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Oct. 8, 2025 - The David Knight Show
54:25
FDR: The Original Deep State Dictator
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Welcome back, and I want to begin with a couple of statements from people about this book.
The book is FDR, A New Political Life.
The author is David Beto.
And this first one that's here is from Hillsdale College.
It's Burton Folsom.
He says, the book, FDR, A New Political Life, is the most illuminating one-volume history of FDR ever written.
American historians have come to recognize that Roosevelt's New Deal did not end the Great Depression, but prolonged it.
David Beto carefully explains why so many FDR programs and power grabs were so counterproductive.
To go from the older FDR histories to David Beto's wonderful new work is to make a historic leap from the Dark Ages.
Also, another author, David Michalis, says, when it comes to race and Western influence, FDR's vision of the world order was muddled by delusional phenomena.
He was not a man of empire or genocide like his wartime allies, Churchill and Stalin, but he was a dreadfully old-fashioned Victorian quack, an amateur phrenologist who believed that repopulating the Pacific Rim with certain choice cross-breeding would create a better world for all.
David Beto takes us further than his predecessors along the breadcrumb path into Franklin Roosevelt's thick forested interior.
And again, many wonderful stellar reviews.
And I got to say, even though I wasn't able to read the entire book, what I read of it really does match with this.
I'll give you one more.
This is from Jim Bovart, who we've interviewed on this show many times.
He said historian David Beto, who previously exposed how President Franklin Roosevelt ravaged Americans' constitutional rights, is back with a new book vividly exposing his personal perfidy from the dawn of Woodrow Wilson administration to 1945, the betrayal at Yalta and Beyond.
With volleys of research, Beto demolishes Roosevelt's reputation as one of the quote-unquote great presidents.
And so I look at FDR like Lincoln.
These are presidents who come in at a time of great societal upheaval and change and war, and they have an active role in redefining our society.
I think we're in a time like that right now.
This is a guy who ran as a peace candidate, but then turned to war.
He was there at the center of the fight between gold and fiat currency.
He was preside over rapid expansion of Leviathan federal government with very creative excuses to override the Constitution.
He instituted surveillance, and there was a free speech revolt against him.
He also weaponized the FCC.
And we can see, you know, we've talked about what was going on with the FCC.
We pointed out that why should broadcast media have its content controlled when they don't control the press?
Well, you can look to FDR for that.
So joining us now is David Beto.
Thank you so much for joining us.
This excellent book here that you have.
Thank you so much.
You know, it's interesting you brought up the, I mean, if you don't mind, the FCC issue.
And it brought to mind the contrast between FDR and Trump.
You know, Trump makes these wild threats about involving the FCC.
He goes public with it.
He tries to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, which really wasn't worth the effort, frankly.
And he succeeds short term, but now Kimmel is back on the air.
So Trump looks silly.
What FDR did is he did it behind the scenes.
He did it carefully.
He would never make a public statement like that.
He went to the sponsors of, for example, there was a leading anti-New Deal radio commentator named Boke Harter in 1938, one of the top-rated commentators in the country on CBS.
And so how did Roosevelt get him off the air?
He opened an IRS investigation, an immigration investigation, because Carter was from Canada.
And then finally, he went to the executives, or he went to the sponsors, including Marjorie Merriweather Post, who sold, well, at least she was the original owner of Mar-a-Lago.
And she used her influence, and Carter was forced off the air.
And by the end of 1938, all anti-New Deal commentators on the main networks were off the air.
And despite the fact that most newspapers were hostile to FDR, he did it all quietly.
He did it all behind the scenes with a scalpel, where, you know, Trump used the blunt edge of the sword.
And maybe in many ways we should be thankful for that.
Yeah.
That Trump is like a bull in a china shop so often.
And sometimes when he doesn't need to get his way, he doesn't get his way because he's so, I don't know, obvious about it.
Yeah, maybe his real thing is more about getting Americans divided and fighting each other than it is about the actual reform.
But what FDR did is something that we've seen a pattern of people in government typically doing, and that is working behind the scenes, quietly sending out messages to make sure that this group or that group is shadow banned or canceled.
And you can use your own judgment in terms of doing this because you're a private corporation and you can do that.
But of course, he kind of did that with in terms of telegrams and things like that before, not the social media side, of course, but actual physical telegrams.
FDR had his involvement with that as well.
And they see the early trends of the surveillance state.
The technology has changed, but the nature of men in power hasn't really changed that much.
Talk a little bit about the black Inquisition and things that were involved in that.
Okay.
Well, the Black Committee was a Senate committee.
It was headed by Senator Hugo Black, who later ended up on the U.S. Supreme Court despite his Klan background.
And Black was an attack dog for the New Deal.
He was really Roosevelt's main ally, I would say, in the Congress.
He was the to-go-to guy.
