Gotham’s War within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II–Era New York City

By Emily Brooks

A surprising history unfolded in New Deal– and World War II–era New York City under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the "disorderly" establishments that officials believed housed these activities.

This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself. Emily M. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469676609

Emily Brooks

Emily Brooks is a full-time curriculum writer at the New York Public Library's Center for Educators and Schools. She received her PhD in history from the Graduate Center at the City University in New York.

Book preview

Cover: Gotham’s War within a War, Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II–Era New York City by Emily M. Brooks

Gotham’s War within a War

JUSTICE, POWER, AND POLITICS

Heather Ann Thompson and Rhonda Y. Williams, editors

Editorial Advisory Board

Dan Berger

Peniel E. Joseph

Daryl Maeda

Barbara Ransby

Vicki L. Ruiz

Marc Stein

The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about America’s past as well as to inform public discussions about its future.

A complete list of books published in Justice, Power, and Politics is available at https://uncpress.org/series/justice-power-politics.

Gotham’s War within a War

Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II–Era New York City

Emily M. Brooks

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

© 2023 Emily M. Brooks

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brooks, Emily M., author.

Title: Gotham’s war within a war : policing and the birth of law-and-order liberalism in World War II-era New York City / Emily M. Brooks.

Other titles: Policing and the birth of law-and-order liberalism in World War II- era New York City | Justice, power, and politics.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. | Series: Justice, power, and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029874 | ISBN 9781469676586 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469676593 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469676609 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: New York (N.Y.). Police Department—History. | Law enforcement—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Police-community relations—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Criminal behavior, Prediction of—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy

Classification: LCC HV8148.N5 B76 2023 | DDC 363.209747—dc23/eng/20230721

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029874

Cover photos: Top, Fiorello La Guardia saluting policemen with Harvey Gibson (Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library); bottom, police on 5th Avenue and 51st Street, ca. 1940 (unknown

[x2010.11.4741],

Museum of the City of New York).

For my father, Jeffrey P. Brooks, who was born in wartime New York City and who taught me to view the past and future with imagination and hope

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

A Political History of Policing in Pre-1930s New York City

CHAPTER TWO

The War Is On!

Policing Practice and Ideology in a Reform NYPD

CHAPTER THREE

Another Form of Sabotage

The NYPD’s Anti-prostitution Crusade

CHAPTER FOUR

Is This the Freedom We Are All Working So Hard For?

Gender, Race, and Wartime Juvenile Delinquency

CHAPTER FIVE

Gamblers Warned to Work or Fight

Policing Male Gamblers, Soldiers, and Sailors

CHAPTER SIX

They Do Not Go There to Say a Padre Nostre

Policing Nightlife in Wartime Harlem

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Gallery of Figures

Acknowledgments

I am delighted to be able to thank many institutions and people for their support over the course of this long project. The Martin E. Segal Dissertation Fellowship for the Study of the History of New York at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York provided support for me to finish the earlier draft of this project. Funding from the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College Faculty Fellowship enabled me to cut back on teaching to work on my manuscript. The National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Research in the Humanities allowed me to complete the final stages of archival research and devote extensive time to writing. Thank you to Melanie Locay for support during the fellowship. I presented parts of this book as a member of the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History Early Career Workshop and received helpful feedback. Thank you to the Journal of Urban History and Labor History for permitting the reprinting of work that originally appeared as articles in those journals. Chapter 2 is derived in part from my article Coercive Patriotism: Gender, Militarism, and Auxiliary Police in New York City during World War II, Labor History (November 23, 2022), copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ 10.1080/0023656X.2022.2147912. Chapter 5 is derived in part from the following article: ‘Rumor, Vicious Innuendo, and False Reports’: Policing Black Soldiers in Wartime Staten Island, Journal of Urban History 47, no. 5 (2020): 1032–49, copyright © 2020 (Emily Brooks), https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442199001.

