Everything Wrong with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration

Any attempt to evaluate FDR’s record in this realm, however, has to first consider his ranking by historians compared to other presidents. In the nineteen most respected polls of historians and political scientists since the 1940s, he has consistently been ranked among the top three “greatest” presidents. What accounts for Roosevelt’s popularity among scholars? One obvious factor, of course, is that left-​of-​center historians and political scientists dominate discourse on the New Deal period and have for generations. One consequence of that dominance is a tendency to take for granted that the rise of the welfare-​regulatory state was long overdue, and that Franklin D. Roosevelt deserves plaudits for helping to make it possible. No president, with the possible exception of Lincoln, is more cited as a model whom leaders should emulate in a national crisis.

This consensus is so durable that it has largely survived intact despite the most obvious evidence of Roosevelt’s darker side: his role in the Japanese internment. In one fell swoop, FDR snatched the First- through Tenth-​Amendment rights of 125,284 Japanese Americans, two thirds of them citizens, without even a hint of due process. While no pro-​Roosevelt scholar continues to defend that policy, discussion of that topic has shown a tendency to portray him, at least in part, as a victim of circumstances who was reacting to an environment created by others. Examples of this include an emphasis on the key role played by such figures as General John L. DeWitt, most famous for claiming “A Jap is still a Jap,” the xenophobia unleashed by Pearl Harbor, and pervasive anti-​Japanese feeling on the West Coast. The unstated implication is that Roosevelt was, like so many others, carried away by the hysteria of the moment. Rarely is FDR depicted as a determinative historical actor who shaped or created events that might not otherwise have occurred.

But Roosevelt very much had his hand on the tiller when it came to this issue. An indication of how much was the commentary of Roosevelt’s own Attorney General Francis Biddle. In his 1962 autobiography, which he dedicated to his former boss, Biddle discusses at some length the question of Japanese internment. Although Biddle had impeccable civil liberties credentials before he assumed office in 1941, he went along with Roosevelt’s executive order to intern the Japanese. Nevertheless, he never liked it, and he was not alone: “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 was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step.…Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him.”²

Biddle rejected the excuse that national hysteria and sentiment for internment forced Roosevelt to act. “It may even be doubted whether, political and special group press aside, public opinion even on the West Coast supported evacuation.” He pointed to a confidential government report from March 1942 that even in California, with the exception of the southern part of the state, “less than one half of those interviewed favored internment of Japanese aliens, and only 14 percent the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry.”³

To underline his point, Biddle concluded that the president “could probably have withstood the popular pressure [for internment] without loss to the tenacity of his leadership-​pressure of a highly vocative minority in the West.” A study by the American Civil Liberties Union later in 1942 came to similar conclusions. Officials who commented privately overwhelmingly emphasized that federal officials showed little support for internment, adding “that the F.B.I. [including Director Hoover], Naval Intelligence and Army Intelligence all disapproved of it.”⁴

Rather than viewing Roosevelt’s internment executive order as an aberration or as a heat-​of-​the-​moment response to pressure, a more logical approach would examine it in the context of his long-​standing attitudes toward Japanese Americans. In an article for the Macon Telegraph on April 28, 1925, for example, he expressed alarm that “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces in nine times out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” He warned ominously about “the growing population of Japanese on the Pacific slope,” adding that “Californians have properly objected on the sound basic ground that Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population.”

With the notable exception of Japanese internment, World War II continues to have a widespread reputation as the “good war” for civil liberties. For example, the authors of a leading history survey text published in 2019 observed: “Franklin Roosevelt had been a government official during World War I. Now presiding over a bigger world war, he was determined to avoid many of the patriotic excesses he had witnessed then: mobs menacing immigrants, the patriotic appeals to spy on neighbors, the raids on pacifist radicals.”⁵

The findings of Richard W. Steele in the most comprehensive work on the topic, Free Speech in the Good War, however, render untenable such a benign interpretation. The central figure in Steele’s account is Roosevelt himself. “If one looks at the paucity of opposition to the war,” writes Steele, “and the extraordinary efforts to suppress what little dissent there was, the administration’s record is less restrained than the figures suggest.” Instead, a mass roundup was never in the cards, nor were other limits on free speech, for one simple reason: the “mass,” if defined as vocal opponents of the war, had almost evaporated after Pearl Harbor.⁶

