David Beito: Was FDR a Tyrant?

David Beito discusses his new book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance.

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David Beito: Was FDR a Tyrant?

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Why has President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dark side been hidden?

Scholars consistently rank FDR as one of America's greatest presidents. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked him number two, below Lincoln, and respondents to the Siena College Research Institute studies have ranked him number one in six out of seven survey years. 

Perhaps it's understandable that the longest-serving president who saw the country through the Great Depression and a World War II victory would rank so highly. But do presidential scholars exhibit a major blind spot when it comes to the authoritarian aspects of FDR and his New Deal agenda? That's what today's guest argues in his book, The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance. 

Those civil liberties abuses, and how they permanently changed America and the relationship between citizen and state, are the subject of this episode. The book's author, David Beito, is an American historian and history professor at the University of Alabama and a research fellow at the Independent Institute.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

1. The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
2. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey
3. Hugo Black Audio-Visual Library
4. FDR's Four Freedoms Speech

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:33 FDR's Legacy: A Closer Look at the New Deal's Impact on Civil Liberties
02:03 Exploring FDR's Authoritarian Tactics and Media Manipulation
05:00 The Power of Radio: FDR's Fireside Chats and Control Over Public Opinion
39:09 The Black Committee: The Beginnings of Mass Surveillance in America
44:38 The Black Committee's Investigation and Western Union's Resistance
45:26 The Extensive Telegram Surveillance Operation
48:09 Legal Battles and Public Outcry Against Privacy Violations
51:17 The Minton Committee's Further Overreach and the War on Fake News
58:13 FDR's Court Packing Plan and Its Echoes in Modern Politics
01:04:59 Revisiting FDR's Role in Japanese Internment
01:17:15 The New Deal's Dark Side: A Critical Reexamination
01:24:59 Reflecting on FDR's Legacy and Its Implications Today

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

Comments

[Mother's Lament]

"Was FDR a Tyrant?"

Absolutely. FDR gets an awful lot of slack for being the wartime president, but he was no Churchill.

[Mickey Rat]

Yes. He gets slack because historians have a bias for Presidents who expand executive power, and thus goes all the more so for one who does so from the Left and expands the government’s authority for central planning and control.which empowers the intellectual class.

[Zeb]

Absolutely was a tyrant. The Japanese internment was bad, but that's not even why. He was a tyrant because he was the president under whom all pretense of actual constitutional limitations on the federal government were discarded.

[Gaear Grimsrud]

Ironically FDR's tyranny came up in the Trump immunity hearings this morning. Gorsuch, I think, asked the Biden regime lawyer if FDR could be criminally charged after leaving office for the Japanese internment. The answer was well, he couldn't have been then but he could be now because Nixon or something.

[Zeb]

Pity he died in office and we never got to test that theory.

[Sevo]

Shame he didn't die 12 years earlier.

[Zeb]

I always take "great" in rankings like this to mean "did big stuff that we still notice today". And in that sense FDR was certainly one of the greatest presidents. But he was not a good president. I'd call him one of the worst if we are talking about actually doing good things and adhering to the oath of office.

[sarcasmic]

Presidents used to be judged by how little they did, back when Americans still had a healthy distrust for government.

[Zeb]

Yeah, what happened to that? Calvin Coolidge was the best president.

[Dillinger]

>> Was FDR a Tyrant?

is the science not settled?

[Quicktown Brix]

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked him number two, below Lincoln

Not everyone is a libertarian. They are probably the 2 most authoritarian presidents (at least corrected for their eras.) Powerful kings are often titled "The Great."

Lots of asterisks with Lincoln's power grabs though.

[Zeb]

Historians love tyrants. In addition to justifying their usually left wing worldview, they make for better selling books.

[Quicktown Brix]

Yeah, I think that explains it.

[sarcasmic]

Other wartime presidents don't get nearly the same praise as those two. Probably helped that they died while they were still heroes.

[Zeb]

Wilson gets a lot more than he deserves.

[sarcasmic]

Wilson brought life to the Progressive machine with Amendments 16-19, instituting the income tax, and creating the Federal Reserve and the FTC, before getting us involved in WWI.
As far as a "gets things done" president he was great. Maybe even Great.
As far as preserving the principles of the Constitution goes he gets a solid F. I'd give him an F- except he did actually ask for a declaration of war, which is quaint by today's standards.

[Mickey Rat]

FDR was basically Wilson 2.0, admiring Wilson's WarSicialusm and general contempt for constitutional limitations on federal authority and a "scientific" approach to social and economic policy.

Wilson has been downgraded himself because his overt racism and segregationist policies are increasingly indefensible in the 21st Century despite his progressivism.

[Zeb]

Wilson was particularly egregiously racist for sure. But I don't know why FDR gets a pass on that. In addition to the Japanese internment thing, didn't he keep the military segregated through the war?

[InsaneTrollLogic]

Yes, Wilson officially segregated it, and FDR continued the practice. It wasn’t until Truman that the military started to integrate.

In many ways, FDR was Wilson’s third through fifth (he died early in his fourth term) terms.

[MWAocdoc]

Well, I think Lincoln's "power grabs" are different in character from FDR's. Lincoln came into office on the brink of national catastrophe and had to deal with a true emergency. I cannot imagine a President who would not be expected by most Americans - including libertarians - to try to put down a military insurgency that would destroy the Constitution of the United States of America in order to preserve slavery. There is not much evidence to support the notion that he grabbed power for any other reason than to preserve the Union and end slavery; or that he would have continued the power grabs after the emergency was over. On balance I still support the Amendments that extended the Bill of Rights to all people in America and banned the states from violating those rights.

