From power Line blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is
the power Line Show with your host Steve Hayward. Among the many odd things
going on right now is a revival of interest and favoritism towards Franklin Roosevelt and
the New Deal. As we know, the usual gang of liberal intellectuals and
historians told Joe Biden when he took office in twenty twenty one that he could
be another Franklin Roosevelt, and this only encouraged the old hack to blow out
our spending with these multi trillion dollar spending bills and other grandiosities as natural to
him as a fish swimming in water. But there's also surprising interest and new
favor for Roosevelt found among some conservatives, especially the National Conservatives, who think
aspects of the New Deal's political economy and especially its favoritism towards labor unions are
something we should emulate today, which seems rather puzzling. There there's been a
lot of really good critiques of New Deal political economy, some great revisionism from
people like Ambony Schlas and Bert Folsom and Jim Powell. And there's been lots
of great constitutional commentary on the mistakes of the Supreme Court and the jurisprudence that
ruled really for fifty years until originalism caught on from people like our friend Richard
Epstein and many others, And in fact that scholarship did play a role,
I think in the turn towards originalism at the Supreme Court over the last decade
or two. But there's one aspect of Roosevelt's record that has escaped attention from
most historians, and that is his record on civil liberties. Now, the
impositions on civil liberties, or the restrictions on civil liberties by Woodrow Wilson are
widely known and widely and correctly deplored, but Roosevelt has gotten a pass with
of course, the conspicuous exception of interning Japanese Americans during World War Two that
was simply too large to be ignored by historians. But there are many others
that have simply disappeared from the radar of historians and journalists who write their favorable
recollections and histories of the New Deal. Why did Roosevelt get a pass on
this well, one reason is he never had a historian like David Bito take
up the cause. David Biito is a professor emeritus of history at the University
of Alabama and someone whose work I've long admired, going back to some of
his very early work more than thirty years ago on tax revolts during the Great
Depression. One hopes that that might be a model or roadmap for tax revolts
over the next decade or two that may want too necessary to restoring limited government
in America. In any case, David has a brand new book out called
The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights, The Untold Story of FDR's
concentration, camps, censorship, and mass surveillance. I highly recommend it to
everybody, and I was lucky enough to catch up to David recently to talk
about the book and some of these unknown aspects of Roosevelt's story that have somehow
simply vanished from the conventional histories. And so, without further ado, let's
talk with David Bito. Well, David, let's start first of all by
saying, it's a real thrill to talk to you. I've been reading you
for years and years, and in particular I'm really thrilled about your new book
because you know, there are a lot of critiques of Roosevelt from the conservatives
of libertarians, but they tend to look at the changes that he worked in
our constitutional law, the bureaucracy and regulation, a political economy of course,
with Kenesianism and tax and spin politics and so forth. But with the exception
of his setting up the internment camps for Japanese Americans, Roosevelt's Franklin Roosevelt's legacy
on civil rights and civil liberties has been largely ignored. And although I've heard
about a few things beyond the internment camps, I learned a lot from your
book. So I guess we'll sort of start the beginning. What prompted you
to take up this particular subject. Well, I've done some research in the
period as you As you know, I did a book on tax revolts during
the Great Depression. I did another book on mutual aid. I was so
touched on the period, and I could never really understand all the positivity for
Roosevelt's administration. And I've read, you know, certainly a lot of the
work by people like Bert Folsom on the economic record, which was not very
good. I mean, we're still we still a double digit unemployment, you
know, right on the eve of World War Two, and certainly there was
the Japanese internment. But I saw little nuggets here and there that presented a
very negative record about Roosevelt's attitude towards the Bill of Rights, despite the fact
that we often associate him with the very flowery rhetoric of the first of the
Four Freedoms speech, which he gave in nineteen forty one, and there's a
sort of an interesting things going on at that time that contradicted that speech in
many ways. But Roosevelt was really a late comer to promoting the Bill of
Rights in that way to the extent he did, and his civil liberties record
was I would rank it as, if not the worst, close to the
worst in American history. And I think his attitudes towards civil liberties were actually
more hostile. I would actually make this case than Woodrow Wilson's. Well,
I was going to ask about that. I mean, you opened the book
by talking about how, as I put it, he was an epagon and
Wilson the sort having served in the Wilson administration. And you know, there
has been some pretty good, quote unquote mainstream work about WILLLM and civil liberties
over the years, but it didn't seem to attach to Franklin Roosevelt. But
I mean, so I guess what I'm saying is it's important, I think
to time into Wilson, isn't it. Didn't he kind of learn from Wilson
to contempt or disregard for the Bill of Rights? Is that fair? Yeah?
