“Law and Order” is one of the most contentious – perhaps even one of the most noxious – political phrases of the last few decades. So I was stunned, when, while looking for something else in one of my late father’s stamp albums, I found it on a 6-cent stamp issued in May 1968.

The stamp has no specific connection to today. But, given that Donald Trump has actively resurrected the phrase – including declaring in his acceptance speech that “I am the law-and-order candidate” I decided to make it today’s #stampoftheday. Aiding my decision was the fact that the other choices were a stamp issued on September 8, 1938 honoring President James K. Polk or the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which was founded on September 8, 1954.

I couldn’t find anything about the backstory of why the stamp – which shows an utterly benign image of a policeman walking and talking with a small white boy – was issued. Mystic Stamp’s usually expansive website merely states: “Issued to encourage concern for order and respect for law, this stamp was designed to honor policemen as protectors and friends of the people.”

Of course, the phrase is anything but benign. Moreover, while it’s particularly associated with Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, it has deeper roots in American politics that went back well before the stamp was designed or issued. President John Adams used the phrase in the 1790s to criticize his opponents; it was a political slogan in Kentucky around 1900 after the assassination of Governor William Goebel; and it was the title of a 1919 speech that Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge gave to justify his decision to call up the National Guard to put an end to the Boston police strike. (The speech, which made Coolidge famous, led delegates to the 1920 Republican convention to make him the party’s vice-presidential nominee, which set the stage for him to become president when President Warren G. Harding died in 1923).

And between the 1930s and 1950s, Hollywood made at least four films titled “Law and Order.,” including a 1953 film starring Ronald Reagan, who, like the protagonists in all the other films played a lawman who reluctantly takes up his badge one last time to clear out the ruffians who have been terrorizing the decent folks of some western town. The phrase really began to gain political traction in 1966, when in the wake of the Watts riots and the disorders at Berkeley, Reagan revived the role of the reluctant sheriff as part of his successful campaign to be governor of California.

And in 1968, when voters saw law and order as the most important issue facing the nation, ahead even of the Vietnam War, both Nixon and George Wallace adopted it as part of their presidential campaigns. Nixon used the phrase in his August 1968 speech accepting the Republic nomination for president. As the late linguist Geoff Nunberg, noted on National Public Radio in July (a few weeks before he died), “Nixon publicly denied that the phrase was a code for racism – the very accusation implied a ‘reverse racism,’ he said, as if the critics were suggesting that ‘the Negroes’ didn’t want law and order, too. But the message was clear enough in Nixon’s references to a ‘city jungle’ that threatened to swallow the affluent suburbs. His TV ads showed a middle-aged white woman walking nervously down a city street at night, where the assailants who might be lurking in the shadows presumably weren’t hippies or demonstrators.”

Nunberg continued that given that most Americans had repudiated explicit racism by the late 1960s, “crude appeals to bias had to be replaced by phrases that obliquely brought racial images to mind. People often describe these phrases as racial dog whistles, which send a signal that’s only audible to one part of the audience. But their racial connections are usually pretty obvious to everyone. You don’t need a Captain Midnight decoder ring to know that ‘welfare queens’ or ‘inner-city culture’ are references to minorities, no more than to know that ‘Park Avenue’ is a reference to the rich.”

Nunberg concluded that “Trump’s single-handed effort to revive the slogan ‘law and order’ is the key to creating the perception of a new crisis of crime and violence; it weaves together assaults by those he calls radical Islamic terrorists, inner-city thugs and illegals. The racial overtones of the phrase are even harder to deny now than they were in the Nixon years, when white radicals and students were part of the mix. But deniability isn’t as important as it used to be; in the new rhetorical climate, these phrases are mostly designed to troll the other side for its political correctness.”

So the question is whether the phrase is still as resonant as it once was or if it’s gone the way of other seemingly benign phrases that masked deeper racist agendas, like “state’s rights.” As Nunberg noted, “‘law and order’ itself sounds a little creaky now. It doesn’t have the mythical resonances it did 50 years ago. When Trump uses it, it makes people think of Richard Nixon; when Nixon used it, it made them think of Wyatt Earp. But they’re not making those movies anymore.” The question is: do enough people – especially older white voters – still remember and revere that old movie trope?

And another question remains: why exactly did the Post Office issue a stamp with such a loaded phrase?

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.