[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: I'm not sure how much of that you saw before. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. Everyone calls me Jag. I am CEO of the Atlas Society. And apologies in advance for some of the connectivity issues that we're having. Hopefully you can hear my voice. We are here to talk with Professor David Bato about his latest book, the New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights, the untold story of FDR's concentration camps, censorship and Mass Surveillance. David, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Thank you so much for inviting me.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: So we are going to dive into your book and more generally the scope of your historical research. But in doing my own research about you, I learned you and your wife were the 2017 winners of the best screenplay award for Keeping It Mighty Hot from Alabama's Writers Conclave, the oldest and largest organization of writers in Alabama. Now, is that your side hustle or your creative passion?
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Well, that movie script was about focused on a fellow we wrote about named Dr. T.R.M. howard, who was a very important civil rights leader, kind of a Randian figure in a way, an entrepreneur, very successful. He owned an arsenal of weapons, he built a fraternal society, his own hospital and so forth.
But he was involved in the Emmett Till case, finding witnesses and evidence.
That movie script sort of is morphed into a series that hopefully will occur on the black independent black town or black majority town of Mount Bayou, Mississippi, where Howard was very successful. And we're hoping that this could be a full scale dramatic series in this town that was founded by two former slaves of Jefferson Davis brother and was a center of entrepreneurship and mutual aid and was the only place, one of the few places in Mississippi where African Americans could vote and hold office. So and it had a lot of juicy gossip. So we're hoping that this is going to be a podcast series very soon, but we're hoping that it's going to be a full scale kind of dramatic series at some point.
So can we assume correctly, figure very prominently because he was the key figure in the history of Modern or Mount Bayou beginning in the 1940s.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: And did that project grow out of your book? T.R.M. howard, doctor, entrepreneur, civil rights pioneer it grew.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: We know the people in Mount Bayou, a lot of them quite well. And so it's still there. It's this town that was founded in 1887 and very proud of its history. And we got to know the people there. And then we got to realize that writing about the history of this town, which was sort of a beachhead or an outpost of freedom in the Deep south could be a great project in and of itself. And we got somebody who's a very well known Hollywood director interested in this. And so we're slowly preparing for, hopefully, you know, getting a first rate kind of series. But it's a spin off of the Howard research. So originally I was interested in Howard, but then I got interested in this. You know, just. That's the way history is. You go, you know, you see something and then you see something else as part of your research and you move into a new research trajectory just because of that. You don't plan it. Sometimes you just don't plan. It just happens. And that's. This is an example of that.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: So did research for that book help deepen your understanding of how FDR allies like Boss Crump in Alabama went after prominent black Republicans like entrepreneur Robert R. Church Sr. Reputed to be the South's first black millionaire. And how does the story of that persecution shed light on the Roosevelt administration's disregard for civil rights?
[00:04:32] Speaker A: That's a very interesting question because I've always been interested in Roosevelt and the New Deal period in and of itself. But because we did do the research on African American entrepreneurs and political figures, many of them Republicans, many of them, you know, conservative slash libertarian in orientation. And Howard sort of moved in that world, we would see interconnections. Because if you are a prominent African American in 1940, like Howard, you knew everybody, you knew Josephine Baker, you knew it was a very small world. So we would see interesting connections. But I think that the FDR book really grew out of interest that predate the Howard book, because I've always been quite, you know, focused. That's what in my teaching and so forth. And Roosevelt always seemed to me to be a president that got a very good press, but a very undeserved good press. And the deeper I look into his background, the less respect I have for him. And, you know, I.
Both sides. But in Roosevelt's case, it's the negative.
Yes.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: So you referenced his undeserved good press. Maybe you could help us understand how it is that he had all of these. He's always showing up in four of these very respected surveys about the best presidents. Is that just because of the kinds of people that they survey or just.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that has a lot.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: To do with this other aspect of his legacy.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: I'm sorry, I think it has a lot to do with who they survey, which are historians, but also it seeped down to the general public. And you're right about Roosevelt's Ranking, he's often number two. I've seen him number one, too, but I mean, he's up there in the top two or three in the rankings over and over, usually by historians and political scientists. Now, why do they like him so much? Well, I think a lot of it does have to do with. With the political attitudes of historians. Right. Most historians are sympathetic to the welfare regulatory state. Roosevelt built the modern welfare regulatory state. So, you know, they tend to look. See those as good things and the man is responsible. You know, they give him a lot of credit for creating these things. So that has a lot to do with it. But there are other things about Roosevelt. He's a very dynamic, charismatic, charming figure in a lot of ways, and people are bewitched by that. It's sort of like he's like. He's like Reagan in a way.
