What Did FDR Get Wrong?

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Citizens waiting in bread lines, a man bent toward a radio to hear a fireside chat, and Roosevelt himself memorialized not once but twice. It is a monument to a life's achievement, but like most monuments, it functions primarily to celebrate, not to question. Which raises an uncomfortable thought. Should we question Franklin Roosevelt? Did the man have any failures at all? Well of course he did. He was only human. But this monument, and honestly popular American history, so often seems to suggest otherwise. Hi all, it's Don Wildman here. Welcome to American History Hit, glad to be with you. It's commonplace in 20th century American history to credit Franklin Delano Roosevelt with so much. He led the nation out of the Great Depression, stabilized a collapsing economy, reshaped the federal government through sweeping reform. Then he turned his attention internationally, confronting and ultimately leading the defeat of fascist regimes threatening to dominate the world. The New Deal, victory in World War II, elected president four times, it's an impressive resume. But in America, we polished our presidents into monuments. They begin as politicians, power brokers, human beings, then over time, memory fades as we smooth away the rough edges, the miscalculations, the moral compromises, all in favor of a more reassuring triumphant image that really reflects how we prefer to see ourselves. Problem is, at some point we stop asking the questions we can learn from. Glossing over decisions that were misguided, off base, even deeply harmful. And yes, Franklin Roosevelt made plenty of those two. So today we'll try to do with FDR what we really should do with every president. Measure greatness alongside failure, achievement alongside consequence. What did FDR do wrong? Well, you might be surprised at the list, which we'll discuss today with David Beto, Professor Emeritus of the History Department at the University of Alabama Roll Tide. Professor Beto's newest book, among so many in his distinguished career, was released in November 25 entitled FDR, A New Political Life. Greetings, Professor. Hello, David. Thank you for your time today. Yeah, it's great to see you again. Yeah. Plus as well. Yeah, I did a thing many years ago. We were vaguely trying to, we were trying to reconstruct what happened exactly. That was all my life. Story of my life. Whatever it was. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this. As a man raised by Died in the Wolf FDR Democrats, I could probably benefit from some wider perspective. Maybe before we go there, let's talk about his general reputation. You see him on every list of the best of worst presidents. He's right at the top, along with Washington Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, there's FDR. Briefly, if that's possible, why so? How did he reach such a pinnacle? Well, I too was raised by Died in the Wolf FDR Democrats. So we have that in common. I think it's interesting that I do what historians call a counterfactual. Justice Zoom as many people had expected. FDR would not have run for a third term. Did he kept the two term tradition? How would he be regarded now, even by mainstream historians? You still have double digit unemployment in 1940. That's after 11 years since the stock market crash. You have no anti-Lenshin bill, for example, year after year, the NAACP been pushing it. The situation in Europe is not looking very good. In 1940, FDR has sort of barred the door to Jewish refugees. We could go on with many examples that if we were to use that particular barometer, or FDR would, you know, how would you rank him as a great president? Yet today, he is ranked as a great president. As you said, he's up there. Number one. Number two. Usually, he's number one or number two. Right, right. Next to Lincoln, sometimes Washington. And he has this incredible reputation. Yet, if we look at his record, again, we did not get out of the Great Depression. We still have double digit unemployment on the eve of World War II. So why is he ranked so highly? I think there's a lot to do with the ideology of most historians, including my colleagues, regard the growth of the welfare regulatory state as a good thing. Is he positive development in American history? And because the FDR, that was one of his legacies, they're inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. That's part of it. I think there's a persona of FDR that is bewitching. He's one of the more charismatic presidents in American history. And I think my parents sort of had the view. They had the same view of Nelson Rockefeller that, well, he's an aristocrat. He doesn't have to do this. He could just live there at Hyde Park and enjoy his gentlemanly life, but he comes forward public service to serve the people. So he's got this aristocratic charming manner about him. I call him Thurston Howe III with a Heart. There you go. It's actually some interesting parallels between them. Or at least that's the reputation. Thurston Howe III. It's the cigarette holder in the teeth. It's the jauntiness of the cap. And Harvard. Yes. And the