After Roosevelt secured reelection in 1936, the emboldened president made mistakes. The most well-remembered was his attempt to add six additional justices to the Supreme Court. Opponents of FDR’s heavy handedness, including the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Governance (NCUCG), played a key role in defeating the Court Packing Scheme.

Marcus M. Witcher

When I arrived at the University of Alabama almost a decade ago to begin graduate school and met the historian David Beito (who would become the co-advisor on my dissertation), he was just beginning a project on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disregard for Americans’ civil liberties. Most critics of FDR point to Executive Order 9066 which forced 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps—around two-thirds of which were in fact American citizens—as an anomaly of his otherwise solid record on civil liberties. In The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, however, Beito goes beyond internment and challenges these notions. Through detailed archival research, he has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of Roosevelt to date.

The Roosevelt consensus among historians, to the extent that it ever existed, has been unraveling for some time. Free market critics such as Robert Higgs, Burt Folsom, Jim Powell, Thomas Fleming, and Amity Shlaes have rightly condemned Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression and his inclination to use the coercive power of the state to impose his policy prescriptions—often with undesirable results and unintended consequences. But there is also an emerging group of historians on the left—Richard Rothstein, Ira Katznelson, Linda Gordon, and Richard Reeves, among others—who criticize FDR for reinforcing the white male breadwinner home, for creating organizations such as the Federal Housing Administration that helped segregate America through redlining, for not supporting anti-lynching legislation, for not ensuring that the New Deal programs benefited minorities on a more equal basis, and for the internment of Japanese Americans. Even David Kennedy’s comprehensive history of the period is critical of Roosevelt on some margins.

Although some historians have criticized FDR, most of the historiography of Roosevelt gives him a pass on the abuse of civil liberties during his administrations and hails him as a champion of democracy often citing his soaring rhetoric and the Four Freedoms. In reality, as Beito demonstrates, Roosevelt’s liberalism did not lead him to care about Americans’ civil liberties and he violated the Bill of Rights time and time again while in office. Further, historians generally treat the internment of people of Japanese ancestry as an exception to Roosevelt’s solid record on civil rights and they generally excuse the president’s actions and cast blame on those who carried out the relocation and internment—such as General John L. Dewitt. Beito set out to prove that Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese Americans was consistent with his general disregard for the Bill of Rights.

Beito begins by chronicling the ways that FDR empowered his allies in the Senate to harass, undermine, and delegitimize political enemies and critics of the New Deal through formal investigations. According to Beito, the Black Committee—chaired by Hugo L. Black (D-AL) who was an ardent New Dealer—was used “as an instrument of political surveillance.” The committee was created to look into opponents of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935 at a time when many of the New Deal initiatives had suffered significant setbacks from the Supreme Court. The Roosevelt administration empowered and supported the committee’s activities. The IRS issued “a ‘general blanket order’ for access to the tax returns of potential witnesses.” Roosevelt’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also granted “authorization to require the telegraph companies [to] comply” with Black’s requests that his committee be granted complete access to witness telegrams. Ultimately, the Black Committee succeeded in its goal to “spread the view that the main anti-New Deal organizations represented a small cabal of big business interests” and it successfully discredited opponents of the New Deal and discouraged financial contributions to FDR’s political opponents.

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