Chapter 1: What are some common misconceptions about FDR's presidency?
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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. A stone's throw from the National Mall in Washington, DC, located on a narrow strip of land between the Tidal Basin and the Potomac River, is the memorial to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is no modest plaque, nothing like the man's first Washington memorial, a desk-sized stone set quietly before the National Archives.
No, this is a sweeping seven and a half acre landscape divided into four outdoor areas, each representing one of FDR's four terms in office. Water moves throughout, crashing downward to evoke the shock of the Wall Street crash, cascading over stepped granite in tribute to New Deal dams, then bursting outward in a restless spray, a reflection of a world at war.
Here stand bronze figures of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's beloved dog, Fala, citizens waiting in bread lines, a man bent toward a radio to hear a fireside chat, and Roosevelt himself, memorialized not once, but twice. It is a monument to a life's achievement. But like most monuments, it functions primarily to celebrate, not to question. Which raises an uncomfortable thought.
Should we question Franklin Roosevelt? Did the man have any failures at all? Well, of course he did. He was only human. But this monument, an honestly popular American history, so often seems to suggest otherwise. Hi all, it's Don Wildman here. Welcome to American History Hit. Glad to be with you. It's commonplace in 20th century American history to credit Franklin Delano Roosevelt with so much.
He led the nation out of the Great Depression, stabilized a collapsing economy, reshaped the federal government through sweeping reform. Then he turned his attention internationally, confronting and ultimately leading the defeat of fascist regimes threatening to dominate the world. The New Deal, victory in World War II, elected president four times. It's an impressive resume.
But in America, we polished our presidents into monuments. They begin as politicians, power brokers, human beings. Then over time, memory fades as we smooth away the rough edges, the miscalculations, the moral compromises, all in favor of a more reassuring, triumphant image that really reflects how we prefer to see ourselves.
Problem is, at some point, we stop asking the questions we can learn from, glossing over decisions that were misguided, off-base, even deeply harmful. And yes, Franklin Roosevelt made plenty of those, too. So today we'll try to do with FDR what we really should do with every president, measure greatness alongside failure, achievement alongside consequence. What did FDR do wrong?
Well, you might be surprised at the list, which we'll discuss today with David Beto, Professor Emeritus of the History Department at the University of Alabama Roll Tide. Professor Beto's newest book, among so many in his distinguished career, was released in November 25, entitled FDR, A New Political Life. Greetings, Professor. Hello, David. Thank you for your time today.
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Chapter 2: How did FDR's policies impact the Great Depression?
The situation in Europe is not looking very good. In 1940, FDR sort of barred the door to Jewish refugees. We could go on with many examples that if we were to use that particular barometer, FDR would You know, how would you rank him as a great president? Yet today, he is ranked as a great president. As you said, he's up there, number one, number two. Usually, he's number one or number two.
You know, right next to Lincoln, sometimes Washington. And he has this incredible reputation. Yet, if we look at his record, again, we did not get out of the Great Depression. We still have double-digit unemployment rates. on the eve of World War II. So why is he ranked so highly? I think it has a lot to do with the ideology of most historians.
Most historians, including my colleagues, regard the growth of the welfare regulatory state as a good thing, as a positive development in American history. And because FDR, that was one of his legacies, they're inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. That's part of it. I think there's a persona of FDR that is bewitching. He's one of the more charismatic presidents in American history.
And I think my parents sort of had the view, they had the same view of Nelson Rockefeller. Well, he's an aristocrat. He doesn't have to do this. He could just live there at Hyde Park and enjoy his gentlemanly life, but he comes forward, public service, to serve the people. So he's got this aristocratic, charming manner about him. I call him Thurston Howell III with a heart. There you go.
There's actually some interesting parallels between them. Or at least that's the reputation, Thurston Holliver. It's the cigarette holder and the teeth. It's the jauntiness of the cap. And Harvard. Yes, and the noise, the voice. It's also very importantly, the bonhomie with the press corps at the time, combined with a new radio presence, which really is of his era.
