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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Illiteracy Podcast.

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I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, a national free market think tank.

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This is episode 129 of the podcast.

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Oh, my God, 129.

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And the first podcast of 2024, bringing in the new year here.

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But so...

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Not a new podcast anymore, as you've noticed, by 129 episodes.

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But if you're just tuning in for the first time, basically what we do here on the podcast is I invite an author on to discuss a book of theirs that's been newly published or recently published on an issue or a person or a thing we think you guys would find interesting.

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And then hopefully at the end of the podcast or even in the middle of the podcast, if you get your druthers about you, you go ahead and purchase the book yourself and give it a read.

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So if you like this podcast, please consider giving Illiteracy a five-star review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show.

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And also by sharing with your friends as that's the best way to support programming like this.

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And my guest today is Dr. David Baito.

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And Dr. Baito is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and our good friends at the Independent Institute and a professor emeritus at the University of Alabama.

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You might have seen his work in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, National Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner, as well as in scholarly journals like the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of Urban History, among many others.

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He is also the author of From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890 to 1967.

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And that's a book that belongs on the shelf of

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any serious student conservative student of history and he's also the author of taxpayers in revolt tax resistance during the great depression and trm howard doctor entrepreneur civil rights pioneer and lastly he is also the author of the new deals war on the bill of rights

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The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship and Mass Surveillance, which was published back in October by the Independent Institute and is the book we will be discussing today.

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So, Dr. Bido, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

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I appreciate it.

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Thank you so much for asking me.

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Oh, no problem.

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So I guess first question.

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What made you want to write this book and what was what was the genesis of it?

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Well, I'd nibbled around the edges.

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I'd done a lot of research on the 1930s and other contexts, and I'd read a lot about FDR.

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I've always been interested in the history of the presidency.

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And I kept running across all of these topics on FDR's dark side, I guess you could say, his civil liberties record.

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that were not being discussed or that would be just sort of asides.

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Certainly people are well aware of the Japanese internment, although there's more to that story, I think, than people are aware of.

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But I kept seeing all these things.

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As I read about FDR as president, I kept coming across evidence that

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He was really a fairly jaded, fairly cynical fellow.

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And if he had political enemies, he was willing to use kind of any means to discredit them.

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But at the same time, FDR was a very charming man.

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And, uh, uh, that comes through in his radio broadcasts.

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It came through in a lot of his personal meetings, but there was this other side to him, more of a cynical, sadistic side, but also one that was very ruthless in dealing with political dissent.

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And I said, look, you know, let's look more into this.

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And I found there's a rich story there of, of, uh,

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of all sorts of things involving the Bill of Rights, violations of the Bill of Rights during both the New Deal period and World War II period.

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Right.

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So you could say I'm sure that his ruthlessness was part of the reason he was so monumentally successful as a politician.

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I mean, it's not a great thing, but it's also something which led to his, at least in electoral terms, the most successful politician in American history.

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I think that that's often true, but it's not always true.

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A very good example of this was their

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there was these two newspaper publishers, the Pattersons.

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One of them was Sissy Patterson, who ran the Washington Times-Herald, and then their brother, Joseph, who ran the New York Daily News.

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And they were two of the biggest publishers in the country.

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They'd been important FDR allies during the 1930s.

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And they were cousins with McCormick.

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Yeah, they were cousins of McCormick.

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But McCormick was much more conservative, had some libertarian tendencies.

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They were New Deal people.

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But they broke with the president over foreign policy in 1941 over Lend-Lease.

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And they became very strong opponents because they were principled, you know, non-interventionists.

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And once Pearl Harbor happened, they both went to FDR sort of hat in hand and said, we'll do whatever you want, please let us know.

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And FDR just blew them off and was like, you guys, you know, you need to look at your record, you had this terrible record and

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Tell sissy to behave.

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This is a woman that had been a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt that had come to the White House that had supported the president.

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And someone said, look, he could have had these two very powerful newspaper publishers on his side if he just extended an olive branch.

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So I think you could make an argument that sometimes this desire for revenge gets to him.

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It's like a little like Trump in that sense, I guess you could say.

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that maybe it's better just to pull back a little bit here at times.

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All right.

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So before we get to his presidency, why don't you talk a little bit about Roosevelt's intellectual roots and the intellectual roots of the New Deal, or at least his, which generally spring from Wilson and the New Freedom and his cousin, Teddy Roosevelt's, the New Nationalism.

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Yeah, I think you summed it up pretty well.

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He's born in the 1880s to privilege, and this is a time when progressive ideas, intellectual ideas, are really starting to percolate in universities, in the church, social gospel movement, Americans going to Germany to study.

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Those ideas are starting to percolate.

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So as he grew to adulthood, those ideas are starting to really become quite prominent.

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And he's a Democrat, but, you know, that branch of the family were Democrats, but that didn't really mean anything.

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Because when Teddy Roosevelt becomes president, who is a distant cousin of Theodore, or I mean of Franklin, Franklin is a very strong supporter of Teddy.

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In fact, he becomes kind of the head of the young Republicans at Harvard for a while.

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And so he looks up to his cousin, Teddy, who he called Uncle Ted, even though he was a very distant cousin, became an uncle in one sense because Eleanor Roosevelt was, in fact, Teddy Roosevelt's niece.

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Teddy gave away Eleanor at the wedding.

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So he looked to him, and then he also looked to Woodrow Wilson.

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He was an early Wilson supporter, and he ended up becoming Secretary of Navy in the Wilson administration.

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Now, one idea that he gets from progressivism, and there's a civil libertarian strain in some progressivism.

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He did not pick up on that.

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But he picked up on the idea of, look, you've got an important goal for the good of the nation, and the means to achieve that goal are less important than the goal itself, meaning don't worry about things like constitutional niceties and that kind of thing.

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Just get that goal because you've got to search out for social justice.

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Yeah, you have a great quote in the book from Robert Jackson, who was –

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one of FDR's attorneys general.

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And the quote was, uh, because he meaning FDR, uh, thought that his motives were always good for the things he wanted to do.

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He found difficulty in thinking there could be legal limitations on them.

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He was not a legalistic minded person.

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Yeah.

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So, so like you said, that's exactly true.

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And his other attorney general,

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I guess his successor to Jackson was Francis Biddle.

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And Biddle says much the same thing about him.

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And Biddle was very reluctant to go along with some of FDR's plans, such as his push for Japanese internment.

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But it's interesting that he dedicated his book to Roosevelt.

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So a lot of people are willing to overlook that aspect of President Roosevelt.

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Mm-hmm.

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right so before we get to his presidency uh why don't you talk a little bit about the what's i guess called the newport sex scandal and uh what does this episode uh sort of show us about fdr's approach to problems or or sort of pre-stage what he's going to do uh once he becomes president yeah this is not well known um it's starting to get more attention but

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When FDR was assistant secretary of Navy, he was appointed by the secretary of Navy in the Wilson administration to head a so-called sex squad, Newport sex squad.

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And they were going to investigate allegations of homosexuality in the Navy, you know, specifically centered there on the port at Newport.

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And so, you know, he did this investigation and he had, oh, I don't know, a couple dozen

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investigators, and they would use methods of entrapment, of intimidation.

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People were arrested and held without charges for long periods of time.

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And it was over the top.

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Now, the goal was to find, ferret out homosexuality in the Navy.

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And of course, you know, that was a different time and that was the priority.

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Having said that, even though I think many people would have agreed with that priority, it was so over the top in terms of the methods that there was a congressional investigation of the Newport Sex Squad and Franklin was condemned.

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He was, people gave up on his political career.

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They said, he's the man responsible.

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He's the one that ran the whole show.

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Under this idea, we got a goal, ferreting out homosexuality for the good of the Navy, and we're going to use any method.

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But he was condemned.

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And a lot of people thought his career was over with.

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And interestingly enough, only about three weeks after

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the Senate issued a very harsh report condemning Roosevelt.

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He had his bout with polio beginning.

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And he's able to eventually rebuild his career after that.

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So there may have been, it's an interesting question as to whether that actually helped his career in the end, because he was very

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you know, very committed.

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And it was a very inspiring story of his overcoming this paralysis.

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But that really all began just, you know, a couple of weeks after a lot of people had written him off politically.

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Okay.

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So let's move now to his presidency itself, at least pre-World War II here.

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And

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The Black Committee, or the Black Inquisition Committee, chaired by Senator Hugo Black, who would later go on to become a justice, or would be appointed by Roosevelt to the Supreme Court.

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Yeah, so talk a little bit about that.

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Who was Hugo Black?

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What was the stated purpose of the Black Committee?

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And what did it actually do?

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Well, Hugo Black was a senator from Alabama, where I'm from, and he was a very, I guess you'd say kind of a populist.

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He was a big New Dealer.

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If you listen to his speeches, and there aren't many of them surviving from that period, they're like, whoa, this is like Huey Long or something.

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It's really over-the-top rhetoric.

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you know, very sort of energetic.

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But anyway, he was loyal to Roosevelt and they all knew it.

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And he was effective.

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He was called the president's chief ferret by some.

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And so they, they,

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By 1934, 35, there was more and more opposition to the New Deal because the economy wasn't doing as well as a lot of people hoped.

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FDR was falling in the polls.

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They were very worried.

