➡ This text discusses the Black Committee, a lesser-known federal court that existed before the creation of the CIA and NSA. The committee collected information from phone companies, possibly using it to trap people into perjury. The text also discusses how President Roosevelt may have used this information for various purposes. The author suggests that this committee is a better example of mass surveillance than more well-known figures like J. Edgar Hoover.

➡ Franklin Roosevelt, a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, was born into a comfortable family and followed a typical trajectory for his class, attending prestigious schools and becoming a social influencer. He was asked to run for the state legislature in New York as a Democrat, which he won, impressing many and gaining the attention of Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt’s career mirrored his cousin’s in many ways, but he did not serve in the military. He faced a significant health challenge when he contracted polio at 39, but showed great determination in overcoming it. His career was almost derailed by a controversial investigation into same-sex relationships in the Navy, which he led and used questionable tactics. Despite this, he managed to maintain his political career and was known for his interventionist approach and disregard for civil liberties.

➡ The text discusses the historical events surrounding the U.S.’s involvement in World War II, focusing on President Roosevelt’s decisions. It suggests that Roosevelt may have known about an impending Japanese attack, but not specifically at Pearl Harbor, and that he could have done more to prevent it. The text also discusses Roosevelt’s economic policies, including his decision to abandon the gold standard, which was seen as arbitrary and superstitious. Lastly, it touches on the end of Prohibition, suggesting that Roosevelt supported its repeal not out of personal conviction, but because it was a popular position and a potential source of tax revenue.

➡ During the early New Deal, most tax revenue came from excise taxes on items like cosmetics, cigarettes, and alcohol, not income taxes. Despite raising the tax rate for the wealthy, the rich found ways to avoid paying, leading to most of the tax revenue coming from the working class. Roosevelt also attempted to increase the size of the Supreme Court to ensure his New Deal programs would be sustained, but faced opposition and was ultimately defeated. This period, following the 1936 election, was a low point for Roosevelt as he faced pushback and was unable to implement his more radical New Deal program.

➡ The text discusses the current political climate, comparing it to the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It suggests that we are in a dangerous time, with people on both sides of the political spectrum disregarding principles of free speech, rule of law, and due process. The text also recommends the book “FDR A Political Life” by David Beto for a better understanding of this historical context. Lastly, it criticizes certain societal systems, claiming they aim to control and diminish the worth of the common man, and encourages sharing information to expose hidden truths.

Welcome back. And I want to begin with a couple of statements from people that about this book. The book is FDR A New Political Life. The author is David Beto and this first one that’s here is from Hillsdale College. It’s Burton Folsom. He says the book FDR A New Political Life is the most illuminating one volume history of FDR ever written. American historians have come to recognize that Roosevelt’s New Deal did not end the Great Depression, but prolonged it. David Beto carefully explains why so many FDR programs and power grabs were so counterproductive. To go from the older FDR histories to David Beto’s wonderful new work is to make a historic leap from the Dark Ages.

Also, another author, David Michalis, says when it comes to race and Western influence, FDR’s vision of the world order was muddled delusional phenomena. He was not a man of empire or genocide like his wartime allies Churchill and Stalin, but he was a dreadfully old fashioned Victorian quack, an amateur phrenologist who believed that repopulating the Pacific Rim with certain choice cross breeding would create a better world for all. David Beto takes us further than his predecessors along the breadcrumb path into Franklin Roosevelt’s thick forested interior. And again, many wonderful stellar reviews. And I gotta say, even though I wasn’t able to read the entire book, what I read of it really does match with this.

I’ll give you one more. This is from Jim Bovard who we’ve interviewed on this show many times. He said historian David Beto, who previously exposed how President Franklin Roosevelt ravaged Americans constitutional rights, is back with a new book vividly exposing his personal perfidy from the dawn of Woodrow Wilson administration to 1945, the betrayal at Yalta and beyond. With volleys of research, Beto demolishes Roosevelt’s reputation as one of the quote unquote great presidents. And so I look at FDR like Lincoln. These are presidents who come in at a time of great societal upheaval and change and war, and they have an active role in redefining our society.

I think we’re in a time like that right now. This is a guy who ran as a peace candidate but then turned to war. He was there at the center of the fight between gold and fiat currency. He was presided over rapid expansion of Leviathan federal government with very creative excuses to override the Constitution, instituted surveillance and there was a free speech revolt against him. He also weaponized the fcc, and we can see, you know, we’ve talked about what was going on with the fcc, we pointed out that why should broadcast media have its content controlled when they don’t control the press? Well, you can look to FDR for that.

So joining us now is David Beto. Thank you so much for joining us. This excellent book here that you have. Thank you so much. You know, you brought up the, I mean, if you don’t mind. No, go ahead. I’m sorry. The FCC issue. And it brought to mind the contrast between FDR and Trump. You know, Trump makes these wild threats about the, involving the fcc, goes public with it. He tries to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, which really wasn’t worth the effort, frankly, and he succeeds short term. But now Kimmel is back on the air, so Trump looks silly.

