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The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
“This book is not mere history; it is an exposé. You won’t know which is more the lengths to which FDR and New Dealers like Senators (and future Supreme Court justices) Hugo Black and Sherman Minton went to suppress freedom of speech, privacy, and civil rights; or the degree to which these efforts have been concealed by pro-FDR and New Deal propagandists.”
— Randy E. Barnett , Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Spying on citizens. Censoring critics. Imprisoning minorities. These are the acts of communist dictators, not American presidents....
Or are they?
The legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoys regular acclaim from historians, politicians, and educators. Lauded for his New Deal policies, leadership as a wartime president, cozy fireside chats, and groundbreaking support of the “forgotten man,” FDR, we have been told, is worthy of the same praise as men like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln....
But is that true? Does the father of today’s welfare state really deserve such generous approbation? Or is there a dark side to this golden legacy?
The New Deal’s War on the Bill of The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance unveils a much different portrait than the standard orthodoxy found in today’s historical studies.
Deploying an abundance of primary source evidence and well-reasoned arguments, historian and distinguished professor emeritus David T. Beito masterfully presents a complete account of the real Franklin D. a man who abused power , violated human rights , targeted dissidents , and let his crude racism imprison American citizens merely for being of Japanese descent.
Read it, and discover how Here is an all too rare portrait of a man who changed the course of American history ... not for the better.
Read it, and you’ll never view the fireside president the same again.
— Randy E. Barnett , Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Spying on citizens. Censoring critics. Imprisoning minorities. These are the acts of communist dictators, not American presidents....
Or are they?
The legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoys regular acclaim from historians, politicians, and educators. Lauded for his New Deal policies, leadership as a wartime president, cozy fireside chats, and groundbreaking support of the “forgotten man,” FDR, we have been told, is worthy of the same praise as men like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln....
But is that true? Does the father of today’s welfare state really deserve such generous approbation? Or is there a dark side to this golden legacy?
The New Deal’s War on the Bill of The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance unveils a much different portrait than the standard orthodoxy found in today’s historical studies.
Deploying an abundance of primary source evidence and well-reasoned arguments, historian and distinguished professor emeritus David T. Beito masterfully presents a complete account of the real Franklin D. a man who abused power , violated human rights , targeted dissidents , and let his crude racism imprison American citizens merely for being of Japanese descent.
Read it, and discover how Here is an all too rare portrait of a man who changed the course of American history ... not for the better.
Read it, and you’ll never view the fireside president the same again.
- GenresHistory
404 pages, Hardcover
Published October 10, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 24, 2024
The author, David T. Beito, is a history professor emeritus at the University of Alabama.
A random thought I had while reading this book: You know how New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die" was borrowed from its French Revolution counterpart, "Vivre Libre ou Mourir"? Maybe the USA's motto should be similarly derived from "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose". Or "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
That would be tough to fit on a penny, though. We'll probably stick with "In God We Trust".
This book is good antidote to more hagiographic depictions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's not really a "warts and all" history; it's just warts, concentrating on FDR-era abuses of civil liberties. But (see the subtitle) it's an "untold story" in the sense that none of this is secret, FDR's participation and acquiescence in the abuses is just neglected. And—plus ça change—I was struck by how many of those abuses have their counterparts in more modern controversies.
The biggie, of course, is the WWII roundup of west-coast Japanese and their relocation to inland concentration camps. Beito notes the cognitively-dissonant treatment by FDR-sympathetic historians: "Over and over again, they leave the impression of two very distinct Roosevelts. The first was the Roosevelt of the New Deal and World War II foreign policy: decisive, bold, humane, and dedicated to advancing the four freedoms. The second was the Roosevelt of internment: a passive and reactive, and somewhat clueless, prisoner of events." Not a particularly accurate, or even coherent, potrayal, and Beito provides some needed corrections.
Other chapters concentrate on different aspects of how FDR's minions in Congress, regulatory agencies, and local political machines cracked down on opponents of the New Deal, court-packing proposals, and pre-WWII foreign policy. Telegrams were mass-snooped in fishing expeditions. A bill was proposed to felonize newspapers who printed as "fact anything known to the publisher … to be false". (Disinformation! Fake news!) Mailing permits were arbitrarily yanked from publications.
The relatively new technology of broadcast radio had been socialized, unfortunately, by Herbert Hoover, with the permission of Calvin Coolidge; this allowed the Feds to demand that the frequencies be used in the "public interest", i.e., uncritical of the state. (Many broadcasters were, of course, were complaisant.) Administration critics were silenced. (To be fair, one of them was the disgusting lunatic Father Coughlin. Although he didn't get into serious trouble until he turned against FDR.)