The two most influential people in his life politically were his cousin. He
referred to his uncle Ted, but he was actually a distant cousin. He's
Eleanor's cousin though, so I guess that kind of works. But I think
he called him uncle Ted for a long time, and it was really only
kind of an accident that he didn't run for office as a Republican. He
supported he supported his cousin. He was in the Young Republicans Club, but
the Democrats kind of it was available, so he ran as a Democrat and
became very much an early supporter of Woodrow Wilson. So he's able to start
to have this interesting balance of having good relations with Uncle Ted but also very
close to Woodrow Wilson and a very consistent support order of Woodrow Wilson. And
I think what comes out of that both from Uncle Ted and Wilson, is
Roosevelt really latches onto that part FDR of progressivism, which focuses on the ends.
Your ends are the key, if you're if you're out for them,
are just society. Don't worry so much about how you get there. So
there was never Roosevelt was never somebody that was worried that much about procedure,
never worried that much about the protections of the Bill of Rights. Now,
I will say for Wilson, Wilson empowered a lot of people that did some
very bad things in terms of civil liberties, but he tended to sometimes push
back against them, not often very successfully. Like he would talk to his
Attorney general and said, do we really have to prosecute this guy? Do
we really need to do it? And he say, yes, we do.
He said, okay. Roosevelt, on the other hand, is pushing
his subordinates to go in further than many of them wanted to do, which
is a big difference. So there's a lot of resistance that FDR is getting
from subordinates on Japanese in tournament, for example, his own attorney general,
his own director of the FBI are against it. So he's often pushing them
in a more hostile direction towards the protection of the Bill of Rights that they
would have even wanted to do. Yeah. Yeah, Well, let's go
through some of the particulars in the book again, things that I was totally
unaware of, and you really get into the weeds of you know, Hugo
Black before he was on the Supreme Court, of course, being on what
you call the Inquisition Committee, of the Minton Committee. I don't want to
take some of these in orders do a little bit of the Hugo Black story,
because that's a name that people still recall some these days, even if
they forget the details. Well, Black is from my own state. In
fact, the law library, I think the law library here is named after
him. So he's a figure that we associate as somebody a very important figure
in the Supreme Court, sometimes pushing for civil rights and civil liberties. But
if you look at his background, Black, of course this came out later,
was a member of the ku Klux Klan. He sort of said later,
well it was for politics and so forth, But he ended up getting
elected to the US Senate, and he was right there in the thicket things
during the early New Deal and was a very zealous New dealer, very ruthless
really in supporting the New Deal, and a trusted ally of President Roosevelt.
So Roosevelt was looking for a way to investigate his opponents. And the way
they did it is they set up a committee in the US Senate to investigate
lobbyings, which just so happened to be anti New Deal organizations. And lobbying
was very broadly defined. Our conversation would be considered lobby right because it as
an effect on the world of ideas. That's how broad it was. So
he wanted to get somebody to who would really be loyal and attack dog and
recruited Black, and Black was chair of this committee to investigate lobbies, and
it came to be known as the Critics. And I'm not just talking about
right wing conservatives. I'm talking about you know, mainstream newspapers like the Washington
Post, you know New York Times describing it as an inquisition, saying that
Black had gone really too far in his methods, which included surveillance of something
like three million private telegrams, which is a story I had not heard before,
and it sort of blew me away when I read about it because I
saw these references in the nineteen fifties to the notorious Black Committee, and I
didn't know what that was. And I started to look further back and found,
yeah, this was headline news throughout you know, uh, well,
nineteen thirty six it was headline news the Black Committee. Black How did you
get the information on this? I mean, did you trace back through the
newspaper counts and then get into archives at the Library of Congress or how did
you unearth the story of this? I'm curious always to Well, so you
just go to ProQuest or newspapers dot com. You know, you're just gonna
and you just you do Black Committee. It's just gonna. It's going to
be almost unavoidable. It was headline news. Now there was a very good
There was some it was good doctoral dissertation down on it that I found quite
useful. But it was all over the place. If you if you ended
up sort of looking at Roosevelt Civil Liberties Record just doing the newspaper search on
terms related to that, the Black Committee would come up over and over again.