But of course, that's all fueled by the charisma, as you say it. Well, on the radio thing, it was said that That FDR could have been a very successful radio announcer that he never run for office. Well, he was. He was announcing his own presidency. He was narrating it by the fire. Yeah, it's really about the triumphalism of what happened as a result of his presidencies.
And as I said in the opening, we don't do ourselves any justice by glossing over all the nooks and crannies of many negatives that happened during his presidency. So that's what this conversation is really about. And your book, FDR, A New Political Life, really does study that. Am I right? Yeah, this is a critical portrait. I think it's fair to say.
But I try to understand what motivates FDR, where he's coming from. I look at his background and how that influenced him. And I rely quite heavily on the leading works by historians that generally give a much more positive assessment of FDR. That's my source material. Yeah. the leading studies that have been done.
I rely a lot on people that knew FDR, that worked with him, like his attorney general, Francis Biddle, for example. And Biddle's a very interesting example. Biddle was against Japanese internment, as were many of FDR's advisers. he has some devastating things to say in his book about FDR's attitudes towards the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
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Chapter 3: What failures did FDR have regarding civil rights?
Harry Truman called him the coldest man he ever knew. Shortly before he died, he was interviewed. He said he was the coldest man he ever knew. He didn't care about you. He didn't care about me. But He brought the country into the 20th century. So there's a devastating thing to have said about you. I mean, FDR's reputation is the guy who cares. About the everyman, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So, yeah, I mean, we can apply the adage, if great times make great men and women, then the Great Depression, for one thing, was bound to produce a figure of considerable consequence. FDR meeting this moment, let's talk about the New Deal. Do we give him too much credit where that is concerned? I think you're going to say yes. Yeah, we give him too much credit.
I mean, typically in American history, depressions had lasted two to three years. Probably the most interesting parallel was in 1921-22. You had a downturn, which was actually more severe than the downturn between 1929 and 1930. But what happened? The United States got out of that pretty quickly. And unemployment was back down to like 3%, 4%.
Yet what we are talking about in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and I blame Hoover and Roosevelt for this, is their policies actually held back recovery. And as I mentioned, you still have double-digit unemployment. That's not a recovery. in 1941 as you're getting close to Pearl Harbor. And a lot of it has to do with policies that were geared to propping up prices, propping up wages.
But it was a heck of a- And the cost for that was a lot of unemployment. Yeah, it was a heck of a climb back, though, from the kind of unemployment we're talking about in the Great Depression. Again, we had very high unemployment in the recession of 1921, and we're down very quickly. Okay, interesting. Yeah, it does get up to 25% by 1933.
But it really is kind of just, it does go down, but then it goes back up again for a while because we have a big downturn in 1937 called the, nicknamed at the time, Depression No. 2, where it spikes back up again, then it goes back down. So it's still stuck.
By 1939, six years after the commencement of the New Deal, 9.5 million people, I'm underscoring what you just said here, 17.2% of the labor force remained officially unemployed. 1939. It's still, as you say, double-digit percentages of employment. The Dow Jones average doesn't pass its 1929 peak until 1952. The net private investment totaled minus $3.1 billion.
All told, we land again in a second recession as we're talking about 1937, which suggests that the New Deal created a rather fragile recovery. And as most people agree, it would take the World War II and the gigantic government stimulus that represents to really shore things up for real in a whole different way. So taking that, FDR's address of the Great Depression has been overblown, hasn't it?
Yeah. And back to the whole net private investment thing. A lot of that is because people were just, were scared. There was uncertainty. Yes. What was going to happen next? Because FDR is, you know, we got top marginal rates getting over 90% during parts of the Roosevelt administration. Yeah. Very high tax rates, a lot of attacks on business people.
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Chapter 4: Why was FDR's approach to Japanese internment controversial?
