David T. Beto (2:24)

Thank you so much.

Stephen Pimpair (2:27)

So I wonder if we might start out by asking you to just tell us a little bit about who you are, your background that you think is relevant, and what it is that brought you to this particular project.

David T. Beto (2:40)

Well, I've taught at the University of Alabama for quite some time. I'm professor emeritus there now. I'm from Minnesota originally. Got my Ph.D. university of Wisconsin of Madison. I've written several books on tax revolts, about a book about an early civil rights leader in the 50s named Dr. TRM Howard. I've written books about fraternal societies. And then I did a book about the New Deals and the Bill of Rights, the New Deals War and the Bill of Rights. And that sort of was a segue to this book, which is titled FDR A New Political Life. I did that book focusing on civil liberties and the Roosevelt administration, civil liberties, surveillance, that kind of thing. I also, you know, I covered the whole period. On the strength of that, I got an offer to write a book, a general, more general biography of FDR, which would deal with his early life, which would deal with foreign policy, which would certainly deal with the economic side. And so I left at that opportunity. So this book is sort of an extension of that book.

Stephen Pimpair (3:53)

Terrific. So, I mean, I don't know whether you would characterize this as a revisionist history, but you are certainly drawing our attention to aspects of FDR's life and career that perhaps are not foregrounded in some of those more traditional histories. So if. I wonder if we might sort of move sequentially through his life and maybe have you talk about the things that you think are worth paying more attention to than maybe we ordinarily have. And if you want, maybe start. Start with FDR's early life and then on into his early career.

David T. Beto (4:29)

Yeah. First of all, the term revisionist is a term that I've. Way back when I was in graduate school, I had a professor there, and he said, isn't that what all historians are? Right. Why write? Unless you're going to add something new to the conversation, you're going to revise the understanding in some way. So there's good history and there's bad history. Right. Revisionism is as a term that, you know, when someone advertises their revisionist, I get, I get worried because, you know, that's what all historians are, should be. Okay, well, one thing I think we don't know a lot about fdr. You want me to describe his early life or describe some things maybe we don't know about him?

Stephen Pimpair (5:15)

I mean, I think given at least my read of the book. I think the thing that might interest people is that you are drawing attention to aspects, aspects of his life and career that I think it's fair to say are not foregrounded in more traditional histories.

David T. Beto (5:30)