Because it brought to light all these issues of privacy, property rights.
It's it's sort of an early example of strong arming social media companies. I
guess you could say, because what Black was able to do is he went
to the FCC. There was a rule that the telegraph companies, the big
one was Western Union, had to have copies of all their telegrams. That's
more than fifty percent of long distance communication as telegrams. That's the email of
its day, instantaneous, almost instantaneous, going back and forth, people being
very candid, you know, just like email in a lot of ways.
They wouldn't be in letters now thinking things through, And he got access to
these by order of the FCC. Went to Western Union. They protested,
but went in their offices and searched something like three million private telegrams targeted towards
critics of the new deal. Yeah, well, I'm going to bring things
all the way up for the current time here toward the end of our conversation
for some obvious parallels that are on our mind, or ought to be on
our mind. But you did mention. So there was Black in his committee,
and then you have the FCC. I don't remember it was the FCC
started, I guess in the twenties when radio started to explode. I don't
remember now when it was started. But you detail the ways Roosevelt used the
FCC, who you know, harassed radio stations. I mean, I continued
well into the sixties and beyond I think by presidents. Well, certainly Johnson
did that in the sixties. But tell us a little bit about that story
too. Yeah, the FCC actually dates from nineteen twenty seven. It is
called the Federal Radio Commission, basically the same thing. They revamped it nineteen
thirty four and expanded it really limited that's where that's where it started. And
again the old rule was pulled out over and over again by regulators. And
these were also network executives that were kind of intimidated in some ways. Well,
we've got scarcity, right, and we could have free speech like we
do for the print press, but we can't do that for radio because we
have a limited number of stations. Of course, by the end of this
period, they are more radio stations than newspapers. And to extent that there
were limits on radio stations, it was somewhat arbitrary in the way they accomplished
that after they created it. So that brings in a kind of equal time
view, right, and this would serve to intimidate networks to say, Okay,
we're going to put on a commentator's anti New Deal, because instantly the
expectation would be that they're going to put on a pro New Deal commentator.
So that rule ends up leading the networks to steer away from controversy. Anything
that's smacked of controversy they ran away from well late Night. It's all described
in the book. It's very complicated how this happened. Combination of strong arm
tactics behind the scenes things, and this kind of equal time rule. By
the late thirties, they're so skittish. There is not a single anti New
Deal commentator on network radio by the late nineteen thirties. Yeah, well,
of course, I mean it parallels, on my mind, at least the
way the economic policy work, you know, creating cartels of you know,
agricultural sectors and so forth, and you know, jailing people who violated the
price controls into the National Recovery Act and things of that kind, which you
know, as you know, the National Recovery Act was ultimately struck down by
the Supreme Court in a rare moment of sense even for the pre nineteen thirty
seven era. But you don't see this similar solicitude or scrutiny by the Court
of Civil Liberties during that period and afterward, I'd say, but I skipped
over. I mean, I'm going a little out of worder for your table
contents. It wasn't just the Black Committee, but you mentioned the Minton Committee.
Uh. And there's several parts of that story, I guess, and
I only skimmed your chapters, So it was a couple of the bullet point
highlights of I think one of the themes here too, is that Roosevelt was
very effective, as you already suggested, of getting Congress to do his bidding,
to be to be his You might say, his do his wetwork.
Roosevelt is a very smart politician. I think you could make comparisons to Trump,
but there but there's big difference. Roosevelt would not give speeches and would
rarely personalize them. Uh. He used good humor. I guess Trump does
in a way too. He would belittle his opponents, but he would do
it in kind of a kind of a good natured way, in a in
a certain sense. You know, Roosevelt is a very but behind the scenes,
he could be extremely ruthless, and he could be a candid behind the
scenes. He would say things to friends. He would say say things privately
that he would not say publicly, and they paint a very different picture of
who he was when you get some of these things, like, for example,
his opponent in nineteen forty was Wendell Wilkie, and it came to be
known there were rumors that Wilkie was having an affair with the editor one of
the books, editor at the New York Post, I think it was,
And so Roosevelt wanted to get this out there. He said, well,
of course we can't say anything about it, but what we can do is
down the line, people can say things. Of course, it should never
be tied to us. Now, why do we know about this. We
know about this because Roosevelt actually did some taping in the White House and they
would left leave the tape machine on. They kind of lost track of it,
really, and he would had a conversation with someone who was saying,
you know, this is how we want to handle this thing, and that
I think I quote from that at the beginning of the book. But I
think it's illustrative that you will get a different Roosevelt. Often in private conversations
a lot more dangerous than Trump. Trumps just lay it out, now,
you know. And Roosevelt would have some of the same views, but he
wouldn't just lay it out. I would come to getting opponents right. I
mean, I think some of my favorite accounts of the what you're referring to,
those sort of the inside story or backroom story, or Raymond Moley's two
memoirs, which you may well know after seven years and the first ye those
are of course Moley was a great writer and then changed his mind about Roosevelt
and the New Deal. But boy, those have some really candid and I
think shrewd assessments of the darker side of Roosevelt that I've also been forgotted.
