Judging Freedom - Prof. David Beito | FDR’s War on Civil Liberties.

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Discover the untold impact of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency on civil liberties with Judge Andrew Napolitano, alongside Professor David Beito, discuss the historical intricacies of a leader celebrated for his charisma yet mired in controversy. Professor Beito, armed with insights from his new book, joins me in unraveling FDR's dualistic nature, where behind the façade of public charm lay actions that often undermined the very constitutional values America stands for. From the Newport Sex Scandal to the Japanese internment camps, our dialogue navigates through the tumultuous waters of FDR's policies, offering a fresh perspective on how these events have shaped our understanding of presidential power and its implications on civil rights. This episode is not just a history lesson; it's a call to examine the complexities of revered figures and the long shadows their decisions cast on future generations. We shed light on the adoration FDR commanded despite the criticisms of his policies, and we discuss the haunting question of his awareness of the impending Pearl Harbor attack. With Professor Beito's expertise, we dissect the paradoxical nature of FDR's supporters and adversaries, providing listeners with a nuanced view of a presidency that continues to provoke debate and reflection. Tune in for a compelling conversation that challenges the narrative of American leadership and the enduring relevance of scrutinizing the balance between security and individual freedoms.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024. Our guest is Professor David Beto, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Alabama and a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. David and I have been friends for a number of years. The professor is an expert on, among other things, American history. And we're going to talk today about FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not his presidency in general, which in my view was one of the worst presidencies in American history, even though if you look at the so-called experts

who compiled the list of so-called great presidents, FDR is up there with Lincoln, the worst president in American history in my view. But we are going to talk about Professor Beto's new book on FDR and civil liberties and what FDR did when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy before he was Governor of New York and before he was President of the United States who suppress speech to invade privacy and to incarcerate people on the basis of their ethnicity, the infamous Japanese internment camps. Professor Beto, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. I've read your books, you know that, and we talked when I was at Fox about one of your previous great books, and I'm happy to discuss this one. Welcome here to Judging Freedom. Thank you. It's been too long.

It has. It has. This show in the past two years has been devoted almost exclusively to the excesses of American foreign policy, particularly the war in Ukraine and for the past three months, the war in Gaza. But we'll take a break from that because it's important to remember the myths in American history. It's also important to remember the subtle ways in which the government has worn away at our liberties. So tell us a little bit first

about FDR the man, the public liberal adored by the media, the private tyrant willing to crush the civil liberties of his opponents. Yeah, there's quite a contrast. Nobody could be more charming. Nobody gave better speeches. Nobody connected with the public more effectively than FDR. So he has that public persona. But in private, what I come across over and over again, this is long before I did the book. When I look at his correspondence, I look at accounts and meetings, is a kind of cynicism, kind of ruthlessness, and a sadism to some extent as well, if you look at his private persona. Trump is somebody who will just burst out and say what he thinks, outrageous very often, repulsive very often, but he'll just sort of say it. FDR would say similar things, but he would be very careful.

When he attacked opponents publicly, it was with humor. You almost kind of liked being attacked by him. So he was very effective, but there was a double-sided nature to him. Tell us about this Newport sex scandal and his persecution of gays. Now, this occurred, I believe, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. So we're about 10 or 12 years before he's President of the United States. But take it from there, please, Professor. Yes. During World War I and after, he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. He was appointed by the Secretary to head an investigation of the Newport Naval Base of possible homosexuality in the Navy. And he,

this came to be called the Newport Sex Squad. And they used methods such as entrapment. They would hold people without charges for long periods of time, intimidation, and he went all for it. FDR was a progressive. FDR, as a progressive, believed that the end was all important, that you didn't worry so much about constitutional procedure. That is a consistent threat. You didn't worry so much about constitutional procedure. That is a consistent threat. You didn't worry too much about due process. You tried to achieve the just end. In this case, it was rooting out homosexuality in the Navy. Now, you'd think that that would be popular at the time because most people would have agreed with that in theory. Well, yeah, I think that's true. But his methods were so over the top, so extreme, that they were subject to several investigations, including one by the U Senate issued its report, its headline news in the

New York Times. People blamed FDR. And a lot of people thought his career was over with. Now, only a couple of weeks after that Senate report, FDR had his bout with polio starting. And he was able to make a recovery, a political recovery. And, you know, possibly some of that was sympathy for him. And I think justified sympathy because FDR did face that problem very courageously. But it's interesting the timing on that. Let me interrupt you, Professor. I mean, aside from the targeting of gays, what did he do that was so reprehensible? Did they entrap people? Did they send investigators to seduce young men in the Navy and then, once they had succumbed, arrest them? I don't know about the seduction aspect. I haven't heard that.

