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Why has President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dark side been hidden?
Scholars consistently rank FDR as one of America's greatest presidents. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked him number two, below Lincoln, and respondents to the Siena College Research Institute studies have ranked him number one in six out of seven survey years.
Perhaps it's understandable that the longest-serving president who saw the country through the Great Depression and a World War II victory would rank so highly. But do presidential scholars exhibit a major blind spot when it comes to the authoritarian aspects of FDR and his New Deal agenda? That's what today's guest argues in his book, The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance.
Those civil liberties abuses, and how they permanently changed America and the relationship between citizen and state, are the subject of this episode. The book's author, David Beito, is an American historian and history professor at the University of Alabama and a research fellow at the Independent Institute.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Sources referenced in this conversation:
- The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
- The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey
- Hugo Black Audio-Visual Library
- FDR's Four Freedoms Speech
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:33 FDR's Legacy: A Closer Look at the New Deal's Impact on Civil Liberties
02:03 Exploring FDR's Authoritarian Tactics and Media Manipulation
05:00 The Power of Radio: FDR's Fireside Chats and Control Over Public Opinion
39:09 The Black Committee: The Beginnings of Mass Surveillance in America
44:38 The Black Committee's Investigation and Western Union's Resistance
45:26 The Extensive Telegram Surveillance Operation
48:09 Legal Battles and Public Outcry Against Privacy Violations
51:17 The Minton Committee's Further Overreach and the War on Fake News
58:13 FDR's Court Packing Plan and Its Echoes in Modern Politics
01:04:59 Revisiting FDR's Role in Japanese Internment
01:17:15 The New Deal's Dark Side: A Critical Reexamination
01:24:59 Reflecting on FDR's Legacy and Its Implications Today
- Producer: John Osterhoudt
The post David Beito: Was FDR a Tyrant? appeared first on Reason.com.
Download audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/35917C/d2h6a3ly6ooodw.cloudfront.net/reasontv-audio-8276453.mp3
On April 11 in Dallas, I participated in a debate on immigration that was sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and The Free Press. The proposition was "America should shut its borders," and columnist Ann Coulter and Compact magazine cofounder Sohrab Ahmari defended it. The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur and I opposed the motion, while The Free Press' Bari Weiss moderated.
The full video is currently only available to Free Press subscribers (a monthly subscription costs $8 a month; go here for details), but I'm happy to share video and a lightly edited transcript of my opening statement, with relevant links embedded.
I went second, after Ann Coulter, and a few of my comments below directly respond to her opening remarks and require a bit of context. She drew a distinction between immigrants and their descendants who were in the United States before 1970 (good) and those who came after (bad).
Most pre-1970 immigrants came from Europe and had entered the country before ultra-restrictive immigration laws were passed in the early 1920s that were explicitly designed to reduce the number of Jews, Italians, and other undesirable groups allowed to enter America. The Johnson-Reed Act completely banned immigration from Asia (including India) and sharply limited newcomers from Europe based on their country of origin. Under the new law, for instance, just 4,000 Italians were allowed to enter the country each year, down from an average of well over 200,000 in each year of the preceding decade. Jewish immigration plummeted by 80 percent.
National origins would remain the basis of U.S. immigration law until 1965, when those quotas were abolished and replaced by a system that emphasized family reunification and labor force needs. Along with Sen. Philip Hart (D–Mich.) and Rep. Emanuel Celler (D–N.Y.), Sen. Ted Kennedy (D–Mass.) was one of the sponsors of the new legislation. Since 1970, the vast majority of immigrants have come from Latin American countries, especially Mexico, and Asia.
The following transcript has been edited for style and clarity.
I'm the token libertarian on the panel, and I know that means you probably think I'm going to talk mostly about economics and drugs. And you'll be right, I am going to talk most about economics and drugs tonight.
