a result, successful adjudication between alternative explanations requires examining the observable implications of these theories within the causal processes generating those outcomes (i.e. the causal story attached to policies and the political imperatives of elected officials). The second condition allows me to trace the development of narcotics control policies within one state and during the governorship of one politician, minimizing the potentially confounding factors associated partisan shifts. Consequently, I should be able to observe with greater precision how both rising crime rates and the conservative turn in American politics shaped the development of these policies during the Rockefeller administration.

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But I do not begin in Albany. This history starts in Harlem, a community hit hardest by rising crime rates and drug addiction.38 Drawing upon newspaper articles, archival materials (i.e. organizational memos and correspondence between political leaders), and testimony before legislative committees, this paper traces how African-American activists “framed and negotiated” the incipient drug problem in their communities and interrogates the policy prescriptions they attached to indigenously constructed frames. I explore the extent to which class-based distinctions and a sense of group threat among working and middle-class African Americans defined these causal stories. Given the unique historical construction of class within the black community, I must note that these class distinctions do not follow neat socioeconomic classifications39 but carry particular moral content and behavioral implications.40 In an essay on the “‘ghettotization’ of the Negro” written in 1965, St. Claire Drake notes, “Although, in Marxian terms, nearly all [African Americans] in the ghetto are ‘proletarians,’ with nothing to sell but their labor, variations in ‘life style’ differentiate them into social classes based more upon differences in education and basic values (crystallized, in part, around occupational differences) than in meaningful differences in income.”41 Delineating the boundaries of these class distinctions, Drake writes:  

Some families live a “middle-class style of life,” placing heavy emphasis upon decorous public behavior and general respectability, insisting that their children “get an education” and “make something out of them selves.” They prize family                                                                                                                 38  Schneider, Smack.   39  E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Book That Brought the Shock of Self-Revelation to Middle-Class Blacks in America (New York: Free Press, 1997); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1993); W. E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007) 40  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006),   41 St. Clair Drake, “The Social and Economic Status of the Negro in the United States,” Daedalus, Vol. 94, No. 4, (Fall, 1965), pp. 771-814., pg. 779. 18  

stability, and an unwed mother is some thing much more serious than “just a girl who had an accident”… Within the same income range, and not always at the lower margin of it, other families live a “lower-class life-style” being part of the “organized” lower class, while at the lowest income levels an “unorganized” lower class exists whose members tend always to become disorganized— functioning in an anomie situation where gambling, excessive drinking, the use of narcotics, and sexual promiscuity are prevalent forms of behavior, and violent interpersonal relations reflect an ethos of suspicion and resentment which suffuses this deviant subculture.42 While economic position certainly matters in the construction of African-American class identities, it interacts with definitions of virtue to create to a historically variable matrix of shared class understandings. Of course, important gradations exist within African-American class categories,43 but the question for this study is whether the economic and social shifts that increased joblessness and ghetto-related behavior sharpened class distinctions, uniting working and middle-class African Americans into an economically and morally-defined status group. If my hypothesis holds, I should observe African-American activists describing drug addicts and dealers as threats to the black working and middle-classes understood in economic and moral terms: addicts and dealers should be considered threats to “respectable families” and “hardworking people.” Because backlash arguments predict that the shift to punitive narcotics control should follow the conservative turn in New York and American politics (as Rockefeller had national political ambitions), I, analyzing local and national polling data, trace shifts in local and national political attitudes in order to identify Rockefeller’s specific electoral incentives. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, archival material (i.e. internal memos and reports), and biographies, this                                                                                                                 42 Drake, “The Social and Economic Status of the Negro,” 779. 43  Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999); William B. Gatewood, Jr., Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880– 1920 (Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).

19  

paper also traces the evolution of Gov. Rockefeller’s understanding of the rising narcotics problem in New York State and explores whether and how African American activists influenced his thinking. I ask: where did Rockefeller get the idea? What is the causal story attached to the idea? How did electoral imperatives influence his pursuit of this policy? In order to adjudicate between my hypothesis and the backlash thesis, I explore the extent to which racial or class differences defined the causal story animating the punitive policy. While my hypothesis proposes that class considerations, specifically those indigenously constructed within the African American community, shaped the development of this policy, the backlash thesis proposes that the racial distinctions should define the causal story. Rockefeller should define the drug threat in racial terms and identify the cause as “volitional and cultural” behavior.44 Furthermore, Rockefeller, a racial liberal in the early 1960s, should employ these racialized, cultural explanations for the state’s narcotics problem after perceiving a racial shift in white attitudes. Sugrue provides a useful example of this dynamic: Edward Jeffries. “Jeffries,” Sugrue explains, “was first elected mayor [of Detroit] in 1941 as a New Dealer, prolabor and racially liberal. He garnered the endorsements of labor unions and civil rights groups and swept both Black and white working-class precincts. After the wartime riots and hate strikes and the emergence of a powerful homeowners’ movement, Jeffries refashioned his racial politics.”45 If racial group-position theories hold, shifts in white racial attitudes should cause Rockefeller, once a staunch defender of civil rights, to refashion his racial politics. Rockefeller’s defense of the drug laws should exhibit this altered racial fashion—though in subdued tones. That is, because Rockefeller’s shift occurs after the Civil Rights movement, it is possible the governor employed “racial codes” and “veiled connections between civil rights activism and violent crime” in order                                                                                                                 44 Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith, “Laissez-faire Racism,” 19. 45 Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics,” 569. 20  

to guard against violating the newly-established norm of racial equality. Given this, successful adjudication between contending explanations requires more than just a recitation of possible codes and connections—“ghettos,” “riots,” “delinquency,” “demonstrations,” “militants,” “police,” “slums,” and “silent majority.” It demands the excavation of their meanings. Consequently, I not only explore the discursive function of “law and order” metaphors and symbols within Rockefeller’s speeches and public statements, but I also examine their discursive utility within African-American and white-ethnic discourses. Understanding the subjective sense of threat aroused by the social and political transformations of the late 60s and early 70s (and understanding white elite responses to them) requires a deeper reading of the rhetorical forms groups employed to articulate this threat.  

The Historical Development of Drug Control Policy in New York State “Ministers and Other Citizens” and Metcalf-Volker During their sojourn to Harlem in the 1920s, wealthy whites learned about the New Negro.46 They heard jazz.47 When blue-blooded politicians ventured into Harlem for votes in the 1960s, they learned quite a different lesson. They heard a very different blues. In 1961, a local station aired an hour-long report entitled, “Junkyard by the Sea,” which examined how the community handled “the problems of its 20,000-30,000 thousand ‘junkies.’” The report profiled neighborhoods “where ‘junkies’ were as numerous as children playing in the street.”48 Still, white politicians did not need to turn to the media to learn about Harlem’s drug problem: African-American leaders taught them.                                                                                                                 46  Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1999); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997). 47 Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue. 48 “Drug Addiction In New York TV Feature,” New York Amsterdam News January 7, 1961 21  

The October before the 1961 mayoral election, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the incumbent, visited the Amsterdam News. The paper’s headline emphasized race, but meeting focused on crime and drugs. The daily had recently reported that one of the mayor’s commissioners was a member a club that discriminated against African Americans. Wagner told the board that the commissioner would “have to make a choice.” He added, “[The commissioner] is either going to have to resign from that club or resign as Commissioner of Commerce.”49 The two-hour meeting, however, covered much more, “ranging from the Wagner record on housing and schools to plans for increased efforts to clean up vice and crime in Harlem.” The publishers “pointedly called the Mayor’s attention to the number of drug addicts and prostitutes found in certain Harlem areas.”50 The editorial board was not alone in its advocacy on the drug issue. Mark T. Southall, a key figure in the city’s black political establishment, 51 aggressively lobbied city and state leaders to focus on Harlem’s narcotics problem. At a public hearing organized by the state Democratic Party to hear proposals for the party’s platform in 1961, Southall, then Democratic leader of Harlem, insisted that the historic community “is slowly and surely becoming a cesspool of the dreadful narcotics racket and disease.” He asserted that, “Irreparable harm is being done to the community…Churches are constantly being robbed by addicts and property is being destroyed…Ministers and other citizens of the community are being mugged, beaten and robbed by addicts, who also are guilty of rapes, pickpocketing and many other crimes, daily and nightly.”52 Given the nature of these problems, Southall asked Democratic leaders for                                                                                                                 49 “‘I Won’t Tolerate Bigotry’ . . . Wagner” New York Amsterdam News October 28, 1961 50 “‘I Won’t Tolerate Bigotry’ . . . Wagner” New York Amsterdam News October 28, 1961. 51 “Mark T. Southall, Leader in Harlem,” New York Times June 30, 1976; “Mark Southall Dead, Former Assemblyman” New York Amsterdam News July 3, 1976 52 Murray Illson, “Addiction Spread in Harlem Scored,” New York Times, December 9, 1961 22  

“mandatory sentences for convicted dope pushers, creation of a narcotics hospital in Harlem, and compulsory commitment and treatment of addicts.”53 Southall also initiated a petition drive to pressure Rockefeller to adopt more aggressive anti-drug measures. In truth, anti-drug activism in Harlem had begun before 1960. In truth, illegal narcotics, crime, and vice had always been part of Harlem’s fabled history.54 Nonetheless, by the end of the 1950s, Harlem’s civic leaders felt they lacked sufficient capacity to manage the community’s growing social problems. In 1960, the Harlem Neighborhood Association told Mayor Wagner about the decline in private welfare and health services and pressured him to offer public services to fill the gap.55 In 1950, East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP) started an anti-narcotics ministry that provided counseling and services to those suffering from drug addiction. Overwhelmed by magnitude of the need, the organization began lobbying local and state officials for more resources by the end of the 50s. Rev. Norman C. Eddy, director of the EHPP’s antinarcotics ministry, noted in 1958, “When men and women come in off the street…and we have to tell them there’s no place they can go right now for treatment, we are for all intents and purposes saying ‘Go out and steal, or commit prostitution, so you can get the drugs you need.’ And this is a vicious position for us to be put in.”56 EHPP went to Albany to pressure the legislature to pass legislation that would create more hospitals so that judges have would places