What FDR did is he did it behind the scenes. He did it carefully. He would never make a public statement like that. He went to the sponsors of, for example, there was a leading anti New Deal radio commentator called, named BOKE Harder in 1938, one of the top rated commentators in the country on cbs. And so how did Roosevelt get him off the air? He did. Opening an IRS investigation, an immigration investigation because Carter was from Canada. And then finally he went to the executives or he went to the sponsors, including Marjorie Meriwether Post, who sold well, at least she was the original owner of Mar a Lago and she used her influence.

And Carter was forced off the air. And by the end of 1938, all anti new Deal commentators on the main networks were off the air. And despite the fact that most newspapers were hostile to fdr, he did it all quietly. He did it all behind the scenes with a scalpel where, you know, Trump used the blunt edge of the sword and many ways we should be thankful for that. Yeah, that Trump is like a bull in a china shop. So often and sometimes when he doesn’t need to get his way, he doesn’t get his way because he’s so, I don’t know, obvious about it.

Yeah, maybe, maybe his real thing is more about getting Americans divided and fighting each other than it is about the actual reform. But what FDR did is something that we’ve seen a pattern of people in government typically doing, and that is working behind the scenes, quietly sending out messages to make sure that this group or that group is shadow, banned or canceled. And you can use your own judgment in terms of doing this because you’re a private corporation and you can do that. But of course, he kind of did that with, in terms of telegrams and things like that before, not the social media.

Site, of course, but actual physical telegrams, FDR had his involvement with that as well. And I see the early trends of the surveillance state. Technology has changed, but the nature of men in power hasn’t really changed that much. Talk a little bit about the Black Inquisition and things that were involved in that. Okay, well, the Black Committee was a Senate committee, was headed by Senator Hugo Black who later ended up on the US Supreme Court despite his Klan background. And Black was an attack dog for the New Deal. He was really Roosevelt’s main ally, I would say, in the Congress.

He was the to go to guy. Well, Roosevelt wanted an investigation of anti New Deal organizations and Black was more than happy to cooperate in this. So Black would call these witnesses and they would sometimes successfully hold him off. He would bring in leading anti New Deal figures. And so Black got the bright idea, or someone got the bright idea. Well, why don’t I get their private telegram? Telegrams were the emails, texts of the time. They were over half of long distance communication. People would say things in telegrams that they wouldn’t say in letters, but they would say now in an email or a text.

And there were thousands of them. They were instantaneous, virtually instantaneous. So Black goes to Western Union and the other telegraph companies and said I want copies of all telegrams sent to and from members of Congress. And he had other people as well for like a six months period. And Western Union’s response was, are you kidding? You know, our customers would, would hate that. And Black goes to the fcc, gets approval. And of course FDR would have had a hand in this, although again, he didn’t really have to order Black to do anything because Black was serving the New Deal and got FCC approval.

So again, it’s FCC because telegraph companies were ordered to provide. That was one example. All it’s, you know, millions of telegrams. But then they expanded the Black expanded the investigation to include other cities, targeted individuals and so forth. So he went in there with his staffers into Western Union and they had to keep copies of, of the, of telegrams. Right. That was sort of part of their requirement. And he, he, they got. That was a government, that was a government went through them. Sorry, that was a government requirement to keep the copies in the first place.

Yes. Yeah, well, I think the telegraph companies probably maybe would have kept their own copies anyway. I don’t know. But they, they were required to keep copies of all telegrams and they went through millions. And I couldn’t believe this when I saw it, but yes, that was true. They went through about 10,000 a day over a very long period of time. And the committee staffers had instructions to don’t look at anything of a personal nature. Just look at material related to lobbying. What would be lobbying? Well, the committee had a specific definition. Indirect or direct lobbying.

Indirect lobbying would be any attempt to influence public opinion. So our conversation would be an example of that. So any attempt to influence public opinion would be considered lobbying. So they went through, copied selectively, and they would ambush witnesses because this was all secret. None of the witnesses knew they were doing this. Wow. None of them knew and eventually came out because Western Union Informed started to inform people who were being targeted. And one of them sued very prominent law firm in Chicago still there. Silas Strawn was his name, and Strachan was a heavyweight and one in federal district court.

By that time, Black had done his damage. And he said, well, we’re done with our investigation. However, this was a very good precedent for the future. Now, of course, Black could use the telegrams that he’d gotten his illegal booty, but he couldn’t do any more of this kind of search. Nor could official future congressional committees. Did they use important precedent. But it’s not very well known. It was a federal court judge. Yeah, we usually think about, you know, what’s going on with FISA and everything. And, you know, that came after World War II because with the creation of the CIA and NSA, they started getting information from the phone company, getting pin information, who did they call, and that type of thing, which they could infer a lot from.

But actually, this predates all of that. Were they using this? As you said, they were questioning people. Did they use this information as a perjury trap for people? You know, ask them a question that they already knew the answer to? I suspect that that kind of thing went on. I haven’t come across it. I have reason to believe, from just reading some of Roosevelt’s comments that he, you know, this information was shared with him, but I can’t prove it. But I think it was used for all sorts of nefarious reasons. See, historians have kind of looked in the wrong place.

