Burton W. and Anita Folsom: FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

Remarks Delivered at the Allan P. Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Statesmanship
Washington, D. C.
January 17, 2012

 

If, as the Folsoms write, President Roosevelt “was always the hero of his own life” (273), then Sir Franklin, Knight of Labor, doubtless would regard them as a two-headed dragon breathing fire upon the assiduously burnished escutcheon of his reputation.

Roosevelt’s reputation mattered to him perhaps not only for the petty reason that all we sinners share—personal vanity—but also because that reputation will forever be linked to his life’s great effort: the founding of a European-style, bureaucratic, modern state in America. What the idealistic early Progressives dreamed of—a powerful agent that would spur History forward towards an egalitarian City on the Hill, a new republic, as Herbert Croly called it on the masthead of his magazine—the pragmatic, New-Deal Progressives founded and fortified. We meet tonight almost literally surrounded by monuments to this new political founding in a newly-rich, newly-recession-proof capital city that has been physically transformed since I first saw it in the late 1950s, a decade and a half after FDR’s death. As the saying goes, his memory lives on, along with the ruling institutions he and his loyal disciples have established and expanded. But as he knew—as his political heirs well know, to this day—the perennial question remains: how will he be remembered? The endurance of the Progressives’ new republic depends in part upon how historians treat him.

The Folsoms treat him quite roughly, and not without reason. They do not of course ignore the fact that FDR presided over a great victory in a great war against a military oligarchy and two tyrannies, one of which numbered among the vilest ever seen. They rightly credit the United States for defeating the Japanese oligarchy and the Italian Fascists, while (again rightly, I think) reserving the lion’s share (or perhaps the Gorgon’s share) of credit to Stalin’s Russia for the defeat of the Nazis. But they do blame FDR for bad policies foreign and domestic. On the domestic side, FDR wrote the American playbook from which Mr. Rahm Immanuel has so devoutly read, not-wasting a good crisis by enhancing executive power, raising taxes, misusing IRS audits and FBI wiretaps, and extending governmental control over businesses still further than he had been able to do in the Thirties—withal doing considerable damage to the United States Constitution in the process.

On this latter set of moves FDR showed his mastery of governmental gamesmanship—of rational-choice theory as applied to the task of ruling the roost. As the Folsoms show, the great Arsenal of Democracy could no longer simply abominate the malefactors of great wealth; it needed the captains of industry to build tanks and airplanes. Neither the captains of industry nor the capos of the New Deal much liked one another, but they disliked Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini a lot more. A truce was arranged, with income taxes (now collected from the middle classes) funneled into the coffers of the men so recently excoriated by Progressives as Merchants of Death—all to the tune of Irving Berlin as interpreted by Danny Kaye. I can report that it was even smoother than that. In his Address to the Nation delivered two days after the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR correctly predicted a long, hard war. He presented two policies to boost production of war materiel: first, to speed up existing factory production with a seven-day work week; second, to increase productive capacity by building new plants and adding to old ones. As a practical matter, only the industrialists could implement that second policy, but FDR didn’t miss a beat: “The fact is,” he explained, “the country now has an organization in Washington built around men and women”—savor that bow to feminist sensibilities—”who are recognized experts in their own fields”—that is to say, the Brains Trusters who staffed the agencies of the New Deal state. “I think”—FDR modestly opined—”the country knows that the people who are actually responsible in each of these many fields are pulling with a teamwork that has never before been excelled.” That is FDR not only nods to the industrialists and the labor union members who will do the actual work that needs doing; he takes credit in advance for their efforts, as expertly guided by the ‘scientific administration’ he has brought in. He assigns the highest honor to the New Deal version of the New Republic, fixing the authority of his regime change in the minds of his countrymen. And—this, for the true connoisseurs—his reference to “teamwork” will recall his excoriation of the Nine Old Men of the U.S. Supreme Court, who’d knocked down several New-Deal enactments during his first administration; at that time, he had complained that the three separated and balanced branches of government should operate as a three-horse team, all pulling in the same direction. They hadn’t then, but he trusted there would be no further problems now.

On these matters I’m with the Folsoms much of the way, with a caveat—a caveat best seen by quoting a sentence early in the book. Speaking of Lincoln seen through the eyes of Roosevelt, they write, “Lincoln was great because Lincoln was a successful war president. His high taxes and abuse of civil liberties were largely forgotten.” I would change “abuse” of civil liberties to “curtailment” of civil liberties. In a genuine national emergency, very much including a major civil war or a world war, no government can rightly avoid such curtailments, any more than it can avoid higher taxes or increased centralization of power generally. Lincoln was right when he argued that he needed to violate the Constitution in a temporary and limited way in order to save the constitutional Union itself; Mr. Strict Construction, Thomas Jefferson, was right about the Louisiana Purchase, too, which he regarded as unconstitutional; and so was FDR in raising taxes (which was constitutional) and in abridging civil liberties (which wasn’t) during the war; there is simply no ‘nice’ solution to the problem of republican government when the very regime itself is truly in peril.