Right. Well, one thing that, that one issue is not discussed a lot and people aren't even aware of it in many cases. Although, you know, historians that have written in detail on FDR have written about it and that is the Newport sex scandal. And you know, I wasn't aware about it until a few years ago. I went to the Wikipedia bio, it didn't even mention it. This is one of the more important events in FDR's life. FDR was brought in as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Basically he had been an early Wilson supporter and he got the eye of the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, and he brought him in as Assistant Secretary and at the time the Navy Department was a cabinet post, so it was a co. Equal post with the Department of War. So he's brought in and there is an investigation that is underway at the Naval base in Newport. And this is led by, you know, some guy that is very upset about the possibility of gays in the Navy, of same sex relationships. So what he does, his name is Irvin Arnold. He engages quite literally in an investigation based on entrapment where they'll send in people who will, you know, have same sex relations as a means of entrapping people. Right? Yeah, when I saw that I did a double take, but that's actually part of the investigation and even more of a double take when I saw that FDR Arnold was having difficulty continuing the investigation because lack of resources. The Attorney General was not willing to back it. He found a backer and that was FDR who went to his boss and said, I want to expand this investigation and I want to lead it. And he did. He became the head of Section A, nicknamed the Newport Sex Squad. And Section A used these exact same strategies. And you wouldn't think this would have been particularly controversial during this period when there's a lot of, you know, anti gay attitudes. However, this is going too far even for a lot of the people during the time and in invest things happen during the investigation such as a local minister, well respected minister in Newport, is harassed by the police. Other things happen that lead to controversy. Local, the local paper really latches onto it and blames fdr. And then the Navy opens its own investigation which is kind of a, I, I wouldn't call it a whitewash. They, they sort of are a little careful not to go too far in blaming fdr, but then the Senate gets involved. The Senate Committee on Naval affairs, which at the time is in transit, well, is under the Republican leadership because the Republicans won the Senate in 1918 elections and they are investigating this and they finally issue their report and they are, they, they, they put the blame squarely on fdr. The Senate investigation says that he is unfit for office. They label, they lay blame slow squarely as it says on the headline in the New York Times on F.D. roosevelt. Right. Roosevelt finds out that there's going to be this damning report and he wants to come and testify. But, and he travels all the way to Washington, he works all night with the response and he comes to Washington, finds out that the committee has issued its report, he doesn't have a chance to respond. FDR is livid and he reads his response and for the rest of his life. Well, what only happens just a few weeks after this is his breakout, the breakout of polio, which, there's some debate about how that happens but you know that there's some tainted water that he is exposed to that. But, but you know, he, he was of the view that it, this, that it creates such emotional stress and it certainly did, that it made him more susceptible. So he blamed particularly the chair of the committee, the Republican chair of the Senate committee for this. You know, so it's a, it's part of the story. You, you, you, you, you, you often don't hear now, okay, what was FDR's response to the investigation? Because people in the investigation are saying this is entrapment, this is un American. You know, that's their argument. And FDR's response initially when this is brought up as well, if I'm assistant secretary and I order a ship to go from, I don't know, Newport to Mexico, I don't worry about how the captain does that. I just worry about the ship getting there. So this argument, like, hey, why are we so worried about the methods used when it isn't the goal? The final issue, he compares it to a policeman who breaks into a house before a crime is committed because he has knowledge that a crime will be committed. Interesting comparison. And he says, well, I'm like that. Then he's pressed on it and he denies it. He says, well, I didn't know they were doing this, you know, namely having gay, you know, same sex relations as a means of entrapment. But nobody believed him. Now the investigation, a lot of people would have thought would have sunk his career, but things happen and he's kind of lucky because there's a lot of attend he Democrats rally around him. He'd just been their vice presidential candidate. And the news is dominated by President Harding's picks for his cabinet. So it just gets pushed off the front page. It's kind of forgotten, but it isn't forgotten by a lot of the people who had been victims of the Newport sex squad, who were drummed out of the Navy, you know, on this kind of evidence. And a lot of these people didn't have naval funerals. They, they lost all their benefits. It was a, was a rather sad story. Now why is this important? Well, it's important for, because it's, it's on its own merit. But it also is important because this shows something about FDR that even people close to him commented upon and that is he's interested in the goal. This is what, what the, his two of his attorney general said with reference to civil liberties during the war. He wanted this anti war talk stopped in the case of the Japanese, he wanted the job done. And he wasn't really that worried about the methods used. In that sense. He's borrowing from a certain strain of progressivism you see in a book called the Promise of American Life by Herbert Crowley. And Crowley says in that book, basically the thing about progressivism is it's Jeffersonian ends, meaning that's his interpretation, Weight, equality, you know, that kind of thing, justice, whatever. And that's what is important. And Crowley said basically, well, we've had this whole focus on Jeffersonian means, right? What we need to look at is Hamiltonian means. Hamiltonian means meaning you focus on the end goal. You don't worry about precedent and procedure so much. You aren't bound by that. You use Hamiltonian means, meaning you get the job done to establish the goal. All right, so he sort of reverses it in a certain sense. And I think that that's a strain of progressivism that we see here. We see it over and over again in FDR's career.

Stephen Pimpair (14:22)

And I think a nice way to reframe what I think is widely acknowledged is that to put it what polit. The FDR absolutely pushed the boundaries of what the, the then extant understanding of constitutional limits were.

David T. Beto (14:40)

He did and he pushed it too far even for some of the people under him. Now people will ask me questions about, well, let's compare, you know, FDR to Wilson. Wilson's got. People generally think he had a bad civil liberties record during the war. That's just sort of become the standard view. There was a view for a long time that, well, it wasn't quite as bad in World War II with that big exception, namely Japanese internment. It's not a small part of the reason it wasn't so bad is because everybody rallied to the flag. Even a lot of people that were accused of sedition. They were like after Pearl harbor was, well, we got it, we got to unite behind the President. It was a little bit like, you know, what happened after, you know, 9, 11, but even more so everybody, I mean, the Congress votes almost unanimously to declare war, for example. And so he's got this support. So there isn't an anti war movement as there was in World War I, where there are a lot of people still don't, don't like it, are against it. And that's, you know, and you have a big crackdown. Now. FDR really wants to go after pre war non interventionists. He wants to go after the big metropolitan newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News. These had been papers controlled mainly by what he, what critics called the McCormick Patterson axis. Right? This is the McCormick and Patterson family. They were intermarried and they controlled three big papers. He wanted to go after them, but his Attorney general pushes back. His attorney general is a civil libertarian named, well, to some, to a greater extent, named Francis Biddle. And Biddle pushes back. And the lawyers, Biddle's subordinates, push back. And the people in the Justice Department push back. For example, in Japanese internment, there is opposition from Biddle, there's opposition from the Secretary of the Interior, Ickes, there's opposition from the FBI Director, there's opposition from a lot of the middle echelon bureaucracy. But that's true on a lot of things. So FDR really does want to go after pre war non interventionists, but he is frustrated. And in Japanese internment as well. He wanted to intern the Japanese in Hawaii, send them to one of the small islands. But he is frustrated by people on the ground who just drag their feet and prevent that from happening. But he still wants to do it after he signed his executive order. But people start coming up with practical arguments like, well, we got a little thing coming up here named we need ships. Midway is going to be coming up soon and we need transports. And that would have been a big operation. So it stopped. But there's a difference there. I don't think FDR was necessarily more tolerant of civil liberties, but I think he did have big pushback from the Congress as well. He had pushback. Democrats, especially after the 42 elections, don't have an overwhelming majority anymore. I think the Republicans almost capture the house in 42. And you've got, you've got a conservative Democratic Republican coalition that really blocks him. And then you've got people in the various agencies. So I think he wanted to go a lot farther than actually happened. He wanted a big sedition trial. He wanted to bring in people from these big papers. And he got a sedition trial, but was kind of a sop that biddle through to him of these kind of these cranks. For the most part.

