Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Illiteracy Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, a national free market think tank.
This is episode 129 of the podcast.
Oh, my God, 129.
And the first podcast of 2024, bringing in the new year here.
But so...
Not a new podcast anymore, as you've noticed, by 129 episodes.
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.
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.
So if you like this podcast, please consider giving Illiteracy a five-star review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show.
And also by sharing with your friends as that's the best way to support programming like this.
And my guest today is Dr. David Baito.
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.
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.
He is also the author of From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890 to 1967.
And that's a book that belongs on the shelf of
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
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.
So, Dr. Bido, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much for asking me.
Oh, no problem.
So I guess first question.
What made you want to write this book and what was what was the genesis of it?
Well, I'd nibbled around the edges.
I'd done a lot of research on the 1930s and other contexts, and I'd read a lot about FDR.
I've always been interested in the history of the presidency.
And I kept running across all of these topics on FDR's dark side, I guess you could say, his civil liberties record.
that were not being discussed or that would be just sort of asides.
Certainly people are well aware of the Japanese internment, although there's more to that story, I think, than people are aware of.
But I kept seeing all these things.
As I read about FDR as president, I kept coming across evidence that
He was really a fairly jaded, fairly cynical fellow.
And if he had political enemies, he was willing to use kind of any means to discredit them.
But at the same time, FDR was a very charming man.
And, uh, uh, that comes through in his radio broadcasts.
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.
And I said, look, you know, let's look more into this.
And I found there's a rich story there of, of, uh,
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.
Right.
So you could say I'm sure that his ruthlessness was part of the reason he was so monumentally successful as a politician.
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.
I think that that's often true, but it's not always true.
A very good example of this was their
there was these two newspaper publishers, the Pattersons.
One of them was Sissy Patterson, who ran the Washington Times-Herald, and then their brother, Joseph, who ran the New York Daily News.
And they were two of the biggest publishers in the country.
They'd been important FDR allies during the 1930s.
And they were cousins with McCormick.
Yeah, they were cousins of McCormick.
But McCormick was much more conservative, had some libertarian tendencies.
They were New Deal people.
But they broke with the president over foreign policy in 1941 over Lend-Lease.
And they became very strong opponents because they were principled, you know, non-interventionists.
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.
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
Tell sissy to behave.
This is a woman that had been a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt that had come to the White House that had supported the president.
And someone said, look, he could have had these two very powerful newspaper publishers on his side if he just extended an olive branch.
So I think you could make an argument that sometimes this desire for revenge gets to him.
It's like a little like Trump in that sense, I guess you could say.
that maybe it's better just to pull back a little bit here at times.
All right.
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.
Yeah, I think you summed it up pretty well.
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.
Those ideas are starting to percolate.
So as he grew to adulthood, those ideas are starting to really become quite prominent.
And he's a Democrat, but, you know, that branch of the family were Democrats, but that didn't really mean anything.
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.
In fact, he becomes kind of the head of the young Republicans at Harvard for a while.
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.
Teddy gave away Eleanor at the wedding.
So he looked to him, and then he also looked to Woodrow Wilson.
He was an early Wilson supporter, and he ended up becoming Secretary of Navy in the Wilson administration.
Now, one idea that he gets from progressivism, and there's a civil libertarian strain in some progressivism.
He did not pick up on that.
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.
Just get that goal because you've got to search out for social justice.
Yeah, you have a great quote in the book from Robert Jackson, who was –
one of FDR's attorneys general.
And the quote was, uh, because he meaning FDR, uh, thought that his motives were always good for the things he wanted to do.
He found difficulty in thinking there could be legal limitations on them.
He was not a legalistic minded person.
Yeah.
So, so like you said, that's exactly true.
And his other attorney general,
I guess his successor to Jackson was Francis Biddle.
And Biddle says much the same thing about him.
And Biddle was very reluctant to go along with some of FDR's plans, such as his push for Japanese internment.
But it's interesting that he dedicated his book to Roosevelt.
So a lot of people are willing to overlook that aspect of President Roosevelt.
Mm-hmm.
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
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.
And they were going to investigate allegations of homosexuality in the Navy, you know, specifically centered there on the port at Newport.
And so, you know, he did this investigation and he had, oh, I don't know, a couple dozen
investigators, and they would use methods of entrapment, of intimidation.
People were arrested and held without charges for long periods of time.
And it was over the top.
Now, the goal was to find, ferret out homosexuality in the Navy.
And of course, you know, that was a different time and that was the priority.
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.
He was, people gave up on his political career.
They said, he's the man responsible.