voice. The voice. It's also very importantly, the Bonne me with the press corps at the time, combined with a new radio presence, which really is of his era. But of course, that's all fueled by the charisma, as you say it. On the radio thing, it was said that FDR could have been a very successful radio announcer that he never run for all. Well, he was announcing his own presidency. He was narrating it by the fire. Yeah, it's really about the triumphalism of what happened as a result of his presidencies. And as I said in the opening, we don't do ourselves any justice by glossing over all the nooks and crannies of many negatives that happened during his presidency. So that's what this conversation is really about. And your book, FDR, A New Political Life, really does study that, am I right? Yeah, this is a critical portrait. I think it's fair to say. But I try to understand what motivates FDR, where he's coming from. I look at his background and how that influenced him. And I rely quite heavily on the leading works by historians that are generally give a much more positive assessment of FDR. That's my source material. The leading studies that have been done, I rely a lot on people that knew FDR that worked with him like his attorney general, Francis Biddle, for example. And Biddle is a very interesting example. Biddle was against Japanese internment as were many of FDR's advisors. He has some devastating things to say in his book about FDR's attitudes towards the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yet, he dedicated his book, it was his autobiography 1962, Two FDR. So it's interesting that you have people that are, you can get some very critical information about him. But in the end, Harry Truman's another example. Harry Truman called him the coldest man he ever knew. Interesting. Charlie before he died, he was interviewed. He said he was the coldest man he ever knew. He didn't care about you. He didn't care about me. But he brought the country into the 20th century. So there's a devastating thing to have said about you. I mean, FDR's reputation is the guy who cares about the every man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, we can apply the adage. If great times make great men and women, then the great repression for one thing was bound to produce a figure of considerable consequence. FDR meeting this moment, let's talk about the new deal. Do we give him too much credit where that is concerned? I think you're going to say yes. Yeah, we give him too much credit. I mean, typically in American history, depressions had lasted two to three years. Probably the most interesting parallel was in 1921-22. You had a downturn, which was actually more severe than the downturn between 1929 and 1930. But what happened? The United States got out of that pretty quickly. And unemployment was back down to like 3, 4%. Yet, what we are talking about in the great depression of the 1930s, and I blame Hoover, and Roosevelt for this, is their policies actually held back recovery. And as I mentioned, you still have double-digit unemployment. That's not a recovery. In 1941, as you're getting close to Pearl Harbor. And a lot of it has to do with policies that were geared to profit-up prices, profit-up wages. But it was a heck of a... And the cost for that was a lot of unemployment. It was a heck of a climb back, though, from the kind of unemployment we're talking about in the great depression. Again, we add very high unemployment in the recession of 1921, and we're down very quickly. Okay, interesting. Yeah, it does get up to 25% by 1933. But it really is kind of just... It does go down, but then it goes back up again for a while, because we have a big downturn in 1937 called the nickname at the time, Depression Number 2, spikes back up again. Then it goes back down. So it's still stuck. So in 1939, six years after the commencement of the New Deal, 9.5 million people, I'm underscoring what you just said here, 17.2% of the labor force remained officially unemployed, 1939. It's still, as you say, double-digit percentages of employment. The Dow Jones average doesn't pass its 1929 peak until 1952. The net private investment totaled minus $3.1 billion. All told, we land again in a second recession, as we're talking about, 1937, which suggests that the New Deal created a rather fragile recovery. And as most people agree, it would take the World War II and the gigantic government stimulus that represents to really shore things up for real in a whole different way. So taking that FDR's address of the Great Depression has been overblown, hasn't it? Yeah, and packed to the whole net private investment thing. A lot of that is because people were just scared. There was uncertain what was going to happen next because FDR is, we got top marginal rates getting over 90% during parts of the Roosevelt administration. Very high tax rates, a lot of attacks on business people. And so business people are very afraid to invest. So that is a major issue that's going on during the Great Depression. I've always wanted to ask this general question. We talk about the New Deal and FDR's policies sweeping reforms. Wasn't that