In fact, you know, I would say he could perhaps teach Reagan some lessons. But they're both very charismatic figures. Roosevelt, it was said, had he not been a politician, could have thrived as a radio announcer or a, you know, whatever you want to call it, a host of his own variety show or interview show. He was the kind of guy that just had this personality that stood out. His former boss, when he was Secretary of the Navy, this is when he was much younger, said of him that he's just like, called it love at first sight. Meaning when he saw Roosevelt, I don't think he meant anything by that, but he said this guy really stood out. And he said he was like an actress. He had it.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: People used to say he had that ability.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: Yeah, he certainly did communicate. So in terms of the early influences, what would later shape his worldview, including his comfort with authoritarian measures, for example, how much would you weight the early progressive ideology being imported from Germany? How much FDR's idolization of his uncle Teddy Roosevelt, how much his service in the Wilson administration, what was most important in shaping his, I don't know, core inner ideology, or at least his inclinations.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Yeah, Roosevelt's not a deep thinker. He would. He devoted far more time to collecting stamps than he did to reading. And people said they knew him well. Said, I never knew him to read a book, but he had an ideology and kind of seeped down. It was a nuts and bolts kind of progressivism, I guess you could say, a faith in governmental power, you know, kind of a disdain for business, although he dabbled in business, usually quite unsuccessfully. And it's something a little bit about his background and I think is important to recognize before I go on is that he's an aristocrat, but he's comfortable being an aristocrat.
He's got this kind of. Someone called him a country squire and I think that that has something to do where he's coming from. There's a paternalism there, a kind of feeling that he's well bred and that he has a responsibility to have a leadership role.
I once said, people don't even know who I'm referring to, but there was a figure on Gilgan's Island TV show years ago named Thurston Howell iii. And I said, well, he's, he's, he's Thurston Howell iii. He's comfortable being this aristocrat, you know, this guy with this kind of debonair class, I guess you could say breeding, you know, went to the very best schools. Now, who does influence him? Well, I would put first on the list as his role model is not as he's not his uncle, he's his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. There's another branch of the Roosevelt family that is in Oyster Bay and they're in communication with each other. And he looks up to Theodore, who he refers to as Uncle Ted, although he's his fifth cousin now, I guess he sort of becomes his uncle when Franklin marries Eleanor Roosevelt, who is Teddy Roosevelt's niece.
And so Teddy Roosevelt gives away the bride at the wedding because Eleanor's father had been an alcoholic and everything had died, and so he gives away the bride. He is sort of Roosevelt's role model. Theodore went to Harvard. He served in the New York State legislature, as did Franklin. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, as was Franklin. He ran for Vice president. Right. And you could look at the trajectory that they're very similar and there's some self consciousness there, but there's a difference because Franklin was an aristocrat and comfortable with it. Theodore was an aristocrat, but wanted to be a cowboy and an adventurer. So they're interesting differences between them, I would say. Another figure that's very influential is Woodrow Wilson. And Roosevelt comes from his family was Democratic in their traditions. However, he probably would have run as a Republican if the Republicans had asked him at a crucial point because he's sort of fluid in his party ideology, but he's influenced by Wilson. He's an original supporter of Wilson and is influenced by Wilson's progressive ideas. Both Wilson and Theodore are progressives, but have sort of a different kind of flavor of progressivism. And as a result of that, Franklin becomes. Works hard for Wilson and becomes appointed by Wilson as His Secretary of the Navy, just like Uncle Ted, had been appointed 13 years. Well, more like 16, 17 years before that is Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Interesting. Well, let's jump off right there. Speaking of his service in the Wilson administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, where he got involved in what became known as the Newport sex scandal of 1919, 1920. Controversial crime, crackdown on suspected homosexual activity in the US Navy. Tell us what went down and how that might foreshadow FDR's disres disregard for privacy or civil liberties later as President.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate your close reading of the book because that is very important. Okay. Not a lot of people knew about this. I only knew about it maybe 10 years ago. Somebody called my attention to it and then I kind of brushed it off and I looked into, I said, my God. Well, Roosevelt is Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He is somewhat, you know, he's quite fascinated by what he, what people he calls the spy business.
He liked to read novels about espionage and that kind of thing. So he's sort of ready for an opportunity. And the opportunity comes because a lower level figure in the Navy had done this investigation at the Newport Naval Base. And this guy was trying to expose same sex relationships that he believed were rife at the, at the base there. Right in the Navy. And he was researching this and basically their investigation didn't go anywhere, let's put it. It reached its limits and it was basically running out of resources and wasn't getting support from like the Attorney General. And Roosevelt found out about it and he said, oh, I like what you're doing. And Roosevelt took over the investigation. He didn't like force anybody out, but he said, I like what you're doing. And he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and he set up a special section in the Department of the Navy with permission of his boss, called Section A. And he was in charge of it. And it came to be nicknamed later the Newport Sex Squad.