But they would, yes, I guess they did do that in a way. They would go in there and they would imply certain things and they would draw them in. And then you also had people held for long periods without charges. Because FDR only cared about the end result. He didn't care about the means. He didn't care about the process. He didn't care about due process. Well, this is a statement from two of his own attorney generals basically said this, that he was not a legalistic person. He did not worry about such things.

He had a problem and he wanted to solve the problem. Why did he view gays in the Navy, which today is commonplace, why did he view that as a problem? Oh, you know, it was just seen as a, you know, this is the period, right? It was seen as a perversion. It was seen as that they could become vulnerable to blackmail. But a lot of it was sort of driven by the view of the time that this is a sexual perversion. We should not allow it. You know, we should not allow gays in the federal government, in the Navy, in any institution, and we should force them out. That is a standard view, but it's revealing that FDR's methods in this case were so extreme that even under that standard view, he was seen as going too far. Did he try and deny that he had anything to do with it? Yeah, he did.

At first, I think he was very, very clear that, well, why are they worried about this? Why are they so upset about this? But you do have FDR sort of trying to shunt this off on others. He had obviously been appointed. So he would try to sort of say, look, I was just doing my job, that kind of thing. Before we get to the internment of Japanese Americans, probably the darkest mark on his personal legacy and on his presidency, tell us about suppression of free speech and tell us about surveillance and tell us about how he used committees in the Congress to take the blame for the suppression and the surveillance. All right. Well, about 1935, 34, 35, there's increased opposition to the New Deal.

Originally, FDR has got total public backing because it's an emergency situation. But there's more and more opposition. So he wants to discredit the opposition. So he recruits through, you know, middleman, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, my own home state. Now, we often think of Black as a Supreme Court justice, but Black was a very ambitious, very ruthless U.S. senator, kind of a populist, I guess you'd say. I believe he was also a grand wizard of the KKK, was he not? He was also in the KKK a lifetime. He wasn't a grand wizard, but he had a lifetime membership in the KKK. And that was known, by the way.

It wasn't officially known, but there were rumors, there were stories. The Chicago Tribune has a famous cartoon showing Hugo Black riding as a Knight Rider, as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And this is before it was all officially released. But that information was out there. And he had basically built his career to a great extent in the 1920s because of his ties to the Klan. That was officially revealed after he was on the court in FDR. Who knew about this?

Basically publicly said, not publicly, he said, probably this is no big deal. A lot of my biggest supporters are in the Klan. Well, what did he have Senator, future Justice Black do? Okay. Well, Black would call in these witnesses and he'd grill them like a la Joe McCarthy, maybe much more extreme in some ways because he had the back end of the administration. But he kind of had mixed success. So he thought, how can I throw these people off balance? And Black came up with an idea or someone came up with an idea and suggested it to him. Why not get their private communications? What is the email of this period? It is the telegram. It's over 50% of long distance communication. It's in some companies, they've got telegraphers right there. People say things in telegrams, just like in emails, they thought, well, if I can get their private telegrams, I can really throw them off balance.

And there was a law that required the telegraph companies, the leading one was Western Union, to save all telegrams. And so Black had this idea. He said, I'd like to get access to their private telegrams. He goes to Western Union and says, I want all telegrams. He said, I'd like to get access to their private telegrams. He goes to Western Union, says, I want all telegrams, for example, this is just part of what he wanted, sent by every member, to and from every member of Congress for a nine-month period. I want copies of them. And Western Union said, no, if people knew this, we wouldn't have anyone want to do business with us. So he goes to the FCC and he goes to the administration and the order comes down. Again, Roosevelt approved all of this, that they fully cooperate with Black and the telegraph companies decided not to fight it.

So they went in, his staffers, FCC staffers, they went in and they searched thousands of telegrams every day. In the end, they searched 3 million telegrams. It's mass surveillance, as I say in the title. jury. This was not done pursuant to a search warrant issued by a judge on the basis of probable cause. This was just FDR's administration strong-arming Western Union to give Hugo Black all these telegrams so that he could embarrass FDR's political opponents. You are absolutely right. Now, in the past, private telegrams had been subpoenas, but they had to be done through the legal process. And you had to name a person and give a certain period and so forth. This is thousands of people literally have their telegrams searched. And of course, the order came down from Black that he said, well, if you see things when you're reading them, you know, to the staff or his private things, go past those and look at anything related to lobbying. What would be lobbying?