Well, Roosevelt wanted an investigation of anti-New Deal organizations.
And Black was more than happy to cooperate in this.
So Black would call in these witnesses and they would, you know, sometimes successfully hold him off.
He would bring in leading anti-New Deal figures.
And so Black got the bright idea, or someone got the bright idea.
Well, why don't I get their private telegrams?
Telegrams were the emails texts of the time.
They were over half of long-distance communication.
People would say things in telegrams that they wouldn't say in letters, but they would say now in an email or a text.
And there were thousands of them.
They were instantaneous, virtually instantaneous.
So Black goes to Western Union and the other telegraph companies and said, I want copies of all telegrams sent to and from members of Congress, and he had other people as well for like a six-months period.
And Western Union's response was, Are you kidding?
You know, our customers would hate that.
And Black goes to the FCC, gets approval.
And of course, the FDR would have had a hand in this.
Although, again, he didn't really have to order Black to do anything because Black was serving the New Deal and got FCC approval.
So again, it's FCC because telegraph companies were ordered to provide that was one example.
It's, you know, millions of telegrams, but then they expanded, Black expanded the investigation to include other cities, targeted individuals, and so forth.
So he went in there with his staffers into Western Union, and they had to keep copies of telegrams, right?
That was sort of part of their requirement.
And they got bigger.
That was a government.
That was a government.
The staffers went through them.
Sorry, that was a government requirement to keep the copies in the first place?
Yes.
Well, I think the telegraph companies maybe would have kept their own copies anyway.
I don't know.
But they were required to keep copies of all telegrams.
And they went through millions.
And I couldn't believe this when I saw it.
But yes, that was true.
They went through about 10,000 a day over a very long period of time.
And the committee staffers had instructions to don't look at anything of a personal nature.
Just look at material related to lobbying.
What would be lobbying?
Well, the committee had a specific definition.
Indirect or direct lobbying.
Indirect lobbying would be any attempt to influence public opinion.
So our conversation would be an example of that.
So any attempt to influence public opinion would be considered lobbying.
So they went through, copied selectively, and they would ambush witnesses because this was all secret.
None of the witnesses knew they were doing this.
None of them knew.
And eventually it came out because Western Union informed, started to inform people who were being targeted.
And one of them sued very prominent law firm in Chicago, still there.
Silas Strawn was his name.
And Strawn was a heavyweight.
And in one in federal district court, by that time, Black had done his damage, and he said, well, we're done with our investigation.
However, this was a very good precedent for the future.
Now, of course, Black could use the telegrams that he'd gotten, his illegal booty, but he couldn't do any more of this kind of search, nor could official, future congressional committees.
It's a very important precedent, but it's not very well known as a federal court judge.
Yeah, we usually think about what's going on with FISA and everything.
And that came after World War II because with the creation of the CIA and NSA, they started getting information from the phone company, getting pin information.
Who did they call and that type of thing, which they could infer a lot from.
But actually, this predates all of that.
Were they using this as you said, they were questioning people.
Did they use this information as a perjury trap for people?
Ask them a question that they already knew the answer.
I suspect that that kind of thing went on.
I haven't come across it.
I have reason to believe from just reading some of Roosevelt's comments that he was, you know, this information was shared with him, but I can't prove it.
But I think it was used for all sorts of nefarious reasons.
See, historians have kind of looked in the wrong place.
They've looked at people like J. Edgar Hoover, who, again, there's a lot of things he did too.
But the mass surveillance, this is a better example of mass surveillance, but people haven't looked at it.
In fact, I hadn't even heard of the Black Committee until about 12 years ago when I was doing research and I came across it.
I said, what's this thing?
The Black Committee?
What's that?
Is that describing the nature of the committee?
Yeah.
It was a Senate committee.
It was forgotten.
Not by a lot of conservatives, though.
Conservatives would be bringing it up in the 1950s.
And that's part of the reason why McCarthyism came about, because they were pissed.
And they thought, well, you guys are now complaining about civil liberties.
What about the Black Committee?
That's a parallel to today as well, isn't it?
You know, when you suffer an injustice like that, you feel entitled to propagate it against your enemies again.
Wait, you guys did it.
So what about that?
Let's do it again.
I love the title that you got.
Sedition trials.
Probably Trump's going to do sedition trials, I would guess, right?
That's right.
The same thing the J6 people were convicted of.
Stupid law that should have been repealed.
Exactly.
Or at least severely limited.
I like the way that you've got it here in your book, The Black Inquisition.
That really does get your attention as you're looking at it.
It's like, oh, okay.
It's all by critics.
Yeah.
The Black Inquisition.
And then there was a pushback against that.
Part of it was William Randolph Hearst was, of course, targeted at that because I guess they could say, well, anything that he says is going to be influencing public opinion, obviously.
