The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW: FDR's Harbinger of Things to Come — Concentration Camps, Surveillance, Censorship

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Human nature (especially politicians) does not change. FDR's tactics and goals in attacking the Bill of Rights differ from today's political class only in the technology available to him. David Beito, professor emeritus of history at Univ of Alabama and Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute joins to discuss his book, "The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance".Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

All right, joining us now is David Beto. He's an emeritus professor of history at the University of Alabama. Right now, he is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, an excellent organization. And we're going to talk to him about freedom issues. The book that he has here, published the independent institute is the new deal's war on the bill of rights the untold story of fdr's concentration camps censorship and mass surveillance thank you for joining us david thank you this is something that i think everybody's going to find very interesting because we know so much about fdr what he did with the war people talk about

pearl harbor they talk about the economic takeover but this civil liberties aspect is something that's not usually talked about much yeah it isn't talked about and i i'm interested in those issues certainly but i i said to myself why don't i just zero in on this and the more i found the more i found there was a story here that really has not been told, or it's only been lightly told about FDR's attitudes toward the Bill of Rights, towards the protections of the First Amendment, toward privacy, and so forth. And FDR's record is atrocious. I would say worse than Woodrow Wilson. And that's saying a lot.

It really was. And of course, it was a major change. And so many things were restructured. You know, it's when we look at him, he really did rule as a tyrant. And we've always had this kind of construct that, well, you know, liberals are for civil liberties and Republicans and conservatives for economic liberties. You know, they're good on those two things. And actually, they're not. The liberals are not good on civil liberties at all, are they?

And FDR is proof of that, isn't he? He's proof of that, although one of the more encouraging things that I found in this book is there was pushback against FDR coming from a lot of people on the left, not only conservatives, but people like Norman Thomas, a great defender of civil libertarianism, who was a socialist. There were new dealers in the Justice Department that really pushed back against a lot of things that he did, including Japanesement so in contrast to woodrow wilson uh fdr is getting a lot of pushback from people from subordinates from new dealers from conservatives some socialists um and that is for me an encouraging lesson for today that maybe there is potential for people on the left and the right to get together to defend civil liberties because if they don't then they're they're more isolated yeah let's begin with the concentration

camps because that is the one aspect of the civil liberty stuff that people are somewhat familiar with but break that down for us exactly uh what was done to the japanese americans and uh and when this all began, uh, as, as the war was rolling out, when did the concentration camps begin? Well, the standard view of FDR, you're going to get in,

in textbooks as well. Japanese internment is a bad thing and he shouldn't have done that, but they often portray him as distracted. Is it, it's really, it was, is done by subordinates. He went along with it.

There was hysteria. I see that with Trump all the time about the lockdowns every day yeah he was distracted he was playing 40 chest or he didn't know what was happening or whatever but yeah that's always what the apology yeah fdr the great the great leader right the guy that's always on top of things yeah is somehow clueless and distracted that that that was not convincing to me and the more i looked into it is that fdr is a leader on this he's very much proactive in the 1920s his attitudes towards the japanese were very clear he said california has a right to deny japanese immigrants the right to own land for example we can never have racial mixing with them it just it just isn't going to work in the in the late 30s he said that if there is a war with japan

we need to put any japanese american who who had met with japanese sailors or their family members we need to put them in his words he uses the term concentration camp there's a debate are these concentration camps well i think they are they're not death camps i don't think they're the same as the nazi death camps but fdr called them concentration camps and that and i think that's what they are so he was prepared for this he was already talking about it um and but he's very smart fdr has deniability he's very smart. FDR has deniability. He's very charming. He would not talk about this in public, but he lets it happen, right? After Pearl Harbor, it took two months for him to issue his executive order. And he's sort of subtly opening the door to people

from below to say, all right, you want to put them in concentration camps? Well, we'll consider that. And then he signs off on it. But the initial attitude of Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the press is not one of, gee, we should put the Japanese Americans in concentration camp. That takes time to happen. And FDR lets that hysteria develop and signs off on it. So he is proactive in this. He's not clueless. He's a very well-informed man. He knows about the issues. He knows what's going on.