Lobbying would be what we're doing now. Having any sort of impact on public opinion through discussion of issues, that would be lobbying under their definition. I'm not kidding. Who was harmed as a result of all this violation of the right to privacy and violation of the Fourth Amendment? Well, the witnesses that were called in and that were ambushed were certainly harmed. Give you an idea of how outrageous the outrage that built over time. Now, at first, this was all secret, but Western Union started to inform people that their telegrams are being searched. One of the people whose telegrams is being searched was named Newton Baker. Baker was Secretary of War under Woodrow Wilson, was a supporter of the New Deal, moderate supporter. And Baker was just

outraged when he found out. And he said, look, if I saw a lynching party, lynching, this is this, mild-mannered guy says this, who's lynching Senator Hugo Black, I wouldn't join the lynching, but I wouldn't stop them when they put the rope around his neck. This is coming from a moderate sort of new dealer who was so upset. A guy finally sued, and his name was Silas Strawn. He was head of the Chamber of Commerce. He was head of the American Power Association, the Gulf Association. This guy was incredibly accomplished. Big Chicago law firm to this day that he was in. And Strawn sued, and then others sued as well, and won in the courts. But by that time, Black had done his big search. And he said, well, we don't need to continue our

search. We've got everything. And the courts were reluctant to say, you know, to do anything then. They just said, don't do it anymore. And as a result of this, there was legal precedent, which was very valuable, which meant later congressional committees could not do this, could not tap phone calls and that kind of thing. I don't know what they're doing now, but they couldn't do this kind of thing for a long time because of these precedents. And that would include the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the McCarthy Committee.

So imagine the damage they would have done if they would have had this kind of same power. Take us to the internment of Japanese Americans, how it happened, who supported it, who tried to wash his hands of it? Well, this is a story. Everybody condemns FDR now for his role in Japanese internment. But if you look at history textbooks, what they tend to do is mitigate blame. They'll say, well, this is a hysteria. This was an emergency period. They'll point to polls that really were taken after the internment was a fait accompli, saying

Americans overwhelmingly supported this, et cetera, et cetera. And FDR really had to do it. And he was distracted. That's another big one. He had so many other things to worry about. This is not true. The internment did not occur until two months after Pearl Harbor. And the initial response from the press and from others is, these are Americans. We're not going to put them in concentration camps, right? People urge FDR to speak out and calm the situation down and prevent the rise of hysteria, but FDR does nothing. Now, FDR was predisposed to do this. In the 1920s, he'd written articles for the Macon Telegraph where he supported bans on Japanese immigration, bans on Japanese first-generation owning land in California. You know, bans on intermarriage.

So he was not a friend of the Japanese Americans. In the late 30s, he said privately at the White House that if we ever have an attack, right, all Japanese ship, people meeting Japanese ships and their family members in peacetime, sailors from Japanese ships in Hawaii, should be put immediately into his words, concentration camps. I've gotten pushback. People say, nobody goes to concentration camps. Hang on a minute, Professor. These people that he put into American concentration camps were as American as he was. Exactly. You're talking about U.S. citizens. This is somebody criticized. This is Senator Black when he was on the Supreme Court, wrote the opinion endorsing Japanese internment, and it was signed by Felix Frankfurter.

And somebody said, Felix Frankfurter is supporting concentration camps for people who qualify, unlike him, to become American president. Wow. Wow. And was there ever any discussion about due process? Or were people just put in these concentration camps because they were Japanese American? Japanese ancestry, but born in the United States. We're not talking about people that are of mixed race. We're talking about Japanese race, but born in the U.S. Legally here as American, as apple pie, as American as FDR, in concentration camps because of their ancestry. Do I have that right? They're in there because of their ancestry. They even put, believe it or not, orphans, Japanese, people of Japanese ancestry who were from orphanages, mixed orphanages, in internment camps. And there was pushback, and there was a lot of pushback, but not from the people enforcing this, certainly not from FDR. There was opposition to it, though. Wasn't one of the people enforcing this a guy who was the Attorney General of California

by the name of Earl Warren? Yes, Earl Warren was. This is the same Earl Warren who would become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court 20 years later, 15 years later. To Warren's credit, once this is all over with, he welcomes back the Japanese people to California and so forth. Someone who never changes his mind is Hugo Black. He basically, till his dying day, says he thinks he was right in doing this. He said you couldn't just tell them apart from each other, that kind of thing. He would make statements like that. What happened in the concentration camps?