In 1902, the nativist publication, Judge, which I'm pretty sure Anne Coulter had a column in, ran a cover image showing a giant horseshoe magnet suspended from a rope titled "American Prosperity." And then all sorts of stereotypically "bad" immigrants—Chinese coolies, fez-wearing Turks, weird people who were probably Persian, French actresses (!), bomb-throwing Italians, Russian peasants, European-looking people who were just carrying bags that said filth on them—were being sucked into the magnet. And the caption of the magnet on the cover of this Judge issue just said, "The only bad feature of our prosperity."
We're a nation of immigrants, but we have never, ever, ever been comfortable with the ones currently streaming across our borders. So it's fascinating to hear Ann talk about how the Jews were pretty good as pre-1970 people. Jews were locked out of this country to such a degree that millions perished during the Holocaust because they couldn't emigrate to America, including Otto Frank.
That was the law that Teddy Kennedy amended. We've never been comfortable with the people streaming across our borders. It was true in 1902, it's true in 2024.
Last year, saw what the AP called a record number of illegal crossings into America from Mexico. And that's not even the whole story, since the majority of people in the country illegally don't bum rush their way across the southern border. They come here legally and then don't leave. That's why South Asian Indians are the third-largest group who are illegal in America. Is that your vision of an illegal immigrant?
But what's really strange about these invaders, these people who are rushing into our country and destroying everything, is what do they do when they get here. They break into our country…and then they pick our crops, prepare our meals, cut our lawns, clean our toilets, and babysit our children. What strange armies of the night!
At the same time that we are creating panic on the border—and we need to deal with that—we've made it harder and harder for people to immigrate legally. Over 9 million people are waiting to get green cards and the wait time has skyrocketed over the past few decades from "just a few months to years, possibly decades."
Immigrants want to come to America now for the same reason they did 100 years ago when my grandparents came here from shithole countries (to use a Donald Trump phrase), from Italy and Ireland. They come here because of American prosperity. And they don't come here to destroy American prosperity, they come here to enjoy it and expand it and make it rich and new again.
Contra Donald Trump, illegal immigrants are not bringing drugs or crime. Illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Immigrants have a higher labor-force participation rate, and they're more likely to start a business than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants and their children started 45 percent of today's Fortune 500 companies. But they're stealing from us, aren't they?
Even anti-immigrant economists like Harvard's George Borjas, himself a refugee from Castro's Cuba, conclude that immigrants on net are a boon because they expand markets and fill labor gaps. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said that the deficit going forward will be a trillion dollars less over the next decade because immigrants have expanded the economy.
So what should we do? We should create a system that allows more people to come here legally and enter through the front door. Nobody can shut the border. Peter Savodnik in The Free Press wrote recently that even Donald Trump couldn't shut America's borders. He slashed, and I'm quoting here, "he slashed legal immigration by making it harder to get a green card or visa," even as "he failed to stop migrants from crossing the border."
What people who want to shut the borders really want is Prohibition, this time for people. Prohibition was passed 100 years ago at the same time that the first wide-scale exclusionary acts against Europeans were passed, driven by the same thing, fear of un-American immigrants like Catholics and Jews from Central and Southern Europe. It was costly and ineffective. Within a couple of years, Americans were drinking more liquor than they had before Prohibition was passed. We get the same thing with border control. Costs have tripled since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The amount of money being spent on border security has tripled, and yet we seem to have less of it.
Let's create an orderly, regulated, and growing market for immigration just like we ultimately did for beer and booze. Let people who want to live and work peacefully here come and do so. We can vet them and have them apply in their own countries and then come here to wherever they want to be rather than getting clogged up at the southern border, or any one place in particular. Allow individuals, churches, businesses, and nonprofits to sponsor them. Immigrants are already barred from most forms of welfare, as they should be. We should tighten up that. But our national debt is out of control. We should be building a wall around the welfare state, not the United States.
We need to legalize immigrants pulled here by the magnet of our prosperity and get on with the business of building the future of our country rather than trying to restore a tattered imagined past.
The post Nick Gillespie: Keep America's Borders Open appeared first on Reason.com.