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There was more and more opposition.

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And so as a result of that, Roosevelt got his advisors together and they basically agreed, we got to discredit this opposition.

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We got to investigate it.

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We got to discredit it.

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We got to find where its money's coming from, you know, pull them in and investigate them.

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And so they decided that Black was their guy.

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And he was made head of a committee to investigate lobbying.

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And how did they define lobby?

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Lobbying would be,

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Basically what we're doing, right?

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Any attempt to influence the ideological environment in terms of policy, even in not in terms of policy,

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directly, would be considered lobbying.

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So it was about as broad a definition you can get.

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So they started to do this.

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Now, at first, they got a lot of pushback because a lot of people said, well, who do you think you are?

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You know, called them in, people would fight back.

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But then Black had a really smart idea.

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I don't know if it was his idea, but he came up with it.

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Someone suggested it or whatever.

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He said, look, what if I can get

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the private communications of these witnesses before they testify, what was the most private form of communication during this period?

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I mean, in terms of

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I guess you could say people writing letters about policy and things.

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It was telegrams probably.

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And that was the email of its time.

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It really was.

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It was instantaneous or close to it.

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It was almost like the texting of its time.

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It really was.

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And you had a lot of companies that would add telegraphers there on sites.

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And people would let down their hair and they would say things they wouldn't say normally like email.

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Right.

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And it was over, like I said, over 50 percent of long distance communication.

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So it was tremendously important.

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And it operated a lot like email.

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Well, anyway, there was a law that required the telegraph companies, the big one was Western Union, but there were others, but that was the big one, to keep copies of all telegrams for a certain period of time.

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And sometimes these were subpoenaed in particular cases on an individual basis.

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But Black wanted, he wanted tons of them.

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So he went to the telegraph companies and he said, for example, is what he wanted.

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Went to the U.S.

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Union and said, I want all incoming and outgoing communication telegraphs, telegrams from Washington to and from every member of Congress.

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And then he had a list of other people.

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And what did Western Union say?

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We're not doing that.

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You know, we'll be discredited with our customers.

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So he found out about this rule, went to the FCC and the FDR went to the FCC and told them you cooperate with black and they went along with it.

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Um, and so for a nine month period, he got telegrams, uh,

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You know, millions of them, literally.

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And he went through something like 10,000 a day.

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And he told his staffers, FCC and committee staffers, well, if you see private things, you know, look past them.

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But look for things about lobbying, right?

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So they take notes, they copy them and that kind of thing.

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And they literally went through something like 3 million because they just every day for months, they were just looking through these communications.

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And then they call in the witnesses and say, hey, on June 8th, you said this.

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What?

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You know, people would be blindsided.

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So it was a very effective way to go on the offensive.

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But there was massive pushback against it, too.

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That's part of the story I tell as well.

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Yeah, you mentioned in the book that we say that the committee, excuse me, the committee monitored private communications on a scale previously unrivaled in U.S.

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history, at least in peacetime.

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So this was, as Joe Biden would say, you know, a big effing deal.

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Talk a little bit about that pushback.

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Who were the people that pushed back on this?

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It's not a...

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straight sort of partisan divide here.

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You mentioned in the book how the civil liberties concerns during this period start to form sort of like a cross-ideological coalition from both the left and both the right to protect civil liberties and the Bill of Rights.

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Yeah.

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Well, what happened was various things, but Western Union started, they didn't like doing this, right?

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And they started to let people know whose communications were being monitored in this way, because a lot of them didn't even know.

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Right.

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So they started to let them know.

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And one guy that found out was named Newton Baker, a Democrat, a New Dealer, not a very radical one, but a supporter of the president.

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He'd been secretary of war under Wilson.

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And he was so mad when he found out that he said, you know, this is a mild-mannered guy.

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He said, I would not participate in a lynching party

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for Senator Hugo Black.

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However, if I saw someone stringing a rope over him, I would not stop them.

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And that's the kind of thing you've got.

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You had New Deal figures like Manuel Seller.

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When I was young, he was a kind of democratic old horse from New York, old war horse.

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And Seller, I think at one point compared

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this to the tactics of Mussolini.

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So you get newspapers like the Washington Post condemning this.

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You get groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.

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You get a lot of people on the left saying this is out of line.

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And there is a successful court suit that provides a precedent that is a rare victory for someone against Congress.

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Congress has wide discretion.

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in investigation, still does, but the court basically said you've gone too far.

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This is a violation of privacy under the Bill of Rights.

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In fact, they use the term privacy, search and seizure and so forth.

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It's going beyond the bounds of the restrictions imposed by the Bill of Rights.

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And there is a court precedent.

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It doesn't go to the Supreme Court because what the committee does is Black is like stunned by it.

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He didn't expect this.

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He says, well, we're done with our investigation.

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We don't really need to do more.

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And the court basically says-

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We can't do much more than that.

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We're finished with it.

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They're finished.

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We can't really do anything more than this.

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So it is a precedent, though, and it may have stopped future congressional committees from doing the same kind of thing later.

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Now, imagine if the McCarthy committee had had the ability to not only look at telegrams, but monitor phone calls, which is really same principle, really.

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Sure.

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They didn't have that power.

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So I think it was a break on what future investigations could do.

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So did Black change his position at all on surveillance once he got onto the Supreme Court?

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Yes, he did.

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And he didn't exactly admit it, but he kind of did.

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He got on the court, and Black was... I think you could overrate his civil libertarianism, but on some issues, he became something of a civil libertarian, along with...

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William O. Douglas in the late 40s and the 50s.

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And there was a similar congressional committee that I discussed called the Buchanan Committee, which was at the same time as the McCarthy Committee.

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And they are not looking at telegrams, but they're trying to get membership lists of organizations.

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And basically, the Supreme Court says you don't do that.

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And Black and what's his name?

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Douglas are especially strong in saying this is surveillance.

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This is totalitarian.

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And so they end up, he ends up becoming something of a, you know, someone said that he would have only contempt for

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You know, if he could go back in a time machine and saw the tactics of his role when he was senator, only contempt for that person and what he was doing.

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because he essentially rules against later congressional committees that are doing things that really aren't quite as bad, you know, as the black committee.

23:12.090 --> 23:12.311
Sure.

23:12.951 --> 23:13.972
So people can change.

23:14.012 --> 23:16.874
And this is an interesting story here that I've seen several times.

23:18.175 --> 23:18.376
Yeah.

23:18.516 --> 23:18.796
All right.

23:18.896 --> 23:25.501
So from one committee to the other, let's shift on the black committee to the Minton committee.

23:26.102 --> 23:29.925
So once again, same sort of question, who was Sherman Minton?

23:30.840 --> 23:35.524
What was the purpose of the Minton Committee and what did it actually do and what was FDR's role?

23:36.364 --> 23:43.430
Well, if you're looking for bad things about FDR's civil liberties record, it's almost an embarrassment of riches because it's one thing after another.

23:43.510 --> 23:45.191
Black is promoted to the Supreme Court.

23:45.311 --> 23:45.631
Why?

23:45.651 --> 23:49.314
Well, FDR knew about it.

23:49.554 --> 23:54.738
The rumors were out there and FDR had a good reason to know about, I think he did know about his Klan background.

23:56.539 --> 23:59.862
But that came out officially after he was on the court.

24:00.855 --> 24:02.696
And he stays on the court.

24:02.776 --> 24:03.936
He's able to stay on the court.

24:04.416 --> 24:05.576
But why was he on the court?

24:05.796 --> 24:09.397
He was on the court because he'd been very effective as the head of the Black Committee.

24:09.638 --> 24:10.718
That was his reward.

24:11.318 --> 24:21.101
The guy, though, that Roosevelt had asked first to be on the Supreme Court for the seat taken by Black was Sherman Minton, who was a young, ambitious senator from Indiana.

24:21.721 --> 24:23.321
Minton is an ally of Black.

24:23.341 --> 24:25.702
If anything, more loyal to the administration.

24:26.829 --> 24:32.374
And he becomes head of this committee that Black had to give up, the lobbying committee.

24:32.394 --> 24:33.855
It's called the Minton Committee now.

24:34.916 --> 24:41.302
And they can't go at the private telegrams that they try to investigate anti-New Deal organizations.

24:42.023 --> 24:47.465
And one of the things they do, they do this early on, is they ask for membership lists.

24:48.325 --> 24:50.566
No, they ask for contribution lists.

24:51.527 --> 24:55.508
And for these organizations, one guy just says, I'm not going along with you.

24:56.228 --> 24:59.890
And he basically says, you throw me in jail for contempt if you want.

25:00.070 --> 25:02.951
I'm not giving our contribution list.

25:03.391 --> 25:08.313
And they decide probably better not to prosecute him because it's not going to look good.

25:09.646 --> 25:24.317
Mint, though, is best known for proposing a bill that would have punished any news article known to be untrue or false.

25:24.537 --> 25:26.239
Fake news.

25:26.439 --> 25:27.880
This is not new.

25:27.920 --> 25:28.520
Make it a felony.

25:33.334 --> 25:42.422
is there is universal opposition on both the left and the right, and he just has to slink away and pull his bill out or withdraw his bill.

25:42.883 --> 25:45.545
And that would not happen now, I don't think.