                                                                                                                53 “Southall Hits Drugs In Harlem,” New York Amsterdam News December 16, 1961 54 Ron Chepesiuk, Gangsters of Harlem (New York: Barricade Books, 2010); Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). In fact, Gilbert Osofsky argued that the nation’s black capital had already become a “ghetto” by 1930. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York: Ivan R Dee, 1996) 55 Emma Harrison, “Needs of Harlem Cited to Wagner,” New York Times, June 16, 1960 56 John Wicklein, “Parish is Seeking Care for Addicts,” New York Times February 23, 1959 23  

to commit addicts.57 In 1959, the organization led a quiet march of about 200 people in Harlem to urge local officials into action. The organization also sent the mayor a list of eight policy recommendations to improve and provide more services for drug addicts.58 Immediately after the demonstration, Mayor Wagner agreed to meet with the organization and the City Council agreed to hold hearings. In 1961, EHPP turned its attention to Gov. Rockefeller. They “succeeded in creating a statewide coalition that agreed that heroin users required treatment, not punishment.”59 In his annual address to the legislature in 1962, Rockefeller stated, “Narcotics addiction is a problem of most urgent concern. Its insidious effects are tragic to the addict and his family and dangerous to society.”60 The governor added, “Many arrested addicts whose crimes are related to their addiction and who are not considered incorrigible may appropriately benefit from medical and psychiatric treatment in special facilities in civil hospitals followed by aftercare in the community.” 61 By April, the legislature passed and the governor signed the MetcalfVolker Narcotic Addict Commitment Act of 1962 into law. The law allowed addicts convicted of non-serious crimes to select in-patient treatment and after care rather than go to prison. The law also established a narcotics office within the Mental Hygiene Department and created a state Council of Addiction, a policy advisory board.62

                                                                                                                57 John Wicklein, “Parish is Seeking Care for Addicts,” New York Times February 23, 1959 58 “City Plan Asked to Help Addicts,” New York Times, Mar 16, 1959 59 Schneider, Smack, 131. 60 “Message of the Governor,” McKinney’s 1962 Session Laws of New York, Volume 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Edward Thompson Company, 1962), 3595 61 “Message of the Governor,” McKinney’s 1962 Session Laws of New York, Volume 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Edward Thompson Company, 1962), 3595 62 “Laws of New York,” McKinney’s 1962 Session Laws of New York, Volume 1 (Brooklyn, NY: Edward Thompson Company, 1962), 391 24  

In the end, Harlem-based political mobilization proved determinative in the development in this narcotics control policy. African-American leaders, alarmed by Harlem’s growing drug problem, educated white politicians about the nature and scope of the problem. Overwhelmed by the accelerating scope of the problem and increasingly limited by the departure of private resources, community organizations pressed local and state politicians for government assistance. Though African-American leaders began to consider addicts threats to the welfare of “Ministers and other citizens of community,” they yet believed that the lack of indigenous organizational capacity caused this problem or at least undermined the community’s ability to deal successfully with it. They still felt they could control the crisis. Consequently, their policy prescriptions did not reject the rehabilitative model that defined private efforts. Instead, they petitioned politicians for policies and resources to augment those strategies. “The Middle-class Negro” and the Narcotics Control Commission By the mid-1960s, Harlem was no longer in vogue.63 It had become a “dark ghetto.”64 Kenneth Clark’s famous study depicted a languishing community. Economic transformations hit Harlem hard. Clark reported: “About one out of every seven or eight adults in Harlem is unemployed. In the city as a whole the rate of unemployment is half that…[I]n 1960 twice as many young Negro men in the labor force, as compared to their white counterparts, were without jobs.” He added, “For the girls the gap was even greater—nearly two and one-half times the unemployment rate for white girls in the labor force.”65 Segregation and the disappearance of work, especially among the young, generated ghetto-related behaviors that plagued the nation’s                                                                                                                 63 David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997). 64 Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 65  Clark, Dark Ghetto, pg. 34.     25  

black capital.66 Among these problems, drug addiction was perhaps the worst. Clark writes, “Harlem is the home of many addicts; but as the main center for the distribution of heroin, it attracts many transients, who, when the ‘panic is on’ cannot buy drugs at home. He added, “The social as well as the personal price of the drug industry is immense, for though addicts are victims of the system, so, too, are nonaddicts.” Unable to buy insurance to protect their property or move into white neighborhoods, nonaddicts, as victims of drug-related crimes, shared with addicts “the fact that they are all powerless to protect themselves from a complex and interrelated pattern of exploitation.” Clark also suggested, “Narcotic addiction is chiefly an economic and class problem in any ghetto.” 67 Clark’s observations both identify the structural origins of drug addiction and related crimes and hint at potential sources of conflict within Harlem’s black community: would all of the citizens of Harlem see themselves as victims of broader economic, racial, and political forces or would some—“the Ministers and other citizens”— consider themselves casualties of the volitional behavior of others? This interpretive tension manifested itself during a Senate subcommittee hearing on the “crisis of the cities”68 in 1966. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, reminisced about Harlem’s halcyon days when the area was “a glamorous place, a place wonderful music existed and where there was a great tradition of Negro American style, Negro American elegance,” when the “great European and American composers were coming there to listen to jazz—Stravinsky, Poulenc,” and when some “of Orson Wells’ best efforts which led to this fame were being

                                                                                                                66 Clark, Dark Ghetto. 67 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 90-91. 68 “Federal Role in Urban Affairs,” Part 5 hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, Eighty-Ninth Congress, second session, on Aug. 29, 30, 1966; Marjorie Hunter, “Senators Hear of Life in the Ghetto,” New York Times August 30, 1966. 26  

produced there.”69 Ellison then explained the neighborhoods decline by referencing economic and racial segregation and the “crisis of optimism” engendered by the slow pace of racial change. Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, and Arthur Dunmeyer, a friend Brown met in reform school, told a different story—a bewitching tale about the baneful behaviors of the black underclass. Rather than addressing the “crisis of optimism,” Brown and Dunmeyer drew attention to culture and behavior. They talked about “crooked cops, the numbers game, prostitution.”70 Dunmeyer testified that his mother became a prostitute in order to feed the family. Brown confessed, “I was selling dope—heroin—at 13.”71 Interpreting the testimony, a New York Times reporter described the “ghetto’ as: “The world of the child watching his father slit another man’s throat. Of mothers who go to bed with the butcher to get pork chops for her children. Of a boy who turned dope pusher at the age of 13. The world of the wino and the back yard crapshooter, of the 12-year old mother and the cop hater, the world of southern Negroes who went north looking for streets paved with gold and found them paved with garbage.”72 The Rev. Bill Jones of Brooklyn took exception to Brown and Dunmeyer’s testimony. He sent a telegram to the committee asking to testify on behalf of the “hardworking, decent people, who make up the backbone” of the city’s black communities and who were “unfairly stigmatized” by Brown and Dunmeyer’s testimony. “Granting that Claude Brown clawed his way out of the concrete jungle of the slums to become a one-book, best-selling author, granted that dope, prostitution, gambling and other evils exist,” but Jones still felt a “duty bound to stand                                                                                                                 69 “Federal Role in Urban Affairs,” Part 5 hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, Eighty-Ninth Congress, second session, on Aug. 29, 30, 1966, pgs. 1149-1150. 70 “Ghetto Testimony Before Senate Draws Mixed Harlem Reaction,” New York Amsterdam News September 3, 1966. 71 “Ghetto Testimony Before Senate Draws Mixed Harlem Reaction,” New York Amsterdam News September 3, 1966. 72 Marjorie Hunter, “Senators Hear of Life in the Ghetto,” New York Times August 30, 1966. 27  

up for the industrious people that make up the backbone of these communities.”73 According to Jones, black New York had become a city of two tales: one in which the community’s “industrious people” persevered and one in which poverty destroyed the lives of everyone else. “But the answer to this complex problem,” Jones concluded, “lies not in the further degradation of the residents of these communities.” He continued, “It lies in fact in the desperate measures that have to be taken on the federal level via massive transfusion of government funds to help these people lift themselves from the abyss of poverty in the midst of plenty.”74 Jones, like Ellison, offers a complex causal story for the burgeoning social crisis in the city’s AfricanAmerican communities. Not all of the city’s black citizens or political elites would agree. Brown and Dunmeyer’s testimony divided Harlemites. One HARYOU worker, remarked, “Unfortunately, Mr. Brown is telling the truth. Certainly, there are good and bad people everywhere and in every neighborhood. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s right about what he said about Harlem.” She added, “It’s true, prostitution is nothing. Many families in Harlem have at least one addict, one prostitute, and one daughter who has had a baby out of wedlock.”75 Another HARYOU employee disagreed: “He’s a liar. All of our women here in Harlem are not prostitutes and all of our men here do not eat dope.” This employee added, “[Brown] forgot to tell the investigating committee about the countless scholars we have here in bad schools and the young people here who go to college and become great and highly respected

                                                                                                                73 Malcolm Nash, “Figures Refute ‘Jungle’ Label,” New York Amsterdam News September 10, 1966 74 “Federal Role in Urban Affairs,” Part 5 hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, Eighty-Ninth Congress, second session, on Aug. 29, 30, 1966, pgs. 1149-1150. 75 “Ghetto Testimony Before Senate Draws Mixed Harlem Reaction,” New York Amsterdam News September 3, 1966. 28  

in all walks of life.” He concluded, “He only told one side of the story that he alone knows.”76 Mrs. Miller of 125th St. declared, “I think Brown and Dunmeyer were right. It’s time someone brought out the facts about Harlem. The middle class Negro is a minority, the rampant povertyridden element are in the majority.” This sentiment echoes a claim in Clark’s Dark Ghetto: “Negroes are compelled to live in concentrated ghettos where there must be a continuous struggle to prevent decadence from winning over the remaining islands of middle-class society.”77 Around the same time, Robert Magnum, the Northeast regional director of the Office of Equal Opportunity, offered his own inflammatory comments. He remarked, “Harlem is now worse now than it ever has been.” He subsequently walked the statement back, remarking, “I’m very of proud my growing up in Harlem I want to make that clear.” Magnum added, “I still say that the once proud streets around 125th St. are gone. I still say that the entire community seems to be getting dirtier and the slums are getting worse.” Interestingly, he did not attribute this decline to a “crisis of optimism.” He blamed “the withdrawal of the Negro middle class, the official leadership of the city and Negro leadership—and that includes me for the present plight of the community,”78 suggesting that the cause of Harlem’s crisis lay in the decline in its social organization. At this point in the process of urban change, most African Americans recognized both the devastation of concentrated poverty and the class cleavages within the city’s ghettos. After signing Metcalf-Volker, Gov. Rockefeller predicted that the measure would save “hundreds and ultimately thousands of young narcotics addicts from a life of enslavement to the                                                                                                                 76 “Ghetto Testimony Before Senate Draws Mixed Harlem Reaction,” New York Amsterdam News September 3, 1966. 77 Clark, Dark Ghetto, 25. 78 Malcolm Nash, “Figures Refute ‘Jungle’ Label,” New York Amsterdam News September 10, 1966 29  