new? Was the idea of the federal government stepping forward in moments of crisis, I guess putting the Civil War aside because that's a different kind of action here. Was that unprecedented or had the federal government tried to do this past and then it was argued against and defeated or whatever, was what FDR did such a breakthrough or not? I think it was a breakthrough except for Hoover. Hoover is the guy that really got the ball rolling. Hoover did not like what had happened in the early 1920s. He's been Secretary of Commerce. He's pressing the president very hard to intervene more. And the president has this view, it's president harding, that let's let everything read just. But sort of the old view was that there'd been a boom situation. There'd been over expansion and that we need to let that readjust back down. And Hoover had the view that we needed to hold up wages. You said, look, wages are the key to prosperity. We had high wages in the 1920s. If we keep them high, we will have high wages now. The trouble with that theory was, yes, you can keep the wages. You can keep the wages up, but then employers are going to lay off people. That's exactly what they did. So this is the biggest, one of the biggest ironies of the Great Depression, real wages. That's what the wage will actually purchase. Real wages are actually higher in 1932 than they'd been in 1929. You get the height of the prosperity, or at least the prosperity is kind of ending at that point. You look before the stock market crash, wages are actually lower in terms of what they really spent, because you have big deflation, you have big price falls, but wages stay up. In fact, Haynes, the British economist, he discusses this. This is not new with me. He says wages are sticky. They're sticky downward. What you used to have in previous depressions is the wages would readjust. They didn't integrate the question. In order to enact so much sweeping reform, FDR had to go around Congress in the States. He had to use the executive orders, the power of the presidency we hear so much about in these days. He used it more than any previous president, correct? Oh, certainly more than any other previous president. Of course, we have the more notorious example of that would be Japanese internment, but then the bank holiday, that was an executive order going off the gold standard initially, although he gets Congress later to agree to that. But there's a whirlwind of executive orders. It's sad in a way, because some of them were that we most praise FDR for, that reasonable people are going to say he had to do this, like the bank holiday, possibly were unnecessary. Because Canada, interestingly enough, FDR was well aware it was going on in Canada, because he vacationed there. Did not have a single bank failure during the Great Depression. Not a single one. Why? Because Canada had a system of banks. Other banks could branch across provincial lines. If you had a banking failure and Saskatchewan because of wheat or whatever, that wouldn't bring down the whole banking system. If you had a banking system and part of Indiana, which was heavily dependent on certain agricultural goods, the local economy, the whole thing would go down. But you allowed branching. There were many proposals put forward to allow banks to branch. And during the period before FDR became president, there was a bill proposed by Senator Carter Glass of Virginia. Glass proposed a bill to allow that. And FDR was sort of non-committal. And then Huey Long, the very famous Senator from Louisiana, launched a filibuster against it and FDR backed off. So if FDR and if Hoover had pushed something like that, we might have been able to avoid this banking crisis that we had because Canada did not have. They didn't have a single banking failure. We had thousands of banks go under. It was devastating. And a lot of that was these smaller banks, local banks that were dependent on the local economy. And they couldn't diversify. They were not diversified for that reason. So questionable approach to dealing with the banking crisis. Let's put that on the list. Also questionable, the approach to the agricultural community, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was a, there were two big things for the first new deal. That was the first way to call the first new deal. One of them was the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the other one was the National Recovery Administration. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration, as you indicated, what that was geared to is reducing production, encouraging farmers, paying farmers, giving them incentives for plowing crops under. People would say, you know, every third row plowed under to killing livestock. Thousands of piglets were killed. This was the whole goal of the AAA was to reduce production. And the irony is some people pointed out that this is all occurring at a time when you have people that, you know, starving, you're destroying foodstuffs. But that was the goal of this. Now it had some unintended consequences. In the South, for example, they tried to reduce cotton production. For example, these go out of these fairly big planners. In the South, and they were paid subsidies to reduce cotton production. Given incentives to have less acreage being used to produce cotton. And so they were supposed to, these planners were supposed to share these benefits with their tenants and sharecroppers because a lot of four whites in African Americans are tenants and sharecroppers. But that wasn't really in force. And so what they ended up doing in many cases is expel them from the land, pick them out. We don't need your labor anymore. We don't need as many sharecroppers. We don't need as many farm tenants because we don't need the goods, you know, we got to reduce production. And this was criticized by a lot of black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender. Yeah, there's something else called the National Recovery Administration. This was news to me. I didn't even know about this agency, which had inspectors that had an unprecedented access to negatively impacting small business owners. Correct. This is an interesting agency. I don't know what they did. This is the most ambitious attempt to plan the economy. I would say ever, even since then. And what the NRA did is it was an agency that was self-regulation, I guess you could say, where you would have hundreds of NRA codes. They had codes for strippers, for example. Not really. I guess it wouldn't be the strippers themselves. It would be the people who run burlesque enterprises. The proprietors of it. Yes, the proprietors. And they would have things like, for example, the basic idea, again, was to raise prices and raise wages and minimize the numbers of hours that people could work. And so they would actually require this. They'd say, OK, we've decided the minimum wage for all workers is going to be this amount. We've decided that the maximum price that people can charge, or the minimum price that people can charge is this amount. So people actually went to jail, violators. There was a code for tailors. And this had actually been made by the tailors themselves. But who tended to control it? The wealthiest ones, right? The ones that lived, the ones that had the best known brand names. So if you were somebody off the main drag and you wanted to compete, your only way to compete was to charge a lower price. And one of these guys was a guy named Jake McGill. He was a tailor. And he charged $0.35 for pressing a suit. When the standard price set under the NRA by his fellow tailors was $0.40. He went to jail for charging $0.35 for pressing a suit when the official price was $0.40. That actually happened. And I was giving the example of the strippers, but they actually limited the numbers of strips per night in burlatch shows. That again, from a historian that is a much more positive about FDR than me named William Luketonburg. He can cover that information. Wow. Talk about the ironic way to address the Great Depression by the opposite of government stimulus. When we come back, let's talk about the 1937 court packing scheme, which was such an interesting time, and also has such themes that resonate today. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the ancient's podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancient's from History Hit. We are speaking with Professor and author David Beto about FDR's failures, as opposed to his so often spoken of successes. David, 1937, we hear about this vaguely in the news these days, the idea of packing a court. Whenever it's discussed, we always hear FDR referred to. Why so? What was happening at that time? What was the plan that he had in mind? Okay. I gave you these examples. They're called the first new deal and the two biggies. These are forgotten now, but these were the two big things that people thought about when they thought about the new deal in 1933, the NRA and the AAA. These were both struck down by the US Supreme Court as an unconstitutional delegation of executive power to the president. They said, you're giving them too much power. My God, you're giving the president the power to set prices, that wages through these appointed boards in cooperation with big business became very unpopular among a lot of people. The Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. Struck both down as unconstitutional and struck down other new deal initiatives. FDR was very upset and his argument was, who are these nine old, who are these members of the court, these old men on the court? Why are we listening to them? FDR had this bright idea that he announces in 1937. He says, and he gives a speech and nobody took it seriously. No one took the argument seriously because here's what his argument was. He said, the courts are overworked. These judges have too much work and I want to make it easier for them. So we're going to increase the size of the court. I think he wanted to add like five members to the court. That was his argument and nobody took that seriously. And even a lot of FDR supporters said, well, why not be honest about it? You know, because you're upset at the court's rulings. So he goes to Congress and at this time the Democrats have an incredible majority. They've got like, I think it's over 80% of the