And there are a lot of top people that are telling him, you don't have to do this, including his own attorney general, Francis Biddle. And Biddle is very much against this he ends up going along with it but he he tells him mr president we don't have to do this there isn't this demand for uh jagger hoover is against it uh secretary of the interior a lot of top people in the justice department are telling him don't do it and he doesn't oh and of course it served a very useful purpose for him if he could um uh you know always to create the enemy especially an enemy amongst us uh that heightens the fear and and and people running to the leader for help and very easy to do that when you got people who don't look like you you know they

couldn't do that with the germans so easily and people of German descent. But I mentioned they might have squeezed some of that stuff in there in more subtle ways. But that was really kind of a PR thing. What was it? He did it with an executive order. So what is the presumed authority that he might have claimed to be able to do something like that, to arrest people just because they're Japanese. Well, you look at his executive order, and I used to have students read it,

but they couldn't figure it out. And I realized when I looked at it, I couldn't figure it out because it uses terms like persons whose removal is, who must be removed. He never uses the term, it's like the Constitution, never uses the term, Constitution never mentions the word slavery. FDR's executive order never mentions Japanese Americans. He says, basically, it's a military argument, right?

He sort of says, well, the military, you know, this has been deemed uh necessary for national defense so we have to remove these people from these areas um namely the whole west coast and then what we'll do you know that the initial order says we'll remove them then it says well then they have to go to these assembly centers and so forth so they're told essentially they can't live where they are and they they have nowhere else to go and we will uh create these uh these camps for them but he never uses the term japanese or japanese americans that comes later in the enforcement orders which are signed by the military and that's why they he's able to shift blame to them and it's all people all people of japanese ancestry i didn't do it that includes people

in orphanages so they actually say well they got to go to the camp yeah yeah yeah but i didn't do it it was the democrat governors who did it or it was the military who did it. And so I guess it was the if you were a Japanese American, you're minding your own business. And then you get a knock on the door and it's a bunch of uniformed soldiers. Was it the military that was going on and rounding people up and taking them in? Yeah, what they do is it's publicized. Right. So they'll go to the neighborhood, they'll put posters everywhere um and say report to this assembly center on june 8th right you go there and they're gonna they take you to camps and you got you got a family dog you love well too bad you know you can't take that dog with you you

better figure out what to do you got some property well you better sell it and of course that put a lot of bargain prices so they're only able to take the bare essentials with them wow it's really quite quite cruel and the cruelty of this is part of the story fdr keeps them in the camps until late well 1945 basically keeps them through the 1944 election even though by 43 the u.s is winning the war again the advice advice he's getting is even more overwhelming from top people in the government let you can let them go now but he says well there's that california you know i want to carry california and so he keeps him there and so they didn't there's a cruelty there a cold-blooded aspect to him that people haven't picked up on so they kept them interred until the papers were signed

essentially with japan i guess and then then uh no uh it was clear that uh the supreme court was going to rule on and they did this in in, I think it was December 44. So he knew that the court, the court sustained it, but he also knew that it was going to be ruled on. So to deflate that, basically they announced, you know, well, we're going to let him go. We're going to wind down the camps by the end of 1944. And that's what they did so the it was a kind of a farcical uh

situation but they knew basically at that point the election is over and that you know the the announce they they decided at that point to do it wow and they knew the courts were going to start ruling on it and yeah yeah that's that's amazing and and of course um and as we were talking um off air uh you pointed out that there was also uh some uh uh actions that he took against a black gop member tell us a little bit about that oh yeah that's that's one of the more interesting chapters of the book for me. Someone told me about this, and I said, well, this is interesting, but how does it figure into the broader story? And I looked into it, and it fits in just perfectly. Now, there was this guy named J.B. Martin. He was the head of the National Negro Baseball League.

He owned a drugstore. He's African-American in Memphis, and it was kind of a showcase drug store a lot of people went to it he was a pretty wealthy guy well he was a republican and he was the head of the shelby county republican party that the memphis republican party and they had a weird deal with the local mayor there well he wasn't mayor he was mayor briefly but he was a city boss boss crump and crump had a deal with the black republicans he said you guys can vote however when i need you for particular things um you know you're gonna serve me and they they were in charge of vice and that kind of thing right so. So he sort of uses them as a tool.

Well, by the late 30s, Crump no longer needs them as much because he's become very close to FDR. He's getting a lot of New Deal money. But Martin doesn't know that, you know, maybe he shouldn't push it. So 1940, Martin wants to carry the state for the Republicans, for Wendell Willkie. And he organizes a quite massive interracial rally. So there are white Republicans in Tennessee. They tend to be from the mountain areas, and they have this alliance with these black Republicans. And he has this rally against over a thousand people.