drug.”79 Yet the legislation did not appear to arrest the city’s growing narcotics problem. It did not save Harlem, its addicts or black working and middle-classes from a life of enslavement to the drug, so African-American leaders continued to press local and state officials for action. Their pleas grew desperate, their prescriptions harsh. James Booker regularly used his column in the Amsterdam News to decry Harlem’s dope problem and shame white political leaders into inaction. Months after the passage of Metcalf-Volker, Booker remarked, “Narcotics conditions getting worse with summer coming. You can help by writing the Mayor and the President, demanding a local narcotics hospital now and less conferences and press releases.” 80 A few weeks later, an item in his column read, “Leading officials inform us they are about to crack down on one of Harlem’s biggest dope and numbers rings…Which reminds us that still not enough is being done to curb the narcotics menace uptown.”81 After the 1962 election, Booker wrote, “What happened to all that campaign talk about people doing something about the growing narcotics problem. It’s getting worse, and after-care and rehabilitation are badly needed. What about it Mr. Attorney General, Mr. Governor, and Mr. Mayor?”82 Other African-American civic and political leaders employed more drastic tactics. They held rallies and marches.83 They circulated petitions to educate white political leaders and offer their own solutions. In the fall of 1962, Rev. O. D. Dempsey led a seven-week, “anti-dope drive.” Towards the end of the drive, thirty civic leaders signed a four-point plan: “1. Urge President Kennedy to push Congress to provide funds for the construction of a hospital in the New York area to treat, cure, and rehabilitate addicts. 2. Also urge the president to mobilize all                                                                                                                 79 “Governor Signs Addicts Bill,” New York Times March 23, 1962 80 James Booker, “The Political Pot,” New York Amsterdam News June 9, 1962. 81 James Booker, “The Political Pot,” New York Amsterdam News June 30, 1962. 82 James Booker, “The Political Pot,” New York Amsterdam News December 8, 1962. 83 “Last Protest Parade On Dope, Crime,” New York Amsterdam News December 8, 1962 30  

law-enforcement agencies to unleash their collective fangs on dope pushers and smugglers. 3. Urge Gov. Rockefeller to also push a similar crackdown. 4. Urge Mayor Wagner and Police Commissioner Michael Murphy to turn loose the city’s police, including the transit and housing lawmen, on criminals and narcotics dealers.”84 The Kennedy White House invited Dempsey to a conference on “Narcotics and Drug abuse” not long after his anti-narcotics drive ended. Dempsey responded to the invitation by stating, “I think it’s an honor to Harlem, considering we have the greatest narcotic problem here.” Dempsey said he would ask the president “for federal sponsorship of a narcotics hospital in the city and a camp, in or near the city, for the rehabilitation of addicts.”85 In 1966, Rockefeller used his annual message to the legislature to sketch a more aggressive approach to city’s drug problem. He declared, “We must remove narcotics pushers from the streets, the parks and the school yards of our cities and suburbs. I shall propose stiffer, mandatory prison sentences for these men without conscience who wreck the lives of innocent youngsters for profit. Society has no worst enemy.” He remarked, “Narcotics addicts are said to be responsible for one-half the crimes committed in New York City alone—and their evil contagion is spreading into the suburbs.” He added, “Accordingly, this program which I will recommend…will include legislation to act decisively in removing pushers from the streets and placing addicts in new and expanded state facilities for effective treatment, rehabilitation, and after care.”86 Over a month later, Mayor John Lindsay and several other state and local officials joined Rockefeller’s effort. The joint effort attempted to raise 75 million from state and federal sources                                                                                                                 84 “Dempsey Gratified In His Anti-Dope Drive,” New York Amsterdam News September 1, 1962. 85 “Rev. Dempsey Is Going To Washington,” New York Amsterdam News September 1, 1962 86 New York Times, January 6, 1966. 31  

to implement major components of the Rockefeller’s plan.87 At the press conference, Rockefeller directly addressed the African American community. After noting that half of the nation’s addicts are in New York City and that many were concentrated in Harlem and other minority sections, the Governor stated that the purpose of the plan was to “rescue thousands of citizens from lives of degradation and crime.”88 The city’s African-American political establishment welcomed this approach.89 The editorial board of the Amsterdam News approved: “We congratulate Governor Rockefeller on the high priority he is giving the fight on narcotics… We agree wholeheartedly with the Governor. There is nothing so crippling in certain areas of New York as the misery connected with drug addiction.” The editorial ended: “We believe New Yorkers from the split level homes to the cold water tenements will join the governor in his fight against narcotics addiction. We pledge our support! This involves us all!”90 The editorial board especially liked compulsory treatment for addicts. They declared, “We are for any move that will take addicts off of the streets and subject them to treatment and aftercare supervision.”91 In April 1965, the legislature passed the governor’s proposal. The new law created the Narcotics Addiction Control Commission in the Department of Mental Hygiene. The legislation gave the new committee the power “to conduct the narcotics addict rehabilitation program, and provides for addicts to be certified to the rehabilitation program (i) civilly, (ii) after conviction of certain crimes, and (iii) after arrest but before trial.”92 The legislation appropriated $75 million for the construction of rehabilitation centers. The law also increased “the sentences for ‘pushers’                                                                                                                 87 Barnard Weinraub, “Confinement of Addicts Proposed by Rockefeller,” New York Times February 24, 1966 88 “Rockefeller Launches All-Out War On Dope,” New York Amsterdam News Feb 26, 1966 89 “Rocky Calls For Total Drug War,” New York Amsterdam News January 8, 1966 90 “All Our Fight,” New York Amsterdam News January 8, 1966. 91 “Editorials,” New York Amsterdam News December 24, 1966 92 “Governor’s Memoranda Approval of Bills,” McKinney’s 1966 Session Laws of New York, Volume 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Edward Thompson Company, 1966), 2985 32  

of narcotics. For example, under this bill a person convicted of selling to a minor would be subject to a minimum sentence of 10 years.”93 Even though the governor considered this “a balanced approach” and suggested it “would help addicts return to normal, useful and healthy lives,” liberals thought otherwise. Liberal Democratic Manhattan Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal stated, “We’re deluding the public if we say we’re going to cure addicts by locking them up for three years. Perhaps we should tell the public that we’re faced with a threat as great as the bubonic plague, and until we find a cure we’re going to set up a concentration camp in every community.” Percy Sutton, an African-American assemblyman from Harlem, shared this sentiment: “The Governor calls this human renewal… I call it human removal.”94 Despite Sutton’s criticism of the governor, his peers—other African-American leaders in Harlem—played a crucial role in the development of this policy. Similar to their efforts before the passage of Metcalf-Volker, Harlem leaders pressed the mayor of New York City and governor for action. In late 1965, the Amsterdam News reported that these policies were stirred “by [Governor Rockefeller’s] recent meeting with Harlem officials and a follow-up closed session with an influential group of Negro leaders.”95 The consultation had begun long before this meeting. In 1965, several African-American leaders, as the Governor developed his legislative agenda, sent him their policy requests. A. Philip Randolph requested a raise in the minimum wage and a local civil rights leader in the Bronx asked for more education funding to decrease class size.96 Mark T. Southall, then State Assemblyman from Harlem, sent the

                                                                                                                93 “Governor’s Memoranda Approval of Bills,” McKinney’s 1966 Session Laws of New York, Volume 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Edward Thompson Company, 1966), 2985 94 John Sibley, “State tries New Answer to Riddle: How to Cure Addiction,” 95 “Governor Unveils War Plans On Narcotics,” New York Amsterdam News December 11, 1965 96 “Groups Flood Rocky With New Requests,” New York Amsterdam News April 4, 1964. 33  

governor a telegram asking him to “introduce bills to strengthened the state’s narcotics program and for [a] takeover of Ellis Island to house narcotics addicts to aid in their rehabilitation.” 97   In late 1965, the Amsterdam News broached several issues with then mayor-elect John Lindsay. They chatted about housing and education. They discussed drugs and crimes. Specifically, Lindsay and the board explored “putting suspected narcotics pushers under a 24hour surveillance and opening drug-store type clinics to launch a neighborhood street-level attack on addiction.”98 After John Lindsay won the mayoralty in 1965, Rev. Dempsey continued to press his “anti-dope” agenda. He circulated petitions urging the newly elected mayor to take the following steps: “1. Declare all habitual narcotics users to be sick people in need of medical assistance. 2. Empower the city and state to construct a huge facility to house and treat them. 3. Set up rehabilitative centers to train cured addicts in employable skills and help re-integrate them into society. 4. Call for a voters referendum in 1966 to possible enable the city to do the last two the above.”99 Dempsey’s 1966 petition differs from the 1962 version in one very significant way: while the 1962 petition evinced some compassion for addicts and urged political leaders to marshal all of the powers of the state against “dope pushers and smugglers,” this petition beseeches political leaders to marshal the powers of the state against the addict. The petition certainly proposes rehabilitation and job training, but Dempsey made the provision of these services contingent upon the state declaring addicts “sick” and removing them from the community.