There are few high-profile criminal defendants as unsympathetic as Harvey Weinstein, the erstwhile Hollywood mogul whose alleged sexual misconduct against women was so pervasive that it was reportedly an open secret in celebrity circles. So the New York Court of Appeals' decision yesterday overturning his sex crime convictions in that state may have seemed to represent something deeper: backlash to the #MeToo movement, how powerful men are held to a less robust standard of justice, how we don't take survivors of sexual assault seriously.
In reality, it was about none of those things. It was actually about a criminal defendant receiving a fair trial—an uncontroversial premise in most cases. This case admittedly isn't like most cases. The premise should still be uncontroversial.
In February 2020, Weinstein was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual assault and third-degree rape after three women testified about nonconsensual encounters with him. But during his trial, the prosecution convinced the judge to allow three additional witnesses to testify about their experiences with Weinstein as well, despite that their testimony related to alleged misconduct for which Weinstein wasn't charged.
That was a fatal error, said the New York Court of Appeals.
"We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes," wrote Judge Jenny Rivera for the 4–3 majority ruling. "The only evidence against defendant was the complainants' testimony, and the result of the court's rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant's character before the jury. On the other hand, the threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant's right to testify. The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial."
At the heart of that decision is People v. Molineux, a landmark New York ruling that significantly hamstrings the government's ability to introduce evidence of uncharged conduct, as it could unfairly prejudice a jury against the defendant. According to that 1901 decision, the Molineux rule "is the product of that same humane and enlightened public spirit which, speaking through our common law, has decreed that every person charged with the commission of a crime shall be protected by the presumption of innocence until [they have] been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."
There are ways to dance around that rule, but they're limited. Most notably, Molineux begins with somewhat of a litmus test: Does the testimony merely establish propensity for criminality? If the answer to that is "yes," then that testimony must be excluded. And in Weinstein's case, the appeals court ruled, the answer to that question was "yes."
The court's decision doesn't mean Weinstein is innocent. It means he deserves a fair proceeding. And he will still await that new proceeding behind bars, as he was also sentenced to 16 years in prison by a California court after a jury found him guilty of three sex crimes there.
In dissent, Judge Madeline Singas said the testimony detailing uncharged conduct rose above mere propensity in that it helped rebut longstanding myths about rape victims that could have tainted a jury's evaluation. There are indeed many such myths, including the notion that credible victims immediately report attacks and sever any relationship with their attackers.
"But justice for sexual assault victims is not incompatible with well-established rules of evidence designed to ensure that criminal convictions result only from the illegal conduct charged," countered Rivera. "Indeed, just as rape myths may impact the trier of fact's deliberative process, propensity evidence has a bias-inducing effect on jurors and tends to undermine the truth-seeking function of trials."
The #MeToo movement was in many ways a necessary corrective to years of unacceptable behavior by powerful men, including Weinstein, who, in some sense, were genuinely above the law. The solution, however, is not to make them beneath it. "Under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged," wrote Rivera. "It is our solemn duty to diligently guard these rights regardless of the crime charged, the reputation of the accused, or the pressure to convict."
The post The Court Was Right To Overturn Harvey Weinstein's Rape Conviction appeared first on Reason.com.
A recent viral tweet (it has 8.6 million views) inspired by controversy over anti-Israel activism on college campuses asserts that [a] good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue." Most admirers of student political activism don't go so far as to say student movements are always in the right. Still, the belief that student activists have some special claim to moral authority is nonetheless a common one. Aren't smart, idealistic students at least likely to be right most of the time?
Sadly, the answer is "no." As Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute points out, there is a long history of student movements embracing awful causes and tactics:
[L]et's tally some of the "student movements" that have been a source of (mostly authoritarian) misery, mayhem, and murder over time. In every era. And no matter the issue.
There was the student movement that helped establish Fidel Castro's oppressive regime in Cuba. In 1957, the Revolutionary Directorate, an insurrectionist organization that drew heavily upon students, mounted a bloody attack on the presidential residence during which dozens were killed. Students served as a vanguard for Castro's regime as it wantonly arrested, tortured, reeducated, and murdered those deemed suspect.
