Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is my friend David T. Bateau, he keeps the blog Liberty and Power at the History News Network website.
Welcome to the show, David, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, how are you?
I'm doing great, and actually I should also tell them that you're the author of Black Maverick, the life of T.R.
M. Howard, I didn't get that exactly right, did I?
T.R.
M. Howard's fight for civil rights and economic power.
That's right, excellent book, that's a very interesting story, I really ought to read more biographies, that's how you really learn history, you know?
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have the same demand that my other books had, probably because I guess people figure, well, who is this guy?
Why is he important?
And that's an issue, I guess, that it was a lot of fun writing it, but I just don't think it got the kind of attention that another book like Taxpayers in Revolt or From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State would get now, but it was a lot of fun writing it.
Well, that's true, but you know, the lesson to keep in mind there is that history's not over yet, and that book is going to be certainly part of the legacy of the history of the, I think even the late 19th, but certainly the 20th century there, and it'll never go away.
The state of Mississippi has voted to rename a street after Dr. Howard, so we're doing a dedication ceremony in September, and we tried to get Michael Steele to come, and I made sure to, in my email to Steele's people, to praise what he said on Afghanistan.
It doesn't look like it worked out, though, but they gave consideration to it.
Oh, yeah, that's what backfired on you.
Remember, he retracted that as soon as it got criticized.
I was told that it meant a lot to him, so.
Oh, really?
We'll see.
And they reiterated that when they said no, that they appreciated my comments, so whatever.
Yeah, well, maybe it was the abortion question or something got him.
Anyway, it is an excellent book.
For people who are interested in the history of the civil rights movement, which is a lot of people, I know it is, especially in Austin, Texas, where, you know, a lot of the listenership of this show is, this one really goes at the top of the list.
Very good stuff.
And tell them the exact title again, I'm going to screw it up again.
Black Maverick, TRM Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.
And if you want to go to a website, it's just called trmhoward.com, and it gives a good description of who the guy was and why it's important, why it would be appealing for libertarians.
Not necessarily a libertarian himself, but why a guy like me, you know, who writes libertarian oriented work would be so interested in this guy.
And once you read the book and know a little bit about him, I think, you know, then people will agree.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So now let's talk about what a scumbag Franklin Roosevelt was, president for life, wannabe Joe Stalin.
I guess he didn't really have the power to carry out plans that grandiose, but he sure would have liked to if he could have, huh?
I think he would have.
And I don't think he had that power, because when he ultimately did try to pack the Supreme Court and do some other things, there was a backlash against him.
There was still enough, even though the Democrats were an overwhelming majority, there was enough of a backlash that he had to back down, even from his own party.
I can't imagine that kind of thing happening today, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Wouldn't it be funny if Barack Obama started packing the Supreme Court?
I could see it.
Well, now.
So, well, let's stay on FDR's character a little bit there.
You know, I don't know if you know about this or if you probably have a better footnote than me.
There was a piece in FDR, My Exploited Father-in-Law, years ago, by C.B.
Dahl, that FDR was hell-bent on putting U.N. headquarters not in New York City, but in Hyde Park, New York, near his place, so that then he could be the first Secretary General of the world.
And then he fell dead in his porridge one day.
That seems believable to me.
I never heard that story.
And, of course, Eleanor had some sort of, I forget what her connection was, it was sort of an informal ambassadorship of some sort, connected with the U.N., I believe.
So, you know, that makes sense.
Although I don't know if he believed he could live forever, and the guy was in terrible health.
Maybe he thought he could survive and continue on, but, you know, all I've read is that the guy was pretty much living on borrowed time, and had been for a long time, and it was covered up.
Right.
But maybe he believed somehow he'd go on.
Right.
You know, yeah, exactly.
I mean, if that really is true, that he was planning on trying to run the U.N., then that certainly speaks to his megalomania, when, like you say, you know, I guess, or you didn't say this part, but it is part of the story, he couldn't even go to his own fourth-term convention.
Like Francis C. Deck says, he was too sick.
He must have known he would have never lived to be the president of the world, but he still apparently wouldn't admit it to himself.
Well, he didn't admit it to his vice president.
I mean, this is, for those people that, you know, see him as a great public servant, why do, you know, why does he keep his vice president completely in the dark?
Why doesn't he tell the guy what's going on?
You know, so maybe that does indicate that FDR thought he could survive and continue on to torment us for many more years.
Yeah.
Now, look, I learned about the Red Scares in school.
I learned about the first Red Scare after World War I, and then I learned about the second Red Scare after World War II, but I never learned about any Brown Scares.
What's a Brown Scare, David?
Well, this is a term that a historian named Leo Rebuffalo wrote a book called The Old Christian Right came up with.
And basically, you know, brown is the color of fascism.
So red is the color of communism.
So if you wanted to smear somebody during the McCarthy era, at least this is the, you know, this is what did happen, what's emphasized, you would often say, well, you know, you signed a petition, or you knew a communist, or, you know, you're vaguely leftist, therefore you're a communist, and you smeared them with that, with being a red, unfairly, in many cases.
Well, the same argument Rebuffalo said was going on here, where a lot of people were branded as fascist, who were not, in fact, fascist, and there was a kind of fascist baiting.
I frankly don't like the term Brown Scare, simply because it's, people kind of look at you like, what the hell are you talking about?
And I'm working on a book, which is going to weave all this together.
And I came up, I was originally thinking of having the Brown Scare in the title, but like people look at me, what, what are you talking about?
And the Chicago Tribune did an editorial in the 1940s attacking Roosevelt's smearing of opponents and called it the New Deal witch hunt, and I said, there's my title.
So I'm sort of using that term now, because I think people understand it, and it's just a lot more concise.
And now they didn't just go around and smear people and say, you're a fascist, they put them on trial for being in opposition to Roosevelt's government.
Well, they put them on trial.
A little, little told story is the degree to which they audited their, their taxes.
I find this over and over and over again of where Roosevelt and other Democrats are, are, you know, auditing income taxes.
There was an inquisitorial investigation called the Black Committee in the 1930s that got permission from the Roosevelt administration to investigate people that had opposed a lobbying bill, and part of that investigation included looking at private telegrams, we can tell, I can tell you about that, also getting access to their tax returns, and this was granted by the Roosevelt administration.
There were other committees that came along later that were not pushing the New Deal agenda and wanted also to get access to income tax returns of specific people being investigated, and Roosevelt refused.
And of course, we see him working in tandem with the Secretary of Treasury, repeatedly saying, I want this guy's taxes looked at, I want a tax audit, that kind of thing.
The trial, but you've also got a series of other investigations, lobbying investigations.
And you, of course, as you mentioned, you had a big sedition trial during the war, the largest in American history.
Now, we'll have to hold it there.
We'll come back with David Beto and talk more about FDR's persecution of the innocent.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with my friend David T. Beto, he is the author, co-author with his wife, Linda Royce Beto, of Black Maverick, T.R.
M. Howard's fight for civil rights and economic power, which is awesome, and I highly recommend it.
Now, David, is it okay if I keep you until the top of the hour, because I've got more questions than we've got time.
Okay, great.
So, before we get into Rumley and some of the other examples of these bogus show trials, I wanted to ask a little bit, because we were talking about the Brown scare and whatever, they wanted to call anybody without power who opposed Roosevelt a neo-Nazi or an actual Nazi, I guess that was before anybody would be a neo-Nazi, but, you know, it's sort of like the thing with the Red Scare, right, where at the beginning, the second Red Scare anyway, at the beginning they kind of went after the big foundations and the big banks and, you know, the role of Chase Manhattan and the Bank for International Settlements and making sure that Lenin always had all the capital he needed to enslave more people and that kind of stuff, and then it ended up devolving into, hey, let's persecute an army dentist because, you know, his cousin is a communist, or used to be, or some ridiculous kind of thing, and so I wonder whether, when we talk about the Brown Scare, I don't even know if you accept that premise, but anyway, that's me, and then, but when we talk about the Brown Scare, you know, never mind the lowest member of the America First Committee or something like that, well, what about some of those same bankers?
For example, there's a book called The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer that says that America almost became a fascist dictatorship in the 1930s, that there was a plot between some mostly Wall Street people to put General Smedley Butler in the White House as the co-president and basically do a military coup and take over the country.
Well, I'm not sure if I buy that.
I, you know, I haven't done a lot of investigation of that, but what I've seen is a lot of this is just sort of innuendo.
I'm not sure I buy there was an actual fascist plot to seize the White House, or that if there was, that it was a very serious, serious issue.
Now, there is an argument, though, that some of the Brown Scare in some sense started for not entirely nefarious reasons.
In the 1930s, there was an investigation of lobbies by Hugo Black that we can talk more about.
But his original goal, stated goal, was transparency.
He said, well, we should find out who was opposing, you know, who was lobbying against various New Deal programs.
We should identify who they are.
The public need to know that kind of argument.
And so there is that kind of argument made of transparency, but very rapidly becomes, you know, goes much beyond that.
They do an effort to intimidate people.
And frankly, I think that was part of it from the beginning.
But I think there was this there was a legitimate argument made it made at the beginning.
Well, didn't you tell me one time before that one of the main guys who pushed this story of the alleged coup d'etat plot turned out to be the only man who has ever proven to actually be a KGB agent in the American Congress?
Yeah, that's Martin Dickstein, who was a congressman from New York and was the first head of what later became the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Interestingly enough, and we know, Really?
We have evidence that he, yeah, he was the predecessor to Dyes.
And we have evidence that we, you know, it's not, you know, it's, it's totally, you know, KGB archives, that when they were able to go into them, they found this guy was on the take from had been for many years.
And so he's the only congressman, you know, we know of that was actually on getting money from the Soviet Union.
And what exactly was his role in the, the coup plot story?
Well, again, I haven't, you know, I haven't looked a lot of his specific role, but he, he certainly was an anti-Nazi hunter and saw himself that way.
So from the early 30s on, he is saying we need to investigate German immigrants to the United States who were involved in, you know, various organizations, Italian immigrants, we need to investigate sort of alleged Nazi plots, right wing plots.
So he was very much pushing that kind of agenda.
We need investigations of these subversive elements.
Right now, his role in investigating the, you know, the specific, you know, alleged plot, you know, to take the White House, I don't know enough about that, but that is probably an issue I need to be more up on than I am.
There's so much out here.
I was just overwhelmed by the, by the amount of material that has, that is out there and that has not really been looked at by historians.
So it is overwhelming.
One could write several books about this.
Well, that is an angle I need to look at more.
Yeah, yeah, indeed.
I mean, the 1930s, geez, you could spend your whole life just reading about the 1930s, you know, definitely more than a decade.
But Roosevelt's dirty tricks or Roosevelt's investigations or all of that stuff.
Yeah.
And how controversial it was and how much opposition there was to a lot of this stuff.
Right.
It was interesting.
See, that's the thing that goes untold is, you know, just how, I mean, I guess they tell us what a revolution the New Deal was, but it's always spun in the way of like, here was a rich plutocrat top hat wearing type who turned his back on, on the betters of society and did the right thing by way of the little guy that demanded that the government finally step in and help him.
And so there's so much of that spin built into it that the story of just how much of a revolution in power took place gets lost in the, in the narrative.
And, and just as you just said, how much opposition there was to this.
Yeah.
And eventually some people on the left, some liberals started to turn against a lot of this stuff, but why were they so slow?
And a lot of it has to be that they thought, well, they thought exactly what you said.
This is, you know, Roosevelt's trying to do good.
He's, he's got good intentions.
And so they overlooked a lot of things and continue to overlook them.
But a few of them eventually started to question this.
A lot of this didn't really start happening until the early fifties, though, when they were interested in, in saying, well, you know, we're, we're defenders of civil liberties across the board.
And so they were, you know, because, you know, you had McCarthy and so forth, it led to some people on the left to eventually start questioning what they had been doing and what they had been sanctioning in terms of these investigations of people on the right.
All right.
So now let's talk about this, because this is, I guess, the old right, as, as Justin Armando calls it, is, means this loose coalition of, I guess, mostly classical liberals, like you're talking about, who were opposed to the New Deal and World War II.
Some of them, I guess, were more anti-New Deal.
Some of them were more anti-World War II.
But this is basically the, the collection of right-wing liberals that they call the old right.
I would agree with that, with an amendment, in that there were a lot of progressives, people that remained progressives, that were part of that coalition, that, that turned against certain elements of FDR's new centralization of power.
A case, you know, example that really comes to mind is Burt Wheeler, who was a leading opponent of U.S. entry into the war and a leading opponent of Roosevelt, but had very strong New Deal credentials, somewhat to the left of the New Deal, really.