But the official name was Section A. And his mission was to uncover same sex relationships in the Navy, investigate them. And so he hired a bunch of investigators, brought a lot of dodgy people in, including brought in people he'd known it at Harvard, for example.
And they get involved. Now there were certain people. How do you get evidence in this? Well, there are certain zealous investigators who said, well, the way to get entrap people. Well, how do you entrap people? Well, what they did, and this was unbelievable to me is they actually engage the investigators actually engaged in same sex relationships with people in at the naval base to, to catch them.
And basically Roosevelt, it's pretty clear, knew about these methods, but his attitude was, well, he said this, he said, isn't it important that you, you know, you get the goal accomplished? What are you worried about the methods? He made his famous statement, he said, look, if I send ships to go to Pearl harbor or wherever, you know, Navy ships, I don't really care how they get there, I just want them to get there. That was what he said. And it's a very much this attitude of the ends are important. If you've got the right ends, then don't worry about how you got there. Well, this scandal ends up. You would think this is not a very gay friendly era. It certainly isn't. But this was. There was talk that this is going too far and an Episcopalian minister was arrested. Really doesn't seem to have been involved in anything. But you know, there was this overzealous investigation and then finally there was a naval investigation and it was sort of a little bit of a cover up. And then the US Senate looked into it and they basically singled out FDR for blame. They said he knew about. He must have known what was happening.
He's unfit for office.
I mean, any attack you could make showed up on the front page of the New York Times.
And interestingly enough, this was only weeks before Roosevelt had his first bout with polio.
Roosevelt, interesting time he blamed the polio on the Senate investigation, believe it or not.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Perfect politician always blaming something on someone else. So just kind of get back to the kind of broad sweep of thing. FDR was sworn into the presidency with what was considered a mandate for bold, sweeping action. How did the public receive some of the early moves he made? Is it fair to say that when he faced unexpected opposition to his agenda, that's where he turned to these more intrusive and authoritarian measures to squelch dissent.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Although it took a little time because Roosevelt took office in 1933 and the country was at the bottom of the Great Depression. He had done his own role in making it sink that low because the banking system basically collapsed in between the time he took office and the election. It used to be like a 5 month, 6 month period, 5 month period when you didn't take office till March. But anyway, he takes office and the public is basically rallied to him, so they're willing to forgive a lot. He's got big Democratic majorities and so he doesn't really need to do any investigation. But by about 34, 35, there is increased Opposition to him, setbacks, he's fallen in the polls. The Democrats are starting to lose some key elections and he gets very worried about that. So Roosevelt basically supports very Dragonian investigations that are led by a senator named Senator Hugo Black from my state, my current state of Alabama law school's named after the library is anyway, and Hugo Black was a U.S. senator at the time and was an attack dog. I mean this guy makes Joe McCarthy look kind of mild mannered by comparison. He's much smarter than Joe McCarthy. McCarthy. And black is sort of delegated by the administration to lead an investigation of lobbies.
Now that doesn't sound too exciting, but how did they define lobbies?
Any attempt to influence public opinion, direct or indirect, could be a lobby. So what we're talking about here would be a lobby. Right? If you have some effect on public opinion and they do this very Dragonian, Black leads his investigation, but he has, it's difficult because a lot of these witnesses are pushing back. There's very controversial. So Black gets an idea. It's very timely to current concerns. The telegraph companies were required to keep telegrams, copies of every telegram. And he found out about this and this was a big deal because telegrams were the email, the text message of the time. 50% of long distance communications were through telegrams.
And they were instantaneous or almost instantaneous. People would say things in telegrams, much like emails or texts that they wouldn't say in a letter. And so he gets the bright idea that he was going to subpoena the telegraph company, the main one, Western Union, for copies of telegrams of witnesses. It's like, you know, let's say I go in there and I suddenly find out that all of my emails, all my text messages have been obtained by a Senate committee that calls me in. That's, that's the way it was. You didn't need a court order. He just, he just did it. Basically what he did is he went to the Federal Communications Commission. Roosevelt basically interceded so Black could get permission to look at all these telegrams. How many did he look at? Millions. He went through thousands a day. His investigators, they literally looked at something like 3 million private telegrams of expansive, as you can imagine, every single member of Congress, they searched all their telegrams going in and out of Washington. They targeted leading anti New Deal organizations and they would just go through these big stacks of telegrams, copy the ones that they thought were useful and ambush witnesses who did not know that they had done this search. It was really quite amazing and, and quite Controversial. Once the full news came out about it.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Wow. All right, well, we've got a lot of questions that are popping up. Again, apologies for the lag in my video.