I'm always amazed how Moley is largely ignored by most Roosevelt biographers or mentioned and
shoved aside as quickly as possible, which I think is a big mistake.
But anyway, straight from the point, which is your book not Raymond Moley's
book, Well, mole is quote it, and he he had some interesting
private conversations with the Roosevelt that he related in reference to civil liberties issues,
particularly the Black Committee, where he you know, Roosevelt would still let it
down his hair and tell him what he really thought of this. He wouldn't
do that publicly. Yeah, yeah, that's right. He was a very
shrewd guy. And you know, I have to say, you know,
as a spectator or someone who treats politics often as a spectator sport, I
always did kind of admire or relish the way Roosevelt, to paraphrase what you
said, he would deliver his attacks with a smile and a glint in his
eye like he was enjoying it, right, And you know he he knew
he was making fun of these people, and he did though. I mean,
I'm actually you probably knew for us McDonald pretty well. I mean McDonald's
book on Roosevelt's I guess you'd say, Persecution of sam Insall. Oh,
it's a brilliant book, right right. There should be more of those kind
of yours is kind of in that vein a little bit covers a more bigger
territory. But Insul is somebody that Roosevelt did mention my name a few times
in public. But and that's quite yeah, that's a great story. All
right. Let's see you mentioned already the internment camps in World War Two,
and you know I've read the decisions that you know, famous Corey Matsu case,
and I've actually talked to students, uh, and so I usually concentrate
narrowly on the constitutional reasoning involved in that case. But I actually don't know
much of the whole story other than the role of then Governor Earl Warren of
California, a progressive Republican who seemed to go on to do penance the rest
of his life for having been one of the instigators and saying we need to
round up Japanese and put them in camps. But you said something a minute
ago that I was not aware of that there were actually people in and around
Roosevelt who had second thoughts and and and doubts and even opposition of the idea.
So it walked through the story a little bit for us. Okay,
well, this is it's interesting that you say that Roosevelt no historian, very
few historians now are going to defend the interment, right, and if you
look at the standard district textbooks, none of them do. However, you
also look at them carefully, what you find is there tends to be they
pull their punches in some interesting ways when it comes to Roosevelt. Well,
he didn't really initiate this. This was these people in the military were pushing
it, and there was all this hysteria. It was the hysteria of the
moment. It's all unfortunate. He shouldn't have done it, But you know
that kind of thing. So what you have missing from that is the Roosevelt
of the New Deal, in the Roosevelt of World War Two, who's often
depicted quite accurate, I think, is a man that knew what he wanted
right and was going to push for it, and he was going to focus
on it. Somehow, when it comes to Japanese intermity, he doesn't seem
to know what he wants. He said, drifts along and so forth.