They’ve looked at people like J. Edgar Hoover, who, again, there’s a lot of things he did too. But the mass surveillance. This is a better example of mass surveillance, but people haven’t looked at it. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of the Black committee till about 12 years ago when I was doing research and I came across it. I said, what’s this thing, the Black Committee? What’s that? Is that describing the nature of the committee. Yeah. Was a Senate committee. It was forgotten. Not by a lot of conservatives, though. Conservatives would be bringing it up in the 1950s.

And that’s part of the reason why McCarthyism came about, because they were pissed and they thought, well, you guys are now complaining about civil liberties. What about the Black Committee? And that’s a parallel to today as well, isn’t it? You know, when you suffer an injustice like that, you feel entitled to propagate it against your enemies again, you know, so wait, you guys did it. So what about that? Let’s do it again. I love the title that you guys. Trials, probably Trump’s going to do sedition trials, I would guess, right? That’s right. Same thing. The J6 people were convicted of.

Stupid law that should have been repealed. Exactly. Or at least severely limited. I like the way that you’ve got it here in the, in the, in your book, the Black Inquisition. You know, that that really does get your attention as you’re looking at it. Just like it was like, oh, okay, you go, yeah, the Black Inquisition. And then there was a pushback against that part of it was William Randolph Hearst was, of course, targeted that because I guess they could say, well, anything that he says is going to be influencing public opinion, obviously. So let’s get all of his telegrams.

And so he. Actually, you have a chapter here, the right and the left Free Speech Coalition. So there’s a pushback with that. He joined with the aclu, left, as William Randolph Hearst pushing back. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, well, the Black Committee had gotten a treasure trove of Hearst related telegrams, but they did a very stupid thing. They did a public subpoena. None of this was subpoenaed, by the way, but they did a public subpoena of one and only one telegram that they probably already had. And this telegram was where Hearst was accusing this prominent member of Congress, a committee chair, of being in league with the Communists.

It was kind of a hyperbolic telegram. And I guess what the Black Committee, what black thought was, people just see that as so over the top. This will be good PR for us. But instead, what happened is other members of Congress, like, you know, a guy named McCormack who was future speaker of the House, a guy named Emanuel Seller. These are New Dealers. They say, this is uncalled for. This is the tactics of Mussolini. So it actually backfired on Roosevelt. Even many of his own New Deal supporters were against this. And this is, this is very interesting and very discouraging in some ways.

Because during this period, you had a lot of civil libertarians who on the left who were willing, even though they liked Roosevelt, who were willing to push back against him. And that is not as true today. Maybe that will change now, but it’s not. What. It certainly hasn’t been true today. Well, today we’re so much more partisan and tribal and we don’t seem to care about principles. We don’t seem to care about the rule of law. And that’s true of both sides, isn’t it? Well, you had some people at the time give you a sense of the difference.

H.L. mencken was an in your face kind of anti New Dealer civil libertarian, you know, I don’t know, agnostic. He alienated everybody, but he was friends with everybody. He had correspondence that spanned the political spectrum. He was respected. He was liked as an individual, could talk to people. I don’t think there are as many people who can who fit in that category today. That’s right. Yeah, he was a real clever wit. I mentioned frequently his thing. A year ago, if I had a gold coin and a flask of whiskey, the whiskey was illegal and the coin was legal.

This year, the gold coin is illegal and the flask of whiskey is legal. So, yeah, he was always. I haven’t heard that one. But he was always pointing out the absurdity of fdr. Yeah. So I think one of the very telling things about FDR was the war and peace issue. And you got in here part of his speech, which truly is amazing that he makes when he’s running as a candidate, as a peace candidate. He says, I’ve seen war. I’ve seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I’ve seen men coughing out their gassed lungs.

I’ve seen the dead in the mud. I’ve seen cities destroyed. I’ve seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of the survivors of the regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I’ve seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war. And you write. And as he so often did, FDR exaggerated. His exposure to the fighting in World War I was limited and sanitized. While the Navy had sent him on a guided inspection of American naval and Marine bases in Europe, the main impression conveyed by his contemporaneous diary account was that of a sightseer.

So talk a little bit about that, how he ran as a peace candidate. And then he flipped, pushing us into war. Well, FDR was playing both sides of the street. For example, in the 1930s, he’d been the guy that suggest, well, maybe we need neutrality laws. And then later he pushed for repeal of the Neutrality act, saying, I wish I’d never signed it, never mentioned that he was the guy that helped to inspire it in the first place. So he was a rabid interventionist. When he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson, he was constantly trying to imitate his cousin Theodore and get some sort of incident, possibly.