Lock, stock and barrel asks, are you familiar with the Roosevelt myth by John Flynn, your book, in any way?
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Flynn is. Yes, I'm citing it in my new book. I'm writing a biography of. Of Roosevelt, full scale bio, and I use Flynn. Flynn's a very good reporter, very good journalist, and he's often sort of brushed aside as this conspiracy guy. And I don't know, maybe later, but Flynn's work on Roosevelt is quite good, quite well written and quite well nuanced. And Flynn knew Roosevelt as well. He. He'd been a journalist in New York when Roosevelt was governor of New York, Flynn, for example, so he knew a lot about him. He's an elegant writer and his. His work is really, really quite good. And yes, I have a lot of respect for Flynn. I think I said at the beginning that I compared Roosevelt to a country squire and that I. Where did I get that from? I got that from Another book that F.L. flynn wrote called Country Squire in the White House. And I think he really got at that. That's a side to Roosevelt that is important, who he is. It tells about his charm. It's part of.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: All right, got another question here, Turner, who asks, professor, do you believe that the Second World War and its victory helped to cement FDR as a great president despite his actual policies, or is there more to it?
[00:24:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it did. But I'm finding a lot of interesting things about the war, the way the war is conducted.
For example, FDR is very committed to a doctrine during the war of no negotiation with any element in the Axis.
If any of you have seen the movie Valkyrie, von Stauffenberg's coup against trying to kill Hitler, trying to. Roosevelt was totally unsympathetic to that because his view was, oh, the German military, they're tainted because they went along with Hitler or whatever, Right? Even though von Stauffenberg came from the more liberal part of Germany. So he has this rigid attitude towards negotiation, which has a lot of consequences in prolonging the war. For example, Italy surrendered after Mussolini was overthrown. Roosevelt insisted that Italy sign an unconditional surrender. Italy balked at doing that for a while, even though they'd gotten rid of Mussolini and finally agreed to it. But in the meantime, German troops had poured into Italy. You also see this with the Holocaust, because there were multiple opportunities to save people during the Holocaust, but because Roosevelt had This attitude. He was never going to negotiate with any element.
Romania, for example, wanted to bail out of the access and said, we have 200,000 Jews. You can have them if you pay for their transportation.
No interest from the Roosevelt administration.
So it's a little bit of a different tryst. I don't get into the argument about whether or not whatever, the war was justified or whatever, because it's sort of a secondary argument. I'm a historian reporting on what happened. And what did happen is I think a lot of people needlessly died because of these policies of unconditional surrender and of just not negotiating. And a lot of Jewish organizations were really complaining about that during the war, saying, come on, people are dying, Mr. Roosevelt. And, you know, bombing. There was no effort to bomb the concentration camps, the death camps as well, which was just outrageous. They had information about them. They knew where they were. They knew where the railroad tracks were, the trestles, the bridges. They knew where the crematoriums were. And they would do bombing runs. The Allies are doing Bobby bombing runs, like five miles away.
No interest in doing this. And so I think the indictment really grows. The more research I do on Roosevelt now I look at, well, we can't wait.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Yes, your next book is going to be fantastic. All right, I'll take maybe one or two more. Jackson Sinclair has questions that are related. So first, who were FDR's biggest allies, the ones who helped him stay in power for so long? And then Also, who were FDR's greatest political enemies or adversaries?
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Ah, yeah, okay. His biggest allies, I think, you know, I mentioned Wilson and Roosevelt were certainly important allies, although Teddy Uncle Ted was disappointed that Roosevelt didn't get in uniform during World War I.
You know, he said, you have to. And Roosevelt didn't. Franklin didn't do it. But when he became president, key allies were big city machines. And these would be run by Democrats in cities like Memphis and Jersey City.
These were Chicago, New York. They were very effective in turning out the vote for him, were very effective at the Democratic conventions. In fact, that's really why their power was instrumental in why Roosevelt chose Harry Truman over Henry Wallace. So those were key allies of Roosevelt. That was a diverse coalition. He had a lot of sort of reformer types that supported him. Roosevelt was very effective in building coalitions now, and I could go on forever about that. Who were his enemies?
Well, I would say his enemies were often disorganized. But if you look at the leading newspapers in the United States, they were anti Roosevelt. That's a Big contrast with today. Most newspapers were more conservative.
So something like 60% of the newspapers, when FDR ran for reelection, endorsed his opponent.