Well, as I looked more into this, and initially I wasn't even going
to have a chapter on it because I thought we know that story, I
said, no, he's actually they're ahead of the curve in the mid late
thirties. He's actually proposing this kind of modified uses the term concentration camps,
and some people criticized me for that. I was initially resistant, but that's
the term Roosevelt used, right, And I'm not saying they're anything like the
death camps in Europe. I'm not making that comparison, but I think they
aren't really internment camps either in the sense of the Japanese and the in terms
of the Germans and the Italians are not comparable to that. In any case,
Roosevelt is sort of friendly to this idea from the beginning. Now it's
often forgotten that we don't get interment right away. We don't get it till
February nineteen forty four. There's a long period there, and the initial reaction
from newspapers, even in California is by and large, hey, these are
Americans, leave them alone, you know that kind of thing. So it
takes time to build, and Roosevelt kind of creates an environment for it to
build, and then ultimately in February we get it. But he's really kind
of behind the scenes, I think, not standing in the way and sort
of giving the league way to people that were pushing the idea, and then
he signs off on it. Having said that, as I mentioned, his
own attorney general, this is under publicized. I don't know why. His
name is Francis Biddle. Biddle Is writes about this in his memoir. He
has a whole chapter about it, and Biddle is a Roosevelt fan on the
whole, but on this he says, I was against this, And he
even says, we didn't have to do it. There wasn't that much hysteria,
there wasn't that much of a call for it. We didn't have to
do it. He goes at great length. And I was surprised when I
read that. And there's a friend of mine who's a scholar, very knowledgeable
about the period, and I told him about this, and he wasn't aware
of it, you know. So he's grateful now that he is aware of
it. But I just sort of came across this, and it's been mentioned
by others, but it has not been publicized that much. And of course
jaegg Or Hoover, Harold Ikeys, who was Secretary of the Interior. You
go down a long list of people that were at the time against it and
made known their views. I hadn't known that Hoover had been against it.
That's an interesting and perhaps surprising position for him. I don't know. I
mean, never is a character that you don't know. Sometimes there's a civil
libertarianism that's somewhat latent, But I think a lot of this is he doesn't
want this responsibility and he ends up not getting it. He doesn't it's the
military, and that's part of this. Who wants nothing to do with this.
He thinks this is you know, a bureaucratic knight mayor. But he
also doesn't think it's necessary. He says, so and so that's Bill,
and you know his main enforcement officer, you know, worked under him.
Of course you can't say jag or who were worked under anyone really, but
you know they are against it. Well, my own little footnote to the
the you know, the case that was finally got to the Supreme Court is
I forgot what the vote split was, but it was, you know,
like six three or seven two, something like that. And one of the
leading dissenters was the last of the anti New Deal justices from the early thirties.
Justice Roberts said, this is violation of due process. And let's face
it, these are concentration camps, and so it is. Liberal students are
often confused that one of the so called reactionary justices who stood up for economic
liberty ten years before was one of the few persons who voiced any clarity about
what was going on then, and I find it useful to confuse students with
that juxtaposition. Well, then they might like my book because I go a
lot into Roberts, because Roberts had a fairly strong civil liberties record, by
the way, all the way back, and he is one of the dissenters,
and he also rights the He writes that there's a unanimous opinion in the
Endoh case, which basically says it's convoluted but basically doesn't strike down in tournament,
but it strikes down incarceration, long term incarceration in the future. It
kind of lays the blame on the military. It's a very kind of I
don't know what you'd call it, cynical case in a way. But he
writes an opinion on that, and all the other opinions are blaming the military.
They're blaming the military for this, they're blaming the War Relocation Administration.
One of the opinions even quotes favorably Franklin D. Roosevelt's commentary on Japanese soldiers.
It's really incredible, and Roberts says, it's just a wonderful Wait a
minute, guys, this is the president who did this. This isn't the
This isn't the military, this is the president who did this, and he
calls them out on So you get these flowery descents and opinions that are often
quoted from from people like Jackson and who's the guy that was from Michigan.
I forget the other one that wrote an opinion. Yeah, but you know,
and he comes and they don't blame Roosevelt. If you look at those
opinions, there's no criticism of the president at all, including in the descents.
Most of the descents, but there is by Roberts, right, and
and that is makes him in something of an interesting exception. Yeah, he's
never been pulling off the mask, right. Oh yeah, it's very bracing
descent. A while since I've read it, but I remember the general impression
related to that is one of your last chapters about the case that I thought
I had least heard of most of the civil liberties cases from that era,
but I didn't know about United States versus McWilliams. And you know the sedition
trial fiasco as you called it. So give us a thumbnail sketch of that,
I think, because that's an interesting story. Well, I'm ahead of
the curve and I don't know it. I mean we have sedition trials making
it bing comeback. I mean it's a thing again. It was, it
had been put away and it's been revived with a vengeance. So this is
these are sedition trials. They're against both the left and the case of the
Socialist Workers Party during the war, but in this case the target are basically
right wingers. And it's I think the largest mass trial in America and Washington,
d C. At least in American history. They bring in defendants from
all over the country and they tend to be right wingers. Some of them
are anti semit it's more than a few are. Some are kind of populistic
types, and a lot of them are guys that and women. They will
run a little newsletter somewhere in rural Kansas, right, they're not big figures.