So let's get all of his telegrams.
And so he actually, you have a chapter here, the right and the left free speech coalition.
So there's a pushback with that.
He joined with the ACLU left as William Randolph Hearst pushing back those.
Tell us a bit about that.
Yeah.
Well, the Black Committee had gotten a treasure trove of Hearst-related telegrams.
But they did a very stupid thing.
They did a public subpoena.
None of this was subpoenaed, by the way.
But they did a public subpoena of one and only one telegram that they probably already had.
And this telegram was where Hearst was accusing this prominent member of Congress, a committee chair, of being in league with the communists.
It was kind of a hyperbolic telegram.
And I guess what the black committee, what black thought was, people just see that as so over the top, this will be good PR for us.
But instead, what happened is other members of Congress, like, you know, a guy named McCormack, who was future Speaker of the House, a guy named Emmanuel Seller.
These are New Dealers.
They say this is uncalled for.
This is the tactics of Mussolini.
So it actually backfired on Roosevelt.
Even many of his own New Deal supporters were against this.
And this is very interesting and very discouraging in some ways because during this period, you had a lot of civil libertarians on the left who were willing, even though they liked Roosevelt, who were willing to push back against him.
And that is not as true today.
Maybe that will change now, but it's not.
It certainly hasn't been true today.
Well, today we're so much more partisan and tribal, and we don't seem to care about principles.
We don't seem to care about the rule of law.
And that's true of both sides, isn't it?
Well, yeah, people at the time give you a sense of the difference.
H.L. Mencken was an in-your-face kind of anti-New Dealer, civil libertarian, you know, I don't know, agnostic.
He alienated everybody, but he was friends with everybody.
He had correspondence that spanned the political spectrum.
He was respected.
He was liked as an individual.
could talk to people.
I don't think there are as many people who fit in that category today.
That's right.
Yeah, he was a real clever wit.
I mentioned frequently his thing.
A year ago, if I had a gold coin and a flask of whiskey, the whiskey was illegal and the coin was legal.
year the the gold coin is illegal and the flask of whiskey is legal so yeah he was always i haven't heard that one but he's always pointing out the absurdity of fdr yeah Yeah.
So I think one of the very telling things about FDR was the war and peace issue.
And you got in here part of his speech, which truly is amazing that he makes when he's running as a candidate, as a peace candidate.
He says, I've seen war.
I've seen war on land and sea.
I have seen blood running from the wounded.
I've seen men coughing out their gassed lungs.
I've seen the dead in the mud.
I've seen cities destroyed.
I've seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of the survivors of the regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before.
I have seen children starving.
I've seen the agony of mothers and wives.
I hate war.
And you write, and as he so often did, FDR exaggerated his exposure to the fighting in World War I was limited and sanitized.
While the Navy had sent him on a guided inspection of American naval and marine bases in Europe, the main impression conveyed by his contemporaneous diary account was that of a sightseer.
So talk a little bit about that, how he ran as a peace candidate, and then he flipped pushing us into war.
Well, FDR was playing both sides of the street.
For example, in the 1930s, he'd been the guy to suggest, well, maybe we need neutrality laws.
And then later, he pushed for repeal of the Neutrality Act, saying, I wish I'd never signed it.
He never mentioned that he was the guy that helped to inspire it in the first place.
So he was a rabid interventionist when he was assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson.
He was constantly trying to imitate his cousin Theodore and get some sort of incident, possibly.
So he was a hawk.
But then in the 30s, he sort of realizes there's all this anti-war feeling and he appeals to that.
He actually applauds the Munich Agreement.
But then after that, he becomes much more of an interventionist and certainly aligns himself with Winston Churchill and so forth.
But a lot of this is done quietly.
So he's sort of playing both sides of the street.
And he is in trouble in the 1940 election.
His opponent, Wendell Willkie, who was kind of an interventionist too, but starts talking like an America firster during the last part of the campaign, is making inroads.
So FDR is worried about this.
So very shortly before the election, he gives this speech.
He'd never given a speech this strong where he says, I've said this before, and I'll say it again and again and again.
Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.
Full stop, right?
And Wendell Willkie heard that on the radio, and he said, that hypocritical son of a bitch just lost me the election.
And whether or not that was true or not, FDR was, that was a clear motivation.
His son went up to him and said, Dad, why did you say that?
You've never said anything like that before.
And he said, basically, well, I had to win, you know, for the good of the country.
That kind of thing.
So just amoral, an amoral figure.
Yeah.
Maybe worse in so many ways.
A very cynical, jaded man, I think.
Who had great charm.
Yes.
But I never really cared for him.
I'm going to confess.
Did you ever see that movie Sunrise at Campobello?
No, I never saw that.
Oh, it was a movie made in the 50s starring Rolf Bellamy playing FDR and his battle against polio.