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, or others around him, had sought extensive prosecutions of Americans who had advocated non-​interventionism before the war that too was not feasible, albeit for different reasons. There is no question that he wanted more vigorous action on that front, but resistance within the federal government repeatedly stymied him. A source of this resistance was the rise of a deep civil-​liberties consciousness among Americans traceable to memories of World War I excesses.⁷

Civil libertarian pushback came not only from judges, but also from lawyers in the Department of Justice. Even when egged on from above, more than a few gummed up the legal works by quibbling over technicalities and using other methods of delay. As Steele observes, this “stratagem [was] made effective by the fact that the laws at their disposal were of relatively limited application.” Strengthening this informal resistance was the filtering down of civil liberties consciousness to the public, including potential jury pools. These legal and popular constraints on the administration’s discretion, while highly imperfect, were not insignificant.⁸

Like his World War I mentor, Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt combined a public persona as a champion of democracy and liberalism with a considerable private streak of vindictiveness. If anything, he outdid Wilson in vindictiveness by pestering subordinates to take tougher action than they may have otherwise wanted. Wilson, in contrast, had more commonly embraced the role of a rubber stamp for zealous underlings. Throughout World War II, Roosevelt constantly probed the limits of his repressive power through such diverse schemes as sedition trials and tax audits. Principle, lofty or otherwise, did not appear to impede him. “He was not much interested in the theory of sedition,” recalled Attorney General Francis Biddle, “or in the constitutional right to criticize the government in wartime. He wanted this anti-​war talk stopped.” Echoing this, Steele asserts that although Roosevelt gave lip service to the principle of free speech, “he rarely interpreted it as preventing the executive branch from doing what was necessary to ensure his broadly conceived view of national security.”⁹

If Roosevelt had his way, there is every indication that he would have launched a legal attack on several high circulation metropolitan dailies in the United States which had opposed his policies. Sending Attorney General Biddle some clippings from the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Hearst newspapers, he called for sedition prosecutions so as “to let the whole country know the truth about these papers. The tie-​in between the attitude of these papers and the Rome-​Berlin [foreign propaganda] broadcasts is something far greater than mere coincidence.” Attorney General Biddle plausibly feared that such action could never pass muster with the courts, which had become increasingly pro-​free speech since World War I. Using a strategy of delay, Biddle fought to hold off the president, though he later observed that major outlets in “the isolationist press, particularly the Chicago Tribune” had published articles that were “probably as seditious as anything by Social Justice [Father Coughlin’s rightwing journal], although they were not anti-​Semitic or rabble-​rousing.” In response to presidential prodding, Biddle did an analysis of the papers. After it concluded that the publications did not reflect or follow German propaganda, the government took no further action against the publications. Roosevelt also urged prosecution of several leading pro-​war opponents, including some members of Congress.¹⁰

Although Biddle resisted this pressure, he finally tried to appease the president’s demand to “indict the seditionists” by staging a mass trial of 32 defendants. It became widely known as the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. The defendants were a motley crew of antisemites and cranks who had opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy before the war. One of the best known was Elizabeth Dilling, the author of the anti-​Communist screed, The Red Network. Under a dubious legal rationale, the government brought them in from all around the country to be tried together. Although most of the defendants had little to no association with one another or discernable ties to Nazi Germany, the government alleged that they all had participated together in a worldwide Nazi conspiracy to cause insubordination in the U.S. military.

Within a few months, the seemingly endless trial came to be widely condemned by civil libertarians including Harvard professor Zechariah Chafee Jr., the author of the landmark treatise, Free Speech in America. Roger Baldwin, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the undertaking “monstrous.” The Washington Post, which had initially applauded the prosecution, compared it to the Soviet purge trials. George S. Schuyler, the chief editorial writer for the Pittsburgh Courier, perhaps the leading black newspaper in the United States, depicted the plights of the sedition trial defendants and African Americans as analogous and interdependent. The Roosevelt administration, according to Schuyler, was persecuting the defendants for what they had “said and wrote” and had presented no evidence of collusion or participation in a conspiracy. If these individuals could be put on trial for opposing the policies of Roosevelt or his subordinates, he asked, “then who is safe? I may be nabbed for speaking harshly about Brother Stimson’s treatment of Negro lads in the Army.” The trial finally collapsed after the judge died unexpectedly and it was eventually ruled a mistrial.¹¹