They bring them in the government and said and Roosevelt. The origin of
this is Roosevelt wanted to put on trial the publisher of the Chicago Tribune,
for example. He wanted to bring him in. He wanted to go after
the big He wanted to bring in members of Congress. Sounds familiar, doesn't
it. He wanted to go after the big Fruy, the big Fish,
and instead his attorney general, who had some civiliberty sensitivity, holds them off
so we really don't have evidence, so he to appease him. He does
this trial. They bring all these nobody's in for the most part, and
they accuse them of being involved in a worldwide Nazi conspiracy to promote insubordination in
the military. And they difficulty finding any evidence that say there'd been ever an
effort to like send propaganda to people in the military, and they really never
were able to find that, you know. So they're making this argument to
tying these people together. And most of them they didn't even know each other.
They didn't like each other, although they said once the trials started,
they all start, all these crazy people started to get along well to each
other. Each had their own lawyer. It was chaos. It was It
was a bunch of some somewhat saying people, but a lot of wacky people.
But these are there's no conspiracy here, right. And finally this is
recognized by the mainstream press. The Washington Post had been key in getting this
thing off the ground, and they turned against it and compared it to the
Moscow show trips. Why haven't we heard about because it went on forever.
It went on for months. But what ultimately happened to judge I think got
so flustered. He was sort of a good natured character, and he just
he had a heart attack and he dropped dead. And they had a big
discussion about, well, we're going to have a point a new judge,
and everyone just said, oh God, no, please, I mean,
that was the consensus opinion. So in a couple more years it was sort
of appeals and procedure, but the trial stopped in when the judge died,
which I think was late nineteen forty four, he just keeled over about we're
about at the anniversary right now, and he and they just didnt appoint a
new one and they ended up dismissing the charges. But guess what, the
same law was used within a year and a half, I think, to
go after communists who had applauded the trial, who were universally for this sedition
trial right now, they were the targets. It was under the Smith Act,
and so there were sedition trials ramping up this time. The communists who
had who had been all for prosecuting these right wingers were being prosecuted. So
this is a pattern that we see throughout American history. One day you're a
civil libertarian, next day you're a persecutor of civil liberties, and you know,
you go back and forth. Yeah, well, I was going to
ask, I mean, I'm going to ask a longer term continuity question.
But I guess this kind of carries over into the Truman administration. He inherits
some of these practices. I think I just have that general sense somehow.
I think the Truman was a little bit more, you know, not as
enthusiastic about this kind of thing. But there was really after Truman came back
in forty eight, there was a good, big sense that the reason that
the Democrats had lost the forty six congressional elections and was a bad defeat for
them was these lobby groups. So there was another effort to investigate lobbies which
used some similar methods. And this is sort of something that is interesting because
it's ramping up at the time that McCarthyism is ramping up, and so there
are a lot of people on the left that eventually start saying, well,
wait a minute, these techniques are these same techniques contempt charges and all sorts
of things you know, are being used now against people that we think,
you know, we want to defend their civil liberties. And so actually they
start embracing some of the precedents from earlier cases which had defended the civil liberties
of conservatives and saying pointing to this case, right Rumley was a big guy,
that was a key figure that was being investigated on the right. Anyway,
generate a lot of litigation, and so it ends up becoming a case
that is cited not only by sort of critics of the prosecutions of communists,
but also in civil rights cases. It is cited in the case when the
in the Alabama's trying to get the membership lists of the NAACP and the court
says you can't do that, they cite this earlier case where new dealers are
trying to get membership lists and subscription information for right wing organizations, and they're
latching down to that. So there are people like both Black interest Irony and
Douglas who are both really strong civil libertarians during this period and are actually citing
cases, you know, from these right wingers and Black own biographers said that
Hugo Black would have been hostile of nineteen thirty six would have been very hostile
to the Hugo Black of the nineteen fifties and vice versa. Right, you
know they had a different agendas. Right, Well, let's done bring it
up to the current time for what you know, lessons or parallels we can
observe. You know, there's the famous quote attributed to Mark Twain that they
apparently didn't say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. But you
know, the one difference it's in other words, the point is we still
see this kind of harassment to use actually a mild term of civil liberties and
individual freedoms from government, although it tends to be more bureaucratized today you don't
have with some exceptions. I'll come to the direct fingerprints of the White House
of the president very often. I mean under the Obama administration, we saw
the Federal Election Commission and also the IRS harassing political roots the lobbies as we
call them, back then and then, but then more directly here recently,
and the Supreme Court has just granted cert on a case, the Missouri case,
where the White House was deeply involved in intimidating social media companies to censor
critics of COVID lockdowns and so forth. So it seems like what you observe
of the Roosevelt years is still going on today. And so I'm not quite
sure how to turn it into a question by to throw out that parallel for
your thoughts and observations on where we are, there are very very close parallels.
