The Dark Side of FDR Nobody Talks About - David T. Beito

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1:18Typically depressions were over within two to three years. But FDR is sort of fumbling around and as I said we still have double-digit unemployment in 1940. European countries, other countries in the world generally recover a lot faster than we do. And a lot of that, I think, is because he's doing these weird experiments like the National Recovery Administration and the AAA, which are disasters economically. And in many ways, the New Deal retards a recovery that should have happened much earlier if American history is any guide. So I don't buy the argument that he saved the system because I don't think the system was headed towards a revolution.

1:59Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is a historian and a professor emeritus at the University of Alabama, David Beto. Wrote a great book, FDR, A New Political Life. And David, as you and I had corresponded together, I found this off of the New York Post review of the book. Read the book, found it fascinating. I thought it was a good counterdote to some of the pro-FDR, the Dalek books, Comrade Black, etc., written over the years. And it was a good historical counter-narrative. But let's start there, if you don't mind. So tell us a little bit about your background, your work as a historian, and what drew you to re-examine FDR's life and his political career.

2:50All right. Well, I taught at the University of Alabama for 30 years, and I'm now a professor emeritus there. And I've written on a lot of different topics. I wrote about the history of the welfare state. I wrote about taxpayers' revolts. I wrote about civil rights history. and a few years ago I did a book about a topic that's always been of interest to me, civil liberties during the New Deal period. The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights was the title of the book. Out of that, I got a call offering me in advance to write a full biography of FDR and of course I jumped at the opportunity. This has always been a fascinating period to me.

3:38FDR has always been, you know, he's always loomed large. In my childhood, for example, I saw, you know, he was sort of a hero of my parents in many ways. Well, you know, I would say for my grandparents, they also found him to be a hero. You know, most Americans, I would include my grandparents, my parents would say that they grew up thinking that FDR saved the country. but your book argues that he's one of the great political scoundrels. And I guess my first question is related to what's the single most damning thing that you found that even FDR's most ardent critics don't know? Oh, well, there are a lot of examples.

4:26I don't think the Newport scandal is well known. There's been a little bit of writing about it. Tell us about the Newport scandal. Well, this occurred while FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. And there was this guy that he was investigating, he was a naval officer, he was investigating same-sex relationships in the Navy, right, and trying to force out gays, essentially, from the Navy. This investigation was going nowhere. Not even the attorney general, who was no great civil libertarians, Mitchell Palmer, was interested in funding it. But FDR found out, and he was very supportive of the investigation and took the lead role in it.

5:18And he headed a unit in the Navy called Section A. And that was their mission. And what did they do? Well, to root out same-sex relationships, they actually sent in people, spies, basically, to have these relationships with people, to catch them. So that just struck me when I said, they really did that? Yes, they really did do that. This was too much even for the period. This is not a very gay-friendly period. But there was big pushback against this. And when it was found out and a lot of people was headline news in New York Times and a lot of people predicted that it was going to end FDR's career.

6:06um it didn't um although it has some interesting long-term implications because only a few weeks after fdr testified before a very hostile senate committee about the newport scandal 1921 he had his first bout of paralysis and he blamed the investigation for the rest of his life for bringing on this paralysis. And he might have had a point in a sense, because it is said, or the best theory on this is that he drank some tainted water at a Boy Scout camp, and then he came down with his paralysis. But if that was true, you become less resistant if you have more emotional distress and more fatigue.

6:59And he certainly qualified in that sense, because this was a very difficult time for FDR. Okay, the immune system goes down with the stress. Yes, exactly. I totally appreciate that and get that. That was his theory anyway. Yeah, no, and I hear you. Some people think, Jay Vinick wrote in his book that he thought it could have been Guillain-Barre syndrome, which would be consistent with stress-related attack on the nervous system. So it may not even have been polo. It's hard to know. So for you, you know, when I closed the book, Professor, one word came to mind for me, and I want you to respond, treachery.