So he was a hawk. But then in the 30s, he sort of realizes there’s all this anti war feeling and he appeals to that. He actually applauds the Munich Agreement. But then after that, he becomes much more of an interventionist and certainly aligns himself with Winston Churchill and so forth. But a lot of this is done quietly. So he’s sort of playing both sides of the street. And he is in Trouble. In the 1940 election. His opponent, Wendell Wilkie, who was kind of an interventionist too, but starts talking like an America Firster during the last part of the campaign, is making inroads.

So FDR is worried about this. So very shortly before the election, he gives this speech. He’d never given a speech this strong, where he says, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war full stop. Right? Yeah. And Wendell Wilkie heard that on the radio and he said, that hypocritical son of bit son of a bitch has just lost me the election. And whether or not that was true or not, FDR was. That was a clear motivation. His son went up to him and said, dad, why did you say that? You’ve never said anything like that before.

And he said, basically, well, I had to win, you know, for the good of the country, that kind of thing. So just amoral. An amoral figure. Yeah. Maybe worse in so many ways. A very cynical, jaded man, I think, who had great charm. Yes. But I never really cared for him, I’m going to confess. Did you ever see that movie Sunrise at Campo Bello? No, I never saw that. It was a movie made in the 50s starring Ralph Bellamy playing FDR in his battle against polio. And I just, you know, Bellamy captured FDR in some ways.

It was supposed to be a sympathetic portrayal, but there was just this charm which always seemed a little bit phony to me and very calculating, but very effective. Yeah, he seemed that way to me as well, but I always kind of just dismissed that as, you know, when you look at movies at the time, you know, people came across as very stiff and pretentious and putting on airs. And that’s kind of the way that a lot of people would come across, even in the movies at that time. They wouldn’t come across as genuine. And so I kind of just put it up to the zeitgeist of the time, if you will.

But yeah, it’s interesting. And you begin with his rise to power. Talk a little bit about that. Where’d this guy come from? How’d he get there? He had a big advantage in that he was born into comfortable circumstances. Not super wealth, but wealth. He was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and very distant, like seventh cousin. But the family had contacts with each other and so forth. And he did the typical trajectory of someone in that class. He went to Groton, a very exclusive private school. And he went to Harvard. He got a Columbia, his law degree from Columbia.

He had very mediocre grades. He was not a good student, but he, he was a glad hander. People liked him. He made his impact socially. And then it was some people approached him and said, Mr. Roosevelt, we’d like you to run for Congress or not for Congress for state legislature in New York. You know, Theodore was president at the time. They happen to be Democrats. I guess they thought that that was a brilliant move. Now I say that if the Republicans had approached Franklin, he probably would have run as a Republican. In fact, he had supported his cousin very openly.

When his cousin ran for reelection, his first vote was for Theodore. But the Democrats asked him. It was a Good democratic year, 1908. So he ran as a Democrat and he was able to win. And from there he just impressed people. And he got the attention of a guy named Josephus Daniels, who was Secretary of the Navy. Quite a racist, southern racist type. But Daniels was charmed by Roosevelt. He had a very apt comment. He said he was just like an actress. He had that, he had it right. And funny that he was saying actress. The case of love at first sight.

You know, when Daniel saw him, and I don’t think anything went on, but he made him Assistant Secretary of Navy. And from there Roosevelt was imitating his cousin, either intentionally or by chance. Theodore had been in the legislature. Theodore had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy. And then Theodore was vice presidential candidate as Roosevelt was in 1920. So they’re very similarity, a lot of parallels between them. One difference though. Franklin did not volunteer to fight in World War I. He was in his late 30s. He could have his cousin. Theodore said, you have to get into the infantry, not just the Navy.

You have to get into the infantry. You have to get in the fight. And Roosevelt came back and said, well, my boss thinks I’m essential. And maybe his boss did say that, but Theodore had similar bosses. He didn’t have to go in, but Franklin was not the man that Theodore was. Right. So he did not, he did not serve in the military. So at that point he was able bodied. At that point he was able bodied and could have. Yeah, that was before his bout of polio, which was 19. How old was he right here? 1921.

So he was about how old when that happened? He was about 39. Quite a young man. And the story, there’s an interesting story there. Now, a lot of people said, can’t you say something good about Roosevelt? I will say that, you know, he showed great determination. Of course, he had a lot of. He had a lot of help. He had a lot of doctors, he had a lot of, you know, leisure time. He had a lot of support, but he showed great courage in overcoming that. Part of the story that I was surprised by is who did he blame for the polio? He blamed a Republican senator.

And the story on this is really fascinating. I begin my book with it. There was an investigation. Well, there was something called the Newport Scandal. The Newport sex scandal. Do you recall reading that? Yeah, no. I skipped over to the Black Inquisition. What happened was Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and there was a guy at one of the naval bases in Newport who was investigating whether there, there were same sex relationships going on in the Navy and thought this was, you know, major scandal and so forth, and even did his own private investigations where this guy would find people to go in and they would actually have sex.