25:46.026 --> 25:50.250
But it is an attempt, and Roosevelt agreed, I think, with this.

25:50.930 --> 25:54.914
I don't have the total smoking gun, but I think Roosevelt put him up to it.

25:55.714 --> 25:58.716
You think he said he used it as a trial of fake news.

25:58.756 --> 26:00.297
We got to get rid of fake news.

26:00.817 --> 26:00.957
Yeah.

26:01.157 --> 26:01.357
Yeah.

26:01.397 --> 26:13.024
You, you said, you said in the book, you think he probably used it as he was famous for doing a sort of floating it as a trial balloon, just to see what the reaction to it would be.

26:13.564 --> 26:15.085
Roosevelt's different than Trump.

26:15.585 --> 26:16.966
Trump will just blurt it out.

26:17.106 --> 26:17.926
That's his weakness.

26:18.527 --> 26:20.808
He wants to do something and he'll say it.

26:21.528 --> 26:22.449
And Roosevelt said,

26:23.089 --> 26:24.490
will flow trial balloons.

26:24.530 --> 26:25.751
He'll put people up to it.

26:26.191 --> 26:28.673
He'll pull back if the reaction is not good.

26:30.475 --> 26:32.316
He's very good at that kind of thing.

26:34.278 --> 26:36.980
Oh, somebody called himself the juggler at one time.

26:37.200 --> 26:38.641
You know, you just can't see what I'm doing.

26:38.681 --> 26:42.304
I got this in one hand and this in one hand.

26:42.444 --> 26:48.168
It's an art form to Franklin Roosevelt to manipulate things behind the scenes.

26:48.268 --> 26:49.289
He's very good at it.

26:51.552 --> 26:53.633
OK, let's shift gears again.

26:54.153 --> 27:02.457
This section of the book I thought was very, very interesting just because I literally knew nothing about it really before going into this.

27:02.577 --> 27:19.564
And that was the discussion of radio and the sort of the regulation of radio by the government and the how Roosevelt and the FCC, you know, for lack of a better term,

27:20.659 --> 27:25.163
went after, you know, rogue broadcasters.

27:25.203 --> 27:35.092
But so before we get to that, what does the regulation of the radio waves look like in its really early days?

27:35.412 --> 27:39.295
And how did it change leading up to the New Deal?

27:40.256 --> 27:41.597
Well, these are very good questions.

27:41.738 --> 27:47.923
I wanted to look at Roosevelt and radio, but then I just look, I have to go back further.

27:48.444 --> 27:53.987
And I have to look at the origins of the Federal Communications Commission, which were under Coolidge, 1927.

27:55.548 --> 27:58.290
And what happened here, right?

27:58.670 --> 28:06.174
Because this is later used quite effectively by Roosevelt when it becomes the Federal Communications Commission, same thing.

28:07.432 --> 28:13.337
And what I found was in the early 1920s, radio was arguably freer than the print press.

28:13.757 --> 28:15.858
There was no equal time law.

28:17.019 --> 28:18.260
There was no FCC.

28:18.861 --> 28:20.462
There was the Department of Commerce.

28:20.522 --> 28:35.033
And what you would do is essentially you'd start broadcasting and you'd register your station and they would assign you a wavelength and they'd protect it from interference.

28:36.197 --> 28:37.770
And there was no...

28:38.975 --> 28:42.937
There were no controls, particularly.

28:43.397 --> 28:47.479
And so there were stations that catered to socialists.

28:47.559 --> 28:49.960
There were these rogue broadcasters you mentioned.

28:49.980 --> 28:51.381
These are these small fry.

28:51.401 --> 28:54.942
They had this agenda, small business, sometimes big business.

28:56.083 --> 28:57.704
You had labor unions.

28:58.164 --> 28:59.144
You had churches.

28:59.585 --> 29:05.387
And so you had a wide variety of... I guess you'd call it market segmentation.

29:05.567 --> 29:06.528
And stations were...

29:07.208 --> 29:08.530
coming up all over the place.

29:09.171 --> 29:14.017
And you had a fairly stable system where you had protections against interference.

29:14.658 --> 29:18.864
But Herbert Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce, did not like this.

29:19.164 --> 29:23.189
He wanted, in effect, nationalization of the airwaves.

29:23.229 --> 29:24.511
He wanted to monitor what

29:25.231 --> 29:26.332
stations were doing.

29:27.493 --> 29:30.295
He didn't like this market segmentation.

29:30.615 --> 29:36.900
So he just sort of created chaos by basically refusing to support these rules.

29:37.241 --> 29:42.685
And it created a demand, which ultimately led to the FCC, although there's more to that story.

29:42.705 --> 29:44.767
But the FCC comes along.

29:44.927 --> 29:49.270
And what they do is they basically shut down a lot of stations.

29:49.831 --> 29:51.372
They allocate the airwaves.

29:51.912 --> 29:52.012
And

29:52.913 --> 30:04.261
Eventually, you get a situation where they've got I think it's I think it gets down to something like six month renewal periods where you're constantly having to worry about renewal.

30:04.281 --> 30:08.104
And is the FCC going to shut them down?

30:08.184 --> 30:09.365
And people are intimidated.

30:10.185 --> 30:12.247
And as a result of that.

30:13.103 --> 30:17.990
When Roosevelt comes along using radio very effectively, it is in his hip pocket.

30:18.691 --> 30:20.413
It supports the New Deal 100%, almost, where

30:23.632 --> 30:26.734
Print press is mostly anti-Roosevelt.

30:27.394 --> 30:35.698
So radio is his ace in the hole, and that is important because radio is becoming the main source for news by the 1930s.

30:35.798 --> 30:43.161
In early 40s, I think it becomes the main source, but it's rapidly overtaking the print press.

30:43.482 --> 30:46.503
But it is totally pro-New Deal.

30:46.963 --> 30:48.364
So it's a big contrast there.

30:48.683 --> 31:01.536
Yeah, there's this fear of retaliation by the FCC for, as you said, even the slightest, slimmest critique of either the New Deal itself or FDR or his administration.

31:01.736 --> 31:08.242
Like you said, they have these six-month leases, whatever, and there's this fear that they're just going to

31:10.037 --> 31:12.259
not renew it or just, you know, yank the station off the air.

31:12.719 --> 31:12.979
Yeah.

31:13.179 --> 31:15.081
And if you want to fight that, it's difficult.

31:15.381 --> 31:17.563
Let's say you're a rural station somewhere in Utah.

31:17.583 --> 31:20.325
What are you going to send lawyers to Washington?

31:20.485 --> 31:21.566
I mean, that's where you got to go.

31:21.866 --> 31:35.696
So it's, it's, it's, that's not the only kind of censorship that's going on, but it's part of a web of censorship that, that again, FTR, the federal government have at their disposal.

31:36.263 --> 31:37.084
Yeah.

31:37.765 --> 31:38.926
Actually, I talked a little bit about that.

31:39.086 --> 31:49.657
The NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters, they have this quote-unquote voluntary code for those people listening out there and making air quotes around voluntary code.

31:49.697 --> 31:55.543
So what was the purpose of this code and who fought against it and what were its implications?

31:56.063 --> 31:57.465
Well, a key part of this was

31:58.157 --> 32:00.919
The networks are very cooperative with the administration.

32:00.959 --> 32:06.962
They say, basically, anytime you want to give a speech, they're going to the president constantly and saying, is this all right?

32:07.022 --> 32:07.883
Is this all right?

32:08.563 --> 32:11.345
So he's got the networks kind of under control.

32:11.385 --> 32:13.466
And they're the main airtime.

32:13.506 --> 32:15.287
But there are a lot of independent stations.

32:15.887 --> 32:19.169
And there's a guy named Father Coughlin, who's kind of this right wing person.

32:23.872 --> 32:46.905
know uh whatever you want to call him i don't know if you call him an evangelist but it's kind of a demagogue and he purchases his own time and he gets it from all these independent stations and there are a lot of complaints about him because there's things like you know um uh more and more evidence of anti-semitism and all this so a lot of these stations are very paranoid about this

32:47.489 --> 32:52.992
And they set up a, the broadcasting industry says to the FCC, what do we do?

32:53.192 --> 32:59.935
And, you know, and they finally just set up this code that basically forces Coughlin off the air.

33:00.015 --> 33:05.278
One of the things they decide is, well, you can't purchase time anymore.

33:05.718 --> 33:15.463
If you've got a political agenda, you can't have your own show, you know, to promote a political agenda because then you've got to provide equal time.

33:15.944 --> 33:16.624
And in effect,

33:17.981 --> 33:20.142
You know, that's not the only thing.

33:20.162 --> 33:23.543
You essentially can't buy time for that.

33:23.863 --> 33:27.284
And then if you somehow get on the air, you've got to provide equal time.

33:27.584 --> 33:34.286
So they use that quite effectively against Coughlin, but it ends up getting used against all sorts of people, including labor unions.

33:34.946 --> 33:36.867
And so that's one thing that happens.

33:37.307 --> 33:46.450
So where the independent stations are often have more anti-New Deal voices, the networks know that.

33:48.327 --> 34:01.357
They are increasingly fearful and afraid of having political diversity more and more so over time.

34:02.798 --> 34:08.483
And so this code has the effect of it's got the endorsement of the FCC.