Senate. I mean, it's incredible numbers because they'd won some big victories in the 1936 election. We've got veto proof majorities who turns on FDR. Court packing, certainly a lot of conservatives are against it, but the Republicans stay in the background and the people that really lead the charge are New Dealers. It's like a Burton Wheeler, a New Deal Senator saying this is too much. We, you know, the Supreme Court, you're going too far. So you're actually getting a rebellion on both the left and the right and the Senate is able to defeat. Court packing. Interesting. And FDR makes it his main priority in 1937 when the head of the NAACP is going to him quite desperately and saying, we need a bill to do something about these lynchings that have been occurring, a bill that had been proposed a year after a year. And FDR's priority is, Court packing, it isn't even really do much New Deal stuff in 1937. He's focused on this issue. So heavily that it just dominates everything else, including he dominates anything, having to do foreign policy as well in 1937. The Supreme Court keeps resisting him. These four conservative justices that are really the block, he wants to kind of address that and outflank that. By the excuse, really, of they've got too much work, he's going to add a new member to the court for every member that's over 70 years old. Did I hear that right? Yeah, basically that's what he wants to do. Okay. And again, this is a little dig at them because he's saying, well, they're all old people. They're all old. And they need help. That's his argument. But really what he was up to was trying to get these things past that we're going to run into tangles that he didn't want to have. Ironically, the Democratic Congress rejects this and isn't going to back him on this idea. And that was the end of that, right? Yeah, that was the end of it. And part of the reason it was the end of it is, although this was, this is even happening before this, but people on the, some of the justices are changing their positions. Also, you know, you're getting, you know, they're starting to die and they're starting to retire. By the end of his administration, I think he's appointed nearly the entire court by the end of his administration. They stick around for four terms or at least three terms. You're going to have your chance to do that. What is interesting though is FDR's overreach was so great that some of these court decisions, sometimes forgotten were unanimous. Like the position, the decision to strike down the NRA was unanimous, including the liberals on the court. And FDR was like, what's going on here? I thought these people were on my side. And a more, a lot of them though were more divided, five, four. But some of them were unanimous. Well, you're speaking to a really important subplot of this whole thing, which is, you know, how much pushback was there at the time in the thirties against these reforms? And there was quite a bit. And because of the way this, this story has reported, been reported over the years. And I am part of this. I have often spoken in these terms, very general glossy terms of how great this was that we were able to emerge from this great depression. And we all credit, you know, knee jerk towards FDR for being the guy at the scene. But it was a much more difficult period than people today understand, never mind the economic strife. There was also a lot in the news about the nature of America and how the government ought to be acting, you know, in very much a real time. In the end, this idea of packing the court, I mean, none other than Louis Brandeis, who is the most liberal just as there, signs a letter alongside his conservative colleagues accusing the president of infringing on the court's independence. The very kinds of things we hear about today, very much alive, right in the back in the middle of the thirties. Yeah, FDR was very, they're very close parallels. When he heard about the Supreme Court decisions striking down the NRA said, how did old Isaiah rule? Isaiah was the nickname he gave to Brandeis, who after our thought was he was Sympathica. Uh-huh. And he said, Isaiah ruled against it. That's how universal. Because, you know, one thing about Brandeis, his Brandeis was pretty consistent in opposing bigness. He didn't like bigness. And that included, he was a little leery of too much power in the federal government as well, as well as big business. Maybe I'm wrong to call him so liberal. When we come back after this next break, I'm going to summarize where we come to at this point in the conversation, but we'll move on quickly afterwards to the most extraordinary thing, which is, well, maybe not the most extraordinary thing, but the fact that he lasts her four terms, but barely. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a ruling crowd and potential death in the Colosseum. Find out on the Ancient's podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the Ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancient's from History Hit. David, one of the most amazing things about FDR to this day is that he's elected to presidency four times. We did a whole episode on this. I invite people to look for it. It's, you know, how controversial this really was for FDR to challenge the George Washington rule, which is, you never go past two terms, but he breaks that precedent. And mostly that's because of World War II, right? Well, that's what FDR would say, but I think FDR liked the job. He wanted to stay in the job. And everybody, there were younger people that had similar views, but he was always dissatisfied with all the, all the alternatives. And it's interesting in 1940, and to some extent, 44, FDR keeps everybody waiting. And he's telling all of his close advisors. He's saying, I don't want to run. I want to, I want to, you know, step down. I just want to go back to Hyde Park. There's a very close advisor named James Farley who he's telling that to. Farley wants to run for president himself. He was an FDR confidant. Farley was, you know, is my source on this. Because he has several meetings with FDR because he wants to run for president. So he's going to FDR, trying to get a sense of, you know, are you going to run or not? FDR is saying, I don't want to run. I don't want to run, but he wouldn't make the announcement. He would never make the announcement. And then finally, FDR is going to the convention. And FDR says, well, what should I say? What should I say to these people of the convention? And Farley tells him, tell him what General Sherman said. You will not run. And if nominated, you will not serve. You know, you're, you're not running, right? And FDR said, I couldn't do that. And Jim, and, but then he gives a speech to the delegates where he said, I don't want to run. I hope you pick somebody else, but it's your choice is the delegates. And the delegates were just standing there at the convention. This is at the convention. Very different than today looking dumbfounded like what do we do? FDR has told us nominate whoever we want, but nobody was really running because FDR discouraged them all from going out there because they weren't sure what, you know, what was going to happen. And then the voice from the sewers came. This is called the voice from the sewers. The Democrats had hired a guy who was the editor of this, he was a sewer commissioner. He was in the basement of the convention hall with a microphone that went into the convention hall, loudspeakers. And he starts saying on the microphone, you know, he gets the word we want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt. Michigan wants Roosevelt. And then the delegates start to join in hearing this voice from the sewers. They all holler and holler and FDR is nominated overwhelmingly. This is what he does. And then he gives a speech and he says, I've had many sleepless nights worried about this. I don't want to do this, but like a good soldier, I'm going to serve. I will do it, but I'm reluctant. And it was all orchestrated. It was shamelessly orchestrated. But that's how he pulls it off the first time. And the second time is 1944 when the extenuating circumstances was not over. So he'll get, you know, Democrats going to nominate him, but his health is disaster. FDR as an incompetent doctor who was very good at medicine to treat FDR sinuses. And they said FDR took care of FDR sinuses and he took care of the doctor. And the doctor is eventually promoted to be surgeon general of the Navy. But anyway, he's a health disaster. His daughter, Anna is so distrustful. This doctor that she convinces FDR to have a expert at Johns Hopkins of cardiologist CM. And he says this man could just die any second health disaster. But they covered up. He dies soon after he had been elected. He's sort of a walking dead man. These days with television, you know, relentlessness of media, all of those secrets that were kept behind closed doors with FDR would have been, you know, right out in the open. And would have changed the game a great deal for him politically. I'm sure it would remind personally. Moving on, David, I want to talk about his civil rights record, which is really spotty. I mean, my God, getting renewed attention these days that after Pearl Harbor, there is this extraordinary thing that happens. It's hard to even wrap oneself around the official dem of this. How it was justified, but it really was and it was driven primarily by the executive branch. Executive order 9066 February 1942 allows for the forced relocation and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, citizens, American citizens all out in the West. How much was he being called to do this versus his own engineering of this? He was a central figure. Now, you got to remember that executive order is not signed until more than two months after Pearl Harbor. The initial response after Pearl Harbor, including from newspapers in Los Angeles, places like that, is these are American citizens? No, we're not going to send American citizens to internment camps. We're not going to do that. That is an issue. Even the guy that's in charge of the internment, General DeWitt said, well, of course, we don't do that to American citizens, maybe to non-citizens will do stuff like we did to German and Italian aliens, some of them anyway, but we're not