Right. With these men. Right. To try to entrap them. So Roosevelt found out about this. The investigation was, was, was, was basically had no funding. The Secretary of War was refused, had refused to back it. I mean, the Attorney General refused to back it. And Roosevelt stepped in single handedly and set up a investigative unit headed by him called Section A in the Department of Navy which investigated this issue of same sex relationships in the Navy. And they would send out investigators who again, would entrap people by having sex with them. Wow. And Roosevelt I think quite clearly knew what was going on.

A local journalist in Newport pushed back on this and, and accused Roosevelt of doing this. And Roosevelt basically responded, said, well, you know, you know, isn’t it important to, you know, to find what’s going on here? Why are we so worried about procedure and it was actually controversial. You would think this period is anti gay and it was. But people in Congress and the press thought this was abhorrent. These tactics were beyond the pale. And that’s one of the things that we’ve lost. He did his best to cover it up and it weakened. It put so much tension on him that he said that it had lowered his resistance and made him more susceptible to the outbreak of polio, which may have been true actually, because it was.

A lot of it was contaminated water. But again, if immunity, you know, if you had low resistance and so forth. So he blamed this senator till his dying day for causing his, his polio. Well, you know, you should talk about that investigation which almost derailed his career, almost destroyed him. And again, lucky it’s the tactic that’s involved there and people don’t. Everybody did. And you would think this would be a period where they would say, oh, they’re gay, we need to root them out. And they may have thought that, but this is beyond the pale. And of course these people that had been destroyed, many of them were innocent, you know, they didn’t get any benefits.

Right. They didn’t get military funerals. They were destroyed. And Roosevelt is able to ride through it partly because other things go on that divert public attention. But the New York Times, as a matter of fact has a big story where it calls his behavior. They blame him for it, the Times blames him in this article. And basically, you know, comes to conclusion he’s unfit for office, but he’s able to escape this somehow because of other things going on and it’s forgotten and most people today don’t even know about it. But it’s quite an important, it’s quite an important story in his life.

Well, it reveals his character, which we then saw later when he’s coming after political. And Roosevelt was quite clear that he wasn’t worried about the means. It was the end, get something done. This is a view towards civil liberties. These people need to be shut up. Yeah, I think some way to shut them up. That was a real hallmark. That was a real hallmark of everything that he did. You know, he doesn’t care. I think he was always kind of a default interventionist and I think a lot, you know, I mean, I think he did have an ideology and I think he, he had been a Wilsonian interventionist.

He was a great admirer of Wilson. Right. He defended Wilson when he ran for president in 1920, even though much of the public was sick of Wilson. He defended the worst aspect, the most repressive aspects of Wilsonianism. So I think that was his default position. That’s the best way I could explain it. I think the relationship with Churchill made a difference. But I think you see even signs of that before that where he’s trying to do it. His focus is on the North Atlantic. By 1941, he is desperately trying to provoke an incident in the North Atlantic and he builds up minor incidents or you know, into cause celebs and is trying to get into the war.

It’s clear he wants to do that by 1941 by any means that he, he can. And. But the public is hostile to the idea. Overwhelmingly the public is, you know, does not want to get in another foreign war. They remember World War I. They do not want to do that again. But he’s able to get aid to Britain through Lend Lease, which was very open ended. But again, selling this as well. Of course we won’t have to go in. You know, we can help the British, right. Give them the tools and they will finish the fight, as people used to say and that kind of thing.

But kind of where we are right now with Ukraine. Right, Kind of where we are right now with Ukraine, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can just give them the weapons and we won’t really get involved. But the Germans aren’t taking the bait to the extent that he wants them to. So he kind of shifts to the Pacific, right. And there’s massive sanctions against the Japanese that preceded Pearl Harbor. And of course, what do you have about Pearl Harbor? What’s your take on Pearl Harbor? Did he engineer that to. And keep things secret there in a kind of subversive way? What did, what, what is your opinion on Pearl Harbor? Okay, yeah, again, he is, he, his focus is the North Atlantic.

But he eventually comes to the conclusion, well, you know, if we’re going to go to war with Japan, that’s fine with me. And maybe we can get into the European war as well. I don’t think. I think that that’s part of what he’s pushing. And really since, you know, there were opportunities to have peace agreement with Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister offers to meet with Roosevelt in the middle of the Pacific to have a summit. So let’s hash this out. Roosevelt doesn’t take the opportunity. At one point the Japanese actually say that they were willing to evacuate China.

He doesn’t take the opportunity. So there’s sort of a distraction now. Okay, Pearl Harbor. Did Roosevelt know about it? I don’t think he did. And my argument for that is I think the best evidence is that they did know that chippy Japanese would attack. They thought the attack would probably be somewhere like the Philippines, maybe in, you know, Singapore, somewhere like that. They did not think it would be Pearl Harbor. Very few people thought that. Almost nobody thought that. And part of the reason they didn’t think that is they. They didn’t think the Japanese were capable.

They didn’t think they were good pilots. They didn’t think that they could. They could pull something out like that. And even the commanders on the ground and Roosevelt did short change them short. And Kimmel there at the Pacific, they wanted observation planes, but Roosevelt diverted all resources to the North Atlantic. They wanted, you know, if they had had those observation planes, for example, it might have made all the difference. He shortchanged them. But even they thought that the main danger from the Japanese was sabotage. That’s one of the reasons why they put the planes in the middle of the field.