I would like to thank the wonderful team at the University of North Carolina Press. I am honored to publish this book in the incomparable Justice, Power, and Politics series and extremely grateful to series editors Heather Ann Thompson and Rhonda Y. Williams for their support. My editors Brandon Proia and Dawn Durante provided invaluable guidance as I completed this manuscript. Brandon’s support carried me through particularly difficult stages of the project. He fought for my work even when he did not have to, and I will always be grateful. Dawn came on toward the end of the project but embraced it fully and helped me get through the finishing stages. Thank you to the two anonymous readers who read my early sample chapter and then the entire manuscript. Their reports were extremely generous and improved the manuscript immensely.

The labor of many archivists was essential to this project. This book could not have been written without the work of the staffs at the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library; the New York City Municipal Archives, especially Rossy Mendez; the Manuscripts and Archives Division at John Jay College Library, particularly Ellen Belcher; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, particularly Barrye Brown; the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota; the National Archives at College Park; the Center for Jewish History; and the Columbia University Center for Oral History. The Carl Van Vechten Trust generously granted me permission to reprint an image to which they hold the rights. The Women’s Prison Association graciously allowed me access to their organization’s closed case files. I have tried to treat the women’s stories that I found in those files with as much care as possible.

Many mentors, teachers, and colleagues provided insight and guidance that enriched this project. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from Khalil Gibran Muhammad, whose clarity as a scholar and a teacher is unparalleled. Joshua Freeman and Michael Rawson provided rigorous and encouraging criticism on how to connect the project to urban histories. Clarence Taylor gave invaluable comments related to histories of police brutality against Black New Yorkers. Joan Scott supported and pushed the project for years, strengthening it at every step of the way and helping me to see gender working in the processes I explored. Naomi Murakawa’s sharp insights on the history of the carceral state made the manuscript clearer and smarter, and her guidance throughout the process of writing was essential. David Nasaw has championed my work since my first day of graduate school. He enthusiastically encouraged me, while always pushing for my writing to be clearer and my research stronger. His guidance and support helped make this book a reality. I could not have asked for a better teacher, adviser, or mentor. Thank you for everything.

I would also like to thank the many colleagues and friends who provided support for me or this project over the last ten years. Thank you to Larry May and Elaine Tyler May for your encouragement. Thank you to Karen Miller for asking the smartest and most political questions when reading and for being a great dinner host. Thank you to Ann Gray Fischer for improving chapter 6 with your generous and essential insights and for your advice throughout the writing process. Thank you to Hugh Ryan for sharing your thoughts on histories of women’s imprisonment in New York and on primary sources. Matthew Guariglia exchanged ideas with me as we both completed our projects on policing in New York City, and this manuscript is stronger for it. Ean Oesterle and Katie Uva sustained me throughout this project, encouraging me and reading drafts when I felt stuck. The manuscript is smarter and clearer because of their comments. Thank you to Laura Fink for your support throughout this project. Sarah Litvin, Arinn Amer, and Jeanne Gutierrez provided invaluable feedback at our writing workshop lunch meetings. Thank you to Jessie Kindig for the witching, cocktails, and company. Kimberly Bloom-Feshbach, Joel Feingold, Ruth Baron, Erik Wallenberg, Edna Bonhomme, Jesse Zarley, Baird Campbell, Shifra Goldenberg, and Kallie Dale-Ramos provided feedback, friendship, and encouragement. Sarah Olle and Suma Chandrasekaran supported me through every crisis, every success, and every regular day. They heard more about 1930s and 1940s New York City than they probably ever wanted to.

I was extremely lucky to begin a new job at the New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools at the end of this project. I am grateful for the interest and encouragement of my new colleagues and for the ability to contribute to an essential institution that serves the public of New York City.

I would never have been able to complete this project without the support of my family. Thank you to the Zills for your encouragement of my work. Thank you, in particular, to Karen Zill for being such a loving granny and for providing essential childcare throughout the COVID-19 daycare closures. Thank you to my sister, Lizzy Brooks, for boosting me through the lows and celebrating the highs with me. Thank you to my mother, Karen Brooks, for believing in me for all these years, for showing me how to get things done, and for being Zelda’s first childcare provider. We would not have gotten through 2020 without you. My father, Jeffrey Brooks, has been my number one supporter all my life. He showed me that reading, writing, and teaching history could be meaningful, creative, and fun. This book is for him. Finally, to my z’s: Zach Zill has believed in this project since it began. Thank you for always pushing for it to be better and for always knowing I’d finish it. Zelda Brooks was born toward the end of this project. She made everything harder and so much more fun. Thank you.