going to do that to Americans. That's the initial attitude. But what happens is FDR refuses to give a reassuring speech, which he could have said, we believe in the four freedoms. He'd given a speech a year earlier called the four freedom speech. People even them so much, we apply them to our Japanese American citizens. He doesn't do that. He just sort of lets everything drift. And people start coming forward, falling for internment, but there really isn't mass public hysteria. In fact, polls show that most Americans are satisfied pre-interment polls show with general conditions, that the way we're treating the Japanese. There's no big demand for it. FDR is so enthused about internment that he wants to intern Japanese Americans in Hawaii. And if you look at the executive order, it's vague. It says other persons, don't even say Japanese. It says in designated zones, shall be removed. The Department of the War has the power to do that. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn't even, it doesn't even say it. But FDR wanted to intern them in Hawaii. And after the executive order, he says, I've always believed this. And how would that have worked? Well, they're over a third of the population. The plan was to send them one of the smaller islands, to transport them from the main island to the smaller island. And who stops it? Well, basically the local commanders dragged their feet. Their good bureaucrats, bureaucratic delay. Then some hard realities come up. Like for example, we need transport ships. You know, midway is going to come soon. Are we going to really use the transport ships to transport these Japanese Americans to one of the smaller islands? Yeah. It's really an incredible letter that I cite and it's online where after our lays all this out, well, he lays out I really would like to do this. But it doesn't happen. So he is at the center of it. And a lot of it is, FDR really has a kind of negative view towards Japanese Americans. It written op-eds in the 1920s where he said California is right to do what they're doing. They denied Japanese non-citizens from owning land. That's good. They prohibited interracial marriage with Japanese Americans. And he says that's California's doing the right thing. We don't need this mixing. Attorney General Francis Biddle is quoted with this. The Department of Justice, as I had made it clear to Roosevelt from the beginning, was opposed to and would have nothing to do with the evacuation. I do not think he, Roosevelt, was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step. Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him. Boy, that remark speaks so much about how FDR was being perceived even by his own people, right? Yeah. And Biddle is not the only one against it. Jagger Hoover, not a great civil libertarian. Hoover doesn't like it. He's against it. Part of it because I don't think he wants anything to do with it. And he doesn't have anything to do with it. He ends it all over to the army. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickys is against it. Harry Truman is against it, believe it or not. Truman wrote later that it was the wrong thing to do and I said so at the time. Now, amending that a bit is Truman had a chance to say something at the time and he didn't that I know of, but he says he was against it. So it's remarkable the numbers of people in the administration who were against it. This does not get apologized for until Ronald Reagan during his presidency. Finally, makes that pronouncement. It's a real stain on this country that is still being processed really by generations afterwards. His nomination of Hugo Black as a Supreme Court judge, 1937. Shortly after that nomination, the Pittsburgh Gazette accused Black Hugo Black of joining the Ku Klux Klan for two years, putting only in 1925 and getting a golden grand passport with that organization as a result, FDR distances himself from Black. But Black defends himself on the basis that he had made his name by representing an African American man who was given extra prison time for a sentence. Point is, this is a huge controversy, big blow up in the middle of the 30s, which is so important for FDR. But it also will resonate forward to how we can perceive FDR as not necessarily the man for everybody. He's not a great civil rights president, correct? Oh, no, not at all. I mean, one example is, as I said, the anti-lensching bill, which it actually passed the House in the 1920s, had big support. And Walter White, who is the head of the NAACP, not the Breaking Bad Guy, he keeps going back to FDR a year after a year saying, could you please indicate some support for this? And FDR never does it. And FDR is excused as well. I can't because I got other priorities. This goes on so long. And here, let me give you a very revealing incident. FDR's vice president was fairly conservative, Southerner, Texan, John Nance Gardner. Gardner had never really been favorable to anti-lensching laws, but he got outraged eventually because of just some high profile lynchings. And he was actually thinking of running for president in 1940. And he says, we got to get an anti-lensching bill. FDR found