But FDR had an ally in the press, and that was radio, which through pressure exerted, including to the fcc, he, he was able. Radio was basically his Twitter, right? Years ago, people thought about, I guess it's a bad analogy since Trump was kicked off Twitter, but it was sort of his way of directly communicating with people and not getting much pushback.
So radio was key. And I could go on talking about that a lot, but.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: Well, it's a good segue, actually, it's a good segue to fdr, his administration's expanded press restrictions, particularly with regard to his FCC's so called Mayflower doctrine, whose articulation rested on an explicitly collectivist premise. Quote, radio, to be truly free, must never be used to advocate the interests of the licensees. The public interest, not the private, is paramount. End quote. So was this policy truly motivated from wanting to subjugate private interests or was it to just an altruistic gloss on a campaign of censorship against opponents of the New Deal?
[00:31:12] Speaker A: I think, frankly, a lot of it's the latter because really by the 1940s, there are more radio stations in big cities, for example, than there are newspapers. Radio has become, you know, very, you know, accessible. It would have been, it was even more accessible during the 1920s when we get the origins of federal regulation, which I discuss in the book as well, which really weakened radio as an outlet for free speech. There were, in the 20s, there were socialist paper radio stations, there were conservative, there were evangelistic, there was a wide variety, very, very rich media. But what you start to get with the FCC and other kinds of controls is a kind of a view that all radio stations should be very similar, right? They shouldn't be allowed to have to editorialize, for example. So if I was the owner of a station, I couldn't use it as a kind of means to advertise, you know, my philosophy, right? And then you get early versions of the equal time rule, which said, well, if you do have controversial content, you have to provide a balance. Well, what ended up happening is a lot of these radio stations basically said, we don't want to delve into any controversial content because if we do the. Then we'll have to have give over our airways to all sorts of different perspectives. And so you get a kind of generic watering down of radio.
And a lot of.
And basically there are no anti New Deal radio commentators left by the late 1930s and the ones that are, there are just kind of, I don't know, not very, it's just very dumbed down, I guess you could say, in a way, or it's very, well, us. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Let's now turn to the darkest example of his myriad ways in which FDR waged war on the Bill of Rights. And that is of course his signing of Executive Order 9066, which all removal of over 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese from the west coast. You document FDR's own deeply racist views with regards to Japanese Americans. Break it down for us, if you will, to what extent bigotry, external pressures, demagoguery or even actual security concerns played a role in that decision?
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Well, a lot of it. This is a mindset, a common mindset towards the Bill of Rights, which is he's not a believer really in the Bill of Rights, although he sort of advertises that. But he's, he's an ends oriented guy. So he's got a, FDR is a, I would say a very poor civil liberties record. Now the most egregious example of that is Japanese internment. But that's not the only, only example. I often say it's like a puzzle. That's the big gigantic piece on the puzzle, but there are a lot of other pieces. Okay, what is motivating fdr? There's a kind of callousness and coldness to him.
Individuals are kind of means to an end in a way. It's not. Well, let's sort of look at the whole thing with Japanese. Roosevelt in the 1920s, 20s wrote op eds.
He was sort of given the opportunity to write for a Georgia newspaper for a year and he did a lot of op eds. And in these OP eds basically he discussed the Japanese Americans and he said, well, California is right to prevent them from owning land because they'll just buy it all up. It's right to prohibit interracial marriage.
We were right to prohibit the Japanese. It was a total prohibition basically beginning in the early 20th century of Japanese new Japanese immigration. So there's a racism there, an insensitivity, I guess you could say now after Pearl harbor, there was no great feeling of crisis in the United States. If you look at newspapers even in California, they were basically saying, well these are American citizens, they have rights like everybody el. Even the guy that was in charge, the military guy in charge of internment said that initially. So the initial attitude was well, you know, there are citizens like everybody else.
But gradually Roosevelt supports elements in the administration and he really is Supportive of them, who want to put the Japanese Americans in concentration camps. The Japanese Americans on the West Coast. And yes, they were concentration camps. No, they're not like death camps in Europe, but they are concentration camps. And that's what happens. Japanese, whether they're citizens or non citizens, are forced to go, if they live on the west coast, into camps. FDR also wanted to intern Japanese Americans and Hawaii. Hawaii were about a third or more of the population. He wanted to take them to one of the smaller islands, I forget which one it was, and bring them there. But people told him, well, Mr. President, that might be kind of expensive. And we got this, you know, these things going on, like Midway, we need the ships, you know, and eventually the military commanders on the ground in Hawaii were able to fight him off.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: And.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: And that's part of my. What my book found is there are a lot of heroes, there's a lot of people that oppose internment. One of them, although I don't know she wrote about it specifically by her actions, was Ayn Rand, who would give jobs to people to try to. Who were in the camps so they could get out of the camps and get employment, for example.