The crucial problem arises when such emergency powers become routine. To take the example of FDR’s most distinguished relative, Theodore Roosevelt was right to intervene in a winter coal mine lockout, but to conceive of the president as the steward of the national interest in a sort of perpetual national crisis consisting of never-ending ‘wars’—wars not only against rebellious slaveholding oligarchs or rampaging fascists but against poverty, disease, pollution, and a dozen or so other ills to which flesh is heir—is to guide us down the road to a kinder, gentler Bonapartism—to Tocqueville’s feared dystopia of a nation of sheep tended by dogs in shepherd’s clothing. These new wars were all urged upon us in the name of compassion, of social justice, and of ‘doing the right thing.” As Tocqueville saw, the result of that kind of ‘opinion leadership’—undertaken by politicians instead of preachers, state-builders instead of church-planters—was the diminishment of real citizenship, the diminishment of self-government—and thereby the comprehensive diminishment of what it is to be fully human. (The Folsoms quote Kentucky Senator Happy Chandler saying, “The government can assert its right to have all the taxes it needs for any purpose, either now or at any time in the future.” To think that that man was later named Commissioner of Baseball.)

The Folsoms fault FDR’s foreign policy in two ways. They credit him with seeing the Japanese threat as early as 1933—far sooner than most Americans. But he (along with pretty much everybody else) underestimated Japanese military capacities as grossly a the Japanese underestimated our military potential. During the war itself, FDR esteem Stalin far too much, Churchill far too little—deeming the latter an imperialist fossil while somehow imagining Stalin to have been no imperialist at all. Such are the perils of Leftish historicism or progressivism, which tends to view men like Churchill as vestigial limbs properly to be sloughed off by Evolution, while supposing Communists to be mere New Dealers in a hurry. As a result of this conceptual and moral error, FDR took Stalin’s side against Churchill on the question of invading the Nazi empire from the west, across the English Channel, instead of from the south, whence the republics might have reduced the eventual size of the Soviet Union’s postwar empire in central Europe. After all, what’s the harm in Soviet domination of Poland and Prussia if we can kill Nazi while also putting a stop to the reactionary empire of France? Finally the Folsoms also criticize FDR for abandoning the Washington/Jefferson policy of avoiding entangling alliances for a postwar policy of weaving such entanglements—most prominently, the United Nations and NATO. In his liberal internationalism FDR out-Wilsoned Wilson.

Here again, I must admit to being a somewhat nastier personality than either of the Folsoms. First, although the Progressive’ liberal internationalism had few of the beneficial effects that its advocates expected, the fact is that no American political figure of the war years had conceived a serious overall strategy for our country. Just as transportation and communications technologies had made worldwide trade increasingly prevalent in the modern era, so did they make far-flung military conquest more feasible than it had been since antiquity. President Washington’s wisely-calibrated policy of non-entanglement in Europe worked for most of the nineteenth century, but the policy of continental defense could not longer preserve republicanism by the 1940s. If in the summer of 1941 America’s ambassador in Japan Joseph Grew, believed that the war between the Nazis and the Communists would simply be a matter of “dog eat dog,” with both tyrannies “so weaken[ing] each other that the democracies will soon gain the upper hand or at least…be released from dire peril,” he was simply mistaken. The Nazi dog bit the Communist dog; then the Communist dog ate the Nazi dog. Without Americans in Europe, the Communists would have taken all of Germany, and France too. The centuries-old British nightmare of a continental empire would have come true. Senator Robert Taft, who regarded the victory of communism as “far more dangerous to the United States than the victory of fascism,” would have aided the very thing that he dreaded.

There was moreover a fundamental contradiction in the policy of continental defense—of “America First” or “Fortress America.” The Taftites worried that American entry into a European war would lead to what later generations would call ‘imperial overstretch,’ with bad effects on the American regime of republicanism. This was also a concern on the Left; the prominent political scientist Harold D. Lasswell published his famous article, “The Garrison State,” in 1940. The obvious problem is that Fortress American would be a garrison state; and the more it was surrounded by imperialist tyrants and oligarchs the more garrisoned-up in would need to be. Given what we remember of the postwar condition of Europe and of Japan, it was on balance preferable to fight the world war over there than here—a lesson of war Americans themselves had learned in the 1770s, 1810s, and 1860s.