Was that unprecedented or had the federal government tried to do this past and then it was argued against and defeated or whatever? Was what FDR did such a breakthrough or not? I think it was a breakthrough, except for Hoover. Hoover is the guy that really got the ball rolling. Hoover did not like what had happened in the early 1920s. He'd been Secretary of Commerce.
He's pressing the president very hard to intervene more. And the president has this view, President Harding, that let's let everything readjust. Sort of the old view was, that there'd been a boom situation. There'd been over expansion and that we need to let that readjust back down. And Hoover had the view that we needed to hold up wages. He said, look, wages are the key to prosperity.
We had high wages in the 1920s. If we keep them high, we will have high wages now. The trouble with that theory was Yes, you can keep the wages up, but then employers are going to lay off people. And that's exactly what they did. So this is one of the biggest ironies of the Great Depression. Real wages. That's what the wage will actually purchase.
Real wages are actually higher in 1932 than they'd been in 1929. In 1929, you're at the height of the prosperity, or at least The prosperity is kind of ending at that point. Look before the stock market crash. Wages are actually lower in terms of what they really spend. Because you have big deflation. You have big price falls. But wages stay up.
In fact, Keynes, the British economist, he discusses this. This is not new with me. He says wages are sticky. They're sticky downward. What you used to have in previous depressions is the wages would readjust. They didn't in the Great Depression. In order to enact so much sweeping reform, FDR had to go around Congress and the states.
He had to use the executive orders, the power of the presidency we hear so much about in these days. He used it more than any previous president, correct? Oh, certainly more than any other previous president. And of course, we have the more notorious example of that would be Japanese internment.
But then the bank holiday, that was an executive order going off the gold standard initially, although he gets Congress later to agree to that. But there's a whirlwind of executive orders. And it's sad in a way because some of them that we most praise FDR for, that reasonable people are going to say he had to do this, like the bank holiday.
possibly were unnecessary because Canada, interestingly enough, FDR was well aware it was going on in Canada because he vacationed there, did not have a single bank failure during the Great Depression. Not a single one. Why? Because Canada had a system of banks. Their banks could branch across provincial lines.
So if you had a banking failure in Saskatchewan, right, because of wheat or whatever, that wouldn't bring down the whole banking system. If you had a banking system in part of Indiana, which was heavily dependent on, say, certain agricultural goods, the local economy, the whole thing would go down. But you allowed branching. And there were many proposals put forward to allow banks to branch.
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Chapter 5: What led to FDR's court-packing scheme in 1937?
It was devastating. And a lot of that was these smaller banks, local banks that were dependent on the local economy, and they couldn't diversify. They were not diversified for that reason. So questionable approach to dealing with the banking crisis. Let's put that on the list. Also questionable, the approach to the agricultural community, the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act was a... There were two big things for the first New Deal. That was the first wave called the first New Deal. One of them was the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the other one was the National Recovery Administration.
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration, as you indicated, what that was geared to is reducing production, encouraging farmers, paying farmers, giving them incentives for plowing crops under. People would say, you know, every third row plowed under. To killing livestock. Thousands of piglets were killed. This was the whole goal of the AAA was to reduce production.
And the irony is some people pointed out that this is all occurring at a time when you have people that, you know, starving. You're destroying foodstuffs. But that was the goal of this. Now, it had some unintended consequences. In the South, for example, they tried to reduce cotton production, for example. You still have these fairly big planters in the South.
And they were paid subsidies to reduce cotton production, given incentives to have less acreage being used to produce cotton. And so they were supposed to, these planters were supposed to share these benefits with with their tenants and sharecroppers, because a lot of poor whites and African Americans are tenants and sharecroppers. But that wasn't really enforced.
And so what they ended up doing in many cases is Expel them from the land. Pick them out. We don't need your labor anymore. We don't need as many sharecroppers. We don't need as many farm tenants because we don't need the goods. You know, we got to reduce production. And this was criticized by a lot of black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender. Yeah.
