Liars (14 page)

Historians Burton and Anita Folsom wrote that the OPA “issued more than 600 rent and price regulations on more than 8 million articles, with 3,100 investigators and 700 attorneys, plus support staff” by 1945. “Snoopers” submitted hundreds of thousands of cases to the courts alleging
illegal black-market transactions.

Economic liberty wasn't the only thing languishing.

The Office of War Information (OWI) published and distributed pro-FDR propaganda worldwide and promoted the efforts of the Soviet Communist “ally” in Europe. In addition to the politicized messaging in its hundreds of radio programs, daily cables, recordings, and movie shorts, OWI also printed millions of pro-FDR pamphlets
in the run-up to the 1944 election. News that might have reflected poorly on
Roosevelt was often suppressed.

The FCC and OWI took control of foreign-language radio, often installing un-vetted immigrants with “questionable” (read: Leftist) political views to broadcast to millions of people. The OWI, in conjunction with the FCC, forced out those whose views did not comport with theirs. Eugene L. Carey, a member of the Congressional Select Committee Investigating the FCC, noted that “a real Gestapo was created and a lawless enterprise was launched.” OWI also worked with Treasury to use the airwaves to emphasize the patriotic duty of paying taxes. The theme? “
Taxes to beat the Axis.”

More chilling was Roosevelt's use of illegal wiretapping. Under cover of war, the president authorized agents to bug the phones of not just aliens who threatened national security but also “potential political enemies” and
even “political friends.” Roosevelt's spying targets included former President Herbert Hoover, 1940 Republican presidential opponent Wendell Willkie,
and critical journalists.

FDR asked Treasury Secretary Morgenthau to run a tax audit on the
New York Times
, among other IRS investigations FDR ordered
on behalf of actual opponents. He also sicced the heads of various agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Justice, on several newspaper publishers in a failed witch hunt for evidence of Nazi ties.

FDR's internment of almost one hundred twenty thousand Japanese, most of whom were American, was particularly brazen. It violated the rights of habeas corpus, protection against search and seizure, and protection of property. Meanwhile, Germans and Italians—the latter of whom
consisted of six hundred thousand noncitizens—were never interned en masse.

Roosevelt, however, was really just following the progressive playbook, responding to his innate fear of people different from himself. Consistent with the progressive eugenicists who came before him and
held disdain for “inferior” peoples, Roosevelt had historically argued that
Japanese immigrants were inassimilable on a biological basis. The Germans could be excused—Wilson had, after all,
praised the “Teutonic race”—but not the Japanese. The distinction was made based purely on race. Roosevelt's irrational fear led to the rounding up and unjust imprisonment of tens of thousands of loyal Americans who happened to come from a different background. This is the price of progressive fear in high places.

As World War II wound toward its end in 1944, FDR proposed a “Second Bill of Rights.” The first was apparently insufficient for him. In that year's State of the Union address, he argued: “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

Roosevelt claimed that government had to secure Americans' fundamental right to a job; a decent living; trade without “unfair competition”; a fine home; sufficient health care; financial support in old age, poor health, or unemployment; and a solid education—all to prevent tyranny.

He may have originally claimed that all we had to fear was fear itself, but the reality was that he wanted Americans to fear a whole host of things, from Japanese-Americans to those who didn't have enough to eat. Fear, after all, opened doors to all sorts of things that people wouldn't otherwise think possible.

In addition to fear, Roosevelt also appealed to pride and patriotism. He noted that the nation must not be allowed to slide back into 1920s “normalcy.” Were that to happen, he said, “even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to
the spirit of Fascism here at home.”

In other words, FDR argued that if Americans let his wartime reforms go away, then they might as well have just lost the war in the first place. It sounds incredible, but it's a strategy employed by progressives in government over and over again. Legislation passed during a crisis lives on like a cockroach, able to survive even in the worst of conditions. It was a crisis, after all, that gave birth to the Patriot Act, a law that continues to be used to invade Americans' privacy long after September 11, 2001.

In FDR's wartime America, “rights” were to be granted no longer by our creator but by the federal government. “Security” was to trump liberty. And if you disagreed with any of that, you were a Nazi or at least someone who didn't much care for American values.

Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned a professor who was instrumental in drafting FDR's first inaugural address. This man, Raymond Moley, went on to work for Roosevelt for several years before eventually breaking with him as FDR's policies bore their poisonous fruit.

In his 1952 book
How to Keep Our Liberty
, Moley wrote:

It was no secret that a great number of . . . reformers
[
in Roosevelt's bureaucracy
]
were admirers of the “great Soviet experiment.” And some . . . were secret agents of Communism.

In my opinion, there is a greater danger in collectivists than in the betrayal of our secrets to foreign powers. The danger lies in what can be done to a nation by public officials who do not believe in a free economy. In Roosevelt's day there were many people working for the government who regarded his reforms as
a mere prelude to revolution.

America has been fortunate to avoid such a fate so far, but Roosevelt's revolution not only accomplished more than Wilson and the other progressives who came before him had ever dreamed possible, but it also set the stage for what was to come next.

A New Deal and a Second Bill of Rights were terrific starts, but what America really needed was someone who could pull all of the disparate pieces together. Someone who could appeal to all races and creeds and make Americans believe that they could achieve what no one before them had, that it was their duty to work toward something bigger than themselves, something he called a Great Society.