Democrat-controlled congressional committees dragged in political dissidents for intrusive and unfair "investigations". (It's clear that Joe McCarthy learned his tricks by observing such Democrats.)
For a lot of these attacks, the ACLU, whose upper ranks were filled with New Dealers, was conspicuous in its reticence; many left-leaning opinion magazines remained quiet, or gave encouragement.
Reader, Beito does not even touch FDR's neglect of European Jewry and his associated anti-Semitism. To be fair, that's a little outside the scope of the book. But, once again, plus ça change…
December 14, 2023
Many are aware of the Japanese internment camps in World War II, but as David Beito shows those were just one example of a pervasive disregard of civil rights during the New Deal years. This book focuses on a few prominent examples of such abuses.
Many historians try to dismiss Franklin Roosevelt's personal involvement in the internment, limiting it to his issue of the general Executive Order 9066, and place much of the blame on Lt. Gen. John DeWitt. But as Beito shows FDR called the Japanese "treacherous people" and had earlier supported California's laws forbidding Japanese land ownership because they could not be assimilated. He ignored his own intelligence reports that most Nisei (American-born Japanese) were loyalist and focused on vague threats. He pushed for removal of Japanese from Hawaii, but that collapsed due to the fact that they were 1/3 of the population. DeWitt was at first suspicious of interning the Nisei, but he did everything in his power to carry it out. He used the 1940 Census punch cards to form the plans, a clear denial of the privacy of the census. DeWitt's Final Report that this was all based on race was so potentially devastating to the government in court that the government secretly destroyed them before they should have turned them over. Despite the problems, FDR urged to hold onto the camps until after the 1944 election.
There are many other important stories told here. About the Black Committee's dragnet subpoenas of telegraph messages and other private info; the Minton Committee's similar work (FDR later appointed both Black to the Supreme Court and Minton to a circuit court, from which he was later elevated to the highest court); The FCC's work under both Hoover and Roosevelt to punish opponents; Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City and Boss Ed Crump of Memphis's efforts to ruin and exclude opponents; and the farcical sedition trials and mail stoppages against World War II protestors or just anti-New Dealers. While sometimes this can go into too much detail, this is a needed look at a neglected topic.
Many historians try to dismiss Franklin Roosevelt's personal involvement in the internment, limiting it to his issue of the general Executive Order 9066, and place much of the blame on Lt. Gen. John DeWitt. But as Beito shows FDR called the Japanese "treacherous people" and had earlier supported California's laws forbidding Japanese land ownership because they could not be assimilated. He ignored his own intelligence reports that most Nisei (American-born Japanese) were loyalist and focused on vague threats. He pushed for removal of Japanese from Hawaii, but that collapsed due to the fact that they were 1/3 of the population. DeWitt was at first suspicious of interning the Nisei, but he did everything in his power to carry it out. He used the 1940 Census punch cards to form the plans, a clear denial of the privacy of the census. DeWitt's Final Report that this was all based on race was so potentially devastating to the government in court that the government secretly destroyed them before they should have turned them over. Despite the problems, FDR urged to hold onto the camps until after the 1944 election.
There are many other important stories told here. About the Black Committee's dragnet subpoenas of telegraph messages and other private info; the Minton Committee's similar work (FDR later appointed both Black to the Supreme Court and Minton to a circuit court, from which he was later elevated to the highest court); The FCC's work under both Hoover and Roosevelt to punish opponents; Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City and Boss Ed Crump of Memphis's efforts to ruin and exclude opponents; and the farcical sedition trials and mail stoppages against World War II protestors or just anti-New Dealers. While sometimes this can go into too much detail, this is a needed look at a neglected topic.
August 2, 2024
A true expose of a criminized government under Theodore Roosevelt (FDR)
How Hugo Black and Sherman Minton - FDR's henchmen lorded over our civil rights under thConstitution. It's a stark warning to us AMERICAN PEOPLE to be ever diligent of the goings on of our politicticians and today, our large corporations. "K" street rules thr roost along with far left and far right government.
How Hugo Black and Sherman Minton - FDR's henchmen lorded over our civil rights under thConstitution. It's a stark warning to us AMERICAN PEOPLE to be ever diligent of the goings on of our politicticians and today, our large corporations. "K" street rules thr roost along with far left and far right government.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews