Roosevelt’s Vicious Assault on the Bill of Rights

David Beito is to be commended for undertaking this monumental project. 

 By Mary Grabar December 4, 2023 @ American Spectator

The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance By David T. Beito (Independent Institute, 404 pages, $27)

James MacGregor Burns, one of the old school New Deal giants in Franklin D. Roosevelt scholarship, in his 1956 classic, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, spends several pages describing how FDR adoration fell off after FDR’s strategy of throwing the alphabet-macaroni-on-the-wall New Deal programs failed to spur the economy. Burns, like FDR, could not see merit in the resulting criticism. FDR was a pragmatic centrist who saved capitalism by reforming it, both FDR and Burns insisted. 

Burns presented FDR as a victim, who understandably, because “the hatred on the right seemed so bitter and illogical,” wanted to “respond in kind.” 

He revealed that “[i]n August 1935 the President somehow got hold of a message from a Hearst executive to Hearst editors and to its news service: ‘The Chief instructs that the phrase Soak the Successful be used in all references to the Administration’s tax program instead of the phrase Soak the Thrifty hitherto used, also he wants the words Raw Deal used instead of New Deal.’”

“Roosevelt was indignant,” wrote Burns. “He even had a press release prepared—‘The President believes that it is only fair to the American people to apprise them of certain information which has come to him.’”.............To Read More.....