So you had some people like that, but I would agree in broad terms with what you've said.
And so we're, and these were the people that FDR was going after with his so-called Justice Department, then?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, so let's start off.
We still have just maybe two minutes before the break here, if I'm lucky.
To start off, tell us about who this guy, Rumley or Roomley, tell us who he is, and we'll talk about what happened to him when we get back.
Oh, he should be held up, I think, as a, is a great hero in standing up to government power, you know, regardless of where this guy may have stood on particular issues.
Rumley was a very wealth, had been a very wealthy man, ran a, started a tractor company, ran the New York Mail, which was a newspaper in New York.
Anyway, he was a progressive.
He'd been a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt.
But like a lot of those guys, interestingly enough, he turned against the New Deal in the 1930s because he thought it was destroying the free market and centralizing power.
Well, Rumley teamed up with Gannett, Frank Gannett, who was the publisher, famous publisher of, you know, and now we have the Gannett newspaper change, and they formed a committee for constitutional government to fight FDR's plan to pack the Supreme Court.
And I hear your song coming up, so I guess I could finish the story after that.
Okay, right on.
So now we know who he is.
We'll find out what happened to him and some others.
Dave T. Beto, right after this, y'all.
Anti-war radio.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is my friend David T. Beto.
He keeps the blog Liberty and Power at the History News Network website.
And we're talking about the so-called Brown scare, the New Deal era witch hunt.
And particularly now we're on the story of a guy named Rumley, who on the day that Franklin Roosevelt announced his court packing plan, that was, he said, oh, so the Supreme Court won't go along with saying whatever I do is constitutional, then we'll just increase the number of people on the court, which the Constitution allows the Congress and the president to decide that.
And we'll just increase the number of people on the court to 19, and we'll appoint all loyal New Deal Democrats, and they'll do whatever I say.
And on that day, this guy founded an organization to try to put a stop to the madness.
Is that about where we left off, David?
That's about right.
Roosevelt felt very puffed up at this point because he had the largest majority I think any party has had since, I don't know, maybe early 19th century or something like that.
And he felt like, okay, I've got the Supreme Court.
They struck down the National Recovery Act, the Agricultural Justice Administration.
I'm gonna pack them, pack the court.
And of course, he said stuff like, they're overworked, they're too old, I'm gonna help them out.
Nobody believed it.
And there was a reaction against it.
And the key force in fighting it was this Committee for Constitutional Government.
Under Rumley, he was a manager, and that provided the money.
And it had really the first significant direct mail campaign in American history and was instrumental, I think, in defeating the core packing plan, and a later plan to reorganize government.
It was also instrumental in defeating that.
And the New Dealers were extremely angry about this.
There was a guy named Sherman Minton in the Senate who was the most loyal New Dealer you could find in the Senate, who had pushed the core packing plan.
And Minton said, we're gonna investigate this organization, this lobbying organization.
And that's what he did as.
He was head of a lobbying committee.
His predecessor had been Hugo Black, the Supreme Court Justice, who'd been a U.S. Senator.
Briefly, Black had used extremely inquisitorial methods, including seizure of private telegrams, copies of private telegrams, which Western Union was required to keep by the government.
He seized these in dragnet subpoenas, private telegrams, and used these against political opponents.
It was the most outrageous violations of privacy you could find.
So, Minton was his protege.
Minton was now chair of the committee.
He said, I'm gonna investigate Rumley.
He sent investigators down with a dragnet subpoena to the offices of the Committee for Constitutional Government, started to go through files, copying files.
And these dragnet subpoenas, man, you could just walk around and look for anything, right?
And that's what he did.
And Rumley was there, called his lawyers, said, I don't think they should be able to do this, and basically kicked them out of his office.
He said, I will not cooperate with this investigation.
Well, Minton's reaction is, he says, well, we're gonna cite him for contempt and all of this.
But as he was doing that, he overplayed his hand and called for a law to ban any newspaper article, a newspaper article that was not true from being published.
They have a federal law.
Of course, who would determine that would be a federal government?
There was a big reaction against this from the media backlash, and Minton was discredited, and his investigation collapsed.
