The phrase “law and order” (“lex et ordo” in the Latin) dates back to somewhere around the late 16th century, when modern states began to emerge. For at least two centuries after that, the words seem to have evoked only a vague sense that society should operate in an orderly and reasonable fashion. In the United States, a wide range of groups, from Whig Party offshoots to late-19th-century temperance leagues, claimed the slogan to various ends. Opponents of lynching put their own social-justice spin on the term, arguing that tolerance of mob action and gruesome violence against African-Americans constituted “a sinister menace to all forces of law and order,” in the words of one early-20th-century Southern activist.

The 1920 election produced the nation’s first modern “law and order” presidential candidate in the form of the Massachusetts governor, Calvin Coolidge. Making a long-shot bid for the Republican nomination, Coolidge ran on his opposition to the Boston Police strike, a position that made him “the protagonist of the cause of the supremacy of law and order,” in the words of the former president William Howard Taft. At the Republican convention, Representative Frederick H. Gillett entered Coolidge’s name into contention with the decidedly Trumpian promise to “reinvigorate the homely, orderly virtues which have made America great.” Though Coolidge lost that bid (he joined the ticket as Warren Harding’s vice-presidential candidate), his campaign offered a glimpse of a future in which “law and order” would be about suppressing social rebellion as well as controlling crime.

Thanks partly to Coolidge’s inspiration, the 1920s unfolded as the nation’s first “law and order” decade. “Popular demand is being heard everywhere for candidates pledged to this paramount issue,” The Christian Science Monitor noted in 1922. Behind this embrace of the term were some of the same worries that would resurface in the 1960s, including a perception of sharply rising crime. Far from bringing a triumph of “law and order” as the temperance movement had hoped, Prohibition helped create a major crime wave, as organized syndicates grew fat on bootlegging and smuggling and gained footholds in major cities.

When Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, he oversaw the repeal of Prohibition and called for a “war on crime” to wipe the slate clean. “I want the backing of every man, every woman and every adolescent child in every state of the United States and in every county of every state; their backing for what you and the officers of law and order are trying to accomplish,” he declared to attendees at a crime conference in 1934.