In many cases, it made them more vulnerable to attack, but theoretically less vulnerable to sabotage. So what is Roosevelt’s first reaction after the attack? Well, it’s from a butler who saw him. And Roosevelt’s response was, I will go down in disgrace. He thinks, my God, I didn’t expect this. I’m going to be in trouble because of this. So I don’t think they knew that the attack was going to be at Pearl harbor partly because they underestimated the Japanese. I think Roosevelt was reckless, however, that he knew an attack was going to come. I think he could have done much more to warn naval commanders throughout the Pacific than an attack was going to come.

There were clues that it could have come at Pearl harbor, namely the time of day. They did know the time of the day when the Japanese were going to just in the embassy had been ordered American Embassy, to destroy their codes. And that was at 7:30am which would have been a very good time for an attack on Pearl Harbor. And they didn’t put two and two together. So I think it’s more incompetence. But I don’t buy the theory that has been put forward by people like Stinnett, who makes this argument that, you know, that we knew that the Japanese fleet was on the way and so forth.

I don’t see the evidence for that. We did break one of the codes, but we didn’t break the crucial naval code, broke the diplomatic code. So we knew a lot was going on. Roosevelt knew a lot about it. He was reading a lot of Japanese mail, and maybe they could have put two and two together. But I think it was sort of racism in some sense. They just didn’t think the Japanese could pull something like this off, you know. They found out, didn’t they? Well, talk a little bit about. You got your. And I’d be happy to talk with people about it, but I don’t buy that.

That he knew. Sure. That it was going to happen at Pearl Harbor. Sure. Well, talk about fear and emergency. Okay. Well, when Roosevelt ran in 1940, 1932, he pledged to maintain sound money. Now, he didn’t exactly say, well, gold, but Hoover didn’t either. But he gave a speech right before the election called, little known speech, called the Covenant speech where he would talk about, you know, gold contracts. The Covenant. Right. He said he would uphold the covenant. You know, basically, I will uphold, you know, the use of gold. Right. Then very shortly after the election, he makes a decision to go off the gold standard.

He calls in his secretary of the treasury, who’s much more. Actually Secretary of State who’s much more conservative than him on financial issues, Cordell Hall. And he says, cordell, congratulate me. We’re going off the gold standard tomorrow. And he pulls out some money. And it was a money that was issued by the, whatever, the Federal Reserve bank of Tennessee, I guess he said, this is from Tennessee, your own state, Cordell. And what makes this money go. But it’s only good because we say it’s good. And again, that is what he did. Then he does a lot of crazy things after that.

He does a program to purchase gold and he sets the. No, not to purchase gold, but to set the price of gold. So he has this gold buying program. And how does he determine the price? He determines it then from things like he says, well, I think the price should be 19 cents today because it’s a lucky number. You know, he would say things like that. And Roosevelt was very superstitious. He had lucky shoes, he had lucky hats. So this is, this is not as strange as you might seem. And it was just, it was just a crazy, crazy town.

But what saved us in terms of financially in the 30s was we had massive gold imports from both Europe and the Soviet Union where people are taking their gold, for obvious reasons, out of those places and bringing it to the United States. So we have a tremendous gold inflow to the United States through those sort of happy, not happy, tragic accidents, I guess you could say, both from Russia and from. Cause Stalin is buying a lot of American goods using gold. That’s part of it. And of course, the gold is coming in from Germany because Jews and others are taking their.

Taking their gold out. Yeah. It’s interesting, you know, when you look at how he was reacting, how he had his lucky shoes and all the rest of stuff, and how arbitrary things were. That sounds familiar too, in a disturbing way, doesn’t it? You know, kind of erratic and arbitrary, capricious, what he’s doing with these things. Things we’re starting to see a lot of. That’s a good word. Yeah. Parallels with Trump. But there are big differences, too. Yeah. But, you know, I, I think there are. There, there, there. There. There’s some, there’s some parallels that you control.

Mm. So talk a little bit about the end of Prohibition. That’s, that’s one of the things everybody, you know, happy days is here again. How much of that was, you know, did he build that up for his, um, his campaign and how much of that was really initiative of his, or was it just that people had had it with alcohol prohibition at that point? He got ahead of that. Was he. Was he opposed on that by the Republicans, or what was the situation with the Prohibition? And, you know, I don’t discuss Prohibition a lot, but. But Roosevelt was a straddler.

He wasn’t going to take controversial positions. He was also a straddler on trade issues and tariff issues. So he was not a leader of the anti Prohibition forces. There were Democrats who were the more conservative. Democrats, interestingly, tended to be the more anti Prohibition. And there was a big element in the party and people were sick and tired of the Prohibition laws. By 1932, the Republicans chose to kind of avoid the issue. So Roosevelt and getting the nomination, it certainly was a popular position, but he also recognized that this is a popular position. And he came out for repeal of the constitutional amendment, bringing in Prohibition.

