Roosevelt’s Vicious Assault on the Bill of Rights

James MacGregor Burns, one of the old school New Deal giants in Franklin D. Roosevelt scholarship, in his 1956 classic, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, spends several pages describing how FDR adoration fell off after FDR's strategy of throwing the alphabet-macaroni-on-the-wall New Deal programs failed to spur the economy.

Now, in David T. Beito's The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance, we have a look behind the scenes at how Roosevelt could have gotten this kind of correspondence.

FDR had few qualms about violating the Constitution, including, in Beito's words, giving "Aid and comfort to several highly inquisitorial congressional investigations of political adversaries that often trampled on privacy and free speech." The "Most far-reaching of these probes" by the U.S. Senate's Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities, better known as the Black Committee, was a "Creature of Roosevelt's wish to establish a congressional committee to discredit opponents." Chair Sen. Hugo Black - chosen by FDR - was "a zealous and efficient New Deal loyalist." He was later appointed by FDR to the Supreme Court.

Roosevelt's administration gave crucial aid to investigations: "The Department of the Treasury granted Black access to tax returns dating back to 1925 of such critics as David Lawrence of the U.S. News. The Federal Communications Commission, in turn, authorized the Black Committee to search through copies of millions of private telegrams sent by, and to, New Deal opponents." Beito recounts how targeted Americans were surprised at their offices or hotel rooms and ordered to produce a wide sweep of records and appear before the committee the next morning.

There are some surprises, and Beito reveals them in an engaging style with volumes of research from archival materials and contemporaneous news sources.

One chapter on "FDR's Concentration Camps" tells a much-told story and follows the well-trod path of attributing the relocation of ethnic Japanese on the West Coast during World War II to "Racism." True, FDR said some nasty things about the Japanese, as Beito points out, but he spoke fondly of another Asian group, the Chinese, who helped his maternal grandfather acquire his fortune in the opium trade.

The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights chapter after chapter, reveals another side of the New Deal - as an assault on the Bill of Rights. 

https://spectator.org/roosevelt-vicious-assault-on-the-bill-of-rights/