On the other hand, Roosevelt did NOT inherit a national emergency and his power grabs were thinly-disguised using the excuse of an economic depression - which he and his cronies helped manufacture in the first place - to grab power for long-term sociopolitical purposes, i.e. to move the United States further down the path to socialism.

[Quicktown Brix]

Thanks. This is what I had in mind with the asterisks.

[Gaear Grimsrud]

Yeah slavery ended in a lot of places without 600,000 dead soldiers. The slave trade had already ended due to naval blockades. Slavery was a lousy business model and that fact was obvious to investors, the free states were much wealthier and more productive. Slavery was was quickly becoming obsolete and we will never know how much longer it would have lasted but sooner or later the invisible hand would have beat it to death. And I'm not sure why "preserving the union" was a moral imperative. A confederacy in the south would have been isolated and broke. We will never know if all of this could have ended peacefully thanks to Lincoln.

[sarcasmic]

And I’m not sure why “preserving the union” was a moral imperative.

Especially because it changed the nation from plural to singular by making participation mandatory. Instead of a union of states, it became a single government in Washington D.C.. Had to preserve the union by destroying it. Or something.

[Mickey Rat]

It required 600K dead in this country because the Slave Power went nuts at the loss of effective control of the federal government and gave Lincoln's government a casus bellum by starting the war.

[Zeb]

I wonder how long they could have kept slavery going withtout the civil war. Probably a while. But I do agree that it is a terrible economic/business model. It really held the south back in it's weird feudal sort of system.
It always really annoys me when "anti-racist" progressives argue as if slavery was super effective and efficient to the extent that all white people are still reaping its benefits today. It may have allowed plantation owners to stay rich, but it certainly wasn't any great benefit to society as a whole. But a big part of the prog argument seems to be that slavery and racism have been great boons to white people. I would argue quite the opposite, that slavery and racism were just a huge waste of human potential that held people back and retarded actual progress.

[InsaneTrollLogic]

I have my doubts.

1. It was the slave states (other than Maryland, Delaware, and the duly elected governments of Kentucky and Missouri) and slavery territory that decided to leave the Union due to the election of Lincoln as President. They even went so far as to keep him off the ballot (like Colorado and Maine tried to do to Trump).

2. Look at Brazil for a comparison. There, slavery, even if it was a terrible economic system, existed until 1888. And even then, it took Emperor Pedro II to end it. He got thanked by being overthrown by the former slave owners.

3. The main issue prior to the Civil War was the expansion of slavery. Prior to 1850, slavery was to be contained south of 36’30”. After that, the plantation owners began to use federal power to upset that agreement. Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act, Fugitive Slave Law, Dred Scott decision, the latter two of which were an affront to the states’ rights of the non-slave states.

In a lot of ways, the planters acted a lot like modern Democrats in their abuse of federal power.

[Sevo]

"In a lot of ways, the planters acted a lot like modern Democrats in their abuse of federal power.

Waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck...

[shadydave]

More so than any other President in the country's history, yes. Forget everything else he did, he refused to leave after every other president in the history of the country said it was time to leave. But as far his actions: the New Deal, gold confiscation, concentration camps, his admiration for Stalin, court packing attempts, etc.

[Zeb]

Staying in office at least was constitutional and legal. So not really tyranny by the strict definition. I think all his other acts were where the tyranny really was.

[TrickyVic (old school)]

Mass surveillance in FDR's time was nothing like mass surveillance now.

[Zeb]

True. But that was mostly a technical problem.

[BYODB]

It's unquestionable that he was.

The reason why he's ranked so favorably is because a lot of progressives owe our currently broken extra-constitutional federal model to him and Wilson specifically and they can't let his 'bad side' get any press because it reveals their world view for what it actually is.

[Sevo]

Didn't see it mentioned in the 'outline', but one of his worst 'acts' wasn't an act, it was negligence:
The US was involved in the largest war in human history involving many, many important actors and technical issues (the bomb).
And the criminally-negligent tin-pot-dictator wannabe did not see fit to include Truman in any of the allied meetings, nor advise him of the bomb at all, even though he knew he was circling the drain.
Further, his MD should have suffered some consequences for his blatant lies regarding FDR's medical condition.

[AT]

Yep.

I've said it again and again. If I had a time machine, I'd skip right past Mao, Stalin, and Hitler - and I'd go kick FDR's dad so hard in the nuts on the eve of FDR's conception, that he'd be be too busy peeing blood to get it up for the night.

[TJJ2000]

FDR broke the US Constitution; repeatably. He should've been impeached right away for treason against the USA. Now the [Na]tional So[zi]al[ism] treason has become the status-quo.

[Mickey Rat]

FDR came in with a large majority in Congress. He was in no danger of being impeached for Constitutional violations as enough of the Congress would protect him out of party loyalty for any impeachment effort to fail miserably.

[TJJ2000]

Indeed. ?Blessings? of a Democrat-Trifecta.
Where the worst violations of treason against the USA seems to always happen.

[John C. Randolph]

He was the only president besides Lincoln to lock people up for no reason other than their race.

-jcr

[PeteRR]

In 1936, under FDR, the federal budget grew to the point that it was bigger than all of the state and local governments combined.