He took a very strong stand. I think there were other motivations, though. One was it’s a great tax source. And as a matter of fact, during the early New Deal, even though they’re talking about income taxes, most of the tax collections are from excise taxes. People like things like cosmetics, cigarettes, alcohol. Yeah. That’s where the bulk of the revenue is raised. So Roosevelt is raising the tax top rate to, I don’t know, eventually gets, you know, well over 90%, but it’s going way, way up. He makes a big deal about this. But that means that the wealthy find ways to find tax shelters.

They don’t pay it. So where does the actual money comes? It comes from the nickels and dimes and people going to movies. There’s a tax on movie tickets. It Comes from the nickels and dimes of working class people. But Roosevelt is very clever and never acknowledging that. And of course the excise taxes on liquor as well. Yeah, it’s always maybe in the back of his mind too. And he uses that revenue source in a major way. It’s always soak the rich and then it’s always the poor middle class that pay all the taxes. That’s, that’s another thing that never seems example of that.

Yes, another thing never stops. And of course the revenuers, you know, that’s what they called the people that were coming after the stills and the, in the mountains and everything. Because that was really what they wanted. They wanted the money that was there. So talk a little bit about the Supreme Court packing issue as well and his fight to essentially just completely rewrite the Constitution. When we look at what happened with the New Deal should be called New Constitution proposes, he keeps his quiet again. But then in 1937 he’s, he’s all puffed up because the 1936 election was one of the more spectacular landslides in American history.

Partly because Roosevelt was very effective in using New Deal money, targeted money. And I could talk about that as well. How he was able to win such a big majority. But he thought I’m going to get a third New Deal. Right. He wanted to be more radical. He wanted to do more. But he thought what good will that do if the Supreme Court, which has been striking down measures like the AAA and the National Recovery Administration. What good will all my effort unless I, I get a sympathetic court? Okay, well he, he decides, he proposes to increase the size of the court and his gives a speech where he basically says they’re overextended, they’re, they’re all, they’re tired.

I want to help them. You know, they’ve got a big workload. Well, he gives a speech and he wants to increase the size of the court and he obviously thinks he can pull it off because I don’t know, you’re talking about something like gee whiz, the Republicans are down to like 16, 20 senators. I mean he’s got overwhelming majority. You would think that he could pull this off easily. And he’s so disingenuous and it’s so obvious what he’s doing that there is a big movement against court packing led by a New Dealer, Senator Burton Wheeler, who’d been an ally of Roosevelt and turns against him.

And Wheeler is the ideal guy to lead this effort. The Republicans are very smart. They lay back and let the Democrats take leadership and they do. Now. The campaign is very grueling. And it becomes clear during the campaign that Roosevelt has essentially won because one of the justices on the court has switched sides. And it’s clear that he’s probably going to get all of his New Deal programs sustained. But he keeps pushing on. I guess it becomes a matter of principle for him. He keeps pushing on. He pushes, pushes, pushes. The majority leader of the Senate is exhausted.

He is in bad shape, and he ends up having a heart attack and is found with a copy of the Congressional Record in his hand. His name is Joe Robinson. And Roosevelt is. It doesn’t go to Robinson’s funeral. And there’s a lot of controversy about that. Why don’t you go to the guy’s funeral? Probably because he was pissed off that Robinson wasn’t doing a better job. Anybody says, well, he would understand. You know, he. He had to fight for the. And it hurts Roosevelt no end. And Roosevelt is defeated. So in a lot of ways, that is an example of a left, right coalition.

There are many examples, but that’s one he’s defeated by Democrats. Could you imagine that happening under Biden? I would find it difficult to imagine that. Or Franklin or Trump in the opposite direction. That’s right. But it did happen then, which says something positive about Americans during that period, Americans in Congress included. That’s right. Much higher level of character in a lot of ways. And I’ve mentioned many times about the fact, you know, we have our war on drug that’s been going on for over half a century. But we had the 18th and the 21st Amendment, which said that they had enough respect for the Constitution, that everybody had.

They had a constitutional amendment to stop in order to start it and then stop the alcohol prohibition, because they knew that they didn’t have that power in the Constitution. But today, you know, we don’t care about that. We just do whatever we wish. I think it’s kind of interesting. Everybody agreed on that. We have to have a constitutional amendment. That’s right. It’s one of the biggest arguments against the war on drugs, I think, is the fact that we have those two amendments that are there. But when you go back and you look at this particular case with the Supreme Court, the fact that he’s got the votes, but he still wants to press on with this thing because it’s a matter of personal prestige and power, I think the same type of thing that we see with Trump.

And yet does he take the kind of vengeance against people who go against him and kind of a vendetta that we see Trump taking against Republicans. Let’s say he doesn’t attend the guy’s funeral or whatever, but, you know, it gives him the cold shoulder. But. But did he really go after people like Trump will go after somebody like Thomas Massie who opposes him on his agenda? Yeah. Again, he keeps a secret liability. And this is what, what’s interesting, there is an investigation under another loyalist. In fact, he’d been offered the position on the Supreme Court before Black, but wanted to stay in Congress.