Boss Crump is upset, and he says, you don't do any more of those rallies or i'm gonna police you and martin says well i'm sorry i'm gonna do it and he did it and what does that mean policing well boss crump sent in police to search every customer white or black coming in or leaving the drugstore. Wow. Every customer. And eventually, basically, Crump had a kind of license to bond prisoners and so forth, but it was informal. So it was clear that Crump was going to throw Martin in jail. So Martin leaves. However, he comes back two years later to go to a baseball game in a stadium. He helped to build. The police come to his box at the stadium and tell him, basically, put him in a holding cell. And then he's told he better get out of the city.

Wow. All right. Now, okay. So Martin and others go to the federal government and complain. And what happens is that the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the guy there just says this is really a slam dunk case against Crump here. This is like reporting the newspapers and, you know, it's like a big deal, right? That he's doing this. Even the local Memphis paper saying this is going too far and uh he's ready to prosecute deposes martin and so forth but it goes to higher ups and it's vetoed and uh a philip randolph the labor leader who's very strong on civil liberties

comes to the aid of martin and goes to eleanor roosevelt and she sends a very brief note saying you know i've been told we just don't we're not supposed to look into this that this isn't a good idea and nothing happens nothing happens and and and again crump is very close to roosevelt to both roosevelts he had supported franklin since 1931 he had paid played a key role in getting him in the nomination he gets a lot of federal money um he's an important figure in 44 to get truman in um and so forth so roosevelt is this alliance with big city bosses like crump and they can do whatever they want, suppress the vote, and he's not going to do anything. And that's exactly what happens in this particular case.

Wow. Wow. And of course, you know, they, um, many people have tried to point out the history of the Democrat party vis-a-vis a black community. Uh, and, uh, and it was still happening at that point in time. And then very quickly, they just kind of reversed themselves. It's kind of interesting. It's kind of like seeing, uh uh the guy who started a southern poverty law

center morris dees and how he was he went from defending the ku klux klan to all you know takes a takes a powder uh works on building a business that is uh direct mail and then uh comes back in as an anti-klansman even though the only thing he did in the civil rights was to defend the Ku Klux Klan. It is interesting to see how the Democrats very rapidly did a complete U-turn on all this stuff and made that their issue, isn't it? Yeah, and Roosevelt really, you know, I mean, I don't talk about anti-lynching, but there's an anti-lynching bill and it's filibustered and stopped by the democrats previous presidents coolidge and harding had supported the bill roosevelt does not support the bill and it is uh it is he doesn't do anything for civil rights basically but a lot of money is

spent and um a lot of relief money and he's able to use that effectively with not only african americans but whites uh throwing that money around in a big way it's very important um there's stories that people at the wpa will get the phone and they did forget themselves and they'd say democratic headquarters right so it was intermixed intermingled the relief money and the political machines and these local political machines fdr is perfectly willing to use them but creates his own machine in a sense yeah let's talk a little bit you know you mentioned woodrow wilson uh another uh a very dangerous president i call him president, but he's also a precedent. A lot of precedents that he set.

When we talk about censorship, that's one of the other aspects of your book here. With Woodrow Wilson, I frequently talk about the Supreme Court case where he threw a guy in jail for a movie that he did. And I talk about it in terms of, you know, hey, the Supreme Court reverses itself frequently. You know, when everybody says this is such and such as a law of the land, they're always

reversing themselves and making wrong decisions. Sometimes they do it pretty quickly. Sometimes it takes decades. But they lock this guy away because he did a movie called The Spirit of 76, which had the British as a bad guy. And the Supreme Court upheld that that he got a jail sentence and a pretty stiff fine because woodrow wilson wanted to portray the british as our allies what was uh the kind of things that fdr was doing in terms of censorship well fdr of course had experience uh during the woodrow wilson administration he was assistant secretary of the navy. And his attitude was, if anything, more anti-civil libertarian than other people in that administration. One guy, for example, did an article. He said, well, why isn't kind of implied satirical?