out about this. And he's talking to Farley, his speech writer and so forth. And he says to Farley, did you hear about Gardner? Did you hear that Gardner now is against, you know, for anti-lensching bill, Gardner? And he starts laughing, laughing uncontrollable. And what does that say at the time, the NAACP is still trying to go to FDR to get him to act and he never does? If FDR really was like, oh, I'd like to get this, but I can't for whatever priority, wouldn't that convince him that, well, now is the time? Gardner was highly respected. Was former speaker of the house? Gardner is highly respected in the Congress, including by a lot of people that don't like FDR at all. So that gives you an idea of a kind of attitude. And being a little hard on him, although I've been told by others, I'm not hard on him enough, but there really isn't, there's a coldness there that is just unmistakable. And it's cynicism that is unmistakable. Right. I mean, it's interesting, you know, growing up in my generation born in the early 60s, I came up on the tail end of so much democratic power in both houses of Congress and FDR and Kennedy, big, big figures. But they were real politicians. These guys were power brokers and FDR especially in office for so long, it really behooves us to back up and take a more general view of the 20th century through that lens instead of necessarily glossing over and making these headlines out of triumphalism, which is really not helpful to anybody in the long run of life. That is what your book does. It takes apart this sort of myth and examines FDR from that standpoint, you know, from whatever political affiliation you come from, that's a really healthy thing to do as an American. There was a time when the presidency was a much smaller office than it became in the 20th century. The likes of FDR and others who grew that into a mega office that we down deal with. What does this all mean to you though in your estimation of this presidency? Does he now sink way down on that list of worst of bests or is he still, you know, where do you put FDR in your mind? I don't know if I'd have a specific ranking, but he would be, I put him in the failed category. It's just really my car is on the table. I run a chapter and I call him a failed president. And what are the examples, the great depression, but there are other examples in World War II, for example, helping Jews. FDR did really very little to help Jewish refugees. The most famous case that a lot of people have heard of is the SS St. Louis, which had, which is 1939. It had Jewish refugees and the captain was not able to land in Cuba. He didn't get the landing papers or he had them, but the Cubans denied him. So he comes to the off the coast of Florida and FDR actually sends a Coast Guard cutter. They intercept the ship to prevent it from getting too close to shore, you know, and less people could swim for safety. So he doesn't do anything there. And during the war, a lot of Jewish leaders, dissident Jewish leaders are saying, look, there are dissident exes power. Romania was one hungry. They want to out. They know Hitler's losing and they're willing to say, okay, take the Jewish refugees, just pay for the transportation costs. Hungry offered 70,000 and they, and it was something like $100 per refugee. But FDR's approach, Nialais in general, was we are not going to negotiate with any element in the access, including these dissident exes powers. We see that occur also, of course, with the famous plots against him. MDR showed no sympathy at all to those efforts because he made the, he had the view that these were just a bunch of Russian, German militarists and they are the ones that help bring Hitler to power and so forth. So these guys are like tortured and, you know, it was pretty bad news. But there one thing that they wanted was to encourage these coups was not to modify the unconditional surrender doctrine, which FDR applied to anything, including negotiations with rest of exes powers, including after Mussolini was overthrown. The Italian government there that had overthrown Mussolini, they wanted to surrender, but they did not want to do an unconditional surrender. So the negotiations dragged on and on and in the meantime, German troops pour into the Italian peninsula and we have Anzio. We have the tough slogged north. That could add a fairly potentially quick surrender there. But the Italians just didn't want to sign a document that said unconditional surrender. They turned their backs on fascism, they shut down the fascist party and everything, but they didn't want to agree to that because they thought that was to humiliate. David Beto is the professor emeritus of the history department at the University of Alabama and we've been discussing his most recent book came out in November 25 entitled FDR a new political life, but go on any book site and you will see a lot more from this man. Thank you David, it was great to meet you. Thank you. We'll talk again soon. This is fun. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. Many help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. 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