This was his last chance. For most of his life, Teddy Roosevelt had tried to help his younger brother, Elliott. He'd tried to get him to live a vigorous life, to take advantage of their family's wealth, his good looks, and his easy charm and to contribute something useful to the world.

Instead, Elliott was a reprobate. A spendthrift. A philandering drunk. A dangerous maniac.

Elliott's latest embarrassment—knocking up one of the servants—had left the family in a state of utter dismay. It only underscored Teddy's wisdom in filing the lawsuit in the first place.

With his distraught sister-in-law's approval, he filed to have Elliott judged mentally incapacitated and to take control of his fortune before he spent it all on women, booze, or other passing fancies. The suit did have some negative repercussions—“Elliott Roosevelt Insane” was a headline in one of the New York papers in 1891—but the hope was that the shock of the lawsuit and the likelihood that he might be committed to an asylum (yet again) might finally straighten him out.

It had the opposite effect.

From Paris, where his family had demanded he go in exile, Elliott vowed to fight.

•  •  •

Teddy boarded a ship bound for Europe. It had been several months since the Roosevelts had seen Elliott in America, and they were relieved that he was no longer causing disastrous headlines
and embarrassing the family. Now Teddy was prepared to offer his brother yet another Faustian bargain, hoping to finally bring him around. As Elliott's anxious family awaited a report, Teddy went to work on his brother.

A few weeks later, the Roosevelt family received a letter from Teddy that filled them with hope. “Won!” the letter read. “Thank Heaven I went over.”

Teddy reported that his brother was “
utterly broken, submissive, and repentant.” Elliott had agreed to sign over two-thirds of his property to his wife and to return home and try to make amends with his family, which included his beloved daughter, Eleanor, who still worshipped him.

Unfortunately, Elliott's experiment with sobriety did not last. Later that year, his wife, Anna, contracted diphtheria, a form of the croup, and passed away. Their son, Elliott Jr., died of the same disease the following year. A distraught Elliott returned to the safety of the bottle and the madness it brought. Not long after, drunk and delirious, he fell from a window and suffered a seizure.

He was dead at thirty-four.

Teddy later wrote that Elliott was pursued by “the most terrible demons that ever entered a man's body and soul.” But the devastation was most acute in the sorrow of his adoring daughter. In two short years, young Eleanor had lost her mother, her brother, and now her father. She was now, at just nine years old, an orphan.

The loss of her father—“the love of my life when I was a child”—undoubtedly hit her the hardest. She could never completely come to terms with his raging illness, his selfishness, his neglect. She kept the few letters he had written to her like treasures. And for the rest of her life, she clung to the memory of a sainted man who had never truly existed.

Shipped off to her grandmother and living a sheltered existence,
young Eleanor had a childhood of depression and panic. She never had the family life she wanted, and she yearned for the safety and security of one. But what she lacked in her personal life she tried to make up for in her ideological views, turning to a belief system that allowed her total control. It was an ideology that promised to heal wounds, those seen and unseen, and to remake the world in her own image. The perfect world she had always wanted.

All of which brings us to a small town in West Virginia.

Authoritarians love to build monuments to themselves. In the 1930s, the fad was to build model cities that demonstrated an ideology's glory and greatness. Stalin built the town of Magadan in the wilds of Siberia. Hitler built Ramersdorft. And Eleanor Roosevelt built the town of Arthurdale.

Organizing it to respond to the plight of West Virginia coal miners, Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded her husband to make construction of this
new city a federal priority. Arthurdale was designed to be a city for the future, a city in which all of its inhabitants would show the wisdom and value of the progressive way of life.

The project was
managed by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH), whose aim was to “build ‘a new American man' and ‘a new social order' in which ‘the common good' would replace ‘selfish motives.' ” Author C. J. Maloney wrote that these homesteads were to make up small, semi-independent towns under a centrally planned industrial policy
designed to decentralize American industry.

Eleanor Roosevelt made it her pet project, overseeing budgets, contacting potential employers who might locate in the city, and
raising money for the program in Congress. She'd fix the despair and fear that the miners' families had experienced in a way that no one had been able to fix her own.

The vision of Arthurdale was nothing short of a worker's paradise, a place where citizens would spend half of their days working at a factory and the other half tending their own five-acre plots. Industries would flock to the town. It would become a model for cities across America.

Eleanor Roosevelt would visit the town frequently as first lady, attending dances and graduations and frequently
talking about its future course. She offered extensive input on the design of new homes,
complete with indoor plumbing. Arthurdale was her own real-life dollhouse.

And it was a failure from the start.

The first houses sent to West Virginia had come from Cape Cod and were not very well suited for mountain winters. They also
didn't fit the existing foundations constructed by Arthurdale residents. Fixing this error—along with the many amenities that Eleanor Roosevelt had insisted on—
made the homes three hundred percent more expensive than typical American houses.

As one author summarized it: “The planners of Arthurdale, when conjuring an entire town out of scratch, forgot one of the most basic lessons of real-estate investing: location is everything. Arthurdale's location was less than ideal; in fact, it was in
the middle of nowhere.”

Its remoteness made it almost impossible for manufacturers to want to locate there. Various companies, often at the federal government's urging, set up shop there for a time but eventually folded. Eleanor Roosevelt had personally persuaded General Electric to open a facility there, but
it too quickly shut down. What was meant as a project to show how the government could create a self-sustaining city run by empowered individuals turned out to be an embarrassing and very expensive flop as the costs far exceeded expectations. By 1940, nearly every single citizen of Arthurdale was dependent on a government job.