Why is an FDR in uniform? Assistant secretary of the Navy is in his 30s. Why isn't this guy in the Navy himself? And FDR was so mad that he went to the federal prosecutor and said, why don't you prosecute this guy? And the prosecutor said, well, we really don't have a case. And FDR said, he should be in, you know, in the penitentiary, you know, he should be, you know, that was his attitude. so he comes in with this kind of attitude and fdr's view is social good right i i we we need social justice the ends are the important thing and let's not worry about the means all right well um censorship um there was a senator named uh this is one of the case where where there was pushback

there was a senator named sherman mitten there's a bridge in indiana named after him when i look him up that's the main thing that comes up but mitten was head of a committee in the senate that was investigating anti-new deal organizations and he was getting a lot of pushback from these people so mitten got very frustrated and proposed a bill that would have made it a felony to publish any newspaper article known to be untrue again the president and the new dealers are very worried about misinformation they're very worried about fake news in fact i think they even use that expression now the question is who put mitten up to it and i don't have slam dunk evidence but people at the time said mitten was not the kind of guy to do this kind of thing on of his own so i think fdr was floating a trial balloon that's my opinion uh but what happened was there was universal opposition to this bill coming from the left and the right.

And Minton had to pull it, pull it. Even, you know, these leading New Deal newspaper publishers said, you can't do this. This is going too far. And he had to pull it. Now, more direct FDR involvement was with Minton's predecessor, Senator Hugo Black, who was an attack dog for the New Deal in the Senate. Black had a committee, was having a similar problem. He was investigating anti-New Dealers.

They were not being very cooperative. They were getting some public sympathy. So Black comes up with the idea or someone does what if i could get access to their private telegrams then i could really ambush them now telegrams are the email of the day over 50 of long distance communication they were instantaneous in many cases companies would have telegrapher uh you would say things in telegrams you wouldn't say in you know letters you know off the cuff etc etc you didn't save them generally and so he went to the telegraph companies western union says i want to get all telegrams sent

for example by every member of the congress over a nine-month period to and from going through washington i want all those and uh you know western uses well we don't want to we're not going to do this you know customers aren't going to like this and so he goes to the roosevelt administration and the fcc we're working in tandem and they basically instruct western union to do this and they don't want to do it but they agree so black staffers and western union people go i mean and fcc people go into western union one day and said um okay give us you know these tele, right? They went down the list, who's in Congress and so forth. And they would bring out these big stacks because the law required Western Union

to keep copies of all telegrams, right? So they had to keep copies of all of them. So they go through these copies. They go through several thousand today and it adds up to over 3 million that they go through. Wow. And the instruction comes from Black staffers as well. If you see things of a personal nature, don't worry about that.

Don't look at that. Look at anything having to do with lobbying. And what is lobbying any attempt to indirectly or directly influence uh i don't know uh political policy so what we're doing to be lobbying right yeah uh so anything like that it's it's it's about as broad as you can get and they go through these and eventually it comes out because western union starts to inform people that this is going on one of the people they inform is senator newton baker who'd been secretary of war under wilson baker is kind of a moderate you know new dealer kind of quasi new dealer you know kind of just this mild-mannered guy he is so outraged by this that he finds out

his telegrams have been searched that he says look if somebody saw somebody lynching senator hugo black i would not join the lynching but i would not stop them from putting the noose around his neck and uh this is a mild-mannered guy anyway there's this is a long story and there's a lot of pushback there are court suits and that are successful against this but black is able to get all this booty and then he gets on the supreme court because roosevelt is very appreciative this is the main thing that roosevelt reason that roosevelt puts black on the court he's very appreciative of this um so anyway that's that's the story of that but um it is it is it is condemned though again this is another

thing you get people like walter littman someone who who's a liberal. You get a lot of Washington Post. You get a lot of people in the press who are normally supportive of Roosevelt saying, this is going too far, and there is pushback against it. That's interesting. Human nature doesn't change, especially the human nature of politicians. It's just that they've got better tools today. All this stuff that you're talking about, well, we're going to look for misinformation. We're going to see if we can find something on anybody.