But there were a lot of people. The Attorney General was against internment. The head of the FBI was against Japanese internment. J. Edgar Hoover, the Secretary of the Interior.
There were a lot of people that were urging Roosevelt not to do this. And it's often seen somehow like he had no other choice. And that was what everybody thought. Not at all. He could have made a great argument for the Bill of Rights, for the Four Freedoms, if he said, we believe so much in that we are respecting the freedom of Japanese Americans as well.
And there's a kind of like, inertia. And he's sort of like, okay, put them there now. He keeps them there all the way through almost 1943, 44. A lot of people are saying, Mr. President, top fish, we can release them now. We're winning the war. The Japanese have been doing very well fighting in Italy, you know, Japanese, the Nissi. And Roosevelt said, well, we got an election coming up. He literally said that. And they kept them in the camps, kept them behind barbed wire through the 1944 election, even though just about all of his advisors by that point were saying, Mr. President, we can let them go. So there's a kind of callousness there that I just bowled over by, but I see it over and over again.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: Yeah, callousness and a political calculation.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: Candice Morena has a question. Were why did no courts put an injunction on Executive Order 9066, were the courts also compromised or was it legal recourse?
[00:39:23] Speaker A: Okay, I don't know if I can cut this off here. Daughter's computer. Well, you know, that's a good question. It was challenged in the courts, and they eventually made it way up to the Supreme Court. And there's a very famous case called the Korematsu case. And there were several cases, and basically the court upheld Japanese internment. It was sort of convoluted the way they did it, but interestingly enough, Black, Hugo Black, ended up on the Supreme Court and wrote the opinion. And the basic argument they made was, well, normally, maybe we wouldn't allow this. Maybe this wouldn't be a good thing to allow. They are American citizens. But the military has said that it's military necessity, and we're not going to second guess the military. Now, of course, that isn't strictly true because there were a lot of people in the military that didn't want to do it, did not think it was military necessity. So that was somewhat selective, but that was the argument that they used to justify it. Now, there were dissenters in those cases and so forth, but that's the argument, like, who are we to judge? Was basically what the majority said.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: There's a question here by my modern Gault. I know the answer because I've read your excellent book. He's asking, were there any, any attempts by FDR to intern other ethnic minorities, Italians, Germans?
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yes, there was internment of, by and large, of aliens, of certain classes of Germans and Italians.
But we don't hear stories about Joe DiMaggio in the concentration camp or Dean Martin in the concentration camp, because the Japanese internment was fundamentally different, because it was based on ancestry and whether you lived on the East West coast, but that's where most Japanese Americans lived. So it was based on ancestry. And they even put children from orphanages who had Japanese ancestry in the camps. So it was. There was internment, but it was not on the same scale. And there was that crucial distinction, ancestry. Right. So as I said, you're not putting. In fact, FDR made a joke about that at one point.
There was a, you know, there was some talk about, well, maybe we should intern more Italians. And FDR says, no, no, they're just a bunch of opera singers. You know, we don't need to worry about them. Yeah, okay. But there was not there. There was that difference. So I think that that difference is crucial where it was not ancestry, where if you were born in the United States, you. And you were Japanese, you went to a camp. Now if you were Dean Martin, Kingfisher, right.
[00:42:49] Speaker B: All the opera singers, Kingfisher 21 has a question. If he hadn't died of a stroke, do you think FDR would have run again in 1948?
[00:43:01] Speaker A: You never can tell because in 1940 I would have thought, oh, you know, no, I mean, he was a health disaster.
In 1944. There was a big cover up. His doctors, he had one doctor who examined him, was an expert first. His main doctor was a quack, basically, who was a kind of a courtier, said more of a courtier than a doctor. But they did have one examination from this guy, Johns Hopkins, actually several. And he said, this guy's a health disaster. He's about, he'll die at any minute. Right. Basically they propped him up. Would he have, I doubt he would have survived. Would he run again? I don't know. I think he might have found some rationalization to do it. But his health was horrible. And if you, if you listen to some of his later speeches when he came back from Yalta, it's just this rambling mess.
So it was affecting his mind, it was affecting his memory.
He would shake. One of the last people to meet with him was the secretary of the treasurer, Morgenthau, and he went to FDR and he said he had to hold his glass for him. People had to shave fdr. He couldn't shave himself anymore. And this was all covered up. It was a massive cover up led by his main physician, a guy, I Forgot his name, McIntyre. That guy's name should live in infamy, who said, oh, he's in great shape, you know, I mean, it was just a lie. So they really covered it up and stage managed it. I would say even more than Joe Biden, but I don't know, it's hard to compare, but it's very comparable in a certain sense. FDR's mental side was still there to a great extent, but even that I think was starting to diminish by the time he got to the ALTA Conference, for example, I don't think he would have lived in 1948. So that probably would have solved that issue. I don't think he, I don't know if he would have or not.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: So I. You've done a lot of research on Rosewater.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: You're in and out now.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: I wanted to know what did, what did Isabel Patterson and what did Rose Wilder think of what was happening with the Roosevelt administration and these liberty violations?
[00:45:29] Speaker A: Oh, they were all. And I would include ayn Rand, who, you know, knew them, I would include Zora Neale Hurston, who often isn't mentioned, but had a lot in common with Rand Patterson and Lane, a black author.
You know, they were very anti Roosevelt.
They didn't like the New Deal and what it had done to the country.
Were very critical of him.
And my book that I did was on Lane. And Lane wrote a regular column for the leading black newspaper in the United States. And we reprinted all of her columns. And she sells laissez faire. Her words, laissez faire to a black audience. Wonderful stuff. But anyway, she was very critical of the wartime bureaucracy, the meddling, the New Deal. Lane was someone, though it's interesting, didn't make it personal. And I will say that about all these women, in a way, they were people. They were interested in ideas, in the broader picture. So you wouldn't see them go on a tear against Roosevelt that much when they wrote things, maybe in their private correspondence, but they certainly didn't like what he was doing. But they were more timeless in their, you know, in their writing, in their work. And that's one of the reasons why now you can read them so profitably. Now.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Do you see any echoes of the administration and its executive orders in Atlas Shrugged, in this sort of faceless bureaucracy and these various orders, the dog eat dog rule. Because of course, Ayn Rand was writing this during that time, and I believe it.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Yeah, Roosevelt is very much, I mean, I'm sure she had him in mind. So something like a dog eat dog law, Roosevelt would support something like that. But he was. Roosevelt was a political opportunist when it came to business as well. Because initially his view in the New Deal was centralize big business and have it work in partnership with government.
Then when he turns against big business and he sort of demonizes them, scares them to death and starts attacking them. And then when the war comes, he originally tries to rely on his old New Dealer allies to mobilize for the war, but they're incompetent, so he ends up turning to big business to mobilize. So I would say he's the kind of guy that would not, that would be ideologically have no problem with something like, you know, a dog eat dog law, but was also a political opportunist. And he was probably smart enough during certain critical periods to realize that he needed business cooperation, but he was very fundamentally kind of contemptuous of business values.
Didn't think they were very smart. This sounds familiar, doesn't it, that kind of thing. But it was said every time he went into business, it was a disaster or it didn't go well. He had all these great ideas in the 1920s, these investments, and none of them worked out for him. Well, like he wanted to invest in a fleet of dirigibles and passenger travel dirigibles. And it didn't work out for various practical reasons. But, but he was, he was, he, he thought that he was a smart, smart guy, savvy guy. He thought he understood business. He thought he understood economics, but he really didn't. But he thought he did, which is a, which is a kind of a dangerous combination.
[00:49:33] Speaker B: Yes, that's a very bad combination indeed. So we started out on a personal note, personal and professional. You have been teaching at University of Alabama for over 20 years.
[00:49:46] Speaker A: I've lost you, I think.
[00:49:50] Speaker B: Hi.
I was going to ask you a question about your experience. Having taught at the University of Alabama for over 20 years, what has been the biggest change.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: I lost you for a second. Second. Okay, now you're back.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: All right. Yes. I was just going to ask, given that you've been teaching at the University of Alabama for over 20 years, what has been the biggest change that you have observed as a teacher, either within the academic institution or within the kind of students that you've been teaching?
[00:50:29] Speaker A: Well, I've been, I'm an emeritus, so I haven't been teaching now for four years. So I got out right as the kind of nightmare of COVID was just hitting, and I hear it was just horrible at that point. But I went through a whole cycle there. We saw the kind of growth of, I guess you call of dei. There was a period there where there was a big push for things like mandatory diversity training, propaganda of the worst sort, and a kind of climate of fear that I would see now the quality of students.
I don't think students read as much as they used to.