                                                                                                                97 “Groups Flood Rocky With New Requests,” New York Amsterdam News April 4, 1964. 98 James Booker, “Lindsay And The Negro: An Exclusive Interview With Our James Booker,” New York Amsterdam News December 18, 1965 99 “Dempsey Has Advice For Lindsay Dope Fight,” New York Amsterdam News December 11, 1965 34  

At a public meeting with the governor at Harlem’s Salem Methodist Church, members of the community “told him like it is.” The audience included Rev. David Licorish of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and Dr. M. Moran Weston of St. Philips Episcopal Church. Rockefeller asked Weston, “Would you feel people would accept the isolation of addicts together with training to prepare them to come back?” Moran noted that he could not speak for others, but he “personally felt hospitalization to withdraw addicts from drugs and training them in skills once they’ve been treated would be helpful.”100 While the comments speak for themselves, the congregations represented at this meeting bespeak brewing class tensions in Harlem. These were no ordinary churches. “Throughout the nineteenth century,” Gilbert Osofsky noted in 1966, “St. Philip’s was reputed to be the most exclusive Negro church in New York City.” He adds, “Its members were considered ‘the better element of colored people.’…This reputation as a fashionable institution made membership in St. Phillip’s a sign of social recognition...St. Philip’s was also recognized as the ‘wealthiest Negro church in the country,’ and this recognition has continued to the present day.”101 Not only was the “Mighty Abyssinian” one of the largest protestant congregations in the nation by the 1940s and served as the religious home for many prominent African Americans, but it also operated as an organizational center for civil rights activism in New York.102 Even though Salem Methodist, like the other two, served “as one of the most significant social institutions in Harlem,” it “did not cater to the tastes of the black bourgeoisie.” Instead, it welcomed migrants from the south as well as other elements of

                                                                                                                100 “‘Rocky’ Speaks In Harlem,” New York Amsterdam News November 20, 1965 101  Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York: Ivan R Dee, 1996), 115; Stephen D. Glazier, Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (New York: Routledge, 2001), pgs. 1-2. 102 Lee A. Daniels, “The Political Career of Adam Clayton Powell,” Journal of Black Studies 1973(2): 115-138. 35  

Harlem’s working class.103 Therefore, this meeting symbolizes the formation among Harlem’s working class and “better element” of a common “perception of threat” posed by “junkies” and “pushers.” The meeting also signals the deployment of the resources of the “most significant institutions in Harlem” against that threat. Sutton’s description of the new policy as human removal was correct—just what many Harlem leaders desired. By 1966, sympathy for the addict had dissipated. While their drug addiction may have hastened their social death, their threat to what to Mrs. Miller of 125th called “the middle-class Negro” caused many African-American civic and political leaders to advocate for their civil death—if only temporarily. Despite Blumenthal’s inflammatory rhetoric, members of Harlem’s political establishment explicitly advocated to the mayor, governor, and the president of the United States that addicts should be forcibly removed from the community and placed in isolated camps. Many black leaders tempered their proposals by suggesting that addicts deserved treatment, rehabilitation, and job training, but the proposals also made the loss of civil rights a prerequisite for these services. It should also be noted that, despite disagreement over the appropriate policy approach to addicts, a consensus had emerged on the appropriate treatment of “pushers.” Back in 1961, Mark Southall advocated mandatory sentences for “dope pushers.” By the mid-1960s, leaders, like Rev. Dempsey, wanted law enforcement at all levels of government to “unleash their collective fangs on dope pushers and smugglers.” Thus, in the arguments they formulated to defend their policy prescriptions, a core segment of Harlem’s political establishment sowed the seeds from which the carceral state would grow. Many of New York’s African-American leaders, who believed addicts and dealers jeopardized the health                                                                                                                 103  Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, vol 1. (New York: Routledge, 2004), pg. 272.   36  

of the community and the lives of “decent” and “industrious” people developed a particular causal story for the drug problem—a simple one consistent with temporary mass incarceration. By the late 60s, African-American leaders, both those focused on rehabilitation and those focused on punishment, agreed on the necessity of an expanded police state, and most were, implicitly and explicitly, building arguments for an expanded penal state. “The Silent Majority” and the Rockefeller Drug Laws They booed him. They tried to stop him. They chanted, “We want Barry! We want Barry!” Delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention did not hide their distaste for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Somewhat tickled and somewhat energized by the negative reception, Rockefeller was undeterred. He warned delegates against embracing conservative extremism: “These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror. They have no program for America - no program for the Republican Party. They have no solution for our problems of chronic unemployment, of education of agriculture, or racial injustice or strife.” Rockefeller asserted, “there is no place in this Republican party for such hawkers of hate, such purveyors of prejudice, such fabricators of fear, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Bircher. There is no place in this Republican party for those who would infiltrate its ranks, distort its aims, and convert it into a cloak of apparent respectability for a dangerous extremism.”104 By 1973, liberal New Yorkers began to view Gov. Rockefeller as the very embodiment of the new extreme conservatism he derided in 1964. Liberals held him responsible for the Attica massacre, a prison riot that ended with the death of 29 inmates and 10 hostages. For his part, the governor gladly embraced extreme measures to end

                                                                                                                104 Nelson Rockefeller, “Remarks on Extremism at the 1964 Republican National Convention,” Rockefeller Archive Center, http://www.rockarch.org/inownwords/nar1964text.php 37  

what he considered the “reign of fear” created by drug trafficking and addiction. The drug laws represented the centerpiece of this strategy.105 In January of 1973, the governor sent the legislature a series of “stern measures” aimed at finally curbing the state’s drug crisis. The central components of the new approach included life prison sentences for “all pushers” convicted of selling heroin, amphetamines, LSD, hashish, and other dangerous drugs; life prison sentences for addicts that commit violent crimes while under the influence of illegal narcotics; and, the removal of protections for youthful pushers so teenagers caught selling illegal narcotics would receive the same penalty as adult offenders. 106 The address, which the New York Times editorial board called “the lock-‘em-up-and-throwaway-the-key speech,”107 enraged liberals. Blumenthal described the plan as a “cheap shot” that offered a very simplistic approach to a “very complicated problem.”108 The New York Civil Liberties Union issued a statement suggesting that the proposals would “represent a frightening leap towards the imposition of a total police state.”109 The legislature eventually altered the bill after various law enforcement agencies complained about the potential challenges of implementation. The final measure included mandatory minimum sentences, limited pleabargaining power, a system of mandatory life sentences that would allow for parole and lifetime supervision, and removed hashish from the list of dangerous drugs. Liberals remained unhappy. Senate Democrats issued a statement noting, “We are handmaidens of tyranny and the arrogance

                                                                                                                105 “Excerpts From the Message by Governor Rockefeller on the State of the State,” The New York Times Jan 4, 1973. 106 “Excerpts From the Message by Governor Rockefeller on the State of the State,” The New York Times Jan 4, 1973. 107 “Hard Line in Albany,” New York Times, January 4, 1973 108 Francis X. Clines, “Legislature Open,” New York Times January 4, 1973 109 Lesley Oelsner, “Governor’s Drug Plan Draws Anger, Cautious Applause and a Sense of Anguish,” New York Times March 23, 1962 38  

of the executive branch.”110 The New York Civil Liberties Union called it, “one of the most ignorant, irresponsible, and inhuman acts in the history of the state.”111 Despite the objections of liberals and law enforcement groups, the measure passed the Assembly by a vote of 80 to 65 and the Senate by 46 to 7.112 Rockefeller quickly signed the bill, remarking, “We are creating the strong possible tools to protect our law-abiding citizens.”113 And with that, an icon of liberal republicanism assumed a critical position within backlash narratives. Indeed, the political climate had shifted. By 1973, liberalism was no longer in vogue, and the local and national political fortunes of Rockefeller had diminished by the end of the 1960s. When Rockefeller decided to run for an unprecedented fourth term as governor in 1970, Democratic polls exposed Rockefeller weaknesses in four policy areas, “keeping taxes down, controlling narcotics addiction, aiding mass transportation, and providing adequate aid to cities.”114 The local and national political headwinds pushed “High Tax Rocky” to the right. In fact, the Governor told friends that “he could not hope to hold the 35% of Jewish and Negro votes his polls showed him he had received in the past and that he would have to make up for them by increasing his vote in places like Bay Ridge and Buffalo.”115 Rockefeller’s local political future rested in the hands of white ethnics increasingly disenchanted with liberalism. The national electorate had also changed. Table 1 suggests a dramatic ideological shift in the late 60s (See Appendix). The Gallup Poll’s 1968 list of the “Most Admired Men” displays the                                                                                                                 110 “Senate Nod for Rocky’s Plan,” New York Times April 29, 1973 111 William E. Farrell, “Revised Narcotics Measure Is Voted 80-65 in Assembly,” New York Times May 4, 1973 112 William E. Farrell, “Senate Passes Assembly’s Version of Antidrug Bill,” New York Times May 8, 1973 113 William E. Farrell, “Governor Signs His Drug Bills And Assails the Critics Again,” New York Times May 9, 1973 114 Richard Reeves, “Rockefeller’s Strength and Weakness Are Analyzed,” New York Times March 30, 1970 115 Richard Reeves, “Rockefeller’s Strategy,” New York Times September 21, 1970. 39  

ideological diversity of the nation, but it also reveals lingering liberal sensibilities. The 1969 poll announces the conservative turn. Rockefeller, who always pursued the national stage, realized conservative politicians and moral leaders had replaced the nation’s liberal lions as the most admired men in the United States. By the 1970s, many Americans wanted someone like “Barry.” These political dynamics influenced Rockefeller’s adoption of this punitive policy proposal. In March of 1972, Rockefeller ran into William Fine, president of a department store and chairman of a drug rehabilitation program, at a party. The governor asked Fine to visit Japan to learn why the nation had one of the lowest addiction rates in the world. Fine agreed, flew to Japan, spent a weekend meeting with health officials, and returned “with the apparent secret to the Japanese success against drugs—life sentences for pushers.”116 He submitted his report to the governor, but received no response for two months. At another party attended by Fine, Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, Fine and Reagan discussed the trip. Reagan asked for the report, and Fine asked Rockefeller for permission to share the report with Gov. Reagan. Gov. Rockefeller declined. As Joseph Perisco, a long-time speechwriter for Rockefeller, explains, “This thunderbolt was to be hurled by him.”117 Still, reducing the drug laws to Rockefeller’s ambition and desire to remain relevant in a more conservative political party and nation would miss an equally important dynamic: this policy proposal adhered to the logic of the prevailing causal story attached to New York State’s drug crisis. Persico writes, “I never fully understood the psychological milieu in which the chain of errors in Vietnam was forged until I became involved in the Rockefeller drug proposal.” He                                                                                                                 116 Joseph E. Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pg. 144. 117 Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller, pg. 144. 40  

adds, “This experience brought to life with stunning palpability psychologist Irving Janis’s description of groupthink: ‘the concurrence-seeking tendency’ which fosters overoptimism, lack of vigilance and sloganistic thinking about the weakness and immorality of outgroups.”118 By the time chance encounters at parties had generated a draconian policy proposal and rushed the timetable for its release, “pushers” and addicts had already been made enemies of the state’s “citizens” and previous attempts at punishing pushers and disciplining addicts were considered failures. When Rockefeller decided to “tell it like is”119 in his address to the legislature in January of 1973, he captured the essence of the causal story attached to the punitive policy: “We have achieved very little rehabilitation—and found no cure.” He suggested, “The crime, the muggings, the robberies, the murders associated with addiction continue to spread a reign of terror. Whole neighborhoods have been as effectively destroyed by addicts as an invading army. We face the risk of undermining our will as a people—and the ultimate destruction of our society as society.” 120 Drug “pushers” deserved the maximum punishment. Because addicts were incorrigible and jeopardized the welfare of the state’s citizens, they also deserved extreme punishment. Explanations for the drug laws that emphasize white-ethnic “backlash” obscure the nuances of that reaction. The role that African Americans played in the politicization of drug and crimes issues escape them. A statewide survey of voter attitudes commissioned by the New