There's something else called the National Recovery Administration. This was news to me. I didn't even know about this agency, which had inspectors that had an unprecedented access to negatively impacting small business owners. Correct? This is an interesting agency. I don't know what they did. This is the most ambitious attempt to plan the economy, I would say, ever, even since then.
And what the NRA did is it was an agency that was self-regulation, I guess you could say, where you would have hundreds of NRA codes. They had codes for strippers, for example. Really? I guess it wouldn't be the strippers themselves. It would be the people who run burlesque enterprises. The proprietors of it. Yes, the proprietors.
And they would have things like, for example, the basic idea, again, was to raise prices and raise wages and minimize the numbers of hours that people could work. And so they would actually require this. They'd say, okay, we've decided the minimum wage for all workers is going to be this amount.
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Chapter 6: How did FDR's legacy shape American politics?
When the standard price set under the NRA, by his fellow tailors was 40 cents. He went to jail for charging 35 cents for pressing a suit when the official price was 40. That actually happened. And I was giving the example of the strippers, but they actually limited the numbers of strips per night in burlesque shows.
That, again, from a historian that is, you know, much more positive about FDR than me named William Luktenberg. He uncovered that information. Well, talk about an ironic way to address the Great Depression by the opposite of government stimulus. When we come back, let's talk about the 1937 court packing scheme, which was such an interesting time and also has such themes that resonate today.
Are you looking for the perfect podcast to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights? Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddy Pelling. And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre. From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore.
Feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit. We are speaking with professor and author David Beto about FDR's failures, as opposed to his so often spoken of successes.
David, 1937, we hear about this vaguely in the news these days, the idea of packing a court. And whenever it's discussed, we always hear FDR referred to. Why so? What was happening at that time? And what was the plan that he had in mind? Okay, well, I gave you these examples. They're called the First New Deal.
And the two biggies, these are sort of forgotten now, but these were the two big things that people thought about when they thought about the New Deal in 1933, the NRA and the AAA. These were both struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as an unconstitutional delegation of executive power to the president. They said, you're giving them too much power.
My God, you know, you're giving the president the power to set prices, set wages through these appointed boards in cooperation with big business. It became very unpopular among a lot of people. And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that, and struck both down as unconstitutional and struck down other issues. New Deal initiatives.
So FDR was very upset and his argument was, who are these nine old, you know, who are these members of the court, these old men on the court? Why are we listening to them? So FDR had this bright idea that he announces in 1937. He says, and he gives a speech and nobody took it seriously. I mean, no one took the argument seriously because here's what his argument was.
He said, you know, the courts are overworked. These judges have too much work and I want to make it easier for them. So we're going to increase the size of the court. I think he wanted to add like five members to the court. That was his argument. And nobody took that seriously. And even a lot of FDR supporters said, well, why not be honest about it? Because you're upset at the court's rulings.
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Chapter 7: What role did the media play in FDR's presidency?
and the right, and the Senate is able to defeat Korpak. Interesting. And FDR makes it his main priority in 1937 when the head of the NAACP is going to him quite desperately and saying, we need a bill to do something about these lynchings that have been occurring, a bill that had been proposed year after year. And FDR's priority is Court packing.
He doesn't even really do much New Deal stuff in 1937. He's focused on this issue so heavily that it just dominates everything else, including he dominates anything having to do with foreign policy as well in 1937. The Supreme Court keeps resisting him.
These four conservative justices that are really the block, he wants to kind of address that and outflank that by the excuse, really, of they've got too much work. He's going to add a new member to the court for every member that's over 70 years old. Did I hear that right? Yeah, basically, that's what he wants to do. OK.
And again, this is a little dig at them because he's saying, well, they're all people, they're all old and they need they need help. That's his argument. But really what he was up to was trying to get these things passed that were going to run into tangles that he didn't want to have. But ironically, the Democratic Congress rejects this and isn't going to back him on this idea.