34:08.543 --> 34:11.746
They go to the FCC and say, do you approve?

34:11.786 --> 34:12.646
They approve of it.

34:13.067 --> 34:16.109
So it's a private regulation, but they're working with the FCC.

34:17.510 --> 34:21.752
And there's a lot of overlap in what the FCC is trying to do in the NAB.

34:21.772 --> 34:22.752
And they're working together.

34:23.712 --> 34:25.633
But partly because it's just uncertainty.

34:25.853 --> 34:29.735
And the people set it up to say, we got to eliminate this uncertainty.

34:29.815 --> 34:32.256
So they create this code, this very elaborate code.

34:32.276 --> 34:34.917
And the FCC essentially says, yeah, that's great.

34:35.277 --> 34:35.997
You know, we're for it.

34:36.017 --> 34:36.557
Yeah.

34:36.577 --> 34:38.578
All right.

34:39.438 --> 34:44.140
Another chapter that I thought was really, really interesting, again, because it was all...

34:44.659 --> 35:12.289
know pretty much completely new to me was the the chapter on memphis and the democratic uh the the machine boss there guy named edward crump um and crump was basically used his machine uh his democratic machine to effectively you know just trample all over the the civil rights of black memphians and specifically republican

35:12.970 --> 35:14.511
uh, black Republican Memphians.

35:14.791 --> 35:40.162
And, uh, so talk a little about that and, uh, I guess FDR's willingness to put the new deal regulatory and welfare, uh, welfare state apparatus, uh, into the service of these, these big city machine bosses, like, like Crump or Frank Hague in Jersey city, who you also write about, uh, in the book.

35:41.092 --> 35:50.396
Yeah, there are these, and some people have written about them, but, you know, I think I really explore this with reference to civil liberties.

35:50.577 --> 35:54.258
FDR is a very close alliance with city Democratic bosses.

35:55.259 --> 36:00.141
And one of the closest allies is with Boss Crump.

36:00.761 --> 36:08.205
And call him Boss Crump because he is mayor for a brief time, but he most of the period doesn't even hold office, but he runs Memphis.

36:08.245 --> 36:10.086
He has the Democratic machine.

36:11.145 --> 36:14.226
And Crump was an early Roosevelt guy.

36:14.326 --> 36:19.168
He supported Roosevelt in 1931 when they were talking about who to run.

36:20.008 --> 36:22.509
And so Roosevelt appreciates that.

36:22.990 --> 36:26.111
And then every election time, Crump is very reliable.

36:26.131 --> 36:30.092
If FDR needs anything, he backs him.

36:30.572 --> 36:32.073
He backs him at the convention.

36:32.486 --> 36:37.936
He certainly backs him in Memphis and makes sure that Roosevelt piles up a good vote there.

36:38.016 --> 36:39.779
Memphis had gone Republican in the 1920s.

36:42.098 --> 36:44.980
So, Trump is a key ally.

36:45.480 --> 36:52.466
As a result of this, Trump gets all kinds of federal money from the WPA, public works money.

36:53.087 --> 36:57.370
Constantly, he's building things funded by the New Deal.

36:57.970 --> 37:03.695
And it's like, where does the Democratic Party begin and where does the federal government end?

37:04.236 --> 37:10.741
Because people that work for federal agencies are often in the Democratic Party and they're serving

37:11.061 --> 37:16.426
And the message is communicated to these workers, you vote Democrat or else.

37:16.986 --> 37:17.727
Very blatant.

37:17.847 --> 37:19.768
Crump is very blatant about this.

37:20.409 --> 37:24.192
Well, Crump had been willing to tolerate Black voting.

37:24.412 --> 37:26.674
So Memphis is an exception.

37:27.415 --> 37:33.660
Blacks had voted there in the 1930s and earlier in big numbers, and they voted Republican.

37:34.352 --> 37:35.793
And Crump had to deal with them.

37:35.993 --> 37:39.156
It's like, when I need you, you'll support me.

37:39.416 --> 37:44.159
And when I need patronage from Republican presidents, you'll help me get money.

37:45.160 --> 37:45.580
Good deal.

37:46.081 --> 37:51.285
Well, Roosevelt comes along and they don't need the patronage anymore because he's funneling Democratic money in there.

37:51.805 --> 37:56.228
And gradually, Crump says, I don't need these Black voters anymore.

37:56.268 --> 37:57.850
And he increasingly sidelines them.

37:58.817 --> 38:00.498
But they're still voting for a while.

38:00.839 --> 38:02.680
And there's this black leader named J.B.

38:02.720 --> 38:04.462
Martin, black Republican.

38:04.502 --> 38:08.946
He's head of the Republican Party in Shelby County, Memphis.

38:09.866 --> 38:15.651
And he decides, I'm going to carry this state for Wilkie, the Republican in 1940.

38:15.771 --> 38:18.173
And I'm going to win Memphis.

38:18.794 --> 38:21.616
And if he had, Wilkie was very pro-civil rights.

38:21.676 --> 38:22.377
It would have meant

38:23.274 --> 38:25.936
you know, protection, federal protection.

38:26.316 --> 38:36.063
So he organizes an interracial rally in Memphis of over a thousand people, including the wife of the white Republican candidate.

38:37.003 --> 38:41.827
And they're, you know, it's looking like, yeah, maybe we could take the state.

38:42.007 --> 38:42.547
Who knows?

38:42.607 --> 38:43.348
It happened before.

38:44.346 --> 38:50.250
And then Crump is just upset because he thought this guy, you know, I worked with him in the past.

38:50.290 --> 38:55.253
Now he's bucking me and he sends a message through others to, um,

38:57.230 --> 38:57.830
To Martin.

38:58.270 --> 38:59.931
And Martin is a black leader.

38:59.951 --> 39:01.832
He's the head of the Negro Baseball League.

39:01.852 --> 39:02.893
He's a prominent guy.

39:03.393 --> 39:08.295
He owns a leading drugstore for African-Americans in the South.

39:09.115 --> 39:11.176
And Crump says, you better stop this.

39:11.256 --> 39:13.617
No more rallies or I'll police you.

39:14.238 --> 39:16.539
And you better shut down the Republican Party, too.

39:17.882 --> 39:21.045
And Martin says, I'm sorry, I just can't do that.

39:21.065 --> 39:22.566
And he goes out at the second rally.

39:22.666 --> 39:29.372
Well, then right away, the next hour or so after that, his drugstore is being policed.

39:29.592 --> 39:31.894
That means every customer is being searched.

39:32.714 --> 39:33.175
Blatant.

39:33.995 --> 39:35.036
Everybody knows about it.

39:35.196 --> 39:36.277
There's no secret.

39:36.718 --> 39:38.439
Crump said he's searching for drugs.

39:38.499 --> 39:39.260
Nobody believes it.

39:39.420 --> 39:40.000
Nobody does.

39:40.120 --> 39:40.861
He doesn't believe it.

39:41.297 --> 39:46.518
And they search everyone, including children with ice cream cones, coming in there, priests, right?

39:47.979 --> 39:54.461
And eventually becomes so difficult because of that and other pressure, Martin is forced to leave Memphis.

39:55.121 --> 39:57.842
He returns one more time to go to the stadium.

39:57.902 --> 40:00.122
He helped build a black baseball team.

40:01.022 --> 40:08.725
And to watch a game, the police come up to his box and take him and tell him to get out of town.

40:08.965 --> 40:10.205
He never comes back again.

40:10.919 --> 40:12.039
He complains.

40:12.659 --> 40:14.720
Martin complains to the federal government.

40:15.560 --> 40:20.201
And he complains to the Department of Justice.

40:20.321 --> 40:26.242
And they are willing to prosecute low-level people, the civil rights investigators.

40:27.283 --> 40:28.223
Because it's blatant.

40:28.383 --> 40:28.803
It's open.

40:29.123 --> 40:30.043
Everybody knows about it.

40:30.743 --> 40:32.424
And it's not just happening to Martin.

40:32.844 --> 40:34.104
He's exiled, right?

40:35.093 --> 40:36.374
But it's vetoed.

40:37.015 --> 40:38.516
Higher ups, veto it.

40:38.956 --> 40:49.483
Even though it really would have been a slam dunk case because it's quite clear Crump is an ally of both Roosevelt's, Franklin and Eleanor.

40:50.544 --> 40:54.546
And the labor leader, A. Philip Randolph, comes in to help out Martin.

40:54.967 --> 40:58.389
He goes to Eleanor, who is a friend, and said, please help us.

40:58.689 --> 41:02.772
And she says, I've been told that we're not going to do anything on this.

41:03.493 --> 41:04.813
And I got the letter from her.

41:04.953 --> 41:06.074
It's very incriminating.

41:06.534 --> 41:07.854
So nothing happens.

41:08.655 --> 41:13.996
And so Crump is just too powerful an ally for Roosevelt.

41:14.776 --> 41:16.517
And he does nothing again.

41:16.837 --> 41:17.577
He does nothing.

41:17.797 --> 41:24.639
And Crump remains the Democratic boss all the way through Roosevelt's administration.

41:25.059 --> 41:28.580
And really in some ways until the 1950s when he dies.

41:29.321 --> 41:29.561
Yeah.

41:29.921 --> 41:30.041
And...