There was the Marxist-shaded Iranian student movement that helped bring Ayatollah Khomeini to power, occupied and seized hostages at the US embassy in Tehran, and fueled the rise of religious fanaticism. Ironically, for the students, one of the first actions Khomeini took was to "Islamize" universities as part of a Cultural Revolution, which involved purging Marxist and secular books and professors.
There were Mao Zedong's Red Guards, the student-led paramilitary that loomed so large in China's Cultural Revolution, who helped to round up, attack, imprison, and murder millions of "counter-revolutionaries." Impassioned students helped liquidate Mao's rivals while demanding lockstep obeisance from petty officials, educators, scientists, and educated professionals—all conveniently dismissed as members of the "ruling class."
There was Daniel Cohn-Bendit ("Danny the Red") and the French student strike of May 1968, which raised justifiable concerns of civil war. This led to street battles in Paris, the retreat of French president Charles de Gaulle to West Germany, moments when it appeared Soviet sympathizers would overthrow France's democratic government, and de Gaulle's ultimate dissolution of the National Assembly.
Then, of course, there were the US student strikes of the 1960s. While the intimidation of campus leaders, building occupations, violence, and revolutionary cosplay have somehow gained a romantic edge, the institutional destruction wrought by these protestors is perhaps best captured by recalling Mark Rudd's 1968 letter to the president of Columbia: "Up against the wall mother—–, this is a stick-up."
This list can easily be extended. The Nazis were backed by a large and active student movement—the National Socialist German Student League. When it was formed in 1926, it was most certainly opposed to the German "ruling class" of the Weimar Republic.
In the 1960s, many white students at schools like the University of Alabama opposed desegregation and some mobilized to try to stop it. They saw themselves as opposing the overbearing power of the federal government, and the "ruling class" in Washington.
The student anti-war movement of the Vietnam era is often seen as obviously in the right. But US withdrawal from Indochina led to establishment of a brutal totalitarian regime in South Vietnam, and to the horrific Khmer Rouge "killing fields" in Cambodia—one of the worst mass murders in world history. Hundreds of thousands of "boat people" fled Vietnam and Cambodia after the communists triumphed, creating a massive refugee crisis. The evidence of people voting with their feet is a powerful indicator of which side in a conflict is worse. In this case, the communists were vastly more oppressive than the US-supported governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia, despite the serious flaws of the latter. Student activists who failed to see that were badly misguided.
One could still make a strong argument that the war wasn't worth it from the standpoint of America's narrow self-interest. But many student activists went far beyond that, and claimed that a communist victory would actually be a good thing. They could not have been more wrong.
Obviously, student activists aren't always in the wrong. In the 1960s, those who opposed racism and segregation were very much in the right. In more recent years, student activists were right to support same-sex marriage, and oppose racial profiling by law enforcement. And, if student activists often go wrong, the same is true of political activism by older people. The age of people supporting a cause is rarely a strong indicator of its validity.
There are, however, some systematic reasons to view student movements with a degree of skepticism. One is that younger, people, on average, have lower levels of political knowledge than older voters. In most situations, ignorance increases the chance of being wrong.
Students, on average, have higher levels of political knowledge than people who don't go to college. But they are still likely to be less knowledgeable—again, on average—than older college graduates. Recent survey data reveals widespread ignorance among students about the basic facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Committed activists are likely to be more knowledgeable than the average student; they probably spend more time studying the issue in question. But activists with strong views are also disproportionately likely to suffer from "rational irrationality"—the tendency to be highly biased in evaluation of political information. Political activists of all ages are disproportionately likely to be highly biased "political fans" who overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, while downplaying or ignoring contrary evidence.
None of this proves that student movements are necessarily wrong about any given issue, or even that they are generally more likely to be wrong than movements dominated by older people. The point is not that we should reflexively reject student movements' positions, but that we should not give them any special credence. That holds true for other political movements, as well.
The post Student Movements Are Often Wrong appeared first on Reason.com.
