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

In 1966, at the end of almost two decades of civil rights agitation, men and women of color redressed one significant historical injustice—the legislative exemption of tens of thousands of farmworkers from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which guaranteed a minimum wage and maximum hours of work for covered workers. In 1974, after almost a decade of feminist agitation, domestic workers convinced the Congress that even private household service fell within the act's minimum-wage coverage of workers engaged in interstate commerce. The two occupations in which most African Americans and a large number of other nonwhite Americans worked in 1938, and in which significant numbers remained in the 1960s and 1970s, joined the roster of jobs covered by this fundamental legislation. Coverage of the country's least powerful workers and its least valued jobs finally overturned central racial and gender inequalities encoded in the nation's basic labor standards law and awarded workers and jobs long-sought recognition and respect.