41:31.840 --> 41:34.742
you know, it's not like he needs to do much, right?

41:34.822 --> 41:36.744
I mean, he's the president of the United States.

41:36.784 --> 41:37.745
He's the head of the party.

41:37.765 --> 41:41.248
Uh, he's the most powerful man in the country.

41:41.268 --> 41:55.259
Uh, all he really needs to do is not even send word, uh, or not even speak to Crump himself, but just send word through a subordinate to Crump to, to say, Hey, this isn't good.

41:55.399 --> 41:56.240
Knock this off.

41:56.440 --> 41:57.761
You know, that would have been enough.

41:58.001 --> 41:59.122
That would, yeah, that would have been plenty.

41:59.142 --> 41:59.322
And, uh,

42:00.854 --> 42:04.480
And, you know, no public condemnation or anything like that need have been done.

42:04.520 --> 42:10.670
I mean, it just I mean, he could have just done a back channel and all that and and it would have taken care of itself.

42:10.730 --> 42:15.057
But he, for whatever reason, refused to do it.

42:16.260 --> 42:17.682
He is really quite amazing.

42:17.822 --> 42:20.145
And Crump is just, there's no secret, right?

42:20.986 --> 42:24.129
No historian is going to deny anything I've said about Crump.

42:24.650 --> 42:24.930
Sure.

42:25.651 --> 42:29.676
I look at the FDR connection, which other historians have not done as much.

42:30.116 --> 42:32.179
They viewed Crump in isolation.

42:32.860 --> 42:35.242
But it is part of this rather unsavory alliance.

42:35.262 --> 42:36.324
You've got Mayor Haig.

42:36.904 --> 42:57.483
is another one i got a whole story on that where he uses very similar tactics spells people norman thomas the socialist leader is it is expelled by police from jersey city but these guys are just very powerful in the democratic party and they're really key uh in 1944 to to get truman

43:00.385 --> 43:13.333
And these bosses are the ones that go that basically engineer Truman becoming the vice presidential candidate and forcing out Wallace, who's very left wing.

43:14.493 --> 43:14.713
Right.

43:15.034 --> 43:15.534
That actually.

43:16.132 --> 43:17.173
a good thing in retrospect.

43:17.233 --> 43:17.633
Yeah.

43:17.673 --> 43:18.613
It might've been a good thing.

43:18.633 --> 43:27.417
You know, interestingly enough, years later, I'm not a big Truman fan, but you know, but Wallace changes his mind.

43:27.437 --> 43:30.799
He goes to Truman and meets with him somewhere in the fifties.

43:30.839 --> 43:34.340
He said, you know, you were right to fire me because Truman had fired him.

43:34.740 --> 43:37.802
He says, you were right to fire me.

43:37.842 --> 43:38.262
Yeah.

43:38.442 --> 43:40.143
Gotta give a guy credit for that.

43:40.283 --> 43:41.904
I was willing to say something like that.

43:42.364 --> 43:43.264
Yeah.

43:43.564 --> 43:45.005
Speaking of Norman Thomas, that was one of the,

43:45.652 --> 44:00.123
Another interesting thing learning in the book that he and Al Flandin, who is the Republican who ran against Roosevelt in 36, how they basically became like best bros over all this stuff.

44:00.143 --> 44:02.245
Yeah, you got a left-right coalition.

44:02.425 --> 44:02.625
Yeah.

44:02.785 --> 44:04.647
And can you imagine AOC doing that?

44:04.687 --> 44:05.968
That would be equivalent to that.

44:06.048 --> 44:06.769
Maybe Bernie.

44:06.909 --> 44:07.269
I don't know.

44:07.881 --> 44:08.241
whatever.

44:09.522 --> 44:12.743
But you have left-right coalitions working together.

44:13.044 --> 44:24.889
You have new dealers like the Attorney General and others who are willing to oppose Roosevelt's initiatives, criticize him on civil liberties.

44:26.010 --> 44:29.492
And that was the encouraging thing, left-right coalitions.

44:29.592 --> 44:34.134
And I would say we are not as advanced as

44:34.912 --> 44:38.874
because I don't see the strength of these coalitions as much as they used to be.

44:38.894 --> 44:40.135
You have a few people.

44:40.535 --> 44:41.775
But this is very powerful.

44:41.815 --> 44:44.537
Members of Congress turned on Roosevelt.

44:44.837 --> 44:49.399
And not just in this, and something I didn't talk about much was the Supreme Court package.

44:50.039 --> 44:53.661
That was New Dealers, as well as more conservative Democrats.

44:53.681 --> 44:56.502
But a lot of New Dealers said Roosevelt's going too far.

44:56.522 --> 44:58.363
It wasn't just conservative Democrats.

44:58.944 --> 45:00.865
Roosevelt, an overwhelming majority.

45:01.285 --> 45:03.606
A lot of liberals were turning on him too, saying,

45:04.423 --> 45:04.783
Enough.

45:05.123 --> 45:06.303
This is the Constitution.

45:06.343 --> 45:08.744
You just wouldn't have that happen now, unfortunately.

45:09.324 --> 45:10.044
No, I don't think so.

45:10.844 --> 45:11.124
All right.

45:11.824 --> 45:12.965
Now let's get to the big one.

45:14.205 --> 45:29.108
That is the internment of over 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese citizens that are residents of the United States.

45:30.305 --> 45:46.329
taking these 100,000 Japanese people on the West Coast and essentially forcing them into, they're sort of whitewashed as internment camps, but they're, I mean, the definition of what a concentration camp is that they're concentration camps.

45:47.029 --> 45:54.671
So the internment of the Japanese Americans, how did that policy get rolling?

45:55.711 --> 45:57.932
And what was Roosevelt's role in,

46:00.307 --> 46:06.209
that decision and the implementation of, of the internment policy.

46:06.689 --> 46:09.790
He's generally, because see, this is a really big one.

46:09.850 --> 46:23.674
You think like putting a hundred thousand people, American citizens in camps, literally for really no other reason than their, than their, their race or their ancestry.

46:24.935 --> 46:25.975
Literally no other reason.

46:26.015 --> 46:26.215
Yeah.

46:26.255 --> 46:26.475
Yeah.

46:26.595 --> 46:29.516
Would, would, would be something that would,

46:31.666 --> 46:39.770
can get you retroactively canceled in today's culture, but he's generally escaped the cancel mob.

46:39.790 --> 46:44.312
So, but really, but what was Roosevelt's role in internment?

46:45.373 --> 46:50.696
Okay, well, I think you brought up the issue of call them internment camps or concentration camps.

46:50.756 --> 46:54.257
And some people have pushed back and said, don't call them that.

46:54.297 --> 46:59.380
That's like calling them like, comparing them to, you know, Auschwitz camps.

46:59.955 --> 47:01.056
No, I don't compare that.

47:01.156 --> 47:06.958
I think there's a distinction to be made between death camps and concentration camps.

47:07.359 --> 47:08.359
But that's what they were.

47:08.399 --> 47:09.860
And Roosevelt called them that.

47:10.440 --> 47:13.561
He called them concentration camps publicly.

47:14.322 --> 47:16.003
And I think for good reason.

47:16.043 --> 47:17.383
They had guard towers.

47:18.124 --> 47:19.304
People were put there.

47:19.724 --> 47:20.625
They had barbed wire.

47:20.925 --> 47:27.388
People were put there only in the Japanese because of biological ancestry.

47:28.171 --> 47:31.574
born in the United States, you are put there.

47:31.694 --> 47:34.496
Even orphans, Japanese orphans were put there.

47:35.156 --> 47:41.341
So I would argue that what the internment camps are is they show FDR's contempt for civil liberties.

47:42.062 --> 47:44.523
I think that they're a part of, you can see it as a puzzle.

47:44.884 --> 47:50.628
This is by far the biggest puzzle piece if you're judging FDR on civil liberties, internment.

47:50.748 --> 47:53.130
But it is only one puzzle piece.

47:53.170 --> 47:54.111
There are many others.

47:54.631 --> 47:56.673
And it's interconnected with the other pieces.

47:56.973 --> 47:57.793
You see that now.

47:58.074 --> 48:02.777
When I did this chapter, I could see instantly how it's connected with so many other things.

48:03.437 --> 48:05.419
Well, Roosevelt, what is his attitude?

48:05.819 --> 48:09.602
Roosevelt had always been suspicious of Japanese Americans.

48:09.662 --> 48:17.427
He wrote articles in the 1920s for a paper called the Macon Telegraph in Georgia.

48:18.248 --> 48:23.092
And he basically endorsed laws against interracial marriage for Japanese people.

48:23.851 --> 48:27.354
fearful of what he called the intermingling of blood.

48:28.075 --> 48:36.682
He endorsed California's laws to ban Japanese, first-generation Japanese from owning land.

48:38.064 --> 48:41.867
And he supported limits, you know, the bar to Japanese immigration.

48:41.887 --> 48:46.611
So he's not a big pro-Japanese guy, right?

48:46.871 --> 48:49.934
Well, okay, you could say that's one part of it.

48:50.458 --> 49:15.052
But then in the late 30s, 36, I think, Roosevelt actually says privately that if we have a war with Japan, I want anyone who meets with Japanese ships in Honolulu or their friends, I want them put in, quote, a concentration camp.