And I just, you know, Bellamy captured FDR in some ways.
It was supposed to be a sympathetic portrayal.
But there was just this charm, which always seemed a little bit phony to me.
Yeah.
And very calculating, but very effective.
Yeah, he seemed that way to me as well.
But I always kind of just dismissed that as, you know, when you look at movies at the time, you know, people came across as very stiff and pretentious and putting on airs.
That's kind of the way that a lot of people would come across, even in the movies at that time.
They wouldn't come across as genuine or and so I kind of just put it up to the zeitgeist of the time, if you will.
But yeah, it's interesting.
And you began with his rise to power.
Talk a little bit about that.
Where did this guy come from?
He had a big advantage in that he was born into comfortable circumstances.
Not super wealth, but wealth.
He was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and very distant, like seventh cousin, but the family had contacts with each other and so forth.
And he went, he did the typical trajectory of someone in that class.
He went to Groton, a very exclusive private school.
Then he went to Harvard.
He got a Columbia, his law degree from Columbia.
He had very mediocre grades.
He was not a good student, but he was a gladhander.
People liked him.
He made his impact socially.
And then it was some people approached him and said, Mr. Roosevelt, we'd like you to run for Congress, or not for Congress, for a state legislature in New York.
Theodore was president at the time.
They happened to be Democrats.
I guess they thought that that was a brilliant move.
Now, I say that if the Republicans had approached Franklin, he probably would have run as a Republican.
In fact, he had supported his cousin very openly when his cousin ran for re-election.
His first vote was for Theodore.
But the Democrats asked him.
It was a good Democratic year, 1908.
So he ran as a Democrat and he was able to win.
And from there, he just impressed people.
He got the attention of a guy named Josephus Daniels, who was Secretary of the Navy, quite a racist, southern racist type.
But Daniels was charmed by Roosevelt.
He had a very apt comment.
He said, he was just like an actress.
He had that.
He had it, right?
And it was a case of love at first sight, you know, when Daniel saw him.
And I don't think anything went on, but he made him assistant secretary of Navy.
And from there, Roosevelt was imitating his cousin, either intentionally or by chance.
Theodore had been in the legislature.
Theodore had been assistant secretary of the Navy.
And then Theodore was vice presidential candidate, as Roosevelt was in 1920.
So they're very similarity, a lot of parallels between them.
One difference, though, Franklin did not volunteer to fight in World War I. He was in his late 30s.
He could have.
His cousin Theodore said, you have to get into the infantry, not just the Navy.
You have to get into the infantry.
You have to get in the fight.
And Roosevelt came back and said, well, my boss thinks I'm essential.
And maybe his boss did say that.
But Theodore had a similar boss.
He didn't have to go in.
But Franklin was not the man that Theodore was.
And so he did not serve in the military.
So at that point, he was able-bodied.
At that point, he was able-bodied and could have.
Yeah, that was before his bout of polio, which was 1968, right here, 1921.
He was about how old when that happened.
He was about 39, quite a young man.
And there's an interesting story there.
Now, a lot of people say, can't you say something good about Roosevelt?
I will say that, you know, he showed great determination.
Of course, he had a lot of help.
He had a lot of doctors.
He had a lot of, you know, leisure time.
He had a lot of support.
But he showed great courage in overcoming that.
Part of the story that I was surprised by is who did he blame for the polio?
He blamed a Republican senator.
And the story on this is really fascinating.
I begin my book with it.
There was an investigation.
Well, there was something called the Newport scandal, the Newport sex scandal.
Do you recall reading that?
Yeah, no, I skipped over to the Black Inquisition.
What happened was Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy, and there was a guy at one of the naval bases in Newport who was investigating whether there were same-sex relationships going on in the Navy and thought this was a major scandal and so forth.
And even did his own private investigations where this guy would find people to go in and they would actually have sex with these men to try to entrap them.
So Roosevelt found out about this.
The investigation was basically had no funding.
The Secretary of War had refused to back it.
I mean, the Attorney General had refused to back it.
And Roosevelt stepped in single-handedly and set up an investigative unit headed by him called Section A in the Department of Navy, which investigated this issue of same-sex relationships in the Navy.
And they would send out investigators who, again, would entrap people by having sex with them.
And Roosevelt, I think, quite clearly knew what was going on.
A local journalist in Newport pushed back on this and accused Roosevelt of doing this.
And Roosevelt basically responded, said, Well, you know, isn't it important to find what's going on here?
Why are we so worried about procedure?
And it was actually controversial.
You would think this period was very anti-gay, and it was.
But people in Congress and the press thought this was abhorrent.
These tactics were beyond the pale.
And that's one of the things that we've lost.
He did his best to cover it up.
And it weakened.
It put so much tension on him that he said that it had lowered his resistance and made him more susceptible to the outbreak of polio, which may have been true, actually, because it was a lot of us contaminated water.
