#164 Sidebar Interview: David Beito on the New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2024

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 164.
0:11.2	This is an interview and was recorded on September 25, 2024.
0:16.9	I was in Austin and my guest, David Beto, was in a secure, undisclosed location in the great state of Alabama.
0:25.6	If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.
0:36.0	Also, if you're a new listener, sidebar is our term for an episode off the
0:40.8	timeline, which I do occasionally when I come across something interesting and want to talk about it
0:46.1	now, instead of waiting until I'm, you know, 88 or whenever I'd get to the 1940s. This story
0:53.2	definitively falls in that category.
0:57.3	David Beto is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Alabama and a senior
1:02.4	fellow at the Independent Institute.
1:05.4	He is a PhD from the University of Wisconsin.
1:08.7	Over the course of his career, David's academic research has covered a wide range of topics
1:13.5	in American history, including civil rights, tax revolts, civil liberties, the non-governmental
1:20.8	provision of infrastructure, and mutual aid.
1:24.6	His books include, from mutual aid to the welfare stateelfare State, Fraternal Societies, and Social
1:30.1	Services, 1890 to 1967, and co-authored with Linda Royster Beto, TRM Howard, Dr. Entrepreneur, Civil
1:41.1	Rights Pioneer. David's most recent book in the subject of this conversation is the New Deal's war on the
1:50.0	Bill of Rights, the untold story of FDR's concentration camps, censorship, and mass surveillance,
1:57.7	published by the Independent Institute in 2023.
2:02.0	I highly recommend it, especially if you buy it through the link in the show notes on the website.
2:08.2	The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal have now largely passed from living memory.
2:16.5	When I was coming up through junior high school in the 1970s, however, many of the older
	...

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