Was there any statesman who took a position in-between FDR and Taft? None, to my knowledge. For example, the Folsoms are much too kind to Wendell Willkie, FDR’s opponent in the presidential election of 1940. Willkie did indeed know a lot more about electricity production than anyone connected with the TVA, but his vacuity on foreign policy remains in full view to anyone who looks at his book, One World, that astonishing farrago of liberal-internationalist sentiments every bit as bad as FDR’s vaporings on the subject.

American politicians entered the war little better prepared than their European counterparts. America’s manpower, its network of competent military commanders, its vast resources, and its geographic distance from the Axis Powers saved it. It political classes were useless. And had FDR not replaced that egregious ninny, Henry Wallace, with Harry Truman (who seems to have learned foreign policy from the Old Testament he’d studied as a good Baptist boy in Missouri) we might have blundered into the first years of the Cold War, too—denying all the while that there was a Cold War going on.

Why? There seems to have been a gap in foreign policy knowledge in America between (roughly) the death of Henry Adams and the mid-to-late 1940s. It may be that Progressivism sucked the common sense out of that generation of Americans—that, and the disillusionment with foreign policy generally that seems to have followed the First World War. Whatever the reason, the sad conclusion I draw is that—bad as he was—FDR was actually a bit better on foreign policy than most of his peers. He’d been thinking about it longer, having served as Undersecretary of the Navy during the previous war, and having had a decidedly foreign-policy-oriented cousin in the White House a few years before that. At least he saw the war coming and, after 1935 or so, started working against a Congress that was paralyzed by ignorance and cowardice throughout the low dishonest decade. Yes, he lied to the American people and played a massive shell game with military funding, as the Folsoms document, but almost all of his contemporaries were either too foolish or too frightened to be told more than the little truth he did tell.

The French political writer Raymond Aron insisted that a critic must always answer the question, ‘What should the minister do?’ This is the serious question awaiting us upon concluding this fine book that my friends have written. Churchill chose the role of Jeremiah, the task of prophetic warning. That was admirably honest. But never forget: Churchill was out of power. When his warnings went unheeded (as jeremiads by definition do), he positioned himself to take that power to defend his people. Roosevelt, however, was already in power. His waiting game had to be played differently than Churchill’s. He needed the subterfuge he practiced—the subterfuge his benefactor, Wilson, so piously deplored and even on occasion refrained from practicing. Consider Edmund Burke’s words, in his First Letter of a Regicide Peace: “Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever. But, as in the exercise of all virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer. “

Joshua B. Stein: Commentary on the Constitution from Plato to Rousseau. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

 

The living judge the dead, a safe undertaking, but what if the dead could judge the living? One of the judges Stein selects remains very much alive, namely God, and the constitution being judged isn’t literally alive, even if it remains in operation, so the amounts an assortment of the mostly dead judging the sort-of living. Stein has the clever idea of treating not only God but a range of august humans as judges of the Constitution, thereby “testing the Constitution’s strengths and weaknesses” from the “vantage point” of each. The drawback of this project is that it is impossible for one scholar to do it well. No one (well, God excepted) can know enough about all fourteen authors here considered (in addition to the American Founders and the Constitution) to bring the thing off. Stein himself throws in the towel when it comes to the Koran, bringing in a Muslim scholar to help. And after 330 pages of this, it is dismaying to learn that “we will never know” the original intent of the Framers, anyway.

On Plato, Stein does see that Socrates does not intend his ‘regime in speech’ in the Republic as realizable on earth. Beyond this, Stein imagines that Plato would object to the Constitutional preamble’s announced intent to secure the blessing of liberty for American citizens, saying that “Plato warns against unbridled liberty and might have been concerned with this intention.” Since the very nature of a political constitution suggests limits on liberty, this complaint falls flat. He rightly observes that the Athenian Stranger in the Laws recommends an established religion, including expulsion of atheists, whereas the Framers recommended neither. On Aristotle, he claims that Aristotle “saw the poor as the revolutionary class,” but in fact Aristotle regarded the rich as just as likely to revolutionize a democratic regime as the poor were likely to revolutionize an oligarchic one, and in either case often for justifiable reasons. He rightly judges that Aristotle would have endorsed the Framers’ aim of securing the property of the moderating, middle class. Cicero would have found the Constitution’s “lack of direction the Constitution provides for how to live a virtuous life” to be “upsetting,” although (Stein might have added) none of the ‘ancients’ would have overlooked the role of education, and the institution of public schools especially, in the early decades of America, to say nothing of the already-substantial presence of churches here. That is, the ‘ancients’ would understand the American regime as they understood all regimes—as rulers and arrangements of offices beyond those mentioned in any written ‘constitution,’ however authoritative.