But again, if your immunity, you know, if you had low resistance and so forth.
So he blamed this senator until his dying day for causing his polio.
Well, you know, you should talk about that.
Because of this court investigation, which almost derailed his career, almost destroyed him.
He was lucky.
It's the tactic that's involved there.
And people don't know.
Everybody did.
And you would think this would be a period where they would say, oh, they're gay.
We need to root them out.
They may have thought that, but this is beyond the pale.
And of course, these people that had been destroyed, many of them were innocent, they didn't get any benefits, right?
They didn't get military funerals.
They were destroyed.
And Roosevelt is able to ride through it, partly because other things go on that divert public attention.
But the New York Times, as a matter of fact, has a big story where it calls his behavior.
They blame him for it.
The Times blames him in this article and basically, you know, comes to the conclusion he's unfit for office.
But he's able to escape this somehow because of other things going on.
And it's forgotten.
And most people today don't even know about it.
But it's quite an important, it's quite an important story in his life.
Well, it reveals his character, which we then saw later when he's coming after political.
And Roosevelt was quite clear that he wasn't worried about the means.
It was the end.
Get something done.
This is a view towards civil liberties.
These people need to be shut up.
It's not some way to shut them up.
That was a real hallmark.
That was a real hallmark of everything that he did.
He doesn't care.
I think he was always kind of a default interventionist.
And I think a lot, I mean, I think he did have an ideology.
And I think he had been a Wilsonian interventionist.
He was a great admirer of Wilson, right?
He defended Wilson when he ran for president in 1920, even though much of the public was sick of Wilson.
He defended the worst aspect, the most repressive aspects of Wilsonianism.
So I think that was his default position.
That's the best way I could explain it.
I think the relationship with Churchill made a difference, but I think you see even signs of that before that, where he's trying to do it.
His focus is on the North Atlantic.
By 1941, he is desperately trying to provoke an incident in the North Atlantic.
And he builds up minor incidents into cause celebs and is trying to get into the war.
It's clear he wants to do that by 1941 by any means that he can.
But the public is hostile to the idea.
Overwhelmingly, the public does not want to get into another foreign war.
They remember World War I. They do not want to do that again.
But he's able to get aid to Britain through Lend-A-Lease, which was very open-ended.
But again, selling this is, well, of course, we won't have to go in.
We can help the British, right?
Give them the tools and they will finish the fight, as people used to say.
And that kind of thing.
Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, right?
Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, we can just give them the weapons and we won't really get involved.
But the Germans aren't taking the bait to the extent that he wants them to.
So he kind of shifts to the Pacific, right?
And there's massive sanctions against the Japanese that preceded Pearl Harbor.
And of course, what do you have about Pearl Harbor?
What's your take on Pearl Harbor?
Did he engineer that and keep things secret there in a kind of subversive way?
What is your opinion on that?
Okay, yeah, again, his focus is the North Atlantic, but he eventually comes to the conclusion: well, you know, if we're going to go to war with Japan, that's fine with me.
And maybe we can get into the European war as well.
I don't think, I think that that's part of what he's pushing.
And really, since there were opportunities to have a peace agreement with Japan, the Japanese prime minister offers to meet with Roosevelt in the middle of the Pacific to have a summit.
So let's hash this out.
Roosevelt doesn't take the opportunity.
At one point, the Japanese actually say that they were willing to evacuate China.
He doesn't take the opportunity.
So they're sort of a distraction.
Now, okay, Pearl Harbor.
Did Roosevelt know about it?
I don't think he did.
And my argument for that is, I think the best evidence is that they did know that the Japanese would attack.
They thought the attack would probably be somewhere like the Philippines, maybe in Singapore, somewhere like that.
They did not think it would be Pearl Harbor.
Very few people thought that.
Almost nobody thought that.
And part of the reason they didn't think that is they didn't think the Japanese were capable.
They didn't think they were good pilots.
They didn't think that they could pull something out like that.
And even the commanders on the ground, and Roosevelt did shortchange them, short and Kimmel there at the Pacific.
They wanted observation planes, but Roosevelt diverted all resources to the North Atlantic.
They wanted, you know, if they had had those observation planes, for example, it might have made all the difference.
He shortchanged them.
But even they thought that the main danger from the Japanese was sabotage.
That's one of the reasons why they put the planes in the middle of the field in many cases.
It made them more vulnerable to attack, but theoretically, less vulnerable to sabotage.
So what is Roosevelt's first reaction after the attack?
Well, it's from a butler who saw him, and Roosevelt's response was, I will go down in disgrace.
He thinks, my God, I didn't expect this.
I'm going to be in trouble because of this.
So I don't think, I don't think they knew that the attack was going to be at Pearl Harbor, partly because they underestimated the Japanese.