Minton, for his reward, though, like Black, for his loyalty in the lobbying investigation, was later elevated to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
So these two guys were both brought up to the Supreme Court as a reward for their loyalty to the New Deal.
And I think that's the key reason that Black was sent up, even though people knew, widely known, that he'd been a Ku Klux Klan member.
Roosevelt overlooked that and said, I'm gonna reward this guy.
And then Truman rewarded Minton and put him up on the court, too.
So this all continues.
There are a series of these investigations.
They culminate in 1950, when, basically, Rumley is called in before a U.S. House committee, and he is told, okay, you sell books.
Your organization sells books.
What he did was he said to people who wanted to contribute, under $500, he said, why don't you contribute in the form of purchasing books in bulk, and then we will distribute these books.
And the book he used was John T. Flynn's book.
He republished it.
Flynn's book called The Road Ahead.
Flynn was a great sort of classical, liberal, anti-war guy, and he distributed this book around.
The committee distributed this book.
Well, Rumley's called in.
He's asked by the committee, he says, tell us who purchased these books from your organization.
Rumley said, I will not, on First Amendment grounds.
He was cited for contempt.
He was convicted by court, and this conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court.
Ironically, Hugo Black was one of the guys that wrote the opinion overturning the conviction.
And so Black is an example of a guy, I think, who'd been a real witch hunter.
And he kind of eventually sort of said, hey, wait a minute.
He never really admitted I'd been a witch hunter, but he basically overturned a committee contempt citation for basically the same kind of thing he was doing earlier.
Right.
Well, ambition must be made to counteract the ambition.
Well, so now how widespread was this?
You talked about the IRS persecutions and whatever.
Did people actually go to jail on false charges of being in it with Hitler?
It's not like they prosecuted the people over at Union Banking Company or anything.
Well, yeah, there were people that went to jail for income tax evasion.
People like the publisher, I believe he went to jail.
I'm not sure about that 100 percent, but I think he did.
Walter Annenberg, who was a leading publisher in Philadelphia that was opposing Roosevelt, and he had his taxes looked into.
But yeah, well, the people that went to jail during the war were in the sedition trial.
Well, actually, they didn't go to jail.
They were prosecuted for sedition.
And the trial ultimately collapsed because there was again a public reaction against it.
It was a circus atmosphere.
The judge died.
That didn't help.
And the whole thing just sort of fell apart eventually because it was the largest mass sedition trial in American history.
And the government charged that about 30 assorted right wingers were part of a worldwide Nazi conspiracy to encourage subversion in the armed forces and overthrow the U.S. government.
And these guys didn't even know each other.
You know, these are a bunch of crackpots, by and large, who didn't even know each other.
They came from different parts of the country.
They were taken and brought to Washington for the sedition trial, which was dubious enough, right?
A mass trial.
And it fell apart.
But the goal of the government obviously was to throw them in jail.
Well, and also to put Orange Alert on TV or over everybody's fireplace address or whatever.
Right.
Yeah.
And there were out during this time about the plot to overthrow the government, about, oh, you know, Nazi conspiracy.
There was a book called Undercover that came out that was a smear, a smear book that was a bestseller.
And so you have a lot of these investigators that are working with the government, private investigators that are working with the government to smear people, to to to to, you know, to encourage this kind of brown scare.
Here's the thing, though.
A lot of times conspiracy theories are true.
And of course, it turned out that when the Soviet files came out, that there, of course, were a bunch of KGB agents and pro Moscow people all throughout the government and didn't make Joe McCarthy a good guy, but it did make him correct, you know.
So what about the idea?
I mean, obviously, there must have been some pro Hitler people in America.
Yeah, there were.
And some of these guys are the ones who are actually pro Hitler.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
They were being some of them.
But but but the government's case was that these guys were in a part of a coordinated conspiracy to specifically to overthrow the government.
And yeah, you can find some of these guys made, you know, positive statements about Hitler here and there, although mainly the people like that are connected in with the boond.
And they were not really being prosecuted.
They were not the targets of these of this prosecution.
Now, when it came to the anti World War Two movement, people often say that, oh, well, you know, that whole thing was basically at least in effect, you know, objectively pro Hitler, if not outright pro Hitler and that kind of thing.
But I wonder during the politics of the day, did the didn't not the America First Committee make sure that anybody who was actually pro Nazi was kicked the hell out of there rather than, you know, have some coalition with people who were even then way beyond the pale, right?