It reminds me very much of what Truman said about J. Edgar Hoover, how he's got files on everybody, and he's trending towards the Gestapo. This is really pretty pervasive. It's just that it wasn't as widely reported as things are right now and it wasn't as it wasn't directly affecting the public in the same way the social media surveillance and and things like that are rolling out and so it was kind of the people who were inside politics that that were that knew about this that were getting directly impacted with this now with the technology they can do this. Now with the technology,

they can do this with everybody. But the impulse is always the same, isn't it? Well, I will disagree in one sense. This is headline news, front page news, the Black Committee, the Black Inquisition. That's what it was called. I mean, I'm not just talking about right-wing. I mean, this was kind of,

and it's interesting how historians have just yeah that's the thing you know you don't just do just do a search at proquest you'll just see black committing my god all this stuff coming up and historians have not paid attention to it but you're right in a sense that uh a lot of this can be hidden a lot more effectively yes right and it's been hidden by the historians and it's been hidden by the historians. Follow up. And it's been hidden by the historians. So it's good that you brought that out. It went out well-documented at the time, but then flushed down the memory hole for the most part as they polished up the image of FDR. Let's talk about something that a lot of people that listen to this program are being concerned about. And that, of course, is what FDR did with gold in terms of talking about civil liberties it was hl minkin who said you know a year ago if i had a flask of whiskey in my pocket

and a gold coin the whiskey was legal the whiskey was illegal and the gold was legal now this year the whiskey is illegal and the gold is illegal tell us a little bit about about that and people's reactions to his gold confiscation well i didn't you know i didn't focus on that very much but i but i you know i certainly i certainly agree with you i could have done a whole chapter on that i'm sure um you know just a fundamental violation of the you know freedom of contract of contractual rights um and again there were people in the administration who recognized this and were outraged by it but fdr is able to take advantage of this window of opportunity which doesn't last that long when he becomes president but it lasts for a while

where he can just you know everybody's willing to say well this is the president this is a crisis worse than as bad as the great world war they're often comparing it to the war this is a wartime situation very much like you know what we saw with the with covet right and uh oh i don't know the patriot act yeah and and so forth this wartime, and people are willing to defer to the executive branch. And that's another example of that. And, of course, what we look at is the standard procedure. As I said, human nature doesn't change. The tactics that these people use doesn't change.

Their technology is the thing that's changing. But it's always about generating this sense of fear, this sense of fear about the others. We see with the Japanese concentration camps and that type of thing. And just using this sheer demagoguery and the power politics behind the scene to get whatever they want done and to keep people quiet about it. Talk a little bit about some other instances of mass surveillance and censorship that were going on in the fdr regime uh well um during world war ii you had a situation it was very different world war one world one there remained a lot of opposition to the war uh most of roosevelt's

opponents pre-war you know including these some of these big publishers and so forth the chicago tribune and uh and and uh the so-called uh uh patterson mccormick interests they all said after pearl harbor we're in we support the war right so there really isn't much opposition left world war one there's a lot of opposition a lot of people go to jail and so forth so fdr really wants to go after these people who had opposed him before the war however he's getting some pushback his own attorney general basically says well they're you know they're they're not against the war anymore they're not against the war anymore. They're not obstructing the war. They pledge support for it. But he blames them for restraining him in the pre-war period,

and he very much wants to go after them. But he gets pushback. But they do prosecute. So, in other words, the standards are the same as World War I, if not even more severe to be prosecuted however there just aren't as many people that are opposed to the war so they're searching around for people to censor in a way fdr wants to do a lot more censorship but he's getting pushback from the justice department and they go after one little paper uh called the

it's almost got a vendetta against it's it's called the Boise Valley Herald. And this is a paper that's anti-New Deal, defends Japanese Americans, is pro-civil rights. But they remain critical of the war. They're one of the rare people to be critical of the war. And so they go after this little small time newspaper daily newspaper has weddings and obituaries and off to that they make a they make a case out of it they prosecute them under the espionage act where world war one they were prosecuting a lot of people but a lot of people were still against were still against the war um so uh uh the situation is a little different than in world war one in that sense

but fdr is not more tolerant i would say he's less tolerant because he really wants to he wire taps people leading publishers uh he goes after the black press in a major way that story has not been told because the black press is very critical of the administration and they are talking for about prosecuting them for sedition but people go to fdr and say look you can't prosecute the chicago defender and uh the pittsburgh courier for sedition because you want the black vote and they're their main source of news right you don't want to alienate them so what they do is fdr has the fbi go around to these uh black publishers and basically tell them okay cooperate or you might get prosecuted and uh and and basically the black publishers

will give us more access to news and we'll cooperate and they don't get more access. But what happens is there were all kinds of stories in the black press about federal mistreatment of African-Americans, about discrimination in the military, about discrimination by federal contractors, discrimination in government programs. Those stories. Dis stories disappear over time instead you're getting some stories criticizing private employers private discrimination or uh you know things like that they're they they actually start pulling their punches because there's this kind of really quite effective indirect censorship where they get a visit from the FBI. And they say, we're very concerned about this. Wow. And these black publishers back off.