I think Roosevelt was reckless, however, that he knew an attack was going to come.
I think he could have done much more to warn naval commanders throughout the Pacific that an attack was going to come.
There were clues that it could have come at Pearl Harbor, namely the time of day.
They did know that the time of the day when the Japanese were going to, in the embassy, had been ordered, American embassy, to destroy their codes.
And that was at 7.30 a.m., which would have been a very good time for an attack on Pearl Harbor.
And they didn't put two and two together.
So I think it's more incompetence.
But I don't buy the theory that has been put forward by people like Stinnett, who makes this argument that we knew that the Japanese fleet was on the way and so forth.
I don't see the evidence for that.
We did break one of the codes, but we didn't break the crucial naval code, broke the diplomatic code.
So we knew a lot of what was going on.
Roosevelt knew a lot about it.
He was reading a lot of Japanese mail.
And maybe they could have put two and two together, but I think it was sort of racism in some sense.
They just didn't think the Japanese could pull something like this off.
You know, they found out, didn't they?
Well, talk a little bit about that issue, and I'd be happy to talk with people about it.
But I don't buy that, that he knew that it was going to happen at Pearl Harbor.
Sure.
Well, talk about fear and emergency.
Okay.
Well, when Roosevelt ran in 1932, he pledged to maintain sound money.
Now, he didn't exactly say, well, gold, but Huber didn't either.
But he also gave a speech right before the election called a little-known speech called the Covenant Speech, where he would talk about gold contracts, the covenant, right?
He said he would uphold the covenant.
Basically, I will uphold the use of gold, right?
Then very shortly after the election, he makes a decision to go off the gold standard.
He calls in his Secretary of the Treasury, who's much more, actually Secretary of State, who's much more conservative than him on financial issues, Cordell Hull.
And he says, Cordell, congratulate me.
We're going off the gold standard tomorrow.
And he pulls out some money.
And it was a money that was issued by the, whatever, the Federal Reserve Bank of Tennessee, I guess.
He said, this is from Tennessee, your own state, Cordell.
And what makes this money good?
It's only good because we say it's good.
And again, that is what he did.
Then he does a lot of crazy things after that.
He does a program to purchase gold.
And he sets the not to purchase gold, but to set the price of gold.
So he said he has this gold buying program.
And how does he determine the price?
He determines it from things like, he says, well, I think the price should be 19 cents today because it's a lucky number.
You know, he would say things like that.
And Roosevelt was very superstitious.
He had lucky shoes.
He had lucky hats.
So this is not as strange as you might seem.
And it was just a crazy, crazy town.
But what saved us in terms of financially in the 30s was we had massive gold imports from both Europe and the Soviet Union, where people are taking their gold for obvious reasons out of those places and bringing it to the United States.
So we have a tremendous gold inflow to the United States through those sort of happy, not happy, tragic accidents, I guess you could say, both from Russia and from, because Stalin is buying a lot of American goods using gold.
That's part of it.
And of course, the gold is coming in from Germany because Jews and others are taking their gold out.
Yeah, it's interesting.
You know, when you look at how he was reacting, how he had his lucky shoes and all the rest of this stuff, and how arbitrary things were, that sounds very familiar too in a disturbing way, doesn't it?
You know, kind of erratic and arbitrary, capricious, what he's doing with these things.
We're starting to see it.
That's a good word.
Parallels with Trump, but there are big differences, too.
But, you know, I think there's some parallels that you can draw.
So talk a little bit about the end of prohibition.
That's one of the things everybody, you know, Happy Days is here again.
How much of that was, did he build that up for his campaign and how much of that was really an initiative of his, or was it just that people had had it with alcohol prohibition?
At that point, he got ahead of that.
Was he opposed on that by the Republicans?
Or what was the situation with the prohibition?
And I don't discuss prohibition a lot, but Roosevelt was a straddler.
He wasn't going to take controversial positions.
He was also a straddler on trade issues and tariff issues.
So he was not a leader of the anti-prohibition forces.
There were Democrats who were.
The more conservative Democrats, interestingly, tended to be the more anti-prohibition.
And there was a big element in the party.
And people were sick and tired of the prohibition laws by 1932.
The Republicans chose to kind of avoid the issue.
So Roosevelt and getting the nomination, it certainly was a popular position, but he also recognized that this is a popular position.
And he came out For repeal of the constitutional amendment, bringing in prohibition.
He took a very strong stand.
I think there were other motivations, though.
One was it's a great tax source.
And as a matter of fact, during the early New Deal, even though they're talking about income taxes, most of the tax collections are from excise taxes.
People like things like cosmetics, cigarettes, alcohol.
That's where the bulk of the revenue is raised.
So Roosevelt is raising the tax top rate to, I don't know, eventually it gets well over 90%, but it's going way, way up.