                                                                                                                118 Joseph E. Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pg. 145. 119 “Excerpts From the Message by Governor Rockefeller on the State of the State,” The New York Times Jan 4, 1973. 120 “Excerpts From the Message by Governor Rockefeller on the State of the State,” The New York Times Jan 4, 1973. 41  

York Times in 1970 reveals a conservative shift among some white ethnics.121 While only 13% of Roman Catholics identified as “liberal,” only 16 of Jews identified as “conservative.” In fact, 77% of Jewish respondents reported being registered Democrats, 55% identified as liberal, and 76% gave Nixon a negative approval rating (the highest negative rating of any ethnic group in the sample, including nonwhites). The issue of most concern to New York’s ethnic groups in 1970 also reveals much about the zeitgeist of the time. Irish Americans rated student protests as the issue of most concern to them, 27% of Irish Americans mentioned this issue while only 19% of the entire sample mentioned it. Thirty-three percent of nonwhites identified drugs and crime as major issues while only 18% of the entire sample mentioned either drugs or crime. Furthermore, only 16% of nonwhites reported being “very happy” while 35% of the entire sample reported being very happy. By 1970, student protests more so than drugs and crime in black neighborhoods defined Irish Catholic backlash to liberalism in New York. Nonwhites, by 1970, represented the unhappiest group in the state, and drugs and crime caused this anxiety. Additionally, by the end of the 60s, many African Americans considered all previous efforts to curb drug use and trafficking failures. The facts, to a great extent, supported this belief. As Table 2 demonstrates, New York City experienced an extreme increase in its crime rates from 1960 to 1968 (See Appendix). In fact, crime rates in the city in 1960 were around the national average. By 1968, crime rates were nearly double the national average. The crime rates in “slums” in 1968 were far worse. I was unable to locate crime statistics for precincts in Harlem during the 50s, 60s, and 70s,122 but research conducted at the time using data from other precincts provide some insight into the crime situation in the city’s ghettos. Table 3 lists crime                                                                                                                 121 Richard Reeves, “Survey Confirms Politicians' Views of Attitudes of Ethnic-Group Voters,” New York Times, October 25, 1970. N=1,111. 122 When contacted, the precincts in Harlem said they did not have crime records from the 1960s. 42  

rates for precincts in impoverished, nonwhite areas, such as the South Bronx (41st Precinct) and Bedford-Stuyvesant (79th Precinct), a middle-class, white-ethnic area in Queens (112th Precinct), an upper-income area on the east side of Manhattan (19th Precinct), and an area on the west side of Manhattan that included “slum areas” and affluent sections of the upper west side (20th Precinct) (See Appendix). Table 3 demonstrates, that while affluent white areas experienced high rates of property crimes, individuals living in “slums” experienced very high rates of violent crime. As Jameson Doig notes, “In 1968, the probabilities of being robbed were twice as great in the 41st, 79th or 20th Precincts as in the 19th; the incidences of robbery and aggravated assault in the 41st were ten times that of the 112th.”123 Furthermore, many people in Harlem connected increasing crime rates to drug trafficking and addiction, specifically what Rockefeller called the “invading army” of addicts. Given this, it is not surprising that the governor “was repeatedly confronted with the drug problem by angry residents at his ‘town meetings’ in black communities.” In fact, AfricanAmerican ministers “charged that drugs were being openly sold on the streets of Harlem without police interference and demanded action.”124 In June 1970, Ebony described growing grassroots mobilization, especially efforts by women, against the drug epidemic in New York’s black neighborhoods. Ebony reported, “The women are angry. And they are representative of a new mood in New York’s black communities. In Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, and the South Bronx, a backlash is surfacing—a backlash against the heavy drug traffic in their communities and against all who benefit from it. A black silent majority that has long suffered                                                                                                                 123 Jameson W. Doig, “Crime, Police, and the Criminal Justice System,” in Agenda for a City: Issues Confronting New York, eds. Lyle C. Finch and Annmarie Hauck Walsh (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1970), 253. 124 Robert H. Connery, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pg. 269. 43  

from the influx of community-destroying killers such as heroin is preparing to confront those distributors—they call them ‘murders of our children’—of the deadly poisons that are so readily available to youths on street corners and innocent-looking candy stores and teen hangouts.”125 These women were not alone. In 1973, the city’s black community rated crime as the top concern. Early that year, the Amsterdam News and WLIB conducted a poll that asked, “What is the single issue in the New York today that Blacks should be more concerned about? About 60% listed drug abuse, 58.7% listed housing and 58.3% listed education.126 This intense fear and anxiety prompted African-American leaders to declare war on drugs. In 1970, Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, wrote, “The top problem in Harlem and in other parts of New York is not housing. It is not discrimination in employment or public education. Nor is it hospital care, crime or relations with the police. It is the traffic and the toll in narcotics.” He added, “The individuals and groups in the ghetto who are screaming for black control in black areas can test their sincerity on the drug problem. They do not need new ordinances or laws. They do not need a grant from a foundation or a hand-out from the public treasury. They need to declare an action war (not a word war) on the drug pushers in their neighborhoods and especially those around their schools.”127 Almost a full year before Nixon famously declared his war on drugs, Rev. Dempsey announced, “I declare a citizens war on drugs.” He urged Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay to adopt new methods: “We will take the battle to the streets. We will employ any shock action necessary to draw attention to this

                                                                                                                125 “Black Declare War on Dope: Police, Government Inaction Prods New Yorkers to Launch Their Own Attack” Ebony June Vol. 25, No. 11 (1970): 31-40, 31-32. 126 “Opinion Poll For Mayor,” New York Amsterdam News February 10, 1973. 127  Roy Wilkins, “Action Not Words To Fight Dope,” New York Amsterdam News February 14, 1970 44  

city’s desperate drug problem.”128 Additionally, Dempsey’s preferred policy solutions grew in their extremity. He proposed that, “all hard-core, older addicts should be involuntarily removed from the streets.” Dempsey explained, “They are completely adjusted to their positions and are provided with drugs, guns and anything else they need to terrorize and destroy people.”129 In a piece published in the Amsterdam News asking people to “Join the War on Dope Now,” Dempsey declared, “Dope addicts and thugs are VIOLATING THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF BLACKS AND WHITES:” “Owners of various business enterprises, both black and white, are complaining they have to keep the doors of their shops or stores locked tight, during the day, to avoid being robbed, or beaten up by known drug addicts and thugs, forcing store owners to close for good in the early afternoon, thus depriving hard working Harlemites, and other ghetto residents of vital services.”130 In response to critiques of his proposals, Dempsey stated, “We wish to remind the Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, who may be opposed to taking addicts and thugs off the streets and placing them in camps where they can be probably helped, that drug addicts are violating the constitutional rights of blacks and whites right now.”131 Still, only one black legislator voted for the drug laws.132 Senator Vander Beatty, the one African-American vote in favor of the legislation, praised Rockefeller, commending “the Governor for his intestinal fortitude.”133 Beatty lauded the effort it passed. He indicated that he                                                                                                                 128 “Leads Citizens War On Drugs,” New York Amsterdam News Jun 20, 1970 129 “Blacks Declare War on Dope: Police, Government Inaction Prods New Yorkers to Launch Their Own Attack” Ebony June Vol. 25, No. 11 (1970): 31-40, 31. 130  “Dope Battle Lost; The War Still On,” New York Amsterdam News, May 10, 1969 131  Rev Oberia D Dempsey, “Drug Addicts,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb 1, 1969 132 It is important not to overestimate the significance of this fact. It is unclear how partisan considerations (i.e. Democrats not wanting to give a Republican governor a policy win) rather than racial or policy considerations defined this vote. 133 Amy Plumer, “Albany Notes,” New York Amsterdam News May 12, 1973 45  

“was ‘totally committed’ to the Governor’s bill, although he considered it a ‘compromise’ that regretfully stopped short of capital punishment.” Beatty also suggested that “making a distinction for addict-pushers—whom he described as ‘vegetables’ preying on the community— would only see big traffickers feigning addiction with false ‘track marks’ on their arms.” 134 Before the final vote in the state assembly, Beatty said, “If Blacks in my district are pushing drugs, I want them to have life in imprisonment… They’re poisoning our youth.”135 Even though, Beatty was alone in his vehement support of the legislation, the final vote tally obscures the level of agreement many black legislators shared with the Governor. At the beginning of the debate, Black and Puerto Rican legislators were mixed. As the New York Times described it: “There positions range from endorsement by two legislators, at least partial acceptance by many, guarded neutrality by a few and flat denunciation by six members.”136 In March of 1973, a consensus began to emerge among minority legislators. Most of them supported harsher methods, “such as mandatory life for major drug traffickers and compulsory treatment for addicts.”137 For example, Queens Assemblyman Guy Brewer supported the mandatory life for drug traffickers. Brewer was himself once of victim of crime. According to the Assemblyman, drug addicts invaded his home and “walked off with various appliances and a considerable liquor stock that they packed off in my brand new suitcase.” Given his experience and his general understanding of the drug crisis, Brewer said, “You must understand…I cannot stand by and

                                                                                                                134 Francis X. Clines, “Governor’s Drug Bill Splits Black and Puerto Rican Legislators,” New York Times March 4, 1973. 135 Amy Plumer, “Albany Notes,” New York Amsterdam News May 5, 1973 136 Francis X. Clines, “Governor’s Drug Bill Splits Black and Puerto Rican Legislators,” New York Times March 4, 1973. 137 Francis X. Cliness, “Governor’s Drug Bill Splits Black and Puerto Rican Legislators,” New York Times March 4, 1973. 46  

watch my community go down the drain.”138 Frequently near tears during the debate on the bill, Assemblyman Woodrow Lewis of Brooklyn disputed the governor’s claims, arguing that, “efforts in matters of treatment had not been exhausted.” He also declared that, “addicts are already imprisoned by the ills of our society.”139 Lewis even accused Rockefeller of using Reverends Dempsey and MacMurray as “Puppets and instruments in the creation of a hysteria.”140 Others shared this view. Senator Von Luther, for instance, argued, “When he rounded up some ministers and other leaders to support him, he created a stacked deck; many of those people have gotten money from the Governor to run the very drug programs that have failed to solve the problem.”141 The African-American community appeared equally divided.142 A public school principle believed that a “firmer stand” was needed, but she did not “want to violate the civil liberties of these people.” According to her, Rockefeller’s plan represented a destruction of black and Puerto Rican people; I really feel it’s another way of destroying us.” A state employee disagreed with the governor. She said Rockefeller “is out of his mind—we see him now for what he is.” He added, “When [the Governor] starts talking about narcotics, he’s talking about the minority population.” Echoing this sentiment, Barbara Jackson, an Africanist at the American Museum of Natural History, believed that the government was trying to “round up young black kids, young black boys and put them in concentration camps.”143