Less publicized, but an equally important indicator of respect for civil liberties during the war, were the government’s restrictions on the print press. The most stringent sanction was to revoke the second-​class mailing status of newspapers and periodicals. While, as mentioned before, Roosevelt wanted to target major pre-​war non-​interventionist newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, the federal government ultimately used this restriction against seven periodicals. Most were marginal rightwing journals which, to varying degrees, were antisemitic and had opposed the war prior to Pearl Harbor (though not after). In addition, Social Justice, which had a circulation of 200,000, was intimidated into closing down prior to pending legal action. By contrast, in the World War I era, Postmaster General Albert E. Burleson, with the assent of Attorney General Thomas Gregory, interfered with the mailing rights of about seventy-​five publications, most of which were socialist or pacifist in character.¹²

These low comparative numbers, at least if taken in isolation, did not mean that the government in World War II had liberalized its standards for protecting free speech. There were just fewer prospects. Illustrative of just how much the “seditionist” herd had thinned was the government’s stated reasoning for revoking the second-​class mailing rights of the Boise Valley Herald and The Militant. Few examples during this period provide more compelling evidence of prosecutorial overreach, even by the standards of the time. Although each publication was marginal in circulation and influence, both have outsized importance when judging the accuracy of the “good war” characterization. Neither was antisemitic or pro-​Nazi (just the opposite) and neither urged acts of violence against the government nor even acts to directly obstruct the war, such as draft resistance.

Even a cursory reading of the government’s case for pulling the second-​class mailing rights of the Boise Valley Herald, a small-​town weekly from Middleton, Idaho, will do some damage to Biddle’s reputation as a voice for tolerance. The main charge against the paper was that it had argued against “all wars on religious and moral grounds.” In justifying the revocation, the Department of Justice excerpted thirteen “seditious” quotations which had appeared in the paper between January 1942 and August 1942. These included claims that the U.S. embargo had helped provoke the Pearl Harbor attack and that income tax withholding had imposed an onerous burden on the poor and that the wartime mobilization was suppressing “individuality.” Another seditious excerpt defended the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans in Idaho.^{13, 14}

The basic reasoning behind the revocation of the second-​class mailing rights of The Militant (the official outlet of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party) was not unlike that used against the Boise Valley Herald. The government’s complaint reproduced twenty-​six allegedly seditious quotations. Perhaps the most inflammatory of them all, at least from the perspective of the attorney general and postmaster general, was one from December 27, 1941: “When we state that this is an imperialist war, it follows that we cannot possibly support the administration in its war effort.” Another quotation depicted the Four Freedoms policy as a hypocritical ploy to protect the British Empire while others attacked wartime wage reductions, limits on organizing, and continuing racism toward African Americans. To Postmaster Frank C. Walker, statements of this type “were a consistent, sustained and systematic feature of many consecutive issues of this publication, which, by plain import of language, show clearly a proposed attempt to embarrass and defeat the Government in its effort to prosecute the war to a successful termination.”¹⁵

Absent from these selected excerpts, as with the Boise Valley Herald, was evidence of any incitement to insubordination, giving aid or comfort to the enemy, or promoting fascism. Any disparaging comments toward the war were mainly abstract and general rather than a specific call to obstruct its conduct, much less a call to arms. For The Militant, the war was just another in a long line of fratricidal capitalist conflicts which diverted attention from the true interests of the working class.

The hearing before the Post Office Department Board in March put on display the embarrassingly flimsy nature of the government’s case against The Militant. Post Office attorney William C. O’Brien labelled an article as seditious solely because it accurately reported the carnage of a battle in the Solomon Islands. “It does not make any difference if everything The Militant said is true,” he declared. “We believe that any one violates the Espionage Act who holds up and dwells on the horrors of war with the effect that enlistment is discouraged by readers.”¹⁶

The use of statistical measures to assess the comparative severity, or lack thereof, of press restrictions in World War II often obscures more than it reveals. Any free speech improvements from World War I usually occurred despite, not because of, Roosevelt’s desires. He was not demonstratively more sensitive about avoiding potential civil liberties abuses than Wilson, and when it came to the Japanese, quite probably he was less so.