They were just confined and couldn't leave. They weren't executed or tortured as in German concentration camps. No, no, they were not. Although there were people trying to escape who were killed. What became of their homes and businesses? They had to sell them, or they lost them, but they had to sell them at, basically, they were snatched up for, in some cases, for almost nothing. If they had any family pets, those pets had to be destroyed

because you couldn't take them with them. There's no happy ending here. The Supreme Court in one of its worst decisions in history, a case called Korematsu upheld this internment, claimed it was done for military reasons, claimed it was done by the military and was necessary to prevent treason in case of an invasion of the West Coast. In the Reagan years, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act or the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which gave $20,000 a head to the people surviving, a pittance compared to what, protect, and defend so pronounced that he didn't care how they got there. He didn't care what happened to them. He just wanted them locked up. Was it his specific idea? I don't know if it was. He sort of hands it over to others, to the military. And he says, you do what you need to do.

And they come up with this and he signs on to it. But I think he was predisposed to do this. His own attorney general opposed it. This is, J. Edgar Hoover opposed it. And the attorney general, Bididdle writes about this extensively in his autobiography, which very few people quote for some strange reason. And Biddle said he went to FDR and he said, don't do this. And he said, basically, it was just impossible to reach him. He just was predisposed to think, well, the Japanese are this big problem. We got to do it. So FDR had people high up in the government.

Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, was against it. There were people in the military that were against it. That's why it didn't happen in Hawaii. This is very revealing. FDR wanted to intern Japanese Americans in Hawaii. 40% of the population. What did that mean? He wanted to send them to one of the small islands. The military commander on the ground resisted it subtly, and it just was going to be too expensive because you'd have to take ships away from the

Pacific War to transport these Japanese. When he ran for re-election in 1944, he was already very sick and it wasn't a campaign like we're accustomed to in the modern era with debates on television and traveling and mass rallies. It was effectively conducted by surrogates and maybe by him with some speeches from the Oval Office. Was the internment of Japanese Americans a campaign issue in the presidential election of 1944? Let me say something quickly. You said, was it FDR's idea? I gave the example of Hawaii. That was clearly his idea. He pushed that and it was finally posed by people in the military. So that gives you some idea where he's coming from. 1944, it was not an issue, much of an issue.

And FDR's advisor, FDR did not want it to become an issue. His advisors recommend he release people from the camps. Biddle, Ickes. I could go down a long list of people, close advisors, military and so forth, said, we don't need to have them in the camps anymore. The war has turned. There's no real issue here anymore. FDR refused to release them in 1944. A couple more questions. Urge repeatedly kept them there all through the campaign.

Just because he was afraid of the electoral consequences. He said so. He was afraid that close states might go against him. Why did the public love him so much? Why was there such remorse when he died? You know, here's an interesting thing. Francis Biddle, who was again FDR's attorney general, condemns FDR for internment. Very critical. But guess who he dedicated his autobiography to in 1962?

FDR. decided nature here from a lot of people who, you know, love the guy and they're willing to forgive these kinds of things. I think that goes on with a lot of people in the public who end up sort of, you know, this hysteria stoked up, end up supporting, end up supporting the policy. And so people somehow don't blame him for these things as much as you might expect even a lot of the fervent supporters because they just love him in other ways. And there is a very close connection between the welfare state and the internment, which is worth mentioning as well, which is interesting. Do you think FDR knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened? I haven't done enough research to make a definitive conclusion. I think he knew an attack was going to be coming.

I think he was relieved when the attack occurred. But I think he knew that an attack was going to be coming. And I think he was asleep at the switch in really, you know, making sure that the U.S. was protected. Did he know an attack was specifically coming at Pearl Harbor? Again, I haven't done the research on this to say whether he knew specifically whether it was going to occur at Pearl Harbor, but I think he knew one was coming. Professor David Beto, the book is The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights, The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship and Mass Surveillance, a brilliantly, brilliantly written and prodigiously researched work. It is now the standard in the field. Professor Beto, it's a pleasure.

Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Coming up later today at two o'clock Eastern, Colonel Douglas McGregor at three o'clock, Phil Giraldi at four o'clock, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll be you next time. start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.