He makes a big deal about this, but that means that the wealthy find ways to find tax shelters.
They don't pay it.
So where does the actual money come?
It comes from the nickels and dimes of people going to movies.
There's a tax on movie tickets.
It comes from the nickels and dimes of working class people.
But Roosevelt is very clever in never acknowledging that.
And of course, the excise taxes on liquor as well.
Yeah, I think it may be in the back of his mind, too.
And he uses that revenue source in a major way.
It's always soak the rich, and then it's always the poor and middle class that pay all the taxes.
That's another thing that never stops.
That's a dark example of that.
Another thing that never stops.
And of course, the revenuers, you know, that's what they called the people that were coming after the stills in the mountains and everything, because that was really what they wanted.
They wanted the money that was there.
So talk a little bit about the Supreme Court packing issue as well and his fight to essentially just completely rewrite the Constitution.
We look at what happened with the New Deal.
Should be called the new Constitution.
Roosevelt proposes, he keeps his quiet again, but then in 1937, he's all puffed up because the 1936 election was one of the more spectacular landslides in American history.
Partly because Roosevelt was very effective in using New Deal money, targeted money.
And I could talk about that as well, how he was able to win such a big majority.
But he thought, I'm going to get a third New Deal, right?
He wanted to be more radical.
He wanted to do more.
But he thought, what good will that do if the Supreme Court, which has been striking down measures like the AAA and the National Recovery Administration, what good will all my effort be unless I get a sympathetic court?
Okay, well, he decides, he proposes to increase the size of the court.
And he gives a speech where he basically says they're overextended.
They're old.
They're tired.
I want to help them.
You know, they've got a big workload.
Well, he gives a speech and he wants to increase the size of the court.
And he obviously thinks he can pull it off because I don't know, you're talking about something like, gee whiz, the Republicans are down to like 16, 20 senators.
I mean, he's got an overwhelming majority.
You would think that he could pull this off easily.
And he's so disingenuous.
And it's so obvious what he's doing that there is a big movement against court packing led by a New Dealer, Senator Burton Wheeler, who'd been an ally of Roosevelt and turns against him.
And Wheeler is the ideal guy to lead this effort.
The Republicans are very smart.
They lay back and let the Democrats take leadership.
And they do.
Now, the campaign is very grueling.
And it becomes clear during the campaign that Roosevelt is essentially one.
Because one of the justices on the court has switched sides.
And it's clear that he's probably going to get all of his New Deal programs sustained.
But he keeps pushing on.
I guess it becomes a matter of principle for him.
He keeps pushing on.
He pushes, pushes, pushes.
The majority leader of the Senate is exhausted.
He is in bad shape.
And he ends up having a heart attack and is found with a copy of the congressional record in his hand.
His name is Joe Robinson.
And Roosevelt doesn't go to Robinson's funeral.
And there's a lot of controversy about that.
Why don't you go to the guy's funeral?
Probably because he was pissed off that Robinson wasn't doing a better job.
Anybody says, well, he would understand.
He had to fight for the, and it hurts Roosevelt no end.
And Roosevelt is defeated.
So in a lot of ways, that is an example of a left-right coalition.
There are many examples, but that's one.
He's defeated by Democrats.
Could you imagine that happening under Biden?
I would find it difficult to imagine that.
Or Franklin under Trump in the opposite direction.
That's right.
But it did happen then, which says something positive about Americans during that period.
Americans in Congress included.
That's right.
Much higher level of character in a lot of ways.
And I've mentioned many times about the fact, you know, we have our war on drugs that's been going on for over half a century, but we had the 18th and the 21st Amendment, which said that they had enough respect for the Constitution that everybody had a constitutional amendment to stop in order to start it and then stop the alcohol prohibition because they knew that they didn't have that power in the Constitution.
But today, we don't care about that.
We just do whatever we wish.
I think it's kind of interesting.
Everybody agreed on that.
We have to have a constitutional amendment.
That's right.
That's one of the biggest arguments against the war on drugs, I think, is the fact that we have those two amendments that are there.
But when you go back and you look at this particular case with the Supreme Court, the fact that he's got the votes, but he still wants to press on with this thing because it's a matter of personal prestige and power, I think.
The same type of thing that we see with Trump.
And yet, does he take the kind of vengeance against people who go against him and kind of a vendetta that we see Trump taking against Republicans, let's say?
He doesn't attend the guy's funeral or whatever, but he gives him the cold shoulder.
But did he really go after people like Trump and go after somebody like Thomas Massey who opposes him on his agenda?
Yeah, again.
He keeps it secret.
And this is what's interesting.
There is an investigation under another loyalist.
In fact, he'd been offered the position on the Supreme Court before Black, but wanted to stay in Congress.
His name was Senator Sherman Mitten.
And if you search his name, the thing that usually comes up is there's a bridge named after him.