I mean, you mentioned we've got sedition trials, you got a sort
of a government direct and indirect attempts to prosecute the press or to intimidate the
press. So you have parallels. I will say one parallel that I find
less well, I find it discouraging. I mean the others I guess they're
discouraging too, is that there isn't as much pushback, bipartisan pushback. And
this is one of the messages I'd like my book to provide people with examples
of people on the left and on the right too, who are defending civil
liberties for people they disagree with. One of the most consistent civil libertarians,
well, two of them are Norman Thomas, Socialist Party candidate. He was
actually ejected from going to Jersey City to give a speech by this pro now
Deal mayor there jobs, Yeah, who forced him out, and he got
a fan letter from his Republican opponent in nineteen thirty six, Alfred Landon,
and the two became lifelong friends and they linked it together. They say,
we're for civil liberties, for Norman Thomas and against Mayor hay was Mayor hay
name escape me for a second. Who's putting people down? But we're also
against all these Senate committees and what they're doing to conservatives. And so you're
starting to get you get a lot of examples like that where people are saying,
I don't agree with these people, but boy, I'm going to stand
up for their civil liberties. We don't see that to the same extent now.
People are narrowly focused on their own group and then they become civil libertarians
and their own group is threatened, and I could you know, give you
we all could be aware of many examples of that, and we need more
people that will sort of cross the eude. And there were many people that
did that at the time, including in the Roosevelt administration. This is a
big difference. There's I guess you, I don't know if you call it
a deep state or not, but there's there's there's hostility to what he's trying
to do in terms of civil liberties coming pushback coming from lower level, mid
level ranks, high level ranks in the Department of Justice, for example,
don't like what he's doing. And I think there's a civil liberty sensibility that's
come out of World War One. A lot of these people are educated.
Don't do World War One again and then prohibition where they see all the violations
and civil liberties so sufficiently strong that you're getting pushback that you didn't get,
you know, with Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, let's draw. Let's draw to
an end here with a little bit of a few minutes of biography. I
actually meant to do this at the beginning. I always like to ask people,
especially for my non academic listeners who may not be familiar with you at
all, did you give a little bit of biography? And by that,
I mean tell me a little bit about where you're from, where you grew
up and ultimately not simply formal education, but how you came to form your
views. I mean, is it fair to describe you as chiefly a libertarian
or do you have a particular you know, people said they don't like label
sometimes, but how do you describe yourself and how did you arrive at your
disposition towards the world. Well, I won't run away from that label,
so I think that that label fits me pretty well. You know. I
don't really know how it happened exactly. My parents were Hubert Humphrey Democrats,
but were very very open minded, very much encouraged education. And I came
across some books in my library. One was a critical book by kind of
a libertarian about iin Rant. It's called usually begins with iin Rant. This
is really interesting, Yeah, and it's just not a very UNPC book now,
I think, but it is. It is a book that brought me
into sort of libertarian ideas but from a more critical perspective and got me gave
me a sense maybe to not take it too seriously. And then I so,
I don't know how that happened. I just sort of drifted into it,
I guess, and became involved and then got my degrees from University of
Minnesota and then my PhD from University of Wisconsin. And I did my dissertation
on tax revolts in the nineteen thirties, which ended up getting published as a
book. So that sort of brought me into this period. But I've done
stuff on all kinds of things, on civil rights, on the you know,
one of the founders of the modern civil rights movement, a lot of
black history. But that's sort of my background, and I'm a generalist in
the sense that I do a lot of I've done a lot of different kinds
of tops in American history. What am I moved to do, like,
for example, our autobiography of a civil rights leader named T. R.