7:42There was a consistent theme in the book in FDR's political life. And I know it's a strong word, but it seems like that was his operating system in terms of pitting people against each other in the cabinet or some of the things that he did in the state of New York before he rose to the president. see even the relationship that he had with his wife. So did I get that right, sir? That was the feeling from the book. And if I didn't get it right, tell us what you were going after. I think that that's part of FDR. FDR was someone who believed in ideas. I think he was on the political left. He wasn't a communist or anything like that.

8:24He was pushing that direction but fdr's first priority was fdr which is not surprising right um he wanted to get re-elected he would back off if he had to it isn't the word treachery but it's it's sort of interrelated harry truman who knew him pretty well called him the coldest man he ever knew he said he didn't care about you he didn't care about me but and this is an interesting way that Truman ends it, but he brought the country into the 20th century. So some of my sources are very, have devastating things to say about FDR. Truman is an example. Francis Fiddle is another. But then they were kind of admirers of FDR too, because they thought he had accomplished great, great things.

9:14And I think treachery is one, you know, where one can use the anti-lynching bill is kind of an example of that. Yes, so tell us about that because his wife was very much so upset with him over this whole thing. Tell us about the anti-lynching thing. Yeah, well, FDR, of course, takes office in 1933. And his wife, Eleanor, is good friends with Walter White, not the Breaking Bad Walter White. They headed the NAACP. And White wants an anti-lynching bill because there have been some very gruesome stories recently. People like being literally burned alive, right? Burned at stake. I mean, that's what a lynching was.

9:55We had a sort of stereotype of just you string up someone on a tree. No, it was pretty brutal stuff. Anyway, he goes to FDR through Eleanor and he says, look, could you push for an anti-lynching bill? Which it actually passed Congress in 1923. It had stalled in the Senate, but it actually passed the House. If there was ever a time something like that could be brought through, it was then. FDR kept saying, well, maybe we'll do it next year. I got my New Deal priority. And it goes on year after year after year, and it never happens. Finally, this is 1940, FDR's vice president is thinking of running for president, John Nance Garner, who was a conservative Texan.

10:38And Garner says at a cabinet meeting or somewhere, FDR found out about it, said, well, we have to do something about lynching. Lynching has gone too far. okay fdr's response to that given to an ally uh james farley is to start saying look garner said this can you imagine garner and he goes into uncontrollable laughter and this is a story that you hear from others he thought it was just hilarious garner's doing this now what would you do if you truly cared about that issue? I think you'd say, well, gee whiz, a conservative Texan who's very powerful in Congress, my vice president, Garner, he was a hands-on vice president, unlike Truman, he's willing to do something.

11:32Maybe we can get this through. Two years before that, he put it on the back burner because of the court packing. so it never happened but he successfully more or less strung the nsscp along with eleanor kind of being a secret weapon i think eleanor was sincere i think she wanted to do something but she also provided some cover for him in a way because she could always say well maybe next year we'll have better luck and someone like what okay that's all we got you know And he kind of went along with it. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week.

12:16We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. Do you think general historians, some of the ones that I've mentioned, Dalek, H.W. Brands, Conrad Black, that big one volume of his, I've got several of them here in my library. Do you think that they were deliberately soft on FDR? I don't know. I mean, even if I look at a lot of these people, like Brantz is an example, there's some, I quote them a lot. There's some, there's some pretty devastating stuff in there. Like, for example, why didn't FDR volunteer to fight in World War I? He was in his late thirties, like his cousin, who had volunteered.

12:55And it's some pretty devastating commentary. I think a lot of them see him as somebody who did things they like, I guess, who ideologically was pushing an agenda that they thought was beneficial to the country. I think some of it is FDR's charm. He's a likable guy in a lot of ways. uh i was calling thurston howell the third with a heart right he's got that aristocratic persona right he really he knew how to use the media better than anyone so you're better i was gonna go there your quote in the book is he's a genial aristocrat that's what you say about him but he also was able to connect with the people so why was he how was he able to do that common person i think the aristocracy helped him because if he'd have been a rabble rouser type Even charismatic like Huey Long, I don't think he would have been as successful.

