The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
By David T. Beito
(Independent Institute, 404 pages, $27)

James MacGregor Burns, one of the old school New Deal giants in Franklin D. Roosevelt scholarship, in his 1956 classic, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, spends several pages describing how FDR adoration fell off after FDR’s strategy of throwing the alphabet-macaroni-on-the-wall New Deal programs failed to spur the economy. Burns, like FDR, could not see merit in the resulting criticism. FDR was a pragmatic centrist who saved capitalism by reforming it, both FDR and Burns insisted. 

Burns presented FDR as a victim, who understandably, because “the hatred on the right seemed so bitter and illogical,” wanted to “respond in kind.” 

He revealed that “[i]n August 1935 the President somehow got hold of a message from a Hearst executive to Hearst editors and to its news service: ‘The Chief instructs that the phrase Soak the Successful be used in all references to the Administration’s tax program instead of the phrase Soak the Thrifty hitherto used, also he wants the words Raw Deal used instead of New Deal.’”

“Roosevelt was indignant,” wrote Burns. “He even had a press release prepared—‘The President believes that it is only fair to the American people to apprise them of certain information which has come to him.’” 

Fortunately for himself, Roosevelt was, once again, saved from his own impulsive self. Or, as Burns put it, “[M]ore prudent counsels prevailed, and the release was not issued.” 

But consider: The president of the United States planned to expose private correspondence that he “somehow got hold of,” believing that the American public would support him. 

Now, in David T. Beito’s The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (Independent Institute, 2023), we have a look behind the scenes at how Roosevelt could have gotten this kind of correspondence. 

FDR had few qualms about violating the Constitution, including, in Beito’s words, giving “aid and comfort to several highly inquisitorial congressional investigations of political adversaries that often trampled on privacy and free speech.” 

The “most far-reaching of these probes” by the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities, better known as the Black Committee, was a “creature of Roosevelt’s wish to establish a congressional committee to discredit opponents.” Chair Sen. Hugo Black (D-Ala.) — chosen by FDR — was “a zealous and efficient New Deal loyalist.” He was later appointed by FDR to the Supreme Court. 

Roosevelt’s administration gave crucial aid to investigations: “The Department of the Treasury granted Black access to tax returns dating back to 1925 of such critics as David Lawrence of the U.S. News. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in turn, authorized the Black Committee to search through copies of millions of private telegrams sent by, and to, New Deal opponents.” Beito recounts how targeted Americans were surprised at their offices or hotel rooms and ordered to produce a wide sweep of records and appear before the committee the next morning. 

Black used a subpoena on Western Union that went beyond a dragnet “into a whole new category” on the pretext that fake telegrams were being used in lobbying efforts. Beginning in October 1935, staffers from the Black Committee and from the FCC went through about 5 million telegrams sent from Feb. 1 to Sept. 1, 1935, by employees of various companies, lobbyists, newspaper publishers, political activists, and every member of Congress. (RELATED: The Epistle of Paul to the Americans: Exposing White Coat Supremacy)

A major target was newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. He had been “instrumental in securing Roosevelt’s nomination in 1932 but had since turned against his old ally” — apparently seeing that the New Deal was a “Raw Deal” and having the temerity to say so in his newspapers. 

In addition to having his taxes monitored under FDR’s instructions, Hearst, on Feb. 8, 1936, was served a direct subpoena for a specific telegram marked “Confidential” that he had sent on April 5, 1935, to editorial writer James T. Williams Jr., instructing Williams to write editorials calling for the impeachment of “a Communist in spirit and a traitor in effect”: Rep. John J. McSwain (D-S.C.). 

But Black already had a copy of the telegram from the mass search of Western Union, as Beito points out. 

It may come as little surprise that the far-left publications, the Nation and the New Republic, often supported such inquisitions, or that the ACLU and the American Bar Association often failed to speak up. But there are some surprises, and Beito reveals them in an engaging style with volumes of research from archival materials and contemporaneous news sources. 

Beito packs in material on other cases, including the Minton Committee led by Black protégé Sen. Sherman Minton, who introduced a bill criminalizing “’false’” news; the censorship of radio through the FCC; Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, who, in reward for putting FDR “over the top at election time,” had reaped “a constant flow of federal money” to disperse and also denied such individuals as socialist Norman Thomas, and members of the CIO and Farm-Labor Party, the right to speak through bureaucratic roadblocks and encouragement of violence; Edward H. “Boss” Crump of Memphis who literally ran out of town black Republican leaders (thus contributing to the “switch” of the black vote to Democrat!); the persecution and censorship of anti-interventionists; and the forgotten mass “sedition” trial of Lawrence Dennis, who had written a book about the inevitability of fascism (though not advocating it or supporting Adolf Hitler), and 19 others, including an anti-New Deal gossip sheet publisher, four Bund associates, and three for whom Dennis requested a sanity hearing (one, a woman who claimed to be a descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, mockingly gave “a stiff-armed fascist salute” for photographers). The trial that gaveled to order in January 1944 (after changes in prosecutors and defendants through the years) effectively ended with death of the “worn out” judge on Nov. 30. Eighty-year-old defendant Elmer Garner, whose last two years of life were tangled up in weekly defending his small Wichita, Kansas, died during the trial. It was truly a “fiasco,” as the chapter title indicates and as the narrative reveals. (READ MORE: A Dialogue With the Dead: Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty)

One chapter, though, on “FDR’s Concentration Camps” tells a much-told story and, unfortunately, follows the well-trod path of attributing the relocation of ethnic Japanese on the West Coast during World War II to “racism.” True, FDR said some nasty things about the Japanese, as Beito points out, but he spoke fondly of another Asian group, the Chinese, who helped his maternal grandfather acquire his fortune in the opium trade. FDR said they were honest, unlike the Japanese. Nor did FDR like Germans. German “enemy aliens,” placed in internment camps, sometimes on the word of anonymous German-hating neighbors, often stayed longer than did Japanese “enemy aliens” and — unlike the Japanese — received no apologies or compensation. 

Yet, even here, Beito sheds new light: FDR was not, as the history and textbooks say, a victim of circumstances and bad advisers. He was giving the orders, often against the advice of subordinates. 

The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, indeed, chapter after chapter, reveals another side of the New Deal — as an assault on the Bill of Rights. Beito is to be commended for undertaking this monumental project. It stands as a major contribution to the small but slowly growing group of corrective histories and is especially welcome in this era of “seditious conspiracy” trials and calls for censorship of “false news.” 

Mary Grabar is the author of Debunking the 1619 Project and Debunking Howard Zinn. Her book on Franklin Roosevelt will be published in 2024.