Oh, yeah.
In fact, I've got letters from, you know, that were sent to John T. Flynn from a guy named Gerald L. K. Smith, who was kind of a fascist type.
I guess in some sense he was sort of pro Hitler.
And, you know, Flynn writes and back says, we don't want I don't want anything to do with you.
I don't want to work with you on anything.
You're you know, people like you are part of the reason that we as an organization had such difficulty, because it was always an attempt to smear them.
So yeah, I think the American First Committee was tried to be diligent about keeping people like that out of the organization.
Well, you know, I think I even played Charles Lindbergh speech, maybe on the show that you that you gave me the or directed me to the audio of it.
And there's a part where the crowd starts yelling, you know, it their version of USA, USA, like crowds do at political rallies to shout down dissent.
And you're saying you're pretty sure from, you know, other contexts that that was, you know, anti semitic stuff being shouted out, and then the whole crowd drowning them out with their version of USA to keep any any of the politically incorrect stuff out of their message completely.
They were doing that all along.
Contrary to the myth that we're brought with here.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Yeah.
I think so.
Hey, you want to stay another segment?
I got time.
I'd love to write on I'm talking to my friend David Bateau.
He's a professor at the University of Alabama.
Hey, everybody.
It's anti war radio.
We're starting our three here.
Talking to my friend David Bateau, Professor Bateau from the University of Alabama.
He keeps the blog, liberty and power at the History News Network.
That's hnn.us slash blogs slash four.
And we're talking about the evil that was president for life, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the revolution that he waged in Washington, DC, and his persecution of those who tried to stop him.
And now, David, let's talk a little bit about a little bit more about the anti war movement leading up to World War Two.
Of course, it's hard to get anti war movement going when Democrats are in power, right?
It seems certainly that's the case in our time.
Is that the same thing in the 1930s?
Yeah, I mean, because a lot of people that might normally have been sympathetic to it were so pro Roosevelt that they, you know, they weren't they weren't they weren't going to make that leap.
You also have sort of a division in a way too, because the communists were anti war at certain times.
And in other times, they were incredible warmongers.
These interesting divisions.
Yeah, that's a really funny little anecdote or side story there.
Why don't you tell that for the people who aren't familiar?
I like it.
Well, in in the late 30s, the communists were very much into what they always always the main goal of the party was to defend the Soviet Union.
It was a puppet of the Soviet Union.
That's where it got the American Communist Party got its money.
So originally, they were very much, you know, the democracies must stand up to Hitler, etc, etc, right?
Well, then after the 1939, the Hitler Stalin, non aggression pact came in.
And of course, they cooperated in dividing up Poland and in the Baltic republics and so forth, the communists suddenly turned on a dime, it almost overnight and said, Well, now, we need to stay out of this.
This is a traditional imperialist war.
They had slogans like, the yanks aren't coming.
Well, they switch again, in 1941.
In June, when the Soviet Union, when Nazi Germany invade the Soviet Union, and they become the most pro war party imaginable.
And also, the communists during the war, this little known story, were the ones really pushing the hardest for sedition investigations, for prosecutions, for any, any, basically repressing any sort of anti anti war sentiment, not only among from coming from the right, but from pacifists.
And so the party was intensely pro war, even before Pearl Harbor saying we need to get in this and anyone that criticizes this war as a fascist, and they need to be thrown in jail, basically.
Well, you know, there's a collection, I'm sure you've read the collection of essays by Garrett Garrett for the Saturday Evening Post entitled defend America first, his anti war essays, and really, the thing that's most striking about it to me is that just in the plain English, the way he calls out exactly what's going to happen to America if we get into this war, and how, you know, last time we were somewhat able to demilitarize, but after this one, we won't, we will have a military government in effect from now on.
And that really is basically exactly what came true, right?
It's not since September 11.
It's since Pearl Harbor that we've had this permanent national security state and all the welfare recipients known as the military industrial complex that go along with it.
Well, a lot of criticism is very prescient, but understandable.
A lot of these, you know, World War One had been a recent memory.
And everyone remembered all the abuses of civil liberties and what had happened during that war.
And of course, there'd been a big reaction against it.
And now, you know, people like her to say, well, the other side is recognize this as well.