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David T. Beto (19:30)

It was one of the most the biggest fiascos in the in American legal history, I think it's fair to say the Great sedition trial of 1944.

Stephen Pimpair (19:39)

So why don't we jump back in time a little bit and maybe walk us through the New Deal period again. If we look at sort of a superficial reading of a lot of the histories of FDR in the New Deal period, this is an heroic moment from an heroic president who is rescuing us from the Great Depression and building what we now recognize as the American state itself, which at one level is demonstrably true. But there are other ways to think about both that period, his interventions, his intents, and the outcome. So walk us through how you think about the New Deal, the Great Depression and the New Deal period itself.

David T. Beto (20:23)

Well, it is called The Great Depression for a reason. There were other downturns in American history. One in recent memory, 1921, 22, which was actually worse in the early stages in terms of unemployment and fall in gdp. Like first year, first two years or so, it was as bad or worse. But what's different about the Great Depression is not the severity so much, it's the length combined with the severity. So you have a depression that essentially lasts a decade. I mean, I often say that if Roosevelt had stepped down after two terms, would he been regarded the same way? Because you still have double digit unemployment when he steps down, would our opinion of him be the same? In any case, you have this Great Depression and it goes on year after year. And Herbert Hoover's policies really break from the past. Hoover had rejected Harding's policies. So Hoover tries very hard to keep wages high. He brings in a battery of new governmental programs such as the Reconstruction Finance Agency, Federal Farm Board, Federal Home Loan. He brings in a whole battery of interventions. FDR comes along in 1932 and he runs a campaign promising to bring in a new Deal. But what is the New Deal? He doesn't really tell us. He uses that term in his speech where he's nominated, but it's very vague. So FDR is almost like a Bill Clinton in a way. He's very good at, I guess, in a way triangulating, because he wins support of the very conservative Southern, not just Southern, but conservative Democrats like Senator Carter Glass. Because FDR pledges to maintain a sound currency. He calls for budget reductions. In fact, one of the few speech, early speeches memorialized on audio, maybe about fourth one is a speech he gives in 1932 where he goes over the Democratic platform and he's like, I agree with this. And he reads this thing and it's like government cutting government spending 25%. He attacks big government. At the same time, he sends signals to people on the left that, look, I'm going to be pursuing a new approach here. We've got to do something about unemployment. You know, this business class, you know, it's sort of, let us, you know, he'll say things like that, but then he'll say other things. So I would say that the, the two candidates in 1932, there's really not much of evidence of, of a difference. It's, it's, it's in some ways a conventional campaign. And he's elected. And very quickly, Roosevelt starts doing measures like the Banking holiday and two of the biggest programs ever in American history in terms of regulation, the economy the, the nra, the National Recovery Administration has created and the aaa, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. So we get a big move towards, you know, a very ambitious big government program. And a lot of people sort of look back on it. You know, example that you know, people point to is the banking holiday. Part of the story which arguably was needed. You have banking crisis, bank is going under left and right and in the banking holiday closes the banks and then he reopens them once the assets are examined and for whatever reason the banking system is stabilized. Part of the story is not told though is during the interregnum period. This is a very long period, it's hard to believe the worst depression in American history. We have the election in November just like we do now, but the new president doesn't take office until March. That's an incredibly long period where Herbert Hoover is still the President and the banking crisis is just hitting. There have been several, but it's hitting again during this interregnum period. And part of it is just a lack of certainty about where we're going, a lack of confidence. And Roosevelt's, you know, is approached by Hoover more than once. He said let's sit down and let's agree on common, that we agree on these things, right? Sound currency. Well Roosevelt campaigned for that. For example, debt stabilization because that is a big issue that's happening in Europe, your campaign debts. Hoover's willing to do something about that.

Stephen Pimpair (25:36)

Etc.