                                                                                                                138 Francis X. Cliness, “Governor’s Drug Bill Splits Black and Puerto Rican Legislators,” New York Times March 4, 1973. 139 Amy Plumer, “Albany Notes,” New York Amsterdam News May 12, 1973 140 Amy Plumer, “Albany Notes,” New York Amsterdam News May 12, 1973 141 Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “New Drug Laws Scored in Harlem,” New York Times February 3, 1973 142 Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “New Drug Laws Scored in Harlem,” New York Times February 3, 1973 143 C. Gerald Fraser, “Harlem Response Mixed,” New York Times January 5, 1973 47  

Others supported the proposal. Beny Primm, Director of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Addiction Research Treatment Corporation conceded, “I’m not a civil libertarian anymore when it comes to the destruction of lives. I hate to sound so conservative, man, but this is from five years in the field. I see it every day. People say, “Lock pushers up, even if they’re my son or daughter.”144 A civil servant and a recent grandmother, said, “I’m very much a liberal and a militant most of the time, but in terms of [the governor’s proposal] I’d like to see it happen.” Les Matthews, columnist for the Amsterdam News, reacted by saying, “I’m in favor of burning them alive.” Dr. Benjamin Watkins, the “Mayor of Harlem,” noted that he had been robbed “at least six times” and reported that he did not use his car because his hubcaps would be stolen and “sold back to me.” Given these experiences, the “mayor” believed that the “harshest” approach would be necessary in order to “remove this contagion from our community.” Only a few weeks after the passage of the law, the Amsterdam News called it “a powerful weapon against the wholesale use of drugs.” After describing the arrest of 27 individuals charged with “dope conspiracy,” the piece declared, “This is what we need. This is what we wanted. This is the kind of police work which will make our city a better place to live.”145 Despite divergent views within the AfricanAmerican community, a segment of Harlem’s political establishment, succumbing to their own class bias and motivated by class interests, spent a decade drawing attention to what Persico called “the weakness and immorality” of the “outgroup” that was the black underclass. As a result, they, more so than Irish Catholics in the state, created a political context conducive to punitive crime policy.

                                                                                                                144 Lesley Oelsner, “Governor’s Drug Plan Draws Anger, Cautious Applause and a Sense of Anguish,” New York Times March 23, 1962 145 “Man of the Hour” New York Amsterdam News October 13, 1973. 48  

Perhaps Rockefeller, who considered with running for president in 1976,146 used the drug laws “to appeal to the racial biases and economic vulnerabilities of poor and working-class whites through racially coded rhetoric on crime and welfare.”147 However, this proposition relies on a crude reading of late 60s and early 70s “law and order” rhetoric and a very narrow conception of the “silent majority” to which elites directed this rhetoric. The traditional framing of “law and order” overemphasizes the rhetoric’s racial dimension while ignoring its class components. Richard Nixon employed the trope of the “silent majority,”148 which first appeared in a speech on Vietnam, as a discursive device denoting hardworking, tax-paying, working and middle-class whites whose interests were supposedly overshadowed by the disorderly protests and conduct of liberal, upper-class, white students and black radicals.149 The “policeman” played an important role in this narrative, considered the last line of defense of the silent, white, working and middle-class majority against the disorderly behavior and subversive ideas of liberal radicals, both black and white.150 In figurative terms, “the average cop” represented the silent majority—clean-cut, hardworking people respectful authority but victim of the social decadence of liberalism and the groups it seeks to protect.151 And the views of policeman in the late 60s and early 70s complicate traditional descriptions of this rhetoric. “This ‘rebellion of the police,’”                                                                                                                 146 Jules Witcover, “3d Rockefeller White House Bid Is Mapped,” The Washington Post, May 11, 1973 147 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 186. 148 Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” November 3, 1969, Nixon Archives. 149 Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). This may explain why Irish Americans, a group overrepresented in law enforcement in New York, ranked “student protests” rather than drugs as their most pressing issue. 150 William J. Bopp, The Police Rebellion: A Quest for Blue Power (New York: Charles C Thomas Publisher, 1971) 151 Seymour M. Lipset, “Why Cops Hate Liberals-and Vice Versa,” Atlantic Monthly 1969, 76; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993) 49  

Seymour Martin Lipset wrote, “is a response to their being faced with ‘confrontation tactics’ by student and black radical militants.” Based on his analysis of several surveys of police officers, Lipset concluded, “Most policemen are conservative, conventional, upwardly mobile workingclass supporters of the American Way, who aspire for a better for their families.” He added, To find scions of the upper middle class in the best universities denouncing them as ‘pigs,’ hurling insults which involve [the] use of the most aggressive sexual language, such as ‘Up against the wall, Mother F—,’ throwing bricks and bags of feces at them, is much more difficult to accept than any other situation which they have faced. Police understand as normal the problems of dealing with crime or vice. They may resent violence stemming from minority ghettos, but this, too, is understandable and part of police work. But to take provocative behavior from youths who are socially and economically much better off than they and their children is more than the average policeman can tolerate.152 In fact, a survey of police officers in Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. in 1967 indicated that almost two-thirds of police officers listed “demonstrations” as “the main cause of violence these days.”153 Moreover, these “demonstrations” were not simply understood in racial terms. The desire for “law and order” encompassed a variety of anxieties. A 1972 Gallup Poll, in which respondents listed their top concerns, illuminates the multiple dimensions of the “law and order” discourse: “Laws are too lenient/penalties not stiff enough” (25%); “Drugs/drug addiction” (21%); “Lack of supervision by parents” (13%); “Too much permissiveness in society” (10%); “lack of proper law enforcement” (8%); “ill feelings between the races” (7%); “lack of responsibility among younger people/disrespect of the law” (6%); “People have too much money/luxury” (6%).154 Far from being a completely racialized discourse, “law and order”                                                                                                                 152  Seymour M. Lipset, “Why Cops Hate Liberals-and Vice Versa,” in The Police Rebellion: A Quest for Blue Power, ed. William J. Bopp (New York: Charles C Thomas Publisher, 1971) 3436.   153  Albert J Reiss, “Studies in crime and law enforcement in major metropolitan areas,” President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Field surveys, 1967 154 George Gallup, “Fear of Walking Alone in Neighborhood at Night Increases,” The Washington Post, April 23, 1972 50  

meant many things to many people. And, for many whites, “law and order” drew attention to their class-based concerns as well as racial attitudes. Many saw their life chances and values being challenged by liberal, upper class, white students and black militants. Traditional assessments also ignore African-American anxiety over the drug problem and rising crime rates and the extent to which both blacks and whites shared these concerns. The salience of law and order concerns certainly grew from the mid-60s to the beginning of the 70s, especially among those living in cities. In 1973, Gallup reported that individuals living in cities of 500,000 or more listed crime as their top concern (21%). Drugs ranked third (10%) after transportation. About 50% of all respondents—51% of whites and 48% of nonwhites—reported that crime had increased from the year before.155 Later that year, another Gallup poll revealed that the proportion of women afraid to walk alone at night in their neighborhoods increased from 44% in 1968 to 58% in 1972.156 The poll also indicated that, “the ratio is as high as three in four among both white and black women over 50.” 157 Perhaps anxiety and fear did not cause African Americans to support punitive crime policies. Gallup conducted a national poll on the Rockefeller drug laws, asking, “The Governor of a state has proposed that all sellers of hard drugs such as heroin be giving life imprisonment without the possibility of a parole. Do you approve of his proposal?”158 The results in Table 4 are telling (see Appendix). Harsh penalties for “drug pushers” achieved broad-based support, including a sizeable proportion of nonwhites. Perhaps this framing did not allow African-American respondents to express their support for                                                                                                                 155 George Gallup, “Crime Is Rated Worst Urban Problem,” The Washington Post, January 16, 1973 156 George Gallup, “Fear of Walking Alone in Neighborhood at Night Increases,” The Washington Post, April 23, 1972 157 George Gallup, “Fear of Walking Alone in Neighborhood at Night Increases,” The Washington Post, April 23, 1972 158 “Public Supports Drug-Pusher Law,” New York Times February 11, 1973 51  

rehabilitation. For example, in a poll of Washington D.C residents in 1973, 90% of respondents described drug addiction as a serious problem, but black respondents expressed a positive view of rehabilitation.159 The poll revealed that, “blacks were more likely to identify drugs as the most serious problem, to be knowledgeable about existing drug rehabilitation programs, to rate those programs as “good,” but were less likely to accept addicts as neighbors or coworkers.”160 The last opinion exposes some of the tensions and contradictions within African-American attitudes on narcotics control policy. By the time Rockefeller decided to seek the presidency again in a more conservative party (and country), African Americans represented the social group most concerned about drugs and crime, and, even when they supported less punitive measures, they increasingly favored removing addicts from their community and subjecting “pushers” to extremes forms of punishment: African American opinion increasingly implied support for the expansion of the penal state. Because many contemporary treatments ignore the complexities of the “law and order” discourse, they also miss the consistent, cross-racial, class-based nature of Gov. Rockefeller “law and order” appeals. When Rockefeller ran for president in 1968, he purchased ad space in 41 newspapers across the country, including the Amsterdam News and the Wall Street Journal (see Figure 1, Appendix). In the ad, the governor alludes to race riots and the crime problem in “slums.” Yet Rockefeller does not connect these events in order to reestablish the Jim Crow racial order. He does not depoliticize the grievance. Instead, he emphasizes black and white pursuit of the American dream, suggesting that drug addiction frustrates this noble endeavor. As                                                                                                                 159 Raul Ramirez “90% in Poll Call D.C. Drug Problem Serious,” The Washington Post July 26, 1973. 160 Raul Ramirez “90% in Poll Call D.C. Drug Problem Serious,” The Washington Post July 26, 1973.