Stein addresses the first of two revealed religions in his chapter on the Hebrew Bible. He observes that Israelites themselves saw four different regimes: patriarchic, tribal but unitary (in the desert), “purely tribal,” and monarchic. Both the Israelites and the American Founders clearly distinguished kingship from tyranny, abhorring the latter. The Bible commands against fugitive slave laws, without condemning slavery itself, whereas the U. S. Constitution included such laws while the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear witness against slavery, and the Founders aimed at the gradual abolition of slavery, an aim they could not begin to accomplish in the core Southern states, in contradiction with those principles. Slaves who were Israelites enjoyed much better legal protections than did most slaves in the South, and Stein makes the important point that the harsher Biblical laws governing foreign slaves cannot be used to justify those Africans who converted to Christianity after their importation here.

One of the most interesting chapters is the one contributed by Islamic scholar Imad-ad-Dean-Ahmad on the Koran. He observes that both the Islamic covenant given by Muhammad to Muslims at Quraysh and the U. S. Constitution’s preamble aim at “a more perfect union.” He also notices that while the Koran endorses “religious pluralism” of a sort, at least as it is extended to Jews and Christians, “he would have disdained the non-establishment clause” of the American document. Indeed, Jews and Christians are protected by Koranic law, but their status is that of dhimmitude, not full civic equality. As for the role of the legislature, under Islamic law it could make laws regarding matters indifferent to religion (speed limits, for example) but nothing beyond that. Legislators would need to accept guidance not by the consenting people but according to the consensus of Muslim scholars. This would indeed prove a check on any “excess of democracy.” Such a check would be needed, as there is no separation of powers in a Muslim regime. As for slavery, “Muhammad would have found the association of slave status with a particular racial group unacceptable”; in this, the Koran permits what might be termed equal-opportunity slavery imposed upon prisoners of war. Republicanism of some sort might be valid, so long as divine law sets the limits; similarly, amendments to a given community’s constitutional law would be licit so long as they did not contradict the laws set down in the Koran. Islamic regimes would not set down native birth as a condition for serving as the executive, only “declared commitment to the source of the [Islamic] law.” Juries at trial would consist of experts in Islamic law, not citizens approved by secular lawyers. Muhammad would concur in the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, but would define it very differently, likely defending “bodily mutilation as more civilized than imprisonment.” Finally, the Framers intended “to secure men’s freedom from other men, not from God,” although it must be added that Allah prescribes a different set of laws to set the parameters of freedom than do Jews, Christians, and the American Founders.

Catholic Christian thinkers as Stein interprets them would have limited sympathy with the Founders’ regime. The thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II would have frowned at the notion of separating governmental powers, as “he was the fount of law” and indeed the earthly “equivalent of God.” Stein notes that Frederick’s regime wobbled upon the death of His Excellency; “the vital energy of the center” went with him, whereas the U. S. Constitution “survived without Madison.” Dante Alighieri would equally have disliked the limited powers of the American executive and the fairly extensive powers of the states in our federal system. He also supported the founding of a world government under the governance of a Christian monarch, as the American Founders did not.

Anti-papal Machiavelli, in contrast, “would have loved” the Constitution. Stein assumes that the “virtue” Machiavelli lauds means virtue in the old Roman sense, which it didn’t; he assumes that the Framers imitated the Roman Republic in their constitutional design, which they didn’t, at least not entirely. Above all, Stein’s Machiavelli would admire the features of separated, balanced powers, encouraging political struggle and breeding “the virtue of struggle,” and he cites John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States as evidence of this. He would have wished the Framers had used religion more—”not that Machiavelli was a believer in the worth of any particular religion”—a bit of political cynicism which might have worried Adams, and would surely have been rejected by many of the Framers.

And so it goes. Hobbes would have misliked the Constitution; he was a monarchist. Locke and Montesquieu would have liked much of it; they were republicans. Small-government-loving, anti-‘bourgeois’ Rousseau would have disliked it, as he did so many things. No surprises, there. In the end, Stein doesn’t think that the Constitution can be regarded as a coherently-intended document, but only what an earlier scholar called “a bundle of compromises.” It “has worked as well as it has” because “it reflects what he have become, a country which is as multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual as it is, unified by fear that what we have may not be perfect, but content that it is what we have, a reflection of our compromises based on ethnic and political differences.” Tell that to an Islamist, a fascist, a communist, a monarchist (whether Holy Roman or Hobbesian). For all its grand ambitions, this book trivializes the American Constitution and the several thinkers Stein has dragged into commenting on it.