And that was the end of that. Right. Yeah, that was the end of it. And part of the reason it was the end of it is, although this is even happening before this, but people on the, some of the justices are changing their positions. Also, you know, you're getting, you know, they're starting to die. And they're starting to retire.
And by the end of his administration, I think he's appointed nearly the entire court by the end of his administration. Stick around for four terms or at least three terms. You're going to have your chance to do that. What is interesting, though, is FDR's overreach was so great that some of these court decisions, sometimes forgotten, were unanimous.
Like the decision to strike down the NRA was unanimous, including the liberals on the court. And FDR was like, what's going on here? I thought these people were on my side. And a lot of them, though, were more divided, 5-4. But some of them were unanimous.
Well, you're speaking to a really important subplot of this whole thing, which is, you know, how much pushback was there at the time in the 30s against these reforms? And there was quite a bit.
And because of the way this story has reported, been reported over the years, and I am part of this, I have often spoken in these terms, very general, glossy terms of how great this was, that we were able to emerge from this Great Depression. And we all credit, you know, knee jerk towards FDR for being the guy at the at the scene.
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Chapter 8: How should we evaluate FDR's overall impact on American history?
And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit. David, one of the most amazing things about FDR to this day is that he's elected to presidency four times. We did a whole episode on this. I invite people to look for it. It's, you know, how controversial this really was for FDR to challenge the George Washington rule, which is you never go past two terms.
But he breaks that precedent. And mostly that's because of World War II, right? Well, that's what FDR would say. But I think FDR liked the job. He wanted to stay in the job. And everybody... There were younger people that had similar views, but he was always dissatisfied with all the alternatives. And it's interesting, in 1940, and to some extent, 1944, FDR keeps everybody waiting.
And he's telling all of his close advisors, he's saying, I don't want to run. I want to step down. I just want to go back to Hyde Park. There's a very close advisor named James Farley who he's telling that to. And Farley wants to run for president himself. He was an FDR confidant. Farley is my source on this because he has several meetings with FDR because he wants to run for president.
So he's going to FDR trying to get a sense of, you know, are you going to run or not? And FDR is saying, I don't want to run. I don't want to run. But he wouldn't make the announcement. He would never make the announcement. And then... Finally, FDR is going to the convention, and FDR says, well, what should I say? What should I say to these people at the convention?
And Farley tells him, tell them what General Sherman said. You will not run, and if nominated, you will not serve. You know, you're not running, right? And FDR said, I couldn't do that. But then he gives a speech to the delegates where he said, I don't want to run. I hope you pick somebody else. But it's your choice as the delegates. And the delegates were just standing there at the convention.
This is at the convention, very different than today, looking dumbfounded. Like, what do we do? FDR has told us, nominate whoever we want. But nobody was really running because FDR discouraged them all from going out there because they weren't sure what was going to happen. And then the voice from the sewers came. This is called the voice from the sewers.
The Democrats had hired a guy who was, he was a sewer commissioner. He was in the basement of the convention hall with a microphone that went into the convention hall, loudspeakers. And he starts saying on the microphone, you know, he gets the word, we want Roosevelt. We want Roosevelt. Michigan wants Roosevelt.
And then the delegates start to join in, hearing this voice from the sewers, and they all holler and holler, and FDR is nominated overwhelmingly. Yes. This is what he does. And then he gives a speech and he says, I've had many sleepless nights worried about this. I don't want to do this. But like a good soldier. I'm going to serve. I will do it. But I'm reluctant. And it was all orchestrated.
It was just shamelessly orchestrated. But that's how he pulls it off the first time. And the second time is 1944, when the extenuating circumstances, war's not over. So he'll get, you know, Democrats going to nominate him, but his health is disaster. FDR as a incompetent doctor who was very good, had some medicine to treat FDR sinuses.
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