49:15.592 --> 49:17.733
So he's already along that mindset.

49:18.430 --> 49:29.021
Now, once Pearl Harbor happens, there is no great groundswell, and this is one thing I think I show, for Japanese internment.

49:29.301 --> 49:36.068
I mean, there are people that maybe say that, but most people, including in Southern California, are saying they're Americans, etc.

49:36.508 --> 49:40.332
Roosevelt does not take that opportunity, although he's urged to do so,

49:40.799 --> 49:42.480
to say, cool it.

49:42.980 --> 49:44.000
These are citizens.

49:44.500 --> 49:46.521
We have the Bill of Rights, right?

49:46.601 --> 49:48.282
Which he started to talk about.

49:49.142 --> 49:50.822
This is a proof that we're different.

49:50.882 --> 49:52.823
You know, don't leave them alone.

49:53.143 --> 49:54.904
That would have been just fine, right?

49:55.244 --> 49:56.884
There's no great groundswell.

49:57.325 --> 50:01.366
But Roosevelt kind of leaves leeway for people to start pushing this.

50:02.146 --> 50:04.647
And it started happening gradually.

50:05.862 --> 50:24.829
And in February, he signs the order, Executive Order 9066, I think, which begins the whole process of internment, never using the term Japanese in these orders, his orders, his executive orders.

50:24.909 --> 50:29.330
That's carried out by the military, and they use the term Japanese, very much so.

50:29.810 --> 50:33.872
But he does this, and he has opposition.

50:34.775 --> 50:38.119
His attorney general, of all people, is against it.

50:39.661 --> 50:45.428
FDR, the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, is against it.

50:45.969 --> 50:51.095
His secretary of interior, big advisor, Harold Ickes, is against it.

50:51.411 --> 50:53.872
So they're all, and they're people in the military that are.

50:54.172 --> 50:59.554
So Roosevelt chooses not to listen to these military people and he pushes forward on it.

50:59.835 --> 51:03.756
He's given all sorts of advice that this is not that big a deal.

51:04.096 --> 51:05.257
We don't have to worry.

51:05.277 --> 51:06.437
They'll be fine.

51:06.477 --> 51:07.258
They're loyal.

51:08.078 --> 51:09.058
He does it anyway.

51:09.559 --> 51:17.022
And after he signs his executive order, he persists in wanting to intern Japanese Americans in Hawaii.

51:17.442 --> 51:19.363
That is his personal project.

51:20.029 --> 51:25.931
that he pushes and he says, we need to move them all to a small island there.

51:26.892 --> 51:35.615
And the guy on the ground, the military commander, pushes back subtly, drags his feet, and is able to stop it.

51:36.415 --> 51:38.036
And it doesn't happen.

51:38.296 --> 51:45.279
And part of it is the expense because they said, look, if we intern the Japanese in Hawaii, we're going to have to divert all these ships from Hawaii.

51:45.697 --> 51:50.059
you know, from the Pacific back to Hawaii to move them.

51:50.439 --> 51:52.721
And they give up on it, but that's not only that.

51:52.841 --> 51:55.562
I mean, he wants to intern them in Hawaii.

51:55.842 --> 51:57.383
He pushes that long time.

51:57.923 --> 52:04.006
You're going to have to basically enter, you know, a 10th of the population of Hawaii at that time, or maybe even more.

52:04.166 --> 52:04.807
Oh, it's like 40%.

52:04.907 --> 52:05.547
Is it 40%?

52:06.207 --> 52:07.008
Oh yeah.

52:07.328 --> 52:07.588
Yeah.

52:08.409 --> 52:09.169
You imagine that?

52:09.589 --> 52:10.630
Yeah.

52:10.990 --> 52:12.511
No, but I think you make a point.

52:12.931 --> 52:12.991
Um,

52:13.470 --> 52:23.632
again, going back to, to Memphis, you know, just, you know, this internment would not have happened if Roosevelt did not want it to happen.

52:23.652 --> 52:28.053
If Roosevelt didn't, he didn't think internment was a good idea.

52:28.073 --> 52:36.535
I thought it was unconstitutional, thought it was a horrible, uh, you know, abrogation of the rights of American citizens, which is never would have happened.

52:37.115 --> 52:43.236
And it's a, uh, it's a sort of contrast Roosevelt, um,

52:43.769 --> 53:12.687
during that period with George Bush after the 9-11 attacks in 2001, where Bush really sort of went out of his way to sort of put a tamp down on any potential Islamophobic rhetoric.

53:12.707 --> 53:12.807
Yeah.

53:13.710 --> 53:15.891
or actions or things like that.

53:15.931 --> 53:22.714
I mean, he went out of his way to say Islam did not attack us on 9-11, you know, religion to peace, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

53:23.454 --> 53:31.237
All that just to sort of try to cool tensions in what was a very hot period.

53:32.418 --> 53:41.862
And Roosevelt did nothing of the like, as far as I know, after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941,

53:46.283 --> 53:56.207
And that led him to endorsing and enforcing the internment of American citizens for racial reasons.

53:56.887 --> 54:08.611
But another thing too, not just Roosevelt, what was the role of the New Deal bureaucracy in enforcing the internment of the Japanese Americans?

54:09.311 --> 54:11.732
Yeah, I've gotten pushback on this, even though

54:12.096 --> 54:15.458
Most historians who've really studied it agree with what I'm going to say.

54:16.659 --> 54:20.001
People say, oh, that's, you know, don't smear the New Deal.

54:20.021 --> 54:22.262
You're talking about the New Deal's war and the Bill of Rights.

54:22.342 --> 54:23.383
Come on, Beto.

54:23.723 --> 54:24.744
This is World War II.

54:24.784 --> 54:26.265
This is different, right?

54:26.805 --> 54:31.028
As people used to say, Roosevelt said, in fact, I was Dr. New Deal.

54:31.068 --> 54:32.949
Now I'm Dr. Win the War, right?

54:32.969 --> 54:33.809
The people believe that.

54:34.030 --> 54:35.731
Well, guess what?

54:37.532 --> 54:37.632
The...

54:38.487 --> 54:53.959
If you want to think of any agency during the New Deal that is the signature New Deal agency, probably, you know, if you're, you know, you say Social Security, I suppose, but the Works Progress Administration, the WPA projects, they would be way up there.

54:54.600 --> 54:57.802
Well, the WPA is still around in 1942.

54:57.843 --> 55:01.986
And they are spending more than the military in 1942 up to, I think, November.

55:08.035 --> 55:15.228
On building concentration camps for Japanese Americans and on transporting them to these camps.

55:15.508 --> 55:17.732
They're spending more than the Army.

55:17.993 --> 55:20.978
We associate with the Army, they actually spend more than the Army.

55:21.875 --> 55:37.029
And a lot of the things we associate with the camps, such as guard towers, spotlights, barbed wire, are the product of the WPA, the people that use their talents in road building and that kind of thing.

55:37.470 --> 55:44.276
A lot of the early camps, like Manzanar, are administered by WPA officials.

55:48.366 --> 55:51.948
Harry Hopkins, who's the head of the WPA, very key guy.

55:52.449 --> 55:53.750
He's all for this.

55:53.810 --> 55:58.553
He writes his successor is now the head of the WPA, but he praises him.

55:58.573 --> 56:03.596
He said that guy did a great job building these camps for the Japanese Americans.

56:05.038 --> 56:09.179
And so they are a key agency and it is the biggest.

56:09.620 --> 56:11.080
I think you could make an argument.

56:11.140 --> 56:21.823
I haven't really studied this, but I if you people talk about WPA projects, I think it's the biggest single WPA project of all time.

56:22.564 --> 56:24.584
And that's what it's doing during this period.

56:24.984 --> 56:30.506
Now, the WPA is wound down in 43, partly because it just has a bad reputation.

56:32.275 --> 56:40.639
People have said, we piddle along, the Republicans have made gains in Congress, and it's just seen as a kind of wasteful bureaucracy.

56:41.019 --> 56:54.425
But it is wound down after internment, but all the main WPA officials are folded into the bureaucracy of the War Relocation Agency, which administers the camps.

56:54.895 --> 57:00.662
And some of the camps, as it said, are like almost 100% former WPA.

57:01.043 --> 57:02.905
They are the backbone of the camps.

57:03.306 --> 57:04.647
So that continues on.

57:05.989 --> 57:09.593
But that, you know, I think there you could see the interconnections right there.

57:09.634 --> 57:11.296
I don't think you need to do more than that.

57:12.618 --> 57:14.400
Now, I could look at other things.

57:15.241 --> 57:23.250
Boss Crump is able, part of the way he's able to control free speech in Memphis is through things like public housing.

57:25.172 --> 57:31.479
A Black leader, labor leader comes to Memphis and he wants to speak at one of the public housing projects.

57:31.579 --> 57:33.641
It's a Black public housing project.

57:34.842 --> 57:41.825
And the local bureaucracy says, no, you've invited him, but he can't come, right?

57:42.145 --> 57:54.469
So you see this, and you could give other examples about how the New Deal bureaucracy is used in the service of the warfare state, if you want to call it that, during the war.

57:55.069 --> 57:57.570
But Japanese internment is probably the leading example of that.

57:57.830 --> 57:59.511
And again, what I'm saying is not controversial.