He's the one that ran the whole show.
Under this idea, we got a goal, ferreting out homosexuality for the good of the Navy, and we're going to use any method.
But he was condemned.
And a lot of people thought his career was over with.
And interestingly enough, only about three weeks after
the Senate issued a very harsh report condemning Roosevelt.
He had his bout with polio beginning.
And he's able to eventually rebuild his career after that.
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
you know, very committed.
And it was a very inspiring story of his overcoming this paralysis.
But that really all began just, you know, a couple of weeks after a lot of people had written him off politically.
Okay.
So let's move now to his presidency itself, at least pre-World War II here.
And
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.
Yeah, so talk a little bit about that.
Who was Hugo Black?
What was the stated purpose of the Black Committee?
And what did it actually do?
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.
He was a big New Dealer.
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.
It's really over-the-top rhetoric.
you know, very sort of energetic.
But anyway, he was loyal to Roosevelt and they all knew it.
And he was effective.
He was called the president's chief ferret by some.
And so they, they,
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.
FDR was falling in the polls.
They were very worried.
There was more and more opposition.
And so as a result of that, Roosevelt got his advisors together and they basically agreed, we got to discredit this opposition.
We got to investigate it.
We got to discredit it.
We got to find where its money's coming from, you know, pull them in and investigate them.
And so they decided that Black was their guy.
And he was made head of a committee to investigate lobbying.
And how did they define lobby?
Lobbying would be,
Basically what we're doing, right?
Any attempt to influence the ideological environment in terms of policy, even in not in terms of policy,
directly, would be considered lobbying.
So it was about as broad a definition you can get.
So they started to do this.
Now, at first, they got a lot of pushback because a lot of people said, well, who do you think you are?
You know, called them in, people would fight back.
But then Black had a really smart idea.
I don't know if it was his idea, but he came up with it.
Someone suggested it or whatever.
He said, look, what if I can get
the private communications of these witnesses before they testify, what was the most private form of communication during this period?
I mean, in terms of
I guess you could say people writing letters about policy and things.
It was telegrams probably.
And that was the email of its time.
It really was.
It was instantaneous or close to it.
It was almost like the texting of its time.
It really was.
And you had a lot of companies that would add telegraphers there on sites.
And people would let down their hair and they would say things they wouldn't say normally like email.
Right.
And it was over, like I said, over 50 percent of long distance communication.
So it was tremendously important.
And it operated a lot like email.
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.
And sometimes these were subpoenaed in particular cases on an individual basis.
But Black wanted, he wanted tons of them.
So he went to the telegraph companies and he said, for example, is what he wanted.
Went to the U.S.
Union and said, I want all incoming and outgoing communication telegraphs, telegrams from Washington to and from every member of Congress.
And then he had a list of other people.
And what did Western Union say?
We're not doing that.
You know, we'll be discredited with our customers.
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.
Um, and so for a nine month period, he got telegrams, uh,
You know, millions of them, literally.
And he went through something like 10,000 a day.
And he told his staffers, FCC and committee staffers, well, if you see private things, you know, look past them.
But look for things about lobbying, right?
So they take notes, they copy them and that kind of thing.
And they literally went through something like 3 million because they just every day for months, they were just looking through these communications.
And then they call in the witnesses and say, hey, on June 8th, you said this.
What?
You know, people would be blindsided.
So it was a very effective way to go on the offensive.
But there was massive pushback against it, too.
That's part of the story I tell as well.
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.
history, at least in peacetime.
So this was, as Joe Biden would say, you know, a big effing deal.
Talk a little bit about that pushback.
Who were the people that pushed back on this?
It's not a...
straight sort of partisan divide here.
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.
Yeah.
Well, what happened was various things, but Western Union started, they didn't like doing this, right?
And they started to let people know whose communications were being monitored in this way, because a lot of them didn't even know.
Right.
So they started to let them know.
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.
He'd been secretary of war under Wilson.
And he was so mad when he found out that he said, you know, this is a mild-mannered guy.
He said, I would not participate in a lynching party
for Senator Hugo Black.
However, if I saw someone stringing a rope over him, I would not stop them.
And that's the kind of thing you've got.
You had New Deal figures like Manuel Seller.
When I was young, he was a kind of democratic old horse from New York, old war horse.
And Seller, I think at one point compared
this to the tactics of Mussolini.
So you get newspapers like the Washington Post condemning this.
You get groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.
You get a lot of people on the left saying this is out of line.
And there is a successful court suit that provides a precedent that is a rare victory for someone against Congress.