Gotham’s War within a War

Introduction

I have always been in favor of strict enforcement of the morals laws. Corruption in police departments generally begins through alliances between police and morals laws violators.¹ So declared former New York City police commissioner Lewis Valentine in his 1947 autobiography. The book, introduced by the man who appointed Valentine commissioner, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and tellingly entitled Night Stick, included sensational anecdotes from the law enforcement leader’s life, as well as clear articulations of his beliefs about how policing should work and the roles that police officers should play in city life. Though Night Stick was published after Valentine’s death in 1946, its publication and positive reception reflected his prominence in discussions about policing in the United States. The book detailed his thirty-one years in the New York City Police Department before he was named police commissioner by La Guardia, his tenure as police commissioner, his subsequent period as an adviser for the popular radio show Gangbusters, and his experience overseeing the reorganization of civilian policing in U.S.-occupied Japan. The New York Times review of the book stated that though the late Commissioner Valentine has labeled it an autobiography … it is more the history of the metropolitan Police Department he did so much to revitalize during his eleven-year tenure.²

Valentine’s eleven-year stint as commissioner, from 1934 to 1945, was also the tenure of New York City’s most famous reform mayor, La Guardia, and a period of crisis and change in American governance. La Guardia came into power in 1934 on the heels of a city-hall-shattering corruption investigation that called into question many long-held truths about how the government of Gotham, as New York City was colloquially known, should run. The Tammany Democratic faction that was discredited in these investigations had controlled city politics for much of the previous eighty years. Tammany mayors relied on NYPD officers to grant favors, protect allies, punish challenges, and improve the Democratic faction’s chances at the ballot when overseeing elections. Additionally, police department appointments were granted to low-level party members, who then often extorted bribes or kickbacks from proprietors working in the underground economy, many of which then flowed upstream to powerful Tammany players.³ Energetic, progressive, and irascible, La Guardia barreled into office in 1934 with a new vision for how city government could function and the role of the police department within city life. After a brief experiment with another commissioner, he tapped Valentine to bring his vision to life. As Valentine’s statement about morals laws policing illustrates, the pair believed that police corruption and permissive approaches to crimes of vice or morality that included prostitution (as sex work was known), juvenile delinquency, gambling, and disorderly conduct were the primary problems with policing in New York. La Guardia, Valentine, and their supporters contended that these crimes

"endanger[ed]

public morality and proved a disgrace to the people of the City of New York," while also enabling police corruption through payoffs and extortion.⁴

Following their assumption of office, La Guardia and Valentine crafted a new model of liberal law-and-order policing.⁵ Rejecting the machine patronage system that their administration had replaced, the duo divorced the police department from partisan politics. Police work is now a profession, La Guardia informed NYPD members, in which officers were given a chance to do good work without political or any other kind of interference.⁶ Professional officers were expected to enforce the law aggressively and uniformly to all city residents alike—to remain unswayed by partisan allegiance or bribes. Valentine and La Guardia—or the Little Flower, as he was sometimes known, based on the English translation of his first name—also positioned the NYPD as committed to hiring officers and policing the city without regard to racial hierarchy. Valentine proclaimed to the New York Urban League, an organization devoted to Black advancement, that his office was "willing and eager to work with any groups in the community willing to assist him in recruiting

[Black]

candidates for the police force with the necessary physical and mental equipment for the work."⁷ As this quotation suggests, however, racist ideas about the capabilities of Black people and associations between criminality and Black communities structured policing under Valentine and La Guardia. The leaders interwove these racist conceptions with ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and morality and packaged them together under the concepts of order and security.