And they're not going to let this retrenchment happen again.
All right, we're going to go to war.
And we're going to, you know, we're going to continue this national security state after the war.
So they were right.
That's what happened.
Yeah, you know, I actually was reading George Carlin's memoir.
And he was saying the best time in America in his lifetime was between 1945.
And say 1951, or whatever, I guess 1950, before Truman, you know, conjured up the Cold War, really, there was sort of a tiny bit of period of return to normalcy.
But then they made sure to switch it back the other way again.
Yeah, I think there was a brief time where you did have substantial demobilization.
And this has been written about you had an economic, the beginnings of the postwar economic prosperity began in that period of 45, 46, 47.
People on the left were predicting the depression, they said, you cannot end this spending.
But basically, Truman and the administration, I mean, the public was overwhelmingly we need retrenchment.
And they gave it to them.
So there was a big cut back in government spending.
Now, again, you still have troops in, in Western Europe, you still had military was much larger than it had been before the war.
You still had a draft for a while, you still had some price control.
But there was a big cutback, which all the pro new dealers warned about and said, we're going to have a depression, we didn't have a postwar depression, I think, in part, because there was a mass massive retrenchment in size of government is compared to the way it had been during the war.
And then they said, Hey, look at all these tax receipts, we got to spend this money on something.
Hey, we just finished saving the Soviet Union and helping them conquer all of Eastern Europe, maybe we could have a containment policy to waste this money on.
Yeah, yeah.
And there was a big war scare during the Truman administration, where, in fact, there's been a lot of interesting work done about that, about this war mentality that was stoked up.
And, and, of course, you get the beginning of the second Red Scare during that period as well, doesn't begin with McCarthy, he's not even really a player on that stage till about 1950.
But before that, you do get the second Red Scare.
And some of this is Truman's reaction to that, I think.
Well, David, you're a historian, why don't you tell me, if you think I'm crazy to say that really, George Washington, and even Abraham Lincoln are dead, and that really, Franklin Roosevelt is America's founder now.
And that, that was really, you know, when they talk about the various revolutions within the forum, the Lincoln administration, the Wilson one, George W. Bush, it really was this guy that changed America forever, for the worse.
And he's the patron saint of people that want to, you know, increase the power of the state domestically.
It is Franklin Roosevelt.
I mean, Wilson, we could say is important in that Roosevelt was really kind of an extension, a cynical kind of extension of Wilsonianism.
But Wilson, everyone knows that Wilson did so many horrible things, at least that, that maybe 30 years ago, people would have cited him, but they don't cite him anymore.
They cite Roosevelt.
Yeah, only Max Boot.
Yeah, well, and that's funny, too, that the Roosevelt way is a cynical version of that horrible Wilsonian file of police statism and, and hundreds of thousands killed for nothing and all the rest.
And it's see, it's not just the, you know, government as savior in every social situation or whatever, it's the government as the savior of the world.
It's the just war because every war is World War Two theory.
That's the one we operate under right now.
Well, it's interesting about Wilson, I don't want to defend him.
But you do see during World War One, occasionally, Wilson will have misgivings about certain certain excesses, right?
He usually doesn't do anything about them.
You know, he'll write letters occasionally to his underlings saying, well, do you really want to go this far in this case, but then he'll back off.
Roosevelt has no such misgivings during the war.
In fact, Roosevelt is pushing people under him to go a lot further than they maybe would have preferred, such as Francis Biddle as Attorney General, who I don't think was, you know, who did, he did see himself as avoiding what he thought were the excesses of World War One, and was a little bit more restrained.
But Roosevelt is constantly going to Biddle and say, when are we going to have these, when are we going to have these prosecutions?
When are we going to go after Robert McCormick, who was really his main enemy, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, which was very anti-ideal and very anti-war.
And Roosevelt is constantly putting pressure on people to go after them.
So it's a little bit of a reverse of World War One in that sense.
Yeah, or an extension of it to its absurdity.
And then here we are living the results out generations later.
All right, everybody, that is David T. Beto.
He keeps the blog Liberty and Power at the History News Network, hnn.us.
Thanks so much, Dave, for your time.
Thank you.
Goodbye.
All right, everybody, we will be back.
We've got the lady whose name I can't pronounce from the Icelandic Congress thing, Parliament, maybe.