Congress has wide discretion.
in investigation, still does, but the court basically said you've gone too far.
This is a violation of privacy under the Bill of Rights.
In fact, they use the term privacy, search and seizure and so forth.
It's going beyond the bounds of the restrictions imposed by the Bill of Rights.
And there is a court precedent.
It doesn't go to the Supreme Court because what the committee does is Black is like stunned by it.
He didn't expect this.
He says, well, we're done with our investigation.
We don't really need to do more.
And the court basically says-
We can't do much more than that.
We're finished with it.
They're finished.
We can't really do anything more than this.
So it is a precedent, though, and it may have stopped future congressional committees from doing the same kind of thing later.
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.
Sure.
They didn't have that power.
So I think it was a break on what future investigations could do.
So did Black change his position at all on surveillance once he got onto the Supreme Court?
Yes, he did.
And he didn't exactly admit it, but he kind of did.
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...
William O. Douglas in the late 40s and the 50s.
And there was a similar congressional committee that I discussed called the Buchanan Committee, which was at the same time as the McCarthy Committee.
And they are not looking at telegrams, but they're trying to get membership lists of organizations.
And basically, the Supreme Court says you don't do that.
And Black and what's his name?
Douglas are especially strong in saying this is surveillance.
This is totalitarian.
And so they end up, he ends up becoming something of a, you know, someone said that he would have only contempt for
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.
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.
Sure.
So people can change.
And this is an interesting story here that I've seen several times.
Yeah.
All right.
So from one committee to the other, let's shift on the black committee to the Minton committee.
So once again, same sort of question, who was Sherman Minton?
What was the purpose of the Minton Committee and what did it actually do and what was FDR's role?
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.
Black is promoted to the Supreme Court.
Why?
Well, FDR knew about it.
The rumors were out there and FDR had a good reason to know about, I think he did know about his Klan background.
But that came out officially after he was on the court.
And he stays on the court.
He's able to stay on the court.
But why was he on the court?
He was on the court because he'd been very effective as the head of the Black Committee.
That was his reward.
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.
Minton is an ally of Black.
If anything, more loyal to the administration.
And he becomes head of this committee that Black had to give up, the lobbying committee.
It's called the Minton Committee now.
And they can't go at the private telegrams that they try to investigate anti-New Deal organizations.
And one of the things they do, they do this early on, is they ask for membership lists.
No, they ask for contribution lists.
And for these organizations, one guy just says, I'm not going along with you.
And he basically says, you throw me in jail for contempt if you want.
I'm not giving our contribution list.
And they decide probably better not to prosecute him because it's not going to look good.
Mint, though, is best known for proposing a bill that would have punished any news article known to be untrue or false.
Fake news.
This is not new.
Make it a felony.
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.
And that would not happen now, I don't think.
But it is an attempt, and Roosevelt agreed, I think, with this.
I don't have the total smoking gun, but I think Roosevelt put him up to it.
You think he said he used it as a trial of fake news.
We got to get rid of fake news.
Yeah.
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.
Roosevelt's different than Trump.
Trump will just blurt it out.
That's his weakness.
He wants to do something and he'll say it.
And Roosevelt said,
will flow trial balloons.
He'll put people up to it.
He'll pull back if the reaction is not good.
He's very good at that kind of thing.
Oh, somebody called himself the juggler at one time.
You know, you just can't see what I'm doing.
I got this in one hand and this in one hand.
It's an art form to Franklin Roosevelt to manipulate things behind the scenes.
He's very good at it.
OK, let's shift gears again.
This section of the book I thought was very, very interesting just because I literally knew nothing about it really before going into this.
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,
went after, you know, rogue broadcasters.
But so before we get to that, what does the regulation of the radio waves look like in its really early days?
And how did it change leading up to the New Deal?
Well, these are very good questions.
I wanted to look at Roosevelt and radio, but then I just look, I have to go back further.
And I have to look at the origins of the Federal Communications Commission, which were under Coolidge, 1927.
And what happened here, right?
Because this is later used quite effectively by Roosevelt when it becomes the Federal Communications Commission, same thing.
And what I found was in the early 1920s, radio was arguably freer than the print press.
There was no equal time law.
There was no FCC.
There was the Department of Commerce.
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.
And there was no...
There were no controls, particularly.
And so there were stations that catered to socialists.
There were these rogue broadcasters you mentioned.
These are these small fry.
They had this agenda, small business, sometimes big business.
You had labor unions.
You had churches.
And so you had a wide variety of... I guess you'd call it market segmentation.
And stations were...
coming up all over the place.
And you had a fairly stable system where you had protections against interference.