Establishing an orderly and safe city was important to the administrators for a number of different reasons, one of which involved the city government’s relationship to finance and investment. Though an avid fighter for the city’s public sphere, La Guardia had a keen awareness of the role that actual and metaphorical investment in the city from finance and business could play in its governance. On his first day in office, he set about trying to close the city’s budget deficit to restore the value of municipal bonds.⁸ For La Guardia, however, a scowling defender of the public interest, in the words of historian Mason Williams, the more important justification behind his commitment to expanding police power was the improvement he believed it would bring to the public lives of New Yorkers.⁹ To the mayor and his police commissioner, sex workers, juvenile delinquents, gamblers, and disorderly persons were impediments to equitable access to public space and public resources. What their ideology overlooked, however, was the way that these criminal categories, whose definitions were entirely reliant on social hierarchies, created their own landscape of inequality. Gotham’s War within a War tracks the emergence of this law-and-order liberalism, which was crafted in response to municipal corruption and a diversifying population and which profited greatly from the militarism and nationalism that accompanied the nation’s mobilization for World War II.

New York City’s changing racial demographics were central to the mayor and police commissioner’s view of crime and order. From 1930 to 1950 the city’s Black population more than doubled and grew from 4.7 percent to 9 percent of the city’s total population.¹⁰ These new residents came from the American South and, to a lesser extent, from the Caribbean.¹¹ The city’s Puerto Rican population had also increased during the 1920s following the severe restriction of immigration from Europe. Though migration decreased significantly during the war, about 61,500 Puerto Ricans called New York City home in 1940.¹² The city’s white officials, and many white Gothamites, viewed the new residents with extreme unease. Signs stating No Dogs, No Negroes, and No Spanish marked apartment buildings and advertised the city’s racial hierarchy.¹³

La Guardia and Valentine worked to establish their vision of order and security throughout the 1930s, but met with resistance from the city’s growing Black population, led by Black women, as well as from other criminalized groups including working-class women across races and young people. The mobilization for World War II shifted the terrain of this municipal contest; offenses previously categorized as challenges to urban order became threats to national security. During the mobilization, the prevention of Black uprisings or labor unrest and the preservation of the health and morality of enlisted white men who traveled through the city became even sharper priorities for the municipal leaders. In a landscape of an expanded and militarized state and constricted space for civil liberties, La Guardia and Valentine were able to fully realize a policing regime of municipal law-and-order liberalism that they had been pushing since 1934. As the mayor declared in the fall of 1940, he had "the heat turned on gambling and vice for some time,

[and]

this was no time to let down."¹⁴

Gotham, the duo knew, would play a central role in shipping out men and supplies were the United States to enter the conflict.¹⁵ La Guardia worried that the city’s role in transportation networks and its cultural significance would render it a possible target for air strikes or submarine attacks, despite its geographic protections and the fuel limitations of existing bombers. While such an external attack proved a slim possibility, Valentine and La Guardia knew well the internal threats that certainly lurked on the city’s streets and in its harbors, bars, and theaters. On the eve of war, they redoubled their campaigns against such evils as juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and disorderly entertainment; this time with the protection of enlisted soldiers and sailors, wartime peace in the city, and national security in mind.

The increased importance of such efforts during the war, the municipal leaders argued, required the reorganization and expansion of the NYPD’s anti-vice efforts, which now were an essential component of national security. They formed an auxiliary police force of over 7,000, raised the quotas for women in the NYPD, created a new National Defense Squad to suppress vice, organized community groups to monitor youth, and tried to prevent patrolmen from retiring during the war. The pair would also consistently link the civic sacrifices of soldiers and sailors to those of patrolmen, seeking to build connections between policing in New York City and the national war mobilization. In their efforts, Valentine and La Guardia would receive assistance from the city’s Health Department, state and federal agencies, and the military, all of whom participated in shaping the policing landscape of wartime New York City.