A more compelling explanation for the apparent greater tolerance in World War II was a paucity of remotely viable prospects for conviction. An infinitesimal percentage of the press after Pearl Harbor was “seditious” by any criteria prevailing in the legal community at the time. At the same time, the courts, reflecting the views of that community, were often more likely than their predecessors in World War I to blunt the more anti-​free speech instincts of the Roosevelt administration.¹⁷

Roosevelt’s lack of sensitivity to civil liberties was not just a wartime phenomenon. During the 1930s, he was an active player in pushing two congressional investigations which trampled on the rights of anti-​New Dealers. The first of these was through the Special Senate Committee on Lobbying, more widely known as the “Black Committee,” named for its chair Sen. Hugo L. Black (D–Ala.), a zealous and effective New Deal loyalist. Black was recruited at the behest of Roosevelt to take on this role and the administration consistently aided the investigation. The committee’s original mission was to probe the opposition campaign to the “death sentence” provision of the Public Utility Holding Company Bill, which would have allowed, under certain circumstances, the dissolution of utility holding companies. The Black Committee gained traction with the public when it brought to light evidence that some lobbyists had concocted thousands of “fake telegrams” sent to Congress to protest the bill. Smelling blood, Black expanded the investigation into a general probe of anti–New Deal voices, including journalists.

No doubt with the approval of Roosevelt, the Treasury granted Black access to tax returns dating back to 1925 of such critics as David Lawrence of the United States News. Then he moved to obtain his targets’ private telegrams, demanding that telegraph companies let the committee search copies of all incoming and outgoing telegrams for the first nine months of 1935. When Western Union refused on privacy grounds, the FCC, at Black’s urging, ordered it to comply.

Over a nearly three-​month period at the end of 1935, FCC and Black-​Committee staffers searched great stacks of telegrams in Western Union’s D.C. office. Operating with virtually no restriction, they read the communications of sundry lobbyists, newspaper publishers, and conservative political activists as well as those of every member of Congress. Writing to Black, one investigator stated that they had gone through “35,000 to 50,000 [telegrams] per day.” Various newspapers and members of Congress later estimated that staffers had examined some five million telegrams over the course of the investigation. In today’s terms, this would be as if staffers from a congressional committee and the FCC were to convene at the headquarters of Google and Verizon and then spend months secretly searching emails and text messages.

The committee used the information it found as a basis for more than 1,000 new subpoenas. One of these was for all incoming and outgoing telegrams, not just those sent through Washington, D.C., of W.H. Cowles’s anti–Roosevelt newspaper chain in the Northwest.

The subpoenas’ vast reach alarmed Western Union’s executives, who didn’t want to drive away privacy-​conscious customers. In early February 1936, the company adopted a new policy of telling all targeted individuals that the Black Committee had searched their telegrams. Before this time, the committee had been able to do its work in secret most of its targets had no clue about what was happening. As more people found out, the committee faced intensified opposition.

The angriest response might be that of Newton D. Baker, a cautious critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal who had served as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war. After Western Union informed him that Black’s committee had examined his telegrams for an entire year, he wrote: “Man of peace as I am, I am quite sure I could not keep my hand off the rope if I accidentally happened to stumble upon a party bent on hanging him.”

Meanwhile, Black was taking on the most famous newspaper publisher in American history: William Randolph Hearst. An exuberant nationalist and law-​and-​order advocate, Hearst had been instrumental in securing Roosevelt’s nomination in 1932 but had since turned against his old ally. Roosevelt reciprocated by instructing the Department of the Treasury to closely monitor Hearst’s taxes.

In February 1936, the Black Committee served a subpoena on Hearst directly for a telegram he had sent on April 5, 1935, to James T. Williams Jr., an editorial writer for the Hearst papers. In that communication—marked “Confidential”—Hearst asked Williams to write editorials calling for the impeachment of Rep. John J. McSwain (D–S.C.), the chair of the House Military Appropriations Committee: “He is the enemy within the gates of Congress.…He is a Communist in spirit and a traitor in effect. He would leave the United States naked to its foreign and domestic enemies.”

It is odd that Black publicly subpoenaed the original telegram from Hearst, given that he already had a complete copy of it from the earlier search of the Western Union office. Perhaps he feared raising potentially embarrassing questions about the secretive nature and methods used in that search. In any event, in March, Hearst petitioned the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia to enjoin Western Union from handing over the telegram. The suit charged that the committee had violated the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, adding that the telegram contained no reference to lobbying.