58:00.800 --> 58:06.945
historians have studied this and I, you know, and, and there's all, there's some very solid work on this.

58:07.306 --> 58:08.367
Nobody's challenged it.

58:09.247 --> 58:09.407
Yeah.

58:10.188 --> 58:13.451
Well, we're already close to an hour.

58:13.471 --> 58:17.674
There's a few things we didn't get to, but just a couple more questions if I can.

58:22.038 --> 58:28.944
Where was the ACLU on, you know, all of these issues where the,

58:29.656 --> 58:39.804
Were they doing their job, their intended job to be a watchdog for civil liberties during this period?

58:40.304 --> 58:44.507
What was the ACLU up to during this?

58:44.608 --> 58:47.490
The most charitable description to be mixed.

58:48.130 --> 58:50.132
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

58:50.953 --> 58:56.374
Now, part of the issue at the ACLU during the New Deal and World War II, it's revolving door.

58:56.855 --> 59:04.217
A lot of people in the New Deal bureaucracy, including the attorney general, I think two attorney generals, had been ACLU members, still were, I guess.

59:04.957 --> 59:14.079
And so there was a friendly relationship that became increasingly close between the ACLU and the New Deal bureaucracy.

59:14.399 --> 59:18.340
So a lot of these guys are going to these Washington parties and all this, and, you

59:21.121 --> 59:26.283
They like Roosevelt and they're willing to defend him and see the best.

59:26.943 --> 59:31.225
And so when internment comes, the ACLU dawdles around for a long time.

59:31.245 --> 59:33.566
They don't get a letter out, I think, for two months.

59:34.407 --> 59:38.348
It's a long period before they even do a kind of a protest letter.

59:39.049 --> 59:40.829
And it's a mild protest letter.

59:41.370 --> 59:45.471
And there are people in the ACLU like Norman Thomas, for example.

59:45.591 --> 59:47.932
Thurgood Marshall is very strong in civil liberties.

59:48.232 --> 59:49.493
Somebody should write about that.

59:50.558 --> 59:55.982
very good on civil liberties, defending right-wing, white ringers, Japanese Americans, et cetera.

59:56.602 --> 01:00:01.666
There are elements in the ACLU that really want to condemn the president, but they lose.

01:00:02.326 --> 01:00:08.510
And so they take kind of this weird middle ground where they refuse to condemn the executive order.

01:00:09.191 --> 01:00:11.593
They say, well, we're not going to challenge that.

01:00:12.773 --> 01:00:18.097
They challenge various aspects of enforcement, right?

01:00:19.445 --> 01:00:27.970
But it's convoluted, it's weak, and it's not what one could have hoped.

01:00:28.650 --> 01:00:31.151
And they do the same thing when there's sedition trials.

01:00:31.191 --> 01:00:32.472
We're talking about sedition trials.

01:00:32.512 --> 01:00:34.593
That's one thing we could mention.

01:00:34.713 --> 01:00:36.774
Everything old is new again, right?

01:00:37.295 --> 01:00:39.116
And that would include sedition trials.

01:00:39.896 --> 01:00:41.497
And the same kind of problems with them.

01:00:41.537 --> 01:00:44.819
There are sedition trials of left-wingers and right-wingers during the war.

01:00:45.339 --> 01:00:49.241
The ACLU is kind of missing in action on a lot of this stuff.

01:00:50.763 --> 01:00:53.105
There are pro-civil liberty people in it.

01:00:53.986 --> 01:01:01.154
It's not entirely bad, but they tend to be sidelined by the majority in the organization, unfortunately.

01:01:01.581 --> 01:01:02.762
But it's an interesting story.

01:01:03.022 --> 01:01:12.329
And you can find some great heroes here, too, like Norman Thomas, who's just like relentless in defending civil liberties, amazing in defending civil liberties.

01:01:12.610 --> 01:01:15.772
And here's a man who's a social leading socialist of his time.

01:01:16.172 --> 01:01:24.539
And he works with conservatives like Alfred Landon and others and Herbert Hoover in cooperation to defend civil liberties for everybody.

01:01:25.359 --> 01:01:27.221
He's a socialist, but not a communist.

01:01:28.004 --> 01:01:51.646
yeah oh yeah he's anti-communist yeah yeah and a lot and i was amazed by this because i did some work on the socialist socialists in world war ii years ago i interviewed these these were most anti-communist people you'd ever want to meet sure they were real socialists too you know yes uh speaking of world war ii um world war ii has this reputation of being uh

01:01:53.493 --> 01:01:57.914
pretty good war, all things considered for free speech and civil liberties.

01:01:57.934 --> 01:02:05.056
You know, like we didn't go, you know, uh, you know, we didn't, uh, we didn't go to haywire during world war two.

01:02:05.136 --> 01:02:18.219
Like, you know, we didn't sort of, there weren't the excesses that we saw during the great war with the, uh, Wilson administration and overall all things considered world war two, pretty good on civil liberties.

01:02:18.539 --> 01:02:21.680
Um, that the argument goes, is that true?

01:02:22.861 --> 01:02:23.521
Well, it's not true.

01:02:23.541 --> 01:02:26.142
And of course, the big exception is the Japanese internment.

01:02:26.282 --> 01:02:36.507
I mean, several fold more people are interned than are arrested for sedition in World War I. But let's leave that aside.

01:02:36.787 --> 01:02:38.308
And let's just forget that.

01:02:38.988 --> 01:02:44.430
And if you look at one of the things you got to remember at World War II is there's no opposition anymore.

01:02:44.831 --> 01:02:45.331
Very little.

01:02:46.011 --> 01:02:56.684
After Pearl Harbor, a lot of these guys that were the most right-wing people out there who had opposed Roosevelt's foreign policy, they're like endorsing Pearl Harbor.

01:02:56.704 --> 01:03:00.008
I gave the example earlier of these publishers.

01:03:00.869 --> 01:03:04.253
They're endorsing the war effort, right, after Pearl Harbor.

01:03:04.493 --> 01:03:04.634
Right.

01:03:05.334 --> 01:03:07.616
They're saying, we're behind the president.

01:03:08.016 --> 01:03:09.957
And I could give you all sorts of examples.

01:03:10.238 --> 01:03:12.039
So opposition disappears.

01:03:12.419 --> 01:03:19.204
So then that leaves the question, World War I, you had still a lot of people still opposed it after the declaration.

01:03:19.644 --> 01:03:21.785
And those are the people who mainly get in trouble.

01:03:22.246 --> 01:03:23.246
So what do you do now?

01:03:23.827 --> 01:03:27.489
Well, what a lot of people say is, well, we can't prosecute them.

01:03:27.509 --> 01:03:28.810
They're supporting the war.

01:03:28.870 --> 01:03:29.991
We're not making trouble.

01:03:30.551 --> 01:03:32.673
But Roosevelt wants to go after them.

01:03:33.424 --> 01:03:39.368
pre-war opponents who had opposed him before the war, like the Pattersons, but are now supporting the war.

01:03:39.889 --> 01:03:46.413
He wants to go after them because he sees them as subversive, as holding back intervention and all that.

01:03:46.974 --> 01:03:51.817
So he wants to go after him, but he gets pushback from his attorney general and others who

01:03:52.626 --> 01:03:55.788
not always successful, that hold them off somewhat.

01:03:56.409 --> 01:04:12.219
So there aren't as many sedition prosecutions or Espionage Act prosecutions, but that's mainly because there aren't as many people to prosecute by the same standards used in World War I. But they do prosecute people who violate those standards.

01:04:12.459 --> 01:04:20.605
One is a pacifist anti-war publication in Boise, Idaho, which is anti-Japanese internment and anti-racist.

01:04:21.360 --> 01:04:23.462
And it's not a revolutionary publication.

01:04:23.983 --> 01:04:27.426
It's like a town newspaper in Middleton County.

01:04:28.774 --> 01:04:34.377
Idaho, Boise Valley Herald, and they lose their mailing rights.

01:04:34.857 --> 01:04:41.941
Another one is the Socialist Workers Party, which is a Marxist party, and they sort of condemn all capitalist wars.

01:04:42.261 --> 01:04:47.443
And they don't really do anything specifically against World War II, but they say it's a capitalist war, we're against it.

01:04:47.784 --> 01:04:53.046
So they're prosecuted merely for saying they're against capitalist wars.

01:04:53.526 --> 01:04:56.828
They don't do anything like obstruct recruiting or anything like that.

01:04:57.268 --> 01:05:03.433
So if you violate the same rules as in World War I, you are prosecuted.

01:05:03.934 --> 01:05:08.478
The issue is far fewer people are violating those rules.

01:05:08.958 --> 01:05:10.659
So that's what the difference is.

01:05:11.340 --> 01:05:13.962
And also, Roosevelt wants to go further.

01:05:13.982 --> 01:05:18.406
He wants to go after pre-war non-interventionists, but he gets pushed back.

01:05:19.172 --> 01:05:25.318
from his attorney general, from the courts, and he can't do much.

01:05:25.418 --> 01:05:31.525
But he does do some things, and there's a big show trial, a sedition trial during the war that's a disaster.

01:05:32.566 --> 01:05:37.191
But it's of small fry who are brought to Washington, like 30 of them.