So-called vice or morals laws policing proved particularly reflective of political shifts like the mobilization for war. This police activity was usually driven solely by law enforcement policy and discretion, rather than initiated by a civilian complainant. The legal and policy definitions of vice crimes or offenses purported to describe behavior, but were so general that they relied heavily on police discretion and surveillance of people with criminalized identities.¹⁶ General Instructions for Plainclothesmen in the NYPD’s 1940 manual noted, Testimony given by an arresting officer that he had a female defendant under observation for ten or fifteen minutes; that during that time she covered but a short space of ground; that she spoke to or endeavored to attract the attention of several men, and that the police officer knew her to be a prostitute, will warrant a conviction.¹⁷ These directives illustrate the extent to which discretion and the perceived identities of surveilled residents influenced police behavior. Further, we can see that gender and sexuality, along with race and class, were central to how police understood and interpreted the criminal categories that La Guardia and Valentine encouraged them to enforce with new vigor. The mobilization for World War II heightened the gendered divisions of citizenship and the role of gender in policing New York City. When NYPD officers policed for juvenile delinquency, gambling, and disorderly conduct, Valentine and La Guardia directed them to similarly use visual markers of race, class, and sexuality and consider them in conjunction with the city’s geography to make judgments about criminality.

La Guardia and Valentine’s new paradigm for policing did not escape local criticism and resistance. Their tenure was, in fact, bookended by two mass uprisings in Harlem driven partly by frustration with racist policing. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women across races individually and collectively resisted the heightened surveillance and criminalization that the mayor and police commissioner sought to introduce. During these years, ending racially targeted police brutality and harassment was a central civil rights demand for both newly arrived and long-established Black New Yorkers.¹⁸ When the federal Office of Facts and Figures interviewed over 1,000 Black residents in New York about their opinions on the war and their status in American life in spring 1942, only 2 percent answered police when asked, Who would a Negro go to around here if he couldn’t get his rights? For comparison, Nobody—Cynical ‘Who, indeed?’ was the response from 4 percent of respondents.¹⁹ Women in Harlem, led by activists like novelist and reporter Ann Petry, criticized police practices that they felt labeled Black women as prostitutes and boycotted newspapers that disseminated these stereotypes. Incarcerated women petitioned city magistrates for retrials, calling their indefinite detention unjust. Young girls launched a daring nighttime escape from a Brooklyn reformatory. Burlesque performers picketed city hall after La Guardia’s commissioner of licenses shuttered their theaters. Parents complained of the treatment their children met at the hands of NYPD officers. In many of these instances of resistance, New Yorkers connected their criticism to the ongoing war being fought in the name of democracy and freedom. When faced with police repression, they asked, in the words of one Long Island father, Is this the freedom we are all working so hard for?²⁰

These protests did not fall on sympathetic ears. The city’s leadership prioritized maintaining urban order and protecting the health and security of enlisted men, particularly white enlisted men, over respecting the civil, social, and sexual liberties of New Yorkers. Furthermore, the space for criticism of NYPD policies narrowed in the wartime political landscape. Politicians at the local and national levels, as well as many New Yorkers, adopted a framework of coercive patriotism in which any challenge to state authorities or the war mobilization was selfish, dangerous, and anti-American.²¹ This perspective justified heightened surveillance and criminalization of sexually profiled women and girls, who were depicted as venereal disease carriers; led La Guardia to send letters to men deferred from military service telling them that they needed to volunteer for the city’s new auxiliary policing agency or face the possible revocation of their deferral; drove neighbors to inform on each other for supposedly inappropriate use of resources or gambling practices; and broadly led to increased surveillance and criminalization of targeted populations throughout the city.²² This book argues that La Guardia and Valentine crafted a new model of liberal law-and-order policing in New York City in the 1930s. It contends that this vision of policing thrived during the militarized moment of World War II when the space for criticism shrank and the NYPD received ideological and material support from the federal government.