14:00Let me just tell you a story about my parents. I keep bringing my parents up here. They wouldn't appreciate it. But they were great admirers of FDR, but also of Nelson Rockefeller. And their argument on Rockefeller was, here's a guy that doesn't have to do it, right? He's born to wealth. He could just live on his estate. and here he is going and doing public service and i think a lot of people thought of fdr that way he's charming he's aristocratic he's got a great sense of humor and it is said that even when you're being attacked publicly you kind of almost like it and he doesn't personalize it i mean there's a contrast here with Trump.

14:49FDR doesn't personalize public attacks. He does occasionally, but usually he doesn't take that approach. So, I mean, here's the guy that gave the fallow speech, which is one of the most brilliant speeches ever. And whatever you think of FDR, if you hear that speech, you go, boy, he really nailed it on that one. And he won the election. Well, he may have won anyway, but certainly it guaranteed the election. But he was also very sick at the time that he gave that speech. And so he was able to put himself together. I mean, he died three, four months after the election, right? So, I mean, he was able to put himself together, even though he was quite sick, right?

15:26He drove around in that car in the pouring rain in New York on that day, you know? So, I mean, it was rough, but... Yeah, it was one of the last high points. That speech was actually suggested by Orson Welles, interestingly enough, who thought that that was a great idea. I'm going to give you a broad theme and I want you to rebut it using the elements in your book. So the broad theme was the country was going haywire during the Herbert Hoover years. Again, these are broad themes. You could rebut me and tell me that because Hoover was obviously a very smart man, very successful man. And so FDR came in and tried a lot of things.

16:08Some things work, some things different, but at least he was trying and he got the Americans to think, okay, at least the government is trying to figure out a way to help us out of this depression. And then he was artful at being an arsenal for democracies and coming up cleverly with the Lend-Lease idea prior to, and literally helping democracies while he knew he was dealing with the isolationist side of the American public and the American sentiment. and so he was able to help those countries before they lost their battles with the nazis and then he was one of the principal architects of the post-world war ii order with the concepts around the united nations and so even though he died in april of 45 he was one of the people that laid out the blueprint for the rules-based society that you and i and our families were directly beneficiaries of so rebut those things for me Okay.

17:09That's a lot to talk about there. Let me start with the whole thing about the Great Depression. I think in a lot of ways that FDR and Hoover were not that dissimilar. In fact, they'd been very good friends. And ideologically, I don't think they were that different. And Hoover really begins, you know, kind of the emphasis on the federal interventionist federal response to business cycles, you know, creates a lot of agencies and so forth. So keeping that in mind, I would say one negative aspect of this that goes against that narrative, perhaps, is FDR's response during the long period. He used to go from November to March, the interregnum period after his election.

18:01It is until March that the president takes office in 1933. During that time, Hoover is reaching out to FDR repeatedly saying, you know, let's work together. Let's cooperate. And FDR's response is basically, that's not my baby. That's yours. and there is no cooperation. What happens during that interregnum? A severe, there've been several banking crisis, but this is a very severe one compared to the others even that really hits because of uncertainty, because of panic. And FDR does little to bring that about it or to counteract that. And people even talk to them, advisors say, why don't you do something about this?

18:49why don't you cooperate with uh president hoover why don't you take a stand and fdr's sort of response is i want to start anew i will hoover was willing to do a banking holiday that's what we associate with fdr uh who wrote the speech where fdr proclaims the banking holiday was hoover was hoover administration officials that were held over because they had the necessary expertise to be held over for a little while after the election. So I think that that puts another side on that. And then when you look at the Great Depression, we still have double-digit unemployment in 1941. It's the longest depression in American history.

19:33That's not a record to brag about. And I often say that FDR had not run in 1940. How would historians assess him, given that record, you know, as of 1941? one, not very positively. Now, the wartime leadership, you know, certainly you had gangster countries running amok, Germany, Japan, etc. But FDR's role in kind of creating those conditions was not an entirely innocent one. In 1933, there was an economic crisis. There was a world conference to deal with the economic crisis. FDR's own Secretary of State went there. It was the London Economic Conference. It was torpedoed as Hull got off the boat and thought he had an agreement on tariffs and debt by FDR, who had basically kind of an isolationist position at that time.