Black’s first instinct was to counterattack, but he did so in an uncharacteristically clumsy way. He sent copies of the Hearst telegram both to the press and to McSwain. He apparently hoped that his colleagues would take such offense at the inflammatory prose that they would rally to the committee. In a coup de grace, Black minimized the potential legal damage by also withdrawing the subpoena. Because the committee already had a copy, he explained, no “good purpose can be served by a one-​sided court battle in the nature of a mock trial of an injunction proceeding affecting the basic constitutional powers of the Congress of the United States.”

Black’s release of the Hearst telegram backfired. Critics pointed out that it directly contradicted the committee’s previous pledge to only reveal telegrams found to be relevant. By releasing the telegram, the Washington Post editorialized, the Black Committee showed it had become “rather too smart for success.” Instead of discrediting Hearst, the action had “sharply underlined the indefensible nature of its own dragnet tactics” that had revealed “a private wire from a citizen who has filed a charge of conspiracy against the committee.” Editor and Publisher wondered “if anything [was] safe” when a congressional committee and the FCC could fish a “private message out of the Western Union office for political reasons solely.”

Caught flat-​footed, Black’s defenders claimed that they were following the precedent set by earlier congressional investigations, such as the probe of the Teapot Dome scandal. But those earlier subpoenas had not included anything approaching the Black Committee’s open-​ended demands for telegrams—fishing expeditions that hadn’t specified particular individuals. Black further hurt his cause with a continuing tone-​deafness toward privacy concerns. For example, he claimed that the “law doesn’t recognize that a telegram is a man’s” but that each telegram “is the telegram company’s and is retained for subpoena purposes.”

In the face of mounting congressional opposition, and to fend off a possible injunction, the FCC announced that any telegrams it had seized were now “in the possession of the Special Committee of United States Senate.” Moreover, it did not intend any “further investigation or examination” of telegrams at Western Union. A Washington Post editorial attributed the commission’s decision to “public outcry against the OGPU methods followed by Senator Black’s investigators.” (The OGPU was the Soviet secret police.) Short of funds and under fire, Black had no choice but to end the “field investigation.” The FCC’s decision forced the Black Committee to retreat on future searches but also shielded it from direct legal sanctions.

The committee’s most powerful champion was Roosevelt himself, although he carefully avoided tipping his hand in public. He referred specifically to the Black Committee at a May 1936 meeting, according to former FDR advisor Raymond D. Moley. In the midst of a “nightmarish conversation [that] went on and on in circles for some two hours,” Moley bluntly asked Roosevelt about the lack of “moral indignation” when Black’s committee had “ruthlessly invaded the privacy of citizens.” Moley opined that he would rather let the guilty “go free than to establish the principle of dragnet investigations.” Roosevelt responded with a long discourse on how Black’s actions had “ample precedent.” Moley inferred that Roosevelt believed “the end justified the means.”

Although members of the committee talked about resuming the deliberations in the winter, it never met again under Black’s chairmanship. The senator had sometimes churned up embarrassing information on anti–New Dealers, but his methods had proven too toxic.

The final decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the Hearst case, handed down just after Roosevelt’s landslide re-​election victory in 1936, gave only mixed solace to Black Committee foes. The Court blasted the FCC for sanctioning a “wholesale” examination of telegrams and then turning these over to the Black Committee, declaring that this was “without authority of law and contrary to the very terms of the act under which the Commission was constituted.” It added that “telegraph messages do not lose their privacy and become public property when the sender communicates them confidentially to the telegraph company,” elaborating that in many states it was a “penal offense” to violate this privacy. The Court also affirmed that it had jurisdiction over the FCC’s future actions. Yet it ruled that it had no constitutional basis to assert jurisdiction in the case, despite the “unlawful nature of the search,” because the investigation had ceased.

Still, the Hearst ruling was a precedent against any future mass seizure of private telegrams by a congressional committee, at least via the FCC. One can only imagine what Senator Joseph McCarthy could have done had he been able to get similar access to private communications. In later years even Black, who often championed civil liberties after he joined the Supreme Court, expressed some regret about his actions as a senator.

At the time, the Hearst ruling meant little to Roosevelt, who appeared to have no need for more investigations. He now had overwhelming Democratic support in both houses of Congress and seemed free to get a Third New Deal if he wanted one. His window of opportunity soon closed, however.