New York City was not just any urban landscape. It was and remains the nation’s largest city, as well as a cultural and financial center. As the head of the recently formed U.S. Conference of Mayors for almost his entire eleven years in office, the leader of the largest city in the country, and a well-known former congressional representative with sway in Washington, La Guardia exerted influence beyond New York City’s five boroughs. Valentine was also a nationally recognized leader. His savvy awareness of the city’s racial politics and his strain of seemingly unbiased yet harsh anti-vice policing distinguished him from many of his counterparts. When the governor of Maryland wanted to integrate the Baltimore Police Department in 1938, he looked to New York.²³ Unlike the police commissioner of Detroit, Valentine was celebrated for the way the NYPD handled an uprising in Harlem in 1943, even in some of the city’s African American papers.²⁴ When General Douglas MacArthur sought a law enforcement expert to oversee the reorganization of the police force in occupied Japan, he requested Valentine by name.²⁵ By the end of the war, there was no better representative of American municipal policing than the NYPD’s Lewis Valentine, and other cities sought to follow his lead.²⁶

Gotham’s War within a War’s interrogation of mid-twentieth-century liberal policing connects and enriches three branches of the growing subfield of histories of policing in the United States. The first branch considers the role of race and gender in structuring police power. Because of the United States’ history of race-based enslavement and the racist criminalization of Black Americans that followed the abolition of slavery, racism on the part of police and resistance by Black Americans are at the center of much historiography on policing. Historians have shown that northern urban America was a generative site for this policing and resistance; Gotham proves no exception.²⁷ Scholars of African American history have explored the experiences of Black women in relation to police, and although much of the historiography on policing centers Black men, a number of historians have begun to consider how gender works with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other forms of identity to structure police power.²⁸

The second strand considers the way that the activities of the police intersect with city politics and liberal ideology.²⁹ Historians and scholars have begun to consider these interconnected themes but have not done so in La Guardia’s New York City, which was one of the most long-running and influential municipal administrations in the United States in the twentieth century. By exploring policing in mid-twentieth-century New York City, Gotham’s War within a War provides a missing link in histories of policing between studies of the late nineteenth century and Progressive Era, when police departments were small and reform generally came from outside government, and the post–World War II turn toward urban crisis and mass incarceration.

The book also enriches understandings of liberalism and urban politics by unearthing an essential, yet overlooked, component of La Guardia’s influential administration. Despite his short stature, La Guardia casts a long shadow in New York City’s history. Multiple biographers frame his life as emblematic of the city’s trajectory into the modern twentieth century.³⁰ Yet the Little Flower’s approach to policing and crime, one of the most modern and enduring aspects of his administration, has not been a focus of these works. Furthermore, Valentine, the man with whom La Guardia crafted his policing praxis and who led the NYPD for by far the longest term in the twentieth century, has merited even less discussion from scholars.³¹ Historians have missed how central police reform was to La Guardia’s larger urban vision and how formative his politics were to liberal visions of policing more broadly.

Finally, the third historiographical subfield that this book engages with is histories that explore policing from perspectives of militarism and military mobilizations. Gotham’s War within a War considers the interconnections between militarism and policing by examining how World War II changed policing in New York City. It places studies of the World War II home front in conversation with histories of policing, therefore reframing how we see the impact of the war on American society and on the trajectory of policing in the United States.³² During the war, in cities across the United States urban leaders were considering how to increase surveillance and maintain control over criminalized populations. Though the particulars varied in accordance with the city’s demographic makeup and its role in military mobilizations and wartime production, municipal administrators across the country shared common goals. From Orlando, Florida, to Long Beach, California, coalitions of city officials, military administrators, police officers, and even Immigration and Naturalization Service agents worked to control populations they viewed as threats to urban order or the wartime mobilization. Depending on the city, these threats included Black migrants, Japanese Americans, sexually profiled women, Mexican American zoot suiters and pachucas, Chinese sailors, and enlisted men on leave. As Aaron Hiltner argues, the war ushered in a wave of urban militarization that rippled through many urban systems, including policing.³³ Gotham’s War within a War shows that the wartime obsession with gendered policing explored at the federal level by women’s historians also affected municipal policing. This new history of wartime policing enriches understandings of the relationship between military mobilization and domestic policing. Though modern activists often reference the collaborative relationship between the military and domestic police departments today and scholars have highlighted how this relationship expanded after the Vietnam War, the longer histories of these intertwined branches of violent state power remain less well explored.³⁴

The chapters that follow explore how La Guardia and Valentine sought to build their liberal policing regime and how New Yorkers