His name was Senator Sherman Mittman. And if you search his name, the thing that usually comes up is there’s a bridge named after him. But now maybe that’ll change. But was a very young guy. He was already in the Senate leadership first termer and he was very tight with Roosevelt. And Minton starts his own investigation, basically succeeds the Black committee. It’s the same committee, but Black is now in the U.S. supreme Court. And so Minton heads this investigation. They can’t search telegrams anymore, but one of the things they do do is they use. Minton gets permission to look at the IRS tax records of people he targets, for example.

He gets that. But Minton gets very frustrated because there’s a lot of pushback. People are very upset about his methods and he lacks black subtlety. Black had some subtlety. Minton is just charging forward. And so Minton gives this speech. He said, well, we need a law against these big newspapers because most of the press was against Roosevelt. So he said, let’s make it a felony to publish anything known to be untrue. Fake news, basically. In fact, they use that term, I think, false news or fake news. Yeah. And he proposes this bill. And what is the reaction to the bill? You.

Almost universal opposition sets in almost from the beginning. As it is setting in, Roosevelt is asked about the Mitten bill at a news conference. And I think Roosevelt was the guy that had the idea. I think he put Minton up to it. I can’t prove that, but I think it’s true because Minton was not the kind of guy to go off on his own. And it reflects what Roosevelt thought of the press. He was asked about this and he said, well, you know, if we had such a bill, we wouldn’t even have enough room in the federal prison system to hold all the prisoners.

And he gets a little laugh, right? Yeah. And then as he moves on to a new topic, and I wish they’d done follow ups, they didn’t. He says, you boys asked for it. You know, that’s what he Says, you boys asked for it. You know, I mean, you reporters, you. You know, people, you asked for this. And then he moves on to the next topic and he drops it, right, because Min ends up dropping it. But. And it discredits his investigation. And his investigation is pretty much shut down after that. So FDR, those two years after the 1936 election are a low point for FDR.

There’s pushback against him. He loses Corp Packing, the Minton Committee collapses, and he puts all of his attention on Corp Packing. And as a result, he isn’t able to get his radical New deal program in 1938. 37, 38. That he wanted because he focuses almost entirely on court packing. And then later, after, really, it’s too late on these investigations. You know, it’s kind of interesting when you look at this period of time, you know, when all the institutions were being reconsidered, reinvented, if you will. And he’s fighting against the constitutional pattern that had been accepted, that he was getting pushback again, even from his own party, against some of this stuff, because as we talked about, people understood the principles he had, a lot of people who did not share his idea that the end justifies the means.

And we don’t see that today. We’re in a much more dangerous situation. I think when we look at this, why it’s good to go back and look at history. You look at the radical change that was accomplished during the FDR period of time, and you look at the fact that now we have people on both sides have become unhinged from, or have detached themselves from basic principles about free speech, the rule of law, and having a due process to investigate things like that. I think we’re in a very dangerous time right now. I think this book helps to get people to understand that.

If we look at the context, the historical context of this. Yeah, we’re seeing a lot of people on the right who were talking about free speech and local control, states rights, you know, turned on a dime. That’s right. This is very discouraging to see this. Yeah, now they want to come after their idea of fake news. You know, now they’ve got their own fake news vendettas that they want to come after. So it is. There is so much here. I mean, we could do several interviews with this. This is an excellent book. It is a very important presidency to understand the context of the times in which we live in our government.

And I really highly recommend this book, FDR A Political Life by David Beto. And you spell your Name as B, E, I, T, O. Is that correct? That’s right, yeah. So it’s not spelled like the Texas politician. Oh, please. No. And a lot of people will call him Beto o’, Rourke, but I think it’s Beto, actually. Oh, yeah, I believe that’s the way his name is pronounced. Yeah, I keep telling people that, even if it isn’t true. That was his nickname. Yeah, I think it is true. Yeah. I used to always call him Robert Francis o’ Rourke or whatever his original name was.

I said he’s a trans Hispanic. He identifies as Hispanic even though he’s not Hispanic. Has been. Now let’s keep it that way. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. We don’t want to resurrect him with any attention, I guess, but an excellent book and thank you so much for joining us. And there is much to learn in terms of politics and history. It was a very seminal presidency. Unfortunately for many of us who like to see government that follows the Constitution, FDR’s presidency was an unmitigated disaster. And it bears looking at it and see if we see any repetition in current events as a warning, as a harbinger of what’s coming.

Because as we were talking about earlier, you know, this whole stuff of secretly getting information on his enemies, we saw that immediately after, after World War II ended. We saw that immediately being transferred over to the nsa, the CIA, the FBI and all these people using the income tax, Aspinal people. These same tactics are used over and over again. Thank you very much, David Beto. The book is FDR A Political Life. Thank you folks for joining us. Have a good day. The common man. They created Common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us.

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