Roosevelt’s Revolution
Franklin Delano Roosevelt ranks highly in historians’ polls about successful presidents. His wartime leadership is often rightly praised, and many see the New Deal as a major accomplishment. FDR remains an icon of liberalism, and presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden have sought to imitate him.
In The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, however, Independent Institute research fellow David Beito exposes the dark side of Roosevelt’s legacy. Far from saving or enhancing liberty, Beito argues that the New Deal built up a vast bureaucratic apparatus which Roosevelt used in near-dictatorial ways to trample on the people’s longstanding rights. The New Deal which emerges from Beito’s narrative is nothing less than a revolution against the American constitutional order.
Beito argues that the Roosevelt administration systematically abused the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment. Beyond simply implementing a set of expanded federal economic programs, New Deal Democrats accrued vast bureaucratic powers to silence opposition and persecute political rivals. In Beito’s account, the Roosevelt presidency was not altogether unlike other authoritarian regimes that came to power in the era. Much like fascist or communist parties in Europe, for example, New Dealers used the fear of extremism to persecute their political opponents and shattered long-held First Amendment protections in the process.
The specific constitutional violations Beito cites are both troubling and under-reported in the wider literature. Alabama senator (and later Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black, for instance, used the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Communications Commission to hound opponents of Roosevelt’s agenda. Other bureaucratic allies found ways to use regulations on radio stations to silence or discourage critics. Even at a local level in places such as Memphis, Tennessee, Democratic party machine bosses covered up New Deal corruption and exploited their authority to give themselves unfair advantages in elections.
Read more at the Russell Kirk Center.