M. Howard because they just read a little bottom, I said, nobody's
written about this guy, and I put everything aside, and that led me
in a whole different direction. But it all ties together, I kiss in
some sense. Well, yeah, you've been at the University of Alabama for
I know you're Americas now, but you've been there for most of your academic
career, is that right, Yes, since the nineteen nineties. I was
at UNLV for a while before that. Oh, okay, right, but
back when Murray Rothbard was there. Yeah, it was a coincidence. He
was in the economics department, I was in history. So that was an
interesting coincidence that so we ended up serving on committees together, and he would
hold court at a restaurant called JoJo's every afternoon. Anyone can go there and
sit down next to him and whatever, and it's fun to be around in
that sense. Right. But uh, yeah, I yeah, I've been
at Alabama for a long time and I to know someone I think you knew.
I don't know if you knew him, but Forrest McDonald. Yeah I
knew him some not well, but but some always. Yeah, he was
instrumental in getting me a job here because I was really low on a search
and he he gave recommendation and they got me up to seven and every one
of them didn't work out for some reason. They worked their way down to
me, so I got good. But yeah, he was he was.
He was. He was a character. He was, he was a man
that His wife is also very one of the best editors. The best editor
ever is his wife, Ellen, who edited some of my work. It
was She was just remarkable. But they were kind of a team. You'd
say they always see them together, right, Is it true? I've always
heard this and read this. Is it true that he actually liked to you
know, right in the nude and even write his track on his farm in
the nude? I believe that's true. I never saw that, but I
but I I know people that went to his farm and you know he was
out mowing the lawn and the two something. But I mean, apparently that's
all true. Right, Yeah, Donald said things like that. Yeah,
you they were probably true. You would say outrageous things. Go he's not
kidding, that's right. Yeah, No you care? You know you have
you got any other projects on the drawing board right now? Or are you
enjoying your your transition to retirement. Oh no, I'm not transitioning at all.
It seems like I mean I'm doing it by I'm doing a book.
My next book, it's going to be a podcast series coming uh. It's
about the history of an all black town called Mound Bayeu. And Mound Bayou
was all well. It was a black controlled town in Mississippi where the mayor
and the police chief and everyone in it could vote and then they were The
leadership was black. It was founded by former slave of Jefferson Davis Wow and
it ended up being a hub of kind of self help and civil rights and
entrepreneurship in Mississippi. So if you anyone's heard of the Ammatel trial, that's
where the reporters stayed. There was an investigation led by the guy I've written
about also, TRM. Howard, an informal interracial investigation trying to find evidence
in that case coming out of Mound Bayou. It was a place that I
think sends a message about what one little place can do that does respect where
you do have individual rights in a place naming the Mississippi that was probably the
most hostile to the rights of African Americans in the country. It's right in
the middle of that and it's right in the middle of the area of that
state. Wow. And it's becoming a kind of center of resistance, or
became a center of resistance, and very few people know about it. And
if I'm getting more and more pushed into the direction, I've done three articles
about it that are up now if people want to google them. But that'll
give you a sense where I'm going with this. Oh good, well,
that sounds well, David, Thanks very much, and congratulations on the New
Deals war on the Bill of Rights, and we'll look forward to that next
work you put out. All right, thank you, Well, there you
have it, as I like to say, And while happy days are here
again, the Great New Deal anthem plays in the background. Longtime listeners may
recall that Lucretian I had the great Conrad black On Oh I don't know,
a year and a half ago now, to give his defense of Franklin Roosevelt,
and we rouffed him up a little. But we like Conrad, and
so we didn't rough him up too much, and we didn't bring up the
issues that David Bito does here on civil liberties. Meanwhile, I am working
on a long essay about the recent conservative interest in Roosevelt among the national Conservatives.
I've had a lot of trouble getting to a conclusion, and new things
keep popping up, like Saraba Maari's latest book, for example. Maybe this
will prompt me to get off my rear end and finish the essay, which
is already quite long in draft form, and then I'll do a podcast with
myself. Perhaps I don't know, but any event, thanks for listening.
We'll be back this weekend with another edition of the three Weeks Sky Happy Hour.
John You is reporting in person from the APEC conference in San Francisco right
now, and we'll see what light he can shed on the conversations between Joe
Biden and President G of China. No one's looking forward to that outcome with
baited breath. In any case, don't forget to milk the soft power dividend.
We'll see you all this weekend. Everybody, Bye bye Ricochet. Join
the conversation.