But Herbert Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce, did not like this.
He wanted, in effect, nationalization of the airwaves.
He wanted to monitor what
stations were doing.
He didn't like this market segmentation.
So he just sort of created chaos by basically refusing to support these rules.
And it created a demand, which ultimately led to the FCC, although there's more to that story.
But the FCC comes along.
And what they do is they basically shut down a lot of stations.
They allocate the airwaves.
And
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.
And is the FCC going to shut them down?
And people are intimidated.
And as a result of that.
When Roosevelt comes along using radio very effectively, it is in his hip pocket.
It supports the New Deal 100%, almost, where
Print press is mostly anti-Roosevelt.
So radio is his ace in the hole, and that is important because radio is becoming the main source for news by the 1930s.
In early 40s, I think it becomes the main source, but it's rapidly overtaking the print press.
But it is totally pro-New Deal.
So it's a big contrast there.
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.
Like you said, they have these six-month leases, whatever, and there's this fear that they're just going to
not renew it or just, you know, yank the station off the air.
Yeah.
And if you want to fight that, it's difficult.
Let's say you're a rural station somewhere in Utah.
What are you going to send lawyers to Washington?
I mean, that's where you got to go.
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.
Yeah.
Actually, I talked a little bit about that.
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.
So what was the purpose of this code and who fought against it and what were its implications?
Well, a key part of this was
The networks are very cooperative with the administration.
They say, basically, anytime you want to give a speech, they're going to the president constantly and saying, is this all right?
Is this all right?
So he's got the networks kind of under control.
And they're the main airtime.
But there are a lot of independent stations.
And there's a guy named Father Coughlin, who's kind of this right wing person.
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
And they set up a, the broadcasting industry says to the FCC, what do we do?
And, you know, and they finally just set up this code that basically forces Coughlin off the air.
One of the things they decide is, well, you can't purchase time anymore.
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.
And in effect,
You know, that's not the only thing.
You essentially can't buy time for that.
And then if you somehow get on the air, you've got to provide equal time.
So they use that quite effectively against Coughlin, but it ends up getting used against all sorts of people, including labor unions.
And so that's one thing that happens.
So where the independent stations are often have more anti-New Deal voices, the networks know that.
They are increasingly fearful and afraid of having political diversity more and more so over time.
And so this code has the effect of it's got the endorsement of the FCC.
They go to the FCC and say, do you approve?
They approve of it.
So it's a private regulation, but they're working with the FCC.
And there's a lot of overlap in what the FCC is trying to do in the NAB.
And they're working together.
But partly because it's just uncertainty.
And the people set it up to say, we got to eliminate this uncertainty.
So they create this code, this very elaborate code.
And the FCC essentially says, yeah, that's great.
You know, we're for it.
Yeah.
All right.
Another chapter that I thought was really, really interesting, again, because it was all...
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
uh, black Republican Memphians.
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.
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.
FDR is a very close alliance with city Democratic bosses.
And one of the closest allies is with Boss Crump.
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.
He has the Democratic machine.
And Crump was an early Roosevelt guy.
He supported Roosevelt in 1931 when they were talking about who to run.
And so Roosevelt appreciates that.
And then every election time, Crump is very reliable.
If FDR needs anything, he backs him.
He backs him at the convention.
He certainly backs him in Memphis and makes sure that Roosevelt piles up a good vote there.
Memphis had gone Republican in the 1920s.
So, Trump is a key ally.
As a result of this, Trump gets all kinds of federal money from the WPA, public works money.
Constantly, he's building things funded by the New Deal.
And it's like, where does the Democratic Party begin and where does the federal government end?
Because people that work for federal agencies are often in the Democratic Party and they're serving
And the message is communicated to these workers, you vote Democrat or else.
Very blatant.
Crump is very blatant about this.
Well, Crump had been willing to tolerate Black voting.
So Memphis is an exception.
Blacks had voted there in the 1930s and earlier in big numbers, and they voted Republican.
And Crump had to deal with them.
It's like, when I need you, you'll support me.
And when I need patronage from Republican presidents, you'll help me get money.
Good deal.
Well, Roosevelt comes along and they don't need the patronage anymore because he's funneling Democratic money in there.
And gradually, Crump says, I don't need these Black voters anymore.
And he increasingly sidelines them.
But they're still voting for a while.
And there's this black leader named J.B.
Martin, black Republican.
He's head of the Republican Party in Shelby County, Memphis.
And he decides, I'm going to carry this state for Wilkie, the Republican in 1940.
And I'm going to win Memphis.