20:35The view was, let's focus on the New Deal. So there's a lot of wrinkles to this, I think you could say. We could look at the period before the war, FDR's attitudes towards the plight of Jews in Europe. It was not a very sympathetic attitude. After Kristel knocked, many people were, for example, saying we got to do something to provide a refuge, either the United States or and a third country for Jewish refugees. And FDR really did nothing. In fact, the theory during the war was the only way to help Jews was to win the war, despite the fact that there were a lot of people, including many of them very strong Zionists, who wanted to cut side deals with restive Axis powers like Hungary and Romania, who were willing to release their Jewish population.

21:35but there was no negotiation going on. So I think you could focus on the wartime leadership. I think there were positive things about that. I think one thing that FDR did do during the war is he was deferential for the most part to his generals. He didn't muck around too much. He did a little bit, though, in strategic planning and that kind of thing. um but if you look at even things that we give a lot of fd credit to fdr for there's another side to it which is not so pretty um anyway i can go on and on talking about that but if you have any specific questions you make a lot of compelling points you know professor glenn lowry reviewed the book and uh he called fdr a tragic figure talented ruthless unscrupulous and possibly necessarily to preserve a constitutional democracy from forces that could have destroyed it.

22:36I guess, is he right about that or is he letting him off the hook? And by the way, I should also point out that his second wife was my labor economics professor at Tufts, Linda Datcher Laurie, who unfortunately passed away of breast cancer a few years ago. But I admire Professor Lory, and I'm wondering your thoughts about his review of the book. Well, it was a positive review for the most part, and I like it. And I've been interviewed by Glenn as well. He's a good guy. He thinks – what I like about him is he's very much – But I guess you're saying there's a lot of bad shit going on in that era, and he kept us at least in a democracy.

23:20Yeah. Well, that was FDR's view. And he would say things basically, you got a lot of historians now say, well, FDR saved capitalism. And FDR thought that. And he would say things, why aren't these business people more grateful to me? I saved their highs. however i don't i don't buy into that if you look at the 1932 campaign when fdr was elected he was not running on a new deal agenda uh the socialists the communists in that election did very poorly so where's the threat to capitalism in that election fdr runs a rather conventional campaign in fact he is just as often attacking herbert hoover as a spendthrift as he is a big you know, as saying we need a bigger government reach.

24:08You can't find the New Deal, basically, in FDR's campaign pronouncements. So I don't see that there was a threat of revolution from, you know, from the left, certainly, during that period in the United States, even though the Depression was more severe here than it was in Germany. But we had these traditions which were deeply entrenched. And even at the height of FDR's power in 1933, those traditions are still there. People push back more than you might expect. And there is no real threat, I think, of a communist revolution and so forth. And I think FDR's policies in many ways delayed recovery.

24:56Typically, depressions were over within two to three years. but FDR is sort of fumbling around and as I said we still have double-digit unemployment in 1940 European countries other countries in the world generally recover a lot faster than we do and a lot of that I think is because he's doing these weird experiments like the National Recovery Administration and the AAA which are disasters economically and in many ways the New Deal retards a recovery that should have happened much earlier if American history is any guide. So I don't buy the argument that he saved the system because I don't think the system was headed towards a revolution in 1933.

25:46Certainly there was disorder. There were tax revolts. There were all sorts of things going on. But the communists and the socialists did a pathetic performance. in the election. He didn't elect a single member of Congress, for example. You think the unconditional, I mean, this is some points that, you know, change my view a lot. I have to tell you, Professor, this is a very compelling book, and I'm glad I read it because it's a counterweight to some of the other things I read about FDR, and I want it to be fair and objective about people. You make a great point in this book, and I want you to elaborate on it, if you don't mind, that his fixation on the North Atlantic sort of starved Pearl Harbor for resources.

