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David T. Beito’s most recent book, and the subject of this conversation, is The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (buy it through the link!), published by the Independent Institute in 2023.
The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal have now largely passed from living memory. When I was in junior high school in the 1970s, however, many of the teachers had not only lived through the New Deal but remembered it as an almost sacred moment. We watched scratchy black-and-white movies in class about the great success of FDR’s New Deal in ending the Great Depression, the soundtrack blaring with “Happy Days Are Here Again.” David Beito’s book is about the dark side of all that, the almost crazy abuse of American civil liberties under FDR’s administration. FDR’s Congressional allies, including future Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and Sherman Minton, rifled through individual tax returns and more than 3 million Western Union telegrams to find dirt on outspoken opponents of the New Deal. They proposed criminalizing “false” news. They used regulatory power and private coercion to drive virtually any criticism of the New Deal from the new medium of radio. And, finally, they put more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps built by the famous Works Progress Administration, and kept them there long after any argument for military necessity had passed. And that isn’t the end of it by any means!
And please listen to the last part, in which we discuss the frosty even if perhaps unsurprising silence with which academic historians have responded to David’s excellent book.
Listen on Apple, if you prefer, or Spotify.
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