And if he had, Wilkie was very pro-civil rights.
It would have meant
you know, protection, federal protection.
So he organizes an interracial rally in Memphis of over a thousand people, including the wife of the white Republican candidate.
And they're, you know, it's looking like, yeah, maybe we could take the state.
Who knows?
It happened before.
And then Crump is just upset because he thought this guy, you know, I worked with him in the past.
Now he's bucking me and he sends a message through others to, um,
To Martin.
And Martin is a black leader.
He's the head of the Negro Baseball League.
He's a prominent guy.
He owns a leading drugstore for African-Americans in the South.
And Crump says, you better stop this.
No more rallies or I'll police you.
And you better shut down the Republican Party, too.
And Martin says, I'm sorry, I just can't do that.
And he goes out at the second rally.
Well, then right away, the next hour or so after that, his drugstore is being policed.
That means every customer is being searched.
Blatant.
Everybody knows about it.
There's no secret.
Crump said he's searching for drugs.
Nobody believes it.
Nobody does.
He doesn't believe it.
And they search everyone, including children with ice cream cones, coming in there, priests, right?
And eventually becomes so difficult because of that and other pressure, Martin is forced to leave Memphis.
He returns one more time to go to the stadium.
He helped build a black baseball team.
And to watch a game, the police come up to his box and take him and tell him to get out of town.
He never comes back again.
He complains.
Martin complains to the federal government.
And he complains to the Department of Justice.
And they are willing to prosecute low-level people, the civil rights investigators.
Because it's blatant.
It's open.
Everybody knows about it.
And it's not just happening to Martin.
He's exiled, right?
But it's vetoed.
Higher ups, veto it.
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.
And the labor leader, A. Philip Randolph, comes in to help out Martin.
He goes to Eleanor, who is a friend, and said, please help us.
And she says, I've been told that we're not going to do anything on this.
And I got the letter from her.
It's very incriminating.
So nothing happens.
And so Crump is just too powerful an ally for Roosevelt.
And he does nothing again.
He does nothing.
And Crump remains the Democratic boss all the way through Roosevelt's administration.
And really in some ways until the 1950s when he dies.
Yeah.
And...
you know, it's not like he needs to do much, right?
I mean, he's the president of the United States.
He's the head of the party.
Uh, he's the most powerful man in the country.
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.
Knock this off.
You know, that would have been enough.
That would, yeah, that would have been plenty.
And, uh,
And, you know, no public condemnation or anything like that need have been done.
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.
But he, for whatever reason, refused to do it.
He is really quite amazing.
And Crump is just, there's no secret, right?
No historian is going to deny anything I've said about Crump.
Sure.
I look at the FDR connection, which other historians have not done as much.
They viewed Crump in isolation.
But it is part of this rather unsavory alliance.
You've got Mayor Haig.
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
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.
Right.
That actually.
a good thing in retrospect.
Yeah.
It might've been a good thing.
You know, interestingly enough, years later, I'm not a big Truman fan, but you know, but Wallace changes his mind.
He goes to Truman and meets with him somewhere in the fifties.
He said, you know, you were right to fire me because Truman had fired him.
He says, you were right to fire me.
Yeah.
Gotta give a guy credit for that.
I was willing to say something like that.
Yeah.
Speaking of Norman Thomas, that was one of the,
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.
Yeah, you got a left-right coalition.
Yeah.
And can you imagine AOC doing that?
That would be equivalent to that.
Maybe Bernie.
I don't know.
whatever.
But you have left-right coalitions working together.
You have new dealers like the Attorney General and others who are willing to oppose Roosevelt's initiatives, criticize him on civil liberties.
And that was the encouraging thing, left-right coalitions.
And I would say we are not as advanced as
because I don't see the strength of these coalitions as much as they used to be.
You have a few people.
But this is very powerful.
Members of Congress turned on Roosevelt.
And not just in this, and something I didn't talk about much was the Supreme Court package.
That was New Dealers, as well as more conservative Democrats.
But a lot of New Dealers said Roosevelt's going too far.
It wasn't just conservative Democrats.
Roosevelt, an overwhelming majority.
A lot of liberals were turning on him too, saying,
Enough.
This is the Constitution.
You just wouldn't have that happen now, unfortunately.
No, I don't think so.
All right.
Now let's get to the big one.
That is the internment of over 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese citizens that are residents of the United States.
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.
So the internment of the Japanese Americans, how did that policy get rolling?
And what was Roosevelt's role in,
that decision and the implementation of, of the internment policy.
He's generally, because see, this is a really big one.
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.
Literally no other reason.
Yeah.
Would, would, would be something that would,
can get you retroactively canceled in today's culture, but he's generally escaped the cancel mob.
So, but really, but what was Roosevelt's role in internment?
Okay, well, I think you brought up the issue of call them internment camps or concentration camps.
And some people have pushed back and said, don't call them that.
That's like calling them like, comparing them to, you know, Auschwitz camps.
No, I don't compare that.
I think there's a distinction to be made between death camps and concentration camps.
But that's what they were.
And Roosevelt called them that.
He called them concentration camps publicly.
And I think for good reason.
They had guard towers.
People were put there.
They had barbed wire.
People were put there only in the Japanese because of biological ancestry.
born in the United States, you are put there.
Even orphans, Japanese orphans were put there.
So I would argue that what the internment camps are is they show FDR's contempt for civil liberties.
I think that they're a part of, you can see it as a puzzle.
This is by far the biggest puzzle piece if you're judging FDR on civil liberties, internment.
But it is only one puzzle piece.
There are many others.
And it's interconnected with the other pieces.
You see that now.
When I did this chapter, I could see instantly how it's connected with so many other things.
Well, Roosevelt, what is his attitude?
Roosevelt had always been suspicious of Japanese Americans.
He wrote articles in the 1920s for a paper called the Macon Telegraph in Georgia.
And he basically endorsed laws against interracial marriage for Japanese people.
fearful of what he called the intermingling of blood.
He endorsed California's laws to ban Japanese, first-generation Japanese from owning land.
And he supported limits, you know, the bar to Japanese immigration.
So he's not a big pro-Japanese guy, right?
Well, okay, you could say that's one part of it.
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.
So he's already along that mindset.
Now, once Pearl Harbor happens, there is no great groundswell, and this is one thing I think I show, for Japanese internment.
I mean, there are people that maybe say that, but most people, including in Southern California, are saying they're Americans, etc.
Roosevelt does not take that opportunity, although he's urged to do so,
to say, cool it.
These are citizens.
We have the Bill of Rights, right?
Which he started to talk about.
This is a proof that we're different.
You know, don't leave them alone.
That would have been just fine, right?
There's no great groundswell.
But Roosevelt kind of leaves leeway for people to start pushing this.
And it started happening gradually.
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.
That's carried out by the military, and they use the term Japanese, very much so.
But he does this, and he has opposition.
His attorney general, of all people, is against it.
FDR, the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, is against it.
His secretary of interior, big advisor, Harold Ickes, is against it.
So they're all, and they're people in the military that are.
So Roosevelt chooses not to listen to these military people and he pushes forward on it.
He's given all sorts of advice that this is not that big a deal.
We don't have to worry.
They'll be fine.
They're loyal.
He does it anyway.
And after he signs his executive order, he persists in wanting to intern Japanese Americans in Hawaii.
That is his personal project.
that he pushes and he says, we need to move them all to a small island there.
And the guy on the ground, the military commander, pushes back subtly, drags his feet, and is able to stop it.
And it doesn't happen.
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.
you know, from the Pacific back to Hawaii to move them.
And they give up on it, but that's not only that.
I mean, he wants to intern them in Hawaii.
He pushes that long time.
You're going to have to basically enter, you know, a 10th of the population of Hawaii at that time, or maybe even more.
Oh, it's like 40%.
Is it 40%?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
You imagine that?
Yeah.
No, but I think you make a point.
Um,
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.
If Roosevelt didn't, he didn't think internment was a good idea.
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.
And it's a, uh, it's a sort of contrast Roosevelt, um,
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.
Yeah.
or actions or things like that.
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.
All that just to sort of try to cool tensions in what was a very hot period.
And Roosevelt did nothing of the like, as far as I know, after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941,
And that led him to endorsing and enforcing the internment of American citizens for racial reasons.
But another thing too, not just Roosevelt, what was the role of the New Deal bureaucracy in enforcing the internment of the Japanese Americans?
Yeah, I've gotten pushback on this, even though
Most historians who've really studied it agree with what I'm going to say.
People say, oh, that's, you know, don't smear the New Deal.
You're talking about the New Deal's war and the Bill of Rights.
Come on, Beto.
This is World War II.
This is different, right?
As people used to say, Roosevelt said, in fact, I was Dr. New Deal.
Now I'm Dr. Win the War, right?
The people believe that.
Well, guess what?
The...
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.
Well, the WPA is still around in 1942.
And they are spending more than the military in 1942 up to, I think, November.
On building concentration camps for Japanese Americans and on transporting them to these camps.