26:32And then he made this demand for unconditional surrender, which you feel elongated the war. And so how many lives do you think that that cost us the stubbornness on that position? I mean, we ended up keeping the emperor anyway, by the way. I mean, it wasn't MacArthur after FDR died, thought it was necessary culturally to keep the emperor in place. Yeah, and it's interesting about Japan. I don't go into that. But even after Nagasaki bombed, the Japanese still are not unconditionally surrendering. And Truman finally sends them a note back saying, well, when we occupy the country, the emperor shall be under our authority.

27:17And that was sending a very clear signal to the Japanese, OK, you're going to keep him. So even after Nagasaki. But, yeah, you see how I don't know how many people, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. Give you an example of this. There are several examples. One is in Italy. uh mussolini was overthrown uh by the fascist council in and by the military after the u.s landed in sicily in 1943 at that point the j the italian government was eager eager to get out of the axis and eager to surrender and they were coming at fdr and saying okay we'll surrender But they didn't want to do unconditional surrender because they thought that was a humiliation.

28:09Now, and that term now is coming back up again in another context. And it dragged on and on and on. The negotiations dragged on and on. And meanwhile, the Germans poured their troops into the Italian peninsula. And we get Anzio and we get that slog north because the Germans had time to fill that vacuum. And of course, later, we had Tom Cruise, which was about it. There were various plots to overthrow Hitler. What was the big impediment to the success of those plots? It was the doctrine of unconditional surrender. Because FDR had the attitude that all these generals, who we had a stereotype, they were all Prussians, which wasn't true, that they're just as bad as Hitler.

28:56They went along with Hitler. They allowed him to come to power. We're going to sweep it all aside. So there was no willing to negotiate. Negotiate. And as Eisenhower said, okay, that's going to make the enemy fight on harder. And, you know, we have variations on that. One aspect of unconditional surrender was the unwillingness to negotiate with restive Axis powers like Hungary and Romania about saving Jews. And that's very much part of the same doctrine. and you know that's a doctrine which has led us to a lot of trouble where you don't negotiate you don't bend you know you don't try to make life i think it's a really important point and i'm really happy that you you've made it in your book and on the program so we're down to the last five words from your book and so what i did was we we take five words from the book my producer and i And then we ask our authors to give us a sentence or two.

29:56Okay? Okay. So I say the word politics. You say what? Politics. Well, if we're thinking about FDR, I'm thinking of amorality. Okay. That's a good word. If I say the word leadership, you think of what? Let's use the lens of FDR. The word leadership. If we use the lens of FDR, I would say a master of duplicity in many ways. Okay. How about power? Power is the goal, is the main goal. If we're talking about FDR, he wants to rise to power. He wants to stay in power. That is more important than anything else. Now, he's ideological as well, I think. For most of these politicians, that is a big one. How about America?

30:44I said the word America to you. With reference to FDR, I think he's certainly part of the American story. I mean, the guy's background is very, you know, he was descended from people who fought in the revolution. He was a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt. He was definitely part of an American tradition, an aristocratic American tradition. Okay. I'm going to say the last word, which is his three initials, FDR. And I'm going to give you the last word. well uh fdr right um i guess he's one of the first presidents to go to be known primarily by his initials i think that that's probably fair to say that's true i don't know if i can say anything more profound than that yeah yeah well jfk came after him there hasn't really been too many presidents known for their initials right you know just him and jfk that i can think of right i guess well he's so and i think that that probably happened later in his term because he became such a fixture.

31:49I mean, the man held office longer than any other president has held office in American history. And his legacy continued in many ways under Truman. And the Democratic Party still looks towards FDR for inspiration in many ways. He won four elections. So to your point about power, you understood how to attain it and you understood how to keep it you know he was very rough on farley uh because farley told him in 40 that he wanted to run for president and farley stupidly thought that fdr was going to give it up you know susan dunn wrote about that in her book 1940 and he went after farley you know he was very nice to him in that genial aristocratic way but then went after farley when it became clearly thought Farley was going to be a competitor of his.