But now maybe that will change.
But Mitten was a very young guy.
He was already in the Senate leadership, first termer, and he was very tight with Roosevelt.
And Mitten starts his own investigation, basically succeeds Black's, the Black Committee.
It's the same committee.
But Black is now in the U.S. Supreme Court.
And so Mitten heads this investigation.
They can't search telegrams anymore, but one of the things they do do is they use Mitten gets permission to look at the IRS tax records of people he targets, for example.
He gets that.
But Mitten gets very frustrated because there's a lot of putback, pushback.
People are very upset about his methods.
And he lacks Black's subtlety.
Black had some subtlety.
Mitten is just charging forward.
And so Mitten gives this speech.
He said, well, we need a law against these big newspapers because most of the press was against Roosevelt.
So he said, let's make it a felony to publish anything known to be untrue, fake news, basically.
In fact, they use that term, I think, false news or fake news.
And he proposes this bill.
And what is the reaction to the bill?
Almost universal opposition sets in almost from the beginning.
As it is setting in, Roosevelt is asked about the Mitten bill at a news conference.
And I think Roosevelt was the guy that had the idea.
I think he put Mitten up to it.
I can't prove that, but I think it's true.
Because Mitten was not the kind of guy to go off on his own.
And it reflects what Roosevelt thought of the press.
He was asked about this, and he said, well, you know, if we had such a bill, we wouldn't even have enough room in the federal prison system to hold all the prisoners.
And he gets a little laugh, right?
And then as he moves on to a new topic, and I wish they'd done follow-ups.
They didn't.
He says, you boys asked for it, you know.
That's what he says.
You boys asked for it, you know, meaning you reporters, you know people, you asked for this.
And then he moves on to the next topic.
And he drops it, right?
Because Mitten ends up dropping it.
And it discredits his investigation, and his investigation is pretty much shut down after that.
So FDR's, those two years after the 1936 election are a low point for FTR.
There's pushback against him.
He loses core packing.
The Mitten committee collapses.
And he puts all of his attention on court packing.
As a result, he isn't able to get his radical New Deal program in 1938, 37, 38 that he wanted because he focuses almost entirely on court packing.
And then later, after it really is too late on these investigations.
You know, it's kind of interesting when we look at this period of time, you know, when all the institutions were being reconsidered, reinvented, if you will, and he's fighting against the constitutional pattern that had been accepted, that he was getting pushback, even from his own party, against some of this stuff, because as we talked about, people understood the principles.
He had a lot of people who did not share his idea that the end justifies a means.
And we don't see that today.
We're in a much more dangerous situation, I think, when we look at that.
That's why it's good to go back and look at history.
You look at the radical change that was accomplished during the FDR period of time.
And you look at the fact that now we have people on both sides have become unhinged from or have detached themselves from basic principles about free speech, the rule of law, and having a due process to investigate things like that.
I think we're in a very dangerous time right now.
I think this book helps to get people to understand that if we look at the context, the historical context of this.
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of people on the right who were talking about free speech and local control, states' rights.
Yeah, turned down a dime.
That's right.
This is very discouraging to see this.
Yeah.
Now they want to come after their idea of fake news.
Now they've got their own fake news vendettas that they want to come after.
So there is so much here.
I mean, we could do several interviews with this.
This is an excellent book.
It is a very important presidency to understand the context of the times in which we live in our government.
And I really highly recommend this book, FDR, A Political Life by David Beto.
And you spell your name as B-E-I-T-O.
Is that correct?
That's right.
Yeah, so it's not spelled like the Texas politician candidate.
Oh, please, no.
And a lot of people will call him Beto O'Rourke, but I think it's Betto, actually.
Oh, yeah.
I believe that's the way his name is pronounced.
Yeah.
I keep telling people that, even if it isn't true.
That was his nickname.
I think it is true.
Yeah, I used to always call him Robert Francis O'Rourke or whatever his original name was.
I said he's a trans-Hispanic.
He identifies as Hispanic, even though he's not Hispanic.
He's a has-bend now.
Let's keep it that way.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, we don't want to resurrect him with any attention, I guess.
But an excellent book, and thank you so much for joining us.
And there is much to learn in terms of politics and history.
It's a very seminal presidency, unfortunately, for many of us who like to see government that follows the Constitution.
FDR's presidency was an unmitigated disaster, and it bears looking at it and see if we see any repetition in current events as a warning, as a harbinger of what's coming.
Because as we were talking about earlier, you know, this whole stuff of secretly getting information on his enemies, we saw that immediately after World War II ended.
We saw that immediately being transferred over to the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, all these people that are using the income tax to spy on people.
These same tactics are used over and over again.
Thank you very much.
David Beto, the book is FDR, a Political Life.
Thank you folks for joining us.
Have a good day.
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