They're spending more than the Army.
We associate with the Army, they actually spend more than the Army.
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.
A lot of the early camps, like Manzanar, are administered by WPA officials.
Harry Hopkins, who's the head of the WPA, very key guy.
He's all for this.
He writes his successor is now the head of the WPA, but he praises him.
He said that guy did a great job building these camps for the Japanese Americans.
And so they are a key agency and it is the biggest.
I think you could make an argument.
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.
And that's what it's doing during this period.
Now, the WPA is wound down in 43, partly because it just has a bad reputation.
People have said, we piddle along, the Republicans have made gains in Congress, and it's just seen as a kind of wasteful bureaucracy.
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.
And some of the camps, as it said, are like almost 100% former WPA.
They are the backbone of the camps.
So that continues on.
But that, you know, I think there you could see the interconnections right there.
I don't think you need to do more than that.
Now, I could look at other things.
Boss Crump is able, part of the way he's able to control free speech in Memphis is through things like public housing.
A Black leader, labor leader comes to Memphis and he wants to speak at one of the public housing projects.
It's a Black public housing project.
And the local bureaucracy says, no, you've invited him, but he can't come, right?
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.
But Japanese internment is probably the leading example of that.
And again, what I'm saying is not controversial.
historians have studied this and I, you know, and, and there's all, there's some very solid work on this.
Nobody's challenged it.
Yeah.
Well, we're already close to an hour.
There's a few things we didn't get to, but just a couple more questions if I can.
Where was the ACLU on, you know, all of these issues where the,
Were they doing their job, their intended job to be a watchdog for civil liberties during this period?
What was the ACLU up to during this?
The most charitable description to be mixed.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Now, part of the issue at the ACLU during the New Deal and World War II, it's revolving door.
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.
And so there was a friendly relationship that became increasingly close between the ACLU and the New Deal bureaucracy.
So a lot of these guys are going to these Washington parties and all this, and, you
They like Roosevelt and they're willing to defend him and see the best.
And so when internment comes, the ACLU dawdles around for a long time.
They don't get a letter out, I think, for two months.
It's a long period before they even do a kind of a protest letter.
And it's a mild protest letter.
And there are people in the ACLU like Norman Thomas, for example.
Thurgood Marshall is very strong in civil liberties.
Somebody should write about that.
very good on civil liberties, defending right-wing, white ringers, Japanese Americans, et cetera.
There are elements in the ACLU that really want to condemn the president, but they lose.
And so they take kind of this weird middle ground where they refuse to condemn the executive order.
They say, well, we're not going to challenge that.
They challenge various aspects of enforcement, right?
But it's convoluted, it's weak, and it's not what one could have hoped.
And they do the same thing when there's sedition trials.
We're talking about sedition trials.
That's one thing we could mention.
Everything old is new again, right?
And that would include sedition trials.
And the same kind of problems with them.
There are sedition trials of left-wingers and right-wingers during the war.
The ACLU is kind of missing in action on a lot of this stuff.
There are pro-civil liberty people in it.
It's not entirely bad, but they tend to be sidelined by the majority in the organization, unfortunately.
But it's an interesting story.
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.
And here's a man who's a social leading socialist of his time.
And he works with conservatives like Alfred Landon and others and Herbert Hoover in cooperation to defend civil liberties for everybody.
He's a socialist, but not a communist.
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
pretty good war, all things considered for free speech and civil liberties.
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.
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.
Um, that the argument goes, is that true?
Well, it's not true.
And of course, the big exception is the Japanese internment.
I mean, several fold more people are interned than are arrested for sedition in World War I. But let's leave that aside.
And let's just forget that.
And if you look at one of the things you got to remember at World War II is there's no opposition anymore.
Very little.
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.
I gave the example earlier of these publishers.
They're endorsing the war effort, right, after Pearl Harbor.
Right.
They're saying, we're behind the president.
And I could give you all sorts of examples.
So opposition disappears.
So then that leaves the question, World War I, you had still a lot of people still opposed it after the declaration.
And those are the people who mainly get in trouble.
So what do you do now?
Well, what a lot of people say is, well, we can't prosecute them.
They're supporting the war.
We're not making trouble.
But Roosevelt wants to go after them.
pre-war opponents who had opposed him before the war, like the Pattersons, but are now supporting the war.
He wants to go after them because he sees them as subversive, as holding back intervention and all that.
So he wants to go after him, but he gets pushback from his attorney general and others who
not always successful, that hold them off somewhat.
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.
One is a pacifist anti-war publication in Boise, Idaho, which is anti-Japanese internment and anti-racist.