01:05:38.280 --> 01:05:44.103
and prosecuted for promoting insubordination in the military.

01:05:44.483 --> 01:05:51.186
And it's laughable because most of these people don't even know each other, but they are accused of being part of a worldwide Nazi conspiracy.

01:05:51.666 --> 01:05:55.408
It's a travesty and it falls apart when the judge dies.

01:05:55.868 --> 01:05:57.889
Because he can't take it anymore, probably.

01:05:58.210 --> 01:06:00.571
And they just decide to drop the whole thing.

01:06:00.871 --> 01:06:04.694
The Washington Post compares it to the Moscow purge trials.

01:06:05.594 --> 01:06:06.495
It's a disaster.

01:06:06.835 --> 01:06:09.377
But it's a small fry for the most part.

01:06:09.917 --> 01:06:13.660
Roosevelt wants to go after these big metropolitan publishers.

01:06:14.160 --> 01:06:15.181
But there's pushback.

01:06:15.801 --> 01:06:18.063
Because people say, look, they're supporting the war.

01:06:18.583 --> 01:06:19.784
What are we going to get them on?

01:06:20.184 --> 01:06:22.345
Because they were against Lend-Lease in early 1941.

01:06:22.425 --> 01:06:22.866
Well, you know.

01:06:24.927 --> 01:06:26.408
Not good enough, Mr. President.

01:06:27.729 --> 01:06:29.930
And that's one encouraging message that you get.

01:06:30.590 --> 01:06:35.013
This is different in that Roosevelt gets people pushing back.

01:06:35.693 --> 01:06:48.541
In the federal government, in fact, I think there's some evidence that the federal government, the lower levels of the Department of Justice were better on civil liberties than the ACLU during World War II.

01:06:48.561 --> 01:06:52.403
They didn't want to go along with these things, like the internment and the sedition trials.

01:06:53.184 --> 01:06:53.304
Mm-hmm.

01:06:54.198 --> 01:06:57.799
All right, so again, we've gone a bit long.

01:06:57.839 --> 01:07:00.280
So final question, sort of a multi-part one.

01:07:00.960 --> 01:07:03.041
Part of it's something I ask everybody that comes on here.

01:07:05.001 --> 01:07:10.783
So what, in your opinion, is FTR's true legacy on civil liberties?

01:07:11.163 --> 01:07:18.645
And beyond that, what would you like the audience to get out of this book?

01:07:18.685 --> 01:07:20.126
Or what's the one thing you'd want

01:07:21.863 --> 01:07:24.925
a reader taking away from it, having read it?

01:07:26.146 --> 01:07:37.094
Well, his legacy of similarities is he is relentless and he has got this view that, you know, the end matters and the means don't matter as much.

01:07:37.495 --> 01:07:46.461
But there's another side to it because we don't think that necessarily because Roosevelt does start making a lot of talk around the late 30s, early 40s.

01:07:48.573 --> 01:07:53.176
because it sells because Americans become very civil liberties conscious.

01:07:53.196 --> 01:08:00.340
So he talks a lot about the bill of rights and he, he has bill of rights day and he does these things.

01:08:00.440 --> 01:08:02.822
So there's a double-sided nature to that.

01:08:03.522 --> 01:08:05.964
But as far as observing it, it's not really there.

01:08:06.884 --> 01:08:08.925
So we get a lot of the bad things happening now.

01:08:09.025 --> 01:08:09.966
I think bad, like,

01:08:10.717 --> 01:08:19.842
Revival of sedition trials, of domestic terrorism trials, of environmentalists on the left, where we're accusing people of these open-ended charges.

01:08:19.922 --> 01:08:21.463
We're seeing this happen again.

01:08:21.963 --> 01:08:25.065
And that is a very unfortunate legacy.

01:08:26.025 --> 01:08:27.486
of the Roosevelt administration.

01:08:27.766 --> 01:08:38.171
But there's a more positive legacy in that we see a lot of people on the left, a lot of civil libertarians on the left and the right working together.

01:08:38.471 --> 01:08:40.452
So what do I want people to get out of this book?

01:08:41.252 --> 01:08:50.618
I think learn from these early pioneers for civil liberties and try to be like them.

01:08:51.038 --> 01:08:56.742
If our people today were more like them, a lot of stuff would be stopped.

01:08:57.062 --> 01:08:59.744
But right now people say, oh, that's conservatives.

01:08:59.784 --> 01:09:00.704
I don't care about them.

01:09:01.365 --> 01:09:07.108
Or that's environmentalists in Atlanta being prosecuted under open-ended domestic terrorism charges.

01:09:07.789 --> 01:09:08.749
Ah, they did bad things.

01:09:08.809 --> 01:09:09.730
I'm not going to worry about them.

01:09:11.109 --> 01:09:13.770
We need to learn to rise above that.

01:09:14.331 --> 01:09:15.751
And I think we see people who do.

01:09:16.312 --> 01:09:21.114
And that's the legacy, the positive legacy, I guess.

01:09:21.494 --> 01:09:21.814
Amen.

01:09:22.455 --> 01:09:23.075
All right.

01:09:23.175 --> 01:09:28.117
Before we go, is there anything else you want to plug while we're on here?

01:09:29.158 --> 01:09:29.438
No.

01:09:29.718 --> 01:09:32.800
The only thing I would say is I do have a book coming out next year.

01:09:32.880 --> 01:09:33.880
People keep an eye out.

01:09:34.200 --> 01:09:37.142
And it's on Rose Wilder Lane, whose mother...

01:09:38.002 --> 01:09:39.703
did the Little House on the Prairie books.

01:09:40.003 --> 01:09:46.307
And she wrote for a black newspaper during World War II, wrote op-eds for one of the leading black newspapers.

01:09:46.907 --> 01:09:50.649
And we republished, we're going to republish all of her articles.

01:09:51.430 --> 01:09:52.170
Very interesting.

01:09:52.290 --> 01:09:56.593
Selling laissez-faire to African-Americans.

01:09:56.693 --> 01:09:58.254
And using that term, by the way.

01:09:58.634 --> 01:09:59.735
Yeah, that's awesome.

01:10:00.215 --> 01:10:00.515
All right.

01:10:01.035 --> 01:10:10.957
Well, the book, once again, is The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights, the Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camp, Censorship and Mass Surveillance.

01:10:11.117 --> 01:10:15.178
Really, really interesting book.

01:10:16.159 --> 01:10:27.041
There's a ton of information in here that was either entirely new to me or only vaguely familiar to me.

01:10:27.381 --> 01:10:29.982
And really just fantastic look at the

01:10:31.405 --> 01:10:34.988
at this period in FDR's record on civil liberties and things like that.

01:10:35.048 --> 01:10:37.551
So highly, highly recommend it to everybody out there.

01:10:38.291 --> 01:10:40.634
Once again, the book is The New Deal's War and the Bill of Rights.

01:10:41.414 --> 01:10:43.796
And the author, Dr. David Bido.

01:10:43.917 --> 01:10:46.439
And Dr. Bido, thank you so, so much for coming on the podcast.

01:10:46.499 --> 01:10:47.160
Really appreciate it.

01:10:47.180 --> 01:10:50.362
Thank you for staying on a couple minutes late with me.

01:10:50.583 --> 01:10:56.788
And lastly, thank you for taking the time out to write the book.

01:10:57.884 --> 01:10:58.905
Well, it was fun.

01:11:00.186 --> 01:11:04.030
It was a laborious process to write this, took 15 years.

01:11:04.570 --> 01:11:07.893
But when it came together, it's sort of fun to talk about.

01:11:08.193 --> 01:11:13.478
And it's a grim story in a lot of ways, but there's a lot of new stuff there.

01:11:13.698 --> 01:11:21.805
So I think people will, even if you don't agree with me, will learn some new things like I did when I was doing the research.

01:11:22.386 --> 01:11:23.427
Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:24.073 --> 01:11:53.469
right so yeah again thank you very much for coming on and uh for you guys out there we will see you later if again if you like this podcast please consider leaving us a five star review and sharing with your friends and if you have books you'd like to discuss with us on this podcast uh feel free to reach out to me at tbensonheartland.org that's t-b-e-n-s-o-n at heartland.org and for more information about the heartland institute you can just go to heartland.org and we do have our twitter account for the for the uh for the podcast itself

01:11:54.318 --> 01:11:58.820
You can also reach out to us there if you have any questions, comments, or more information, anything like that.

01:11:59.340 --> 01:12:01.742
You can reach out to us there at, well, it's not even Twitter anymore, right?

01:12:01.782 --> 01:12:05.904
It's X. So we have an X account or formerly known as Twitter.

01:12:05.944 --> 01:12:11.406
So at illbooks, I-L-L books on X slash Twitter.

01:12:11.446 --> 01:12:12.067
So check that out.

01:12:12.087 --> 01:12:14.948
So thank you very much for listening, everyone.

01:12:14.988 --> 01:12:15.988
We'll see you guys next time.

01:12:16.209 --> 01:12:16.549
Take care.

01:12:16.589 --> 01:12:17.129
Love you, Robbie.

01:12:17.249 --> 01:12:17.649
Love you, mom.

01:12:17.829 --> 01:12:18.169
Bye-bye.

01:12:20.931 --> 01:12:21.131
Okay.