So they're not formally charged with sedition, but they are strong, armed and intimidated to ease up on their criticism of the administration. Now, you were talking about earlier, you know, there was a sense of, you know, like a war that not happened yet, but the sense like we have, like they use with the Patriot Act and 9-11 and that type of thing. And so in the lead up to this, a lot of this stuff is happening before the war. We expect to see some censorship stuff. They're going to make the statement of national security,

but this is stuff that was happening a lot of this before the war. Talk a little bit. You mentioned the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. He was right there with Woodrow Wilson. He kind of cut his teeth on all that stuff with the Palmer raid and helped to create the FBI. He was keeping files on everybody. What was the relationship between Fdr and um jerry hoover and how did he use the fbi besides what you just talked about intimidation well hoover was a you know was a

was a loyal servant of fdr uh um i i don't find him to be as big a player as as as a lot of people do because if you look at hoover's wiretaps in a single day for example he might be wiretapping you know 150 people right you know it's a lot a lot of this is illegal black bag jobs off the books uh but it isn't this this quite this massive scale hoover is actually against japanese internment so in some cases he he kind of pushes back on FDR in a good way. Now, the main way Hoover had come in. Well, let me ask you about that. What was his argument against it?

Was it, I can't imagine J. Edgar Hoover being a civil libertarian. What was his argument? Was it a pragmatic argument against it? What was his argument? He does make arguments like, well, these are American citizens. We shouldn't do this. He says that. However, he doesn't want anything to do with it, right?

Right. He doesn't want his agency to have anything to do with that. So he hands it over to the military. But he is against it. He doesn't think it's necessary. He, in fact, does tell FDR, look, we don't have that severe a problem with the Japanese American population. There isn't an espionage problem here, you know, of any significance. You know, we don't have to be concerned about that. Now, there is one thing during the war that the FBI does play a role in,

is investigating that I didn't talk about, but it's very timely. And that's the great sedition trial of the war. This is a trial, sounds very familiar here, where they get 30 defendants from all around, 32 defendants from all around the country. They scoop them up. And, you know, you'd find some guy that has a little newsletter in Topeka, Kansas. Well, let's bring him in. And these are people that had been, you know, a lot of them were kind of anti-Semitic, that had been anti-war, but some of them weren't. And they're all brought to Washington and prosecuted in D.C. under the Smith Act. And there's a provision of the Smith Act, which was originally aimed at communists, but most of these people are right-wingers, who had supported the Smith Act, interestingly enough.

And in this, it says, promoting insubordination in the U.S. military with the goal of participating in a worldwide Nazi conspiracy. All right. Most of these people didn't even know each other they didn't like each other and they're all and they're all a lot of them are kind of crazy and they're all brought to washington in one courtroom they each have their own lawyers and it's completely chaotic and over time a lot of people on the left recognize that look the government really has no case against these people. They start Washington Post compares it to the Moscow purge trials. And a lot of these lawyers, court appointed lawyers, a new deal lawyers end up becoming sympathetic to the case of these often wacky defendants.

And the trial becomes very chaotic and it ends because the judge dies he has a heart attack and a lot of people think he just he lost control of this trial in this you know he dies and then the government for a while thinks about continuing it but people in the justice department like biddle didn't really want to do this anyway. It's a sop to FDR. He wants to prosecute the head of the Chicago Tribune. So he says, I'll give you these sedition trials. And people on the left are thinking, these are a warning. This is just the beginning.

We're going to get these small fry, but we're going to get the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald. We're going to bring these people in eventually. That never happens. But I think that there's a hope even by FDR that these are just going to be the beginning, but it ends up backfiring for the government and they have ultimately have to dismiss the charges. But only a few months after this is over with, they start prosecuting communists under the Smith Act. And of course course a lot of these guys that were prosecuted are all for that so there's hypocrisy on both sides yeah yeah so yeah j edgar hoover is always a very astute politician he didn't want the optics of this uh the japanese internment camps uh but he um he would go for these other trials of uh you know political viewpoints uh it's kind of interesting to see how that that evolved um

and talk a little bit about uh the switch out of the vice president from henry wallace i've always found that to be fascinating to uh truman you know what what was the uh what was going on behind the scenes there between wallace and fdr and what were the power politics behind all that okay well wallace is made vice president in 1940 that the predecessor to wallace was john nance gardner who was was kind of a conservative democrat um who interestingly enough thought that it was time to have an anti-lynching bill and fdr when he found out about this laughed laughed he just uncontrollable laughter. And of course, FDR did nothing to bring about an anti lynching bill. They thought even Garner supports this. Anyway, Garner is the vice president.

