Despite the growing recognition of Wilson’s censorship, there was a professor who wrote a recent book on FDR’s free speech record, arguing that FDR was worse.
Representing the Wilson side in our discussion is Christopher Cox, author of the new book, “Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn.” Cox is a former member of the House of Representatives, where he served for 17 years, including as chair of the Homeland Security Committee. He is currently a senior scholar in residence at the University of California, Irvine.
Representing the FDR side is professor David T. Beito, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama. He is the author of a number of books, his latest being “The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance.”
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:41 Wilson’s free speech record
15:13 Was FDR’s record worse than Wilson’s?
24:01 Japanese internment
29:35 Wilson at the end of his presidency
37:42 FDR and Hugo Black
42:31 The Smith Act
45:42 Did Wilson regret his actions?
50:31 The suffragists
56:19 Did FDR regret his actions?
01:02:04 Outro
Show notes:
Executive Order (creating the Committee on Public Information)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech (1941)
Editor's note: This abridged transcript highlights key discussions from the podcast. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Please reference the full unedited transcript for direct quotes.
Wilson and the First Amendment
NICO PERRINO, HOST: For the first 140 years since the First Amendment’s ratification, the Supreme Court never struck down a government speech restriction on First Amendment grounds. Nevertheless, was there any concern surrounding the First Amendment or free speech by Woodrow Wilson or his administration?
CHRIS COX, GUEST: Wilson got it between the eyes. There’s no question that there was pushback. He had a very close friend who would become his friend in 1911, I think, Dudley Field Malone, who became a very close campaign advisor during Wilson’s early years. The two of them would appear jointly and speak together. Malone got a very important post in the Wilson administration. He resigned his job very publicly, with front-page headlines all across the United States when he quit over the issue of the Wilson’s administration’s abuse of the suffrage protestors. He then signed up to be their lawyer and represent them in court and eventually won.
Charles Lindbergh, a famous aviator, had a father who was in Congress. He was a progressive. He retired from Congress and wrote a book. His book included women suffrage in it. He happened to be in Washington and observed all of these suffrage protestors getting beaten up. He wrote a very descriptive letter to Woodrow Wilson explaining what he had witnessed and saying only the president can stop this. Wilson privately said let’s keep this under wraps. I’m not going to do anything about it. You can decide whether you think this needs any action.
Wilson knew exactly what was happening. He had personally authorized the forced feeding of Alice Paul. She was put in the insane asylum, as they called it at the time, when she was perfectly sane. They boarded up her windows, put her in a straitjacket, and all these sorts of things. He was unwilling to do anything to stop this, and he was personally authorizing it. So, yes, people thought about the First Amendment, thought you should have the right to petition your government at the time. He was a very, very stern authoritarian when it came to these things.
Wilson’s influence on FDR
DAVID BEITO, GUEST: FDR was very much influenced by two people, one was Woodrow Wilson. The other one was his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, who he referred to as Uncle Ted. In fact, Uncle Ted gave away the bride at the wedding because Eleanor was Uncle Ted’s niece.
FDR became assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913 under Wilson. His boss at the Navy department was a notorious racist named Josephus Daniels, who basically led the charge to segregate, under Wilson’s supervision and support, segregate the federal government, including the Navy Department. Roosevelt certainly carried those things out. He was very supportive of Wilson’s civil liberty policies during World War I, including his policies towards free speech. There were certain strains of progressivism that placed a high value on civil liberties.
There’s another strain, though, that emphasizes the important thing is to achieve the goal, equality or social justice, and we’re not going to worry so much about the means to achieve that goal. That is FDR. During the Wilson administration, FDR was very supportive of what Wilson wanted. In fact, FDR went to the federal district attorney in Atlanta and wanted him to prosecute an anarchist civil libertarian who had criticized FDR for the fact that he, unlike Uncle Ted, did not volunteer to go to war. FDR was so resentful of this that he called for the district attorney to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. And the district attorney wrote back and said, “Well, we really don’t have a case against this guy.”
That gives a little bit of an idea of his attitudes towards civil liberties. So, he is very much a Wilsonian in his views on civil liberties. Now, let’s go forward a little