And it's not a revolutionary publication.
It's like a town newspaper in Middleton County.
Idaho, Boise Valley Herald, and they lose their mailing rights.
Another one is the Socialist Workers Party, which is a Marxist party, and they sort of condemn all capitalist wars.
And they don't really do anything specifically against World War II, but they say it's a capitalist war, we're against it.
So they're prosecuted merely for saying they're against capitalist wars.
They don't do anything like obstruct recruiting or anything like that.
So if you violate the same rules as in World War I, you are prosecuted.
The issue is far fewer people are violating those rules.
So that's what the difference is.
And also, Roosevelt wants to go further.
He wants to go after pre-war non-interventionists, but he gets pushed back.
from his attorney general, from the courts, and he can't do much.
But he does do some things, and there's a big show trial, a sedition trial during the war that's a disaster.
But it's of small fry who are brought to Washington, like 30 of them.
and prosecuted for promoting insubordination in the military.
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.
It's a travesty and it falls apart when the judge dies.
Because he can't take it anymore, probably.
And they just decide to drop the whole thing.
The Washington Post compares it to the Moscow purge trials.
It's a disaster.
But it's a small fry for the most part.
Roosevelt wants to go after these big metropolitan publishers.
But there's pushback.
Because people say, look, they're supporting the war.
What are we going to get them on?
Because they were against Lend-Lease in early 1941.
Well, you know.
Not good enough, Mr. President.
And that's one encouraging message that you get.
This is different in that Roosevelt gets people pushing back.
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.
They didn't want to go along with these things, like the internment and the sedition trials.
Mm-hmm.
All right, so again, we've gone a bit long.
So final question, sort of a multi-part one.
Part of it's something I ask everybody that comes on here.
So what, in your opinion, is FTR's true legacy on civil liberties?
And beyond that, what would you like the audience to get out of this book?
Or what's the one thing you'd want
a reader taking away from it, having read it?
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.
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.
because it sells because Americans become very civil liberties conscious.
So he talks a lot about the bill of rights and he, he has bill of rights day and he does these things.
So there's a double-sided nature to that.
But as far as observing it, it's not really there.
So we get a lot of the bad things happening now.
I think bad, like,
Revival of sedition trials, of domestic terrorism trials, of environmentalists on the left, where we're accusing people of these open-ended charges.
We're seeing this happen again.
And that is a very unfortunate legacy.
of the Roosevelt administration.
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.
So what do I want people to get out of this book?
I think learn from these early pioneers for civil liberties and try to be like them.
If our people today were more like them, a lot of stuff would be stopped.
But right now people say, oh, that's conservatives.
I don't care about them.
Or that's environmentalists in Atlanta being prosecuted under open-ended domestic terrorism charges.
Ah, they did bad things.
I'm not going to worry about them.
We need to learn to rise above that.
And I think we see people who do.
And that's the legacy, the positive legacy, I guess.
Amen.
All right.
Before we go, is there anything else you want to plug while we're on here?
No.
The only thing I would say is I do have a book coming out next year.
People keep an eye out.
And it's on Rose Wilder Lane, whose mother...
did the Little House on the Prairie books.
And she wrote for a black newspaper during World War II, wrote op-eds for one of the leading black newspapers.
And we republished, we're going to republish all of her articles.
Very interesting.
Selling laissez-faire to African-Americans.
And using that term, by the way.
Yeah, that's awesome.
All right.
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.
Really, really interesting book.
There's a ton of information in here that was either entirely new to me or only vaguely familiar to me.
And really just fantastic look at the
at this period in FDR's record on civil liberties and things like that.
So highly, highly recommend it to everybody out there.
Once again, the book is The New Deal's War and the Bill of Rights.
And the author, Dr. David Bido.
And Dr. Bido, thank you so, so much for coming on the podcast.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you for staying on a couple minutes late with me.
And lastly, thank you for taking the time out to write the book.
Well, it was fun.
It was a laborious process to write this, took 15 years.
But when it came together, it's sort of fun to talk about.
And it's a grim story in a lot of ways, but there's a lot of new stuff there.
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.
Yeah, absolutely.
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
You can also reach out to us there if you have any questions, comments, or more information, anything like that.
You can reach out to us there at, well, it's not even Twitter anymore, right?
It's X. So we have an X account or formerly known as Twitter.
So at illbooks, I-L-L books on X slash Twitter.
So check that out.
So thank you very much for listening, everyone.
We'll see you guys next time.
Take care.
Love you, Robbie.
Love you, mom.
Bye-bye.
Okay.