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time passed, Rockefeller dropped the veiled criticisms of Nixon and conservative Republicans but continued to insist that drugs and crime victimized the working and middle-classes of all races. Such was his meaning when in 1966 the governor, before outlining his proposal for the Narcotics Control Commission, stated, “We must remove narcotics pushers from the streets, the parks and the school yards of our cities and suburbs.” In the “the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-awaythe-key speech” in which Rockefeller outlines the drug laws, he appropriates the black vernacular when he says he is going “tell it like it is” and offers a veiled reference to news reports that indicated black audiences continually “told him like it is” on the issue of drugs and crime. Thus, when the governor identified protecting “law-abiding citizens” as the main purpose of the drug laws, the declaration lacked invidious distinctions. Rockefeller defined “citizens,” like so many African-American leaders before him, in class terms—in economic and moral terms. The editorial page of the Amsterdam News shared these class-based convictions. In February 1973, as the legislature began to review the governor’s proposals, the periodical reprinted an editorial from the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Getting Serious About Drugs.” The editorial read in part: Society has been unable to focus on drugs chiefly because the problem has been, again until recently, a problem of the black slums. Those actually suffering its ravages have not had the political power and communications skills to bring its seriousness home to society. Especially so since the black’s traditional political ally, the upper-middle-class reformer, opposes him on this issue. The loudest screams about Governor Rockefellers proposal came from the American Civil Liberties Union and so on, for example, while the strongest cheers came from the slums. ‘The black politicians are going way beyond Rockefeller,’ one drug expert says. ‘They’d be talking about public executions…We do not see any answer to the drug problem so long as these sensibilities—society is to blame, the addict is sick, law enforcement is suspect—combine to prevent effective coercion of drug addicts.”161                                                                                                                 161 “Getting Serious About Drugs,” New York Amsterdam News February 24, 1973 53  

The editorial board of the Amsterdam News (and the Wall Street Journal) explicitly rejects a complex causal explanation for the city’s drug epidemic, and, in doing so, also rejects any policy prescription that could be derived from it. Furthermore, reprinting this placed the AfricanAmerican community at odds with pillars of the city’s liberal political establishment—the ACLU, upper-middle-class reformers, and the New York Times. This editorial makes liberals the enemy of the dreams and aspirations of the city’s black working and middle-classes. The editorial stated, “Legislation to cure slum problems has tended to be written not by politicians with black constituencies but by politicians with upper-middle-class reformer constituencies. This means legislation that provides money not to hire lower-middle-class policemen, but money to hire upper-middle-class social workers and lawyers to implement upper middle-class ‘solutions.’” It continued, “No one has bothered to ask the folks in Harlem whether they would rather have Uncle Sam to buy them a poverty war or lock up the drug addicts.”162 In essence, both the Wall Street Journal and the Amsterdam News embraced a class-based view of the city’s drug problem: addicts and pushers posed a threat to “citizens” living in “split level homes” and to “citizens” living in “cold water tenements.” And, according to this missive, liberals—their ideas and policies—protected addicts and pushers rather than the city’s black and white working and middle-class citizens. This was not the first time either periodical articulated this classbased view. In 1971, the Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed by sociologist Edwin Harwood entitled, “Black Progress is Happening, Too.” Harwood wrote, “Considering what many radical social scientists have been writing about black Americans, and how the American public is consistently overexposed to pitifully small cadres of black extremists by the news media, one can hardly expect even educated Americans to know the most elementary fact about                                                                                                                 162 “Getting Serious About Drugs,” Wall Street Journal January 23, 1973 54  

Black America: Its rapidly growing working and lower-middle classes. The black silent majority shares with its counterpart many of the same jobs and the life-style accompanying those jobs. It also shares the same anxieties over good schools and homes in neighborhoods free of crime.”163 The shooting death of two policemen in Harlem offered another opportunity for AfricanAmerican leaders to embrace the mantra of “law and order” and join the “silent majority.” A militant group calling themselves the “Righteous Brothers of the Black Liberation Army” claimed credit for the murders.164 The group mailed a letter to the New York Times that read in part, “The armed goons of this racist government will again meet the guns of oppressed third world peoples as long as they occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of American law and order.”165 The murders as well as the statement outraged many black leaders. Bayard Rustin wrote, “The killings were strictly anti-police. In a more general sense they were anti-‘law and order,’ though not in the sense that that term is so often used by demagogic white politicians.” He added, “There is only one group in the black community which could conceivably benefit from such a state of affairs: the criminals. The withdrawal of police protection from the ghetto would enable them to prey upon the community at will. Indeed, the criminals are the only people who, could be ‘liberated’ by the total destruction of ‘law and order’ in the black community.”166 Three years later, the Amsterdam News penned “an open letter to the average cop on his beat in our communities.” “In a nutshell,” the letter stated, “we want you to know that you are not alone when you walk your lonely post in the dark, and we would further like you to know that when it comes to the enforcement of the law, the overwhelming majority of the Black                                                                                                                 163 Edwin Harwood, “Black Progress Is Happening, Too,” Wall Street Journal February 2, 1971 164  Martin Arnold, “Key Suspect Held in 2 Police Deaths,” New York Times, May 25, 1971 165  Joseph P. Fried, “2 Policemen Slain by Shots in Back,” New York Times May 22, 1971. 166  Bayard Rustin, “Criminals Alone Benefit,” Sacramento Observer, June 10, 1971 55  

community is standing solidly behind you.”167 The letter’s description of the black community, particularly criminals, is telling. The letter asked rhetorically, “Then who are these people who are shooting at me?” The paper’s answer, “The poorest player on the team is always the one who is first to shout ‘Let’s kill the umpire.’” The letter continued: And the poorest player on the team in the Black ghetto is the criminal element which refuses to go to work and make a decent living, but instead, chooses to make his living by stealing and robbing others of the fruits of their labor and those who wish to take it away from them. You thus become the target of the criminal—the hunter—as you go about protecting the rights of the hunted…[We] can tell you that the situation has reached a point where many decent fathers and mothers will applaud you for locking up a member of their own family when they refuse to stay within the bounds of decent society. We restate once again that black people have suffered too long and overcome too much to now allow themselves to be misled by a small group of cold blooded killers seeking to legitimize and romanticize their actions under the banner of ‘Black Revolutionary Liberation.’ Be assured the loud mouthed vocal minority on the corners who boo and jeer when you lock up a criminal, are not representative of the hard working people watching from their apartment windows—people who are afraid to come down on the corner for fear of being mugged or robbed. Your support, your backup are the people behind those closed doors who stay off the streets because the streets have too often become the property of hoods. The vast majority of the community wants to come back to the streets of Harlem. They want to stroll down the avenues unmolested. They want to attend prayer meetings at night. In short they want to liberate themselves from the jails of their homes.168 Here the Amsterdam News articulates its most explicit class-based argument about the city’s crime problem. Rather than perceiving Harlem’s social crisis as a result of larger structural forces and policy failures (because of the inadequacies of policy rather than flaws of the urban underclass), the editorial conceives of the crisis as a conflict between the “poorest player on the team”—those that refuse “to go to work and make a decent living”—and “decent,” “hardworking people” that would like “attend prayer meetings” “The hunter” and “the hood” are not victims of chronic joblessness or racial segregation. Instead, the famed black newspaper claims that “the                                                                                                                 167 “To a Cop on His Beat,” New York Amsterdam News February 17, 1973. 168 “To a Cop on His Beat,” New York Amsterdam News February 17, 1973. 56  

hunter” and “the hood” simply “refuse to stay within the bounds of decent society.” Because of this, the newspaper perceives the black underclass as not only a threat to “Ministers and other citizens” but also a threat to the hard-fought progress created by the Civil Rights movement. Finally, the editorial clearly embraces “law and order” rhetoric. The newspaper, similar to Ebony Magazine and Bayard Rustin, explicitly appropriates the Nixonian trope of the “silent majority.” The Amsterdam News casts its lot with the cop; it casts the lot of working and middleclass African Americans not with black militants but with working and middle-class whites in “split level homes.” In sum, the rightward turn in white attitudes and chance encounters at parties opened a policy window for the extremely punitive Rockefeller drug laws, but this is only part of the story. Backlash explanations miss the complex, class contours of “law and order” rhetoric and ignore the role that African Americans played in the formation of the causal story that was crucial to the development of the carceral state. Some white political leaders, as Weaver and others demonstrate, certainly infused the “law and order” discourse with racial content and codes, but race was not its only defining feature. In New York and elsewhere, “law and order” represented a class sensibility in which some white ethnics viewed liberal white students, liberal white intellectuals and politicians, and black radicals as threats to their life chances and moral codes. In New York and elsewhere, the African-American working and middle-classes’ experience with the drug crisis and crime fomented a similar class-consciousness: they began to believe that the “truly disadvantaged” not only offended their moral sensibilities but also jeopardized their life chances. As the social organization of African-American communities and public policies seemed inadequate to manage the problems caused by drug addiction and crime, influential African-American leaders in New York constructed a causal story for the drug problem and the