You know, when I first started teaching, you know, I, you know, I could assign a lot of material and you'd have a fairly big core of students that would read a good portion of it. By the end, it was, it was really a challenge to get, to get people to read the material. I think that there was a kind of climate of fear that was developing that I would see students were afraid to talk about controversial issues because they've been slapped down for doing it. Now, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump at all, but one thing, and I'm not sure I like his methods, but getting rid of dei, and I haven't been back Teaching since then. I think it just did incredible damage to higher education. I saw it firsthand of the damage it did, including things like mandatory diversity training. We'd have things like targeted hires where you didn't have to do any search or anything. You would just identify somebody was from a certain protected class and you could hire them without a search. Well, one time I had a friend named Alan Pettany who was kind of a libertarian, who was African American. And I thought, well, I'll play the game. And this guy had a distinguished record and he published all kinds of stuff. And I brought him up as said, we're doing a targeted search. How about this guy? And there was no interest in it. So it was a kind of corruption there, kind of selectivity that was very discouraging and intellectual freedom was really being smothered. Maybe now things are better. Now, I'm afraid that we would go in the opposite direction and start, you know, doing the kinds of things that happen to us, to other people. And that's always a danger you want to worry about, right?
[00:53:07] Speaker B: Well, now maybe we can close up with talking about your new book, your new biography of fdr, which I understand is pretty much drafted. What can we expect? When do you think it'll be available?
And yes, like any areas in particular that you want to cover there that either you haven't covered before or that you think that other historians have not adequately explored and that you want to make a contribution.
[00:53:35] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it's a draft is done and I'm working now on fine tuning it. So I think maybe later this year it's Keras Publishers. We're working on possible deals to maybe have some joint publications. But it's a well respected publisher. And so I've done it. And it looks all the way from FDR's childhood, his early schooling, his time as Secretary of the Navy, what he was doing in the 1920s, trying to rebuild his career, Governor of New York. And as I've said, I found a lot of things in there that are very unflattering and some new, a little bit of a new look at Eleanor Roosevelt's role.
During the 1930s, there were repeated efforts to bring in civil rights laws. The big one was anti lynching laws and they could have probably passed those. But FDR instead was very much focused on his agenda of packing the Supreme Court and other New Deal agendas and never, never promoted this.
Are you still there?
[00:54:58] Speaker B: Yes, we are. And we are actually kind of an.
[00:55:02] Speaker A: It was kind of an interesting situation I'd see with Eleanor Roosevelt, who I think, whose heart was in the right place, but she was also her husband's secret weapon, not so secret weapon. And he, a lot of black leaders were very upset by why aren't you pushing for, as you said you would, an anti lynching law. And he just sat on his hands and did nothing. And he would send Eleanor to them and she would say to them, basically, well, he can't do it now because he's got to pack the court or he's got a little legislation, but next year. And she was such a down to earth person, dealt with them on a human level that she was able to kind of, I don't know, defuse a lot of opposition that might have occurred from African Americans had she not been there. So I think her contributions there was a double sided nature to them. And that's one thing that I look at. I think her heart was in the right place, but she was also a politician like him and also would at crucial point step in and kind of diffuse opposition that had it occurred, might have changed the trajectory of history, might have meant that African Americans were taking more, you know, effective strategies. They may have stayed in the Republican Party, for example, and reformed the party. A lot of things could have happened. So there are a lot of different things like that. And I think I looked also at his role in the Holocaust in just not providing a refuge for Jews or working to find a refuge for them in third countries, which was really quite striking. But I'm not a radical in this argument. A lot of literature now in the Holocaust is very, very anti fdr and it pointed a lot of these things out. So a lot of what I'm saying will show up among mainstream historians who are specialists, specialists in Japanese internment, specialists in civil rights history.
And it just hasn't seeped down to the public, but it's out there. A lot of work being done.
[00:57:12] Speaker B: Well, we, we and you are going to bring it all together and we are really excited for that. You've already got a whole bunch of new readers I've been seeing popping up in the comments. Bought your book. Bought your book.
[00:57:23] Speaker A: All right.
[00:57:24] Speaker B: I'm glad we were able to give everybody a teaser and definitely looking forward to your next book later this year. We'd love to have you back with better connectivity next time. I hope so. Thank you so much, David, for joining us.
[00:57:38] Speaker A: Thank you. And let me say that if you have any students and so forth that are interested in going into history, doing historical research, to feel free to contact me.
[00:57:50] Speaker B: Will do well, maybe we'll just have to have you come to our students at Galt's Gulch coming up in June in Austin, Texas. So we'll put that link as well. I hope to see many of you there.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: Thank you again.
[00:58:03] Speaker B: Thank you all for your wonderful questions and for your patience with this bad connection we had here down in Florida today. Of course, keep in mind the Atlas Society is an nonprofit and you can Support
[email protected] Donate. I look forward to joining us again and seeing you next week when we interview Dr. Daniel Crosby, when he is going to be discussing his latest book, the Soul of Wealth 50 Reflections on Money and Meaning. We'll see you then.