In 1937, the president overplayed his hand by pushing a plan to appoint additional justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. The hard pushback, most visibly by Democrats, threw him off balance. A leader in the opposition was the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government (NCUCG), led by publisher Frank Gannett, formed only days after Roosevelt announced his plan. The NCUCG pioneered direct mail methods and had an impressive list of supporters, including the progressive reformer and civil libertarian Amos Pinchot, the novelist Booth Tarkington, and the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. The group soon expanded its agenda to oppose the New Deal as a whole.

Alarmed New Dealers resumed the investigations of the Senate Special Committee on Lobbying to target those who opposed “objectives of the administration.” By this time Black had joined the Supreme Court, so now Sen. Sherman Minton was chair. Minton was an even more zealous defender of Roosevelt’s agenda than Black had been. According to credible accounts, Roosevelt had first offered him the Supreme Court job that later went to Black, but Minton demurred, wanting to stay in the Senate.

While the Hearst decision had closed off Minton’s power to seize copies of telegrams, his methods were still extremely heavy-​handed. Committee staffers arrived en masse at the NCUCG’s office, where they began copying financial records, membership lists, and other files. After watching this for some time, Edward A. Rumely, the NCUCG’s energetic secretary, ordered the staffers out, labeling the snooping an illegal “fishing expedition.” Meanwhile, the Department of the Treasury gave Minton access to Rumely’s income tax returns. The defiant secretary refused to hand over donor or member lists on the grounds that the demand violated privacy and constitutional rights. The Justice Department contemplated a prosecution but ultimately decided that it might backfire by making Rumely a martyr.

Minton struck back by proposing a “libel bill” imposing a prison sentence of up to two years for publishing newspapers or magazine articles “known to be false.” (Many years later, a confidante of Minton said that someone else, possibly from the administration, had asked him to do it.) While rolling out the bill, Minton charged, in confused but revealing language, that “the free press of this country does not want encroachment upon democracy by the radio of the country. If there is going to be any encroachment on democracy, the free press wants to do it itself. It wants a free hand to do all of the encroaching it wants to do.” He cited several examples of “propaganda,” including articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a prominent anti-​New Deal voice. He also alleged that publishers “want to curb the radio” and “deny the president the right to sit down before a microphone in his own home and speak to the people of the country about their government.”

Minton’s proposed bill encountered outrage across the political spectrum. The ACLU condemned it, and the American Newspaper Publishers Association declared it part of a “lawless inquisition” that showed “arrogant disregard of the bill of rights.” Denying any threat to radio, Gannett promised that he and other publishers would “fight to the end for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom for radio.” The strongly pro–New Deal Rep. Maury Maverick (D–Texas), grandson of the man whose name inspired the term, also rejected the bill, emphasizing “the right of Mr. Roosevelt’s opposition to express its opinions freely.”

Roosevelt was not one to needlessly risk political capital in a losing battle. Asked at a press conference to take a stand on Minton’s bill, he punted, joking that he did not think the federal government had sufficient funds to build enough new prisons to make room for everyone who could be convicted under such a law. Before moving on to the next question, he quipped for the benefit of the reporters present: “You boys asked for it, you know.”

Taken completely aback by the opposition, and no doubt by Roosevelt’s reluctance to weigh in, Minton withdrew his bill and soon called off further investigations. It is quite possible too that Minton himself did not fully believe in his own proposal. Two years later he lost his re-​election race, but he bounced back in 1949 when his old Senate ally, Harry S. Truman, offered him a slot on the Supreme Court. This time Minton said yes.

Although Roosevelt’s most famous oration counted freedom of speech as first among his “Four Freedoms,” his actions pointed very much in the opposite direction. In times of peace as well as war, he repeatedly pushed opportunities to restrict the individual rights of his opposition. Impeding Roosevelt’s more repressive agenda were the willingness and ability to fight back of both the press and the legal community, which had strong memories of federal abuses both during World War I and Prohibition. In the decades that followed, however, historians often forgot or glossed over these civil liberties and civil rights abuses. Increasingly, they highlighted such accomplishments as FDR’s authorship of the Four Freedoms, and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and his appointment of future civil libertarians Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas to the Supreme Court. But that was not the whole truth, or even the beginning of the whole truth.