And he he you know, Wallace, he doesn't get along with FDR. And they bring Wallace in, who's a big pro new dealer guy. Right. Real idea. And kind of a younger guy. long of the FDR and they bring Wallace in who's a big pro new dealer guy right real idea and kind of a younger guy he's kind of a dynamic speaker he's a little wacky but he's he's got a base of the pro new deal elements in the party seemed to me like initially Wallace is going to run wartime mobilization but it's he's so inefficient and the people around him that it doesn't work out very well and there's a lot of people in the business community that are very upset by Wallace.

FDR likes Wallace. I think he'd rather keep him in there. But in 44, basically the people in the business community and a lot of these big city machines are telling FDR, look, he's going to be a drag on the ticket. And FDR is,

you know, near death in 1944, that's covered up be a drag on the ticket and FDR is you know near death in 1944 that's covered up in a massive way he's in terrible shape and so they don't want Henry Wallace to be president FDR may mean now to figure it out but you know he's probably not going to live much longer and so they engineer basically kind of a coup at the convention um and wallace is sort of out of the country during the pre-convention period so he doesn't prepare very well but it's kind of a near thing but they're able to get in truman who's considered much more of a kind of moderate uh democrat pragmatic guy uh not a woolly headed idealist um and uh you know they they you know

they basically you know they're able to engineer this and truman gets the vice presidential nomination that may be an fdr i think was willing wanted wallace but he wasn't willing to stick his neck out for him because he was pragmatic he wanted to win and he thought these party bosses want wallace out well you know i'll kind of pull back and let them take him out maybe a foreshadowing of what's to come in this election cycle right kind of a woolly headed ideologue that uh can't really do anything if you give him a read some of Wallace, and he's more pragmatic guy than I thought he would be. He's sort of like he's into small business and all that stuff,

but yeah, you can see why they got rid of him. But he's allied with the pro-New Deal element in the party, and he's seen as a loose cannon. Yeah. Well, it's very important, and it's seen as is a as a loose cannon yeah well it's very important and it's important for us to see again as i forget who said it but you know history doesn't repeat it rhymes and we see so many different rhyming aspects of what you've been talking about here and again human nature doesn't change political nature doesn't change the nature of men in power

doesn't change the only thing that changes is their reach and so we can see how all this stuff plays out and um it really is amazing to take a look at the bill of rights aspect of uh the new deal and fdr and um but but it's always the bill of rights has always been and it was designed that way as an obstacle to these tyrants and so it's not really a surprise is it that he would take it on directly yeah that's not a surprise that's right he's not somebody that cares about due process and and you know individual rights i mean those are maybe he cares in some sense but if they get in the way of some goal that he has, he's not worried about these little procedural issues. He wants to get the goal achieved.

That's right. Yeah, and the same way that we can see that in Pearl Harbor. You know, hey, if these ships and sailors get in the way of my goal, so what? You know, they're expendable and all this stuff. And so the Bill of Rights was expendable as well well that's a very interesting uh perspective on fdr and a very interesting perspective and real warning for what may happen to us in the near future as we see our society as going through this massive change and with the this part of the fourth turning uh it is really a book that should be on everybody's must-read list, I think.

So thank you so much for joining us, David, again. This is published by the Independent Institute, and I think it's available on Amazon, or do they need to go to the Independent Institute? No, it's available on Amazon, but you can get it directly from the Independent Institute as well. And that'd be better because you can help to support them instead of supporting Jeff Bezos. It's a great organization, the Independent Institute as well. And that'd be better because you can help to support them instead of supporting Jeff

Bezos. It's a great organization, Independent Institute. And again, our guest is David Beto, who is working with them as a fellow and a professor emeritus of history as well. Certainly do know your history. Thank you so much for joining us, sir. Thank you for inviting me the david knight show is a critical thinking super spreader if you've been exposed to logic by listening to the David Knight Show, please do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread farther. People have to trust me. I mean, trust the science.

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