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urban crisis that focused not on structural problems but on individual flaws. Furthermore, they not only lobbied for more punitive policies, but they, even those focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, also offered white politicians an education on drugs and crime that treated the black underclass as the “undeserving poor.”169 Conclusion The carceral state, to borrow a phrase, “did not arise like the sun at an appointed time.”170 The African-American middle class was present at its making. Loic Wacquant writes, “By the end of the seventies, then, as the racial and class backlash against the democratic advances won by the social movements of the preceding decade got into full swing, the prison abruptly returned to the forefront of American society and offered itself as the universal and simplex solution to all manners of social problems.” He continues, “Soon the black ghetto, converted into an instrument of naked exclusion by the concurrent retrenchment of wage labour and social protection, and further destabilized by the increasing penetration of the penal arm of the state, became bound to the jail and prison system by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology and cultural syncretism, such that they now constitute a single carceral continuum which entraps a redundant population of younger black men (and increasingly women) who circulate in closed circuit between its two poles in a self-perpetuating cycle of social and legal marginality with devastating personal and social consequences.”171 Wacquant identifies the right causal and outcome variables, but he misses the process. He misses politics, and those accounts that emphasize politics miss the role that African-American political elites                                                                                                                 169 Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1990) 170 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963) 171 Loic Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the United States,” New Left Review, 2nd series, 13 (February 2003): 40-61. 58  

played in the political development of the carceral state. That is to say, Wacquant’s historical timing is right: the carceral state arose after the successes of the civil rights movement and deindustrialization, but elements of the black political establishment (e.g. ministers and the black press), that were crucial to the successes of the Civil Rights movement, responded to the threats to their life chances posed by the social problems associated with deindustrialization in a manner that promoted mass incarceration. Specifically, many African-American political elites, in order to guard their class position, explicitly—by lobbying for particular crime policies—and implicitly—by constructing a causal story for the urban crisis that emphasized the moral failings of the black underclass—invited “the penal arm of the state” into the ghetto. In the case of the Rockefeller drug laws, many analysts have, by focusing only on that one policy moment, over estimated the effect of local and national racial politics and under specified the manner by which political ambition shaped this policy. Interestingly, tracking stability and change in the policy prescriptions of Rev. O. D. Dempsey from the early 60s to the early 70s offers more explanatory leverage on the developmental path of narcotics control policy in New York State than does examining white ethnic backlash in the state or the nation. Some analysts, however, correctly note Rockefeller’s growing frustration with failed narcotics control policies. Western, for example, writes, “A moderate Republican, Rockefeller had supported some of the country’s leading drug treatment programs in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, he had become disillusioned by the failure of New York’s drug treatment program to stem the flow of new drug addicts.”172 This assessment, though more nuanced than most, ignores the role that African-American activists played in framing these policy failures. Liberals in New York, including some African-American leaders, attributed these policy failures to inadequate funding                                                                                                                 172 Western, Punishment and Inequality, 64. 59  

and poor design as well as to the lack of a broader, serious policy response to poverty. Other African-American leaders attributed these policy failures to the poor choices of the black underclass. As the Amsterdam News echoing the Wall Street Journal, declared, “No one has bothered to ask the folks in Harlem whether they would rather have Uncle Sam buy them a poverty war or lock up the drug addicts.” Only the conjuncture of this revised causal story, the rightward shift in Republican and American politics, and chance encounters at parties explains the specific timing and content of the Rockefeller drug laws. Given this history, the modern carceral state fundamentally differs from Jim Crow. While an effect of the carceral state has been the reproduction of racial inequality, its cause cannot be reduced to the reproductive capacities of the American racial order or capitalist economy. African-American leaders hastened its arrival: they extended no such invitation to Jim Crow. Michelle Alexander acknowledges this critique: “It frequently argued in defense of mass incarceration that African Americans want more police and more prisons because crime is so bad in some ghetto communities.” To this Alexander responds, “This argument, on the surface, seems relatively straight forward, but there are actually many layers to it, some of which are quite problematic.” She explains, “To begin which, the argument implies that African Americans prefer harsh criminal justice policies to other forms of governmental intervention, such as job creation, economic development, educational reform, and restorative justice programs, as the solution to the problems associated crime. There is no evidence to support such a claim.”173 While the attitudinal evidence Alexander cites supports her contention, her claim lacks sufficient historical reflection. The studies she cites analyze surveys conducted after the construction of the carceral state. It is quite plausible that African Americans played a                                                                                                                 173 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), pgs. 203-203 60  

significant role in the construction of carceral state but future experiences with it caused them to reevaluate their support for harsh criminal justice policies. In fact, by the 1990s, most New Yorkers, both white and black, opposed the Rockefeller drug laws.174 Furthermore, the findings in this study indicate broad support among African Americans for harsher penalties for “pushers” before the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws. African-American opinion only diverged on the issue of addicts and low-level dealers. Some people, like Mrs. Miller of 125th St., considered them a threat to the “middle class Negro.” Some people considered the drugs laws an attempt to destroy “black and Puerto Rican people.” Some African-American elites, such as the Rev. Bill Jones and Percy Sutton, offered complex causal explanations for the drug problem and the urban crisis, emphasizing rehabilitation and the need for government policies that would address racial segregation and chronic joblessness. Other African-American elites, particularly the heads of Harlem’s leading churches, the editorial board of the Amsterdam News, and some elected officials—influenced by the perceived threat addicts and low-level dealers posed to their class interests—aggressively lobbied for more punitive policies and constructed a simple causal story that white political elites—driven by their own electoral incentives—used to defend harsh criminal justice policies. To be clear, I am not claiming that the African-American political establishment was uniform its support for punitive policies. Instead, I argue that social transformations in urban ghettos sharpened class differences within the African-American community, and those in control of the organizational resources that were crucial to the                                                                                                                 174  In 2002, 79% of New Yorkers supported changing the law “to end long mandatory prison sentences for low-level offenses, give judges more discretion in sentencing, and use treatment as an alternative to prison in some cases” and 83% supported making rehabilitation an option. Richard Perez-Pena and Marjorie Connelly, “Pataki Viewed Favorably in Poll, Despite Qualms About Economy,” New York Times October 18, 2002   61  

dismantling of the old Jim Crow employed those same resources on behalf of “many decent fathers and mothers” and “Ministers and other citizens” that felt threatened by the addict—who they believed was “completely adjusted to their positions ”—and the “hunter” and “the hood.” Class distinctions undermined a collective, race-based response to the urban crisis, and the classconscious stewards of the core institutions of the black community—the African American church and press—marshaled their political capital and organizational capacity against the urban black underclass. African Americans figure prominently in accounts of the demise of New Deal liberalism—and justifiable so. Whether the account features a top-down or grassroots argument, African-American mobilization for civil rights and their pursuit of scarce economic and political resources prompted whites to perceive this advance as a threat to their position within the American socioeconomic order. Whites began to reject those policies they once supported but now felt threatened their group interests. At the same time, dominant narratives of late 60s and early 70s “law and order” discourse either disregard African-American politics or conceal its diversity. African-American leaders joined the discourse and not always as combatants; they appropriated and revised it for their own purposes. This is not to remove racial content or codes from “law and order” rhetoric: it is to suggest its multivocality, its textual complexity, and its historical contingency. Although national political elites certainly exploited or transfigured “law and order” sentiments, multiple “law and order” discourses developed locally across the nation. Different social groups—responding at certain moments to certain threats created by specific social, political or policy shifts during the 1960s and 1970s—crafted their own narratives. To the extent that one thread united these discourses, it was class not race: working and middle-class blacks and whites viewed major political, social, and policy shifts in the late 60s and early 70s as

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threats to the moral and social codes they had embraced and understood as vital to their pursuit of the American dream. For over a decade, a segment of New York’s black political establishment, as they increasingly lost control over social order in their communities, helped construct the state’s “law and order” narrative. They, driven by class predispositions, crafted a causal story that drew attention to the “weaknesses and immorality” of the black underclass, and the manner by which some African-American activists politicized drug and crime concerns had the effect of depoliticizing the grievances of the urban poor. In New York liberalism lost, at once, its greatest ally and most compelling argument—the causal story that attributes social problems to broader structural forces rather than the individual and, as a result, promotes the progressive potential of social policy rather than the necessity of punishment.175 This explains why, at least in New York, African-American politics successfully dismantled racial barriers but unsuccessfully staved off the loss of civil rights and economic justice for the black underclass.

                                                                                                                175  Eventually, liberalism in the empire state would recover the former; the latter would never be the same again.   63  

Appendix Table 1: Most Admired Men in the United States 1968 1. Dwight D. Eisenhower 2. Lyndon B. Johnson 3. Edward M. Kennedy 4. Billy Graham 5. Richard M. Nixon 6. Hubert Humphrey 7. George C. Wallace 8. Pope Paul VI 9. Harry S. Truman 10. Eugene J. McCarthy

1969 Richard M. Nixon Billy Graham Spiro T. Agnew Lyndon B. Johnson Edward M. Kennedy Hubert Humphrey Harry S. Truman George C. Wallace Pope Paul VI Edmund Muskie

Source: Gallup Poll 1968 and 1969

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Table 2: Major Crimes in New York City and U.S.: 1960 and 1968 (Rate per 100,000 population) New York City US 1960 1968 1960 1968 Total Rate Total Rate Rate Rate Murder and non390 4.9 909 11.3 5.0 6.8 negligent manslaughter Forcible rape 841 10.5 904 11.3 9.4 15.5 Robbery 6,579 82.2 54,405 680.1 58.4 131.0 Aggravated 11,021 137.8 28, 515 356.4 84.7 141.3 assault Total crimes of (235.3) (1,070.8) (157.5) (294.6) violence Burglary 36,049 450.6 173,559 2,169.5 494.4 915.1 Larceny (more 54,213 677.7 146,319 1,829.0 282.3 636.0 than $50) Motor vehicle 54,213 677.7 146,319 1,829.0 282.3 636.0 thefts Source: US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Uniform Crime Reports, 1960 and 1968.

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Table 3: Crimes Reported, Selected Precincts, 1968 (rate per 100,000) 41St Prec. 79th Prec. 20th Prec. 19th Prec. 112th Prec. (Bronx) (Brooklyn) (Manhattan) (Manhattan) (Queens) Murder and non25.6 30.9 16.0 3.6 1.9 negligent manslaughter Forcible rape 50.0 36.4 45.0 17.9 5.0 Robbery 1,294.4 970.0 1,373.0 470.0 113.8 Aggravated assault 771.3 873.6 470.0 112.1 52.5 Total crimes of violence (2, 141.3) (1,910.9) (1,904.0) (603.6) (173.1) Burglary 3,600 1,617.3 4,228.0 3,005.0 1,317.5 Larceny (more than $50) 1,466.9 874.5 3,823.0 3,408.6 1,498.1 Motor vehicle thefts 818.8 751.8 772.0 967.9 1,654.4 Total (7 Crimes 8,026.9 6,154.5 10,727.0 7,985.0 4,643 Source: Jameson W. Doig, “Crime, Police, and the Criminal Justice System,” in Agenda for a City: Issues Confronting New York, eds. Lyle C. Finch and Annmarie Hauck Walsh (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1970)

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Table 4: National Poll on Rockefeller Drug Laws (1973) Approve Disapprove (%) (%) National 67 29 Men 68 29 Women 66 29 Whites 68 28 Nonwhites 59 36 College 62 33 High School 69 28 Grade School 67 26 Under 30 years 62 36 30-49 years 68 28 50 and other 69 24 Community/city size: 73 24 One Million and over 500,000 to 999,999 64 30 50,000 to 499,999 70 27 2,500 to 49,999 62 33 Under 2,500 64 30 East 62 34 Midwest 70 27 South 68 26 West 70 26

Source: Gallup 1973

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No Opinion (%) 4 3 5 4 5 5 3 7 2 4 7 3 6 3 5 6 4 3 6 4 N= 1549

Figure 1: 1968 Rockefeller Campaign Ad

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