David T. Beto (25:37)

So he's saying, he's writing to Roosevelt and he said let's get together, let's, let's issue a reassurance to people that you know, things are going to be stable here. Roosevelt is completely uninterested. And this is one historian, use the term, very well known historian, I can't remember his name at the moment here I've got it on my shelf here, my Roosevelt shelf. But he did Davis, Kenneth Davis, he did a multi volume set in Roosevelt and he talks about Roosevelt. There's a kind of, there's an instant instance sensitivity he calls steel edged cruelty to some extent. And we see that during this period Roosevelt is given Hoover's letter while he's watching a play in New York and he looks at it, he's given the letter by Raymond Moley, one of his key advisors and puts it down and it's this dire letter like we're headed for like big collapse. We got to do something about this. And he's watching the play and he is, he is laughing uncontrollably at the play. It's it, it's it's. And it was really quite remarkable to Moly. And then he doesn't even answer Hoover for a long time, 12 days or something, later says that, you know, he had misplaced, you know, the letter and stuff. And there, there is no, there is no cooperation. Now, privately, Roosevelt talks to people, several people, including Rexford Tugwell, one of the brain trusters. Remy, the guy ran Remington Rand, a guy that was a key figure in the Democratic Party, multiple sources say. He said, look, let the, let the banks created this problem. Let them go under. Let's start fresh. And, you know, and I don't think what I'm saying here is particularly controversial. Now, historians have different takes on this. Some of them say, well, after all, Hoover's. Well, Roosevelt, you know, why should he saddle himself to Hoover's programs? Okay, that's an argument. But the trouble is he's not even willing to talk. I think you could have worked out something, something vague and something that would have been consistent with things that Roosevelt himself said during the campaign. Nothing there. Right. One argument that's made, Jonathan Alter, I think makes this as well, you know, it's Hoover's fault. He was a doctrinaire, laissez faire guy. That's not true. Hoover was anything but doctrinaire, laissez faire. Okay, you want to blame Hoover for that, but Hoover's. From Hoover's perspective, it's like, I'm not going to be president in a couple months, so I need to work it out with the guys succeeding me in case. I don't think. Even if you blame Hoover for it, like Hoover could have done the banking holiday. Hoover was willing to do that, by the way. He was willing.

Stephen Pimpair (28:36)

He initially proposed it, correct?

David T. Beto (28:37)

Yeah. Trading with the Enemy Act. Hoover says, well, why don't we use this? So he. But he hesitated. Well, yeah, Hoover could have done that. I guess that doesn't leave the hook off Roosevelt. So anyway, I think that there's a. That that's, that's another side to that, which is. Which is. Which is not often told. And of course, Roosevelt brings in, in some say in some way these early programs kind of fit into the Hoover template. He goes a lot further than Hoover. Right. But one of Hoover's ideas was that the Great Depression was caused by low wages and that the, the way to get out of it is raise wages. In fact, wages did go up during Hoover's administration. He has all these White House conferences where he said, we need to raise wages, because that was sort of his view. Roosevelt buys into that he also buys into higher prices. And that's what's pushing forward the NRA and the aaa. It's the AAA is destroy agricultural crops, plow crops under, destroy livestock. Very controversial. Raise, you know, raise prices, right? Lower supply. And in a certain sense they're doing that with the, with the NRA. They're saying if you charge, I don't know, 35 cents rather than 40 cents for pressing a suit, that is a, that is a, an offense that can send you to jail. And there was a guy that went, these, one guy went to jail for doing precisely that, named Jack McGid, Jake McGid. And we got some publicity. He charged us. He, he charged. And his argument, McGidd's argument was, well, why am I charging less? As if that's a bad thing. His argument is, look, I'm a small guy, I'm a small tailor and I'm off the beaten track, right? I'm not on the main drag, main urban drags. I'm not. It's not as convenient for people to go to my tailor shop. So that's a way that I can attract customers because if I charge less for pressing a suit than my competitors. And that's the same argument other people are making as well. Montgomery Wards even issue does a, an ad where they say, well, they blame the nra said, we like, you know, we're planning to cut prices on our tires, but we can't do it. You know, they're not going to go to jail. And so that is. And the NRA and the AAA are kind of disasters. They are disasters and just about everybody, by the end, at least when the NRA have decided that this is hopeless, a lot of people involved in it, although FDR really seems like he liked like the idea and wanted to keep going, but they brought in, had Clarence Darrell, the famous lawyer, come in and investigate the nra and they thought, I think that he's an old progressive, he's going to give it a clean bill of health. And he didn't. Darrow issued a very devastating report saying this favors the rich, which it did. It was self regulation. So essentially it handed over to the industry writing, you know, setting prices and other things. And as a result of that, you know, we, you know, it, you know, Daryl was saying, this is just helping out the rich.

Stephen Pimpair (32:11)

You're listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network and we have been speaking with David Beto about his new book, FDR A New Political Life, where you can read these and other stories that may be less familiar to them unless you are immersed in this material. David, thank you so much for joining us today. Much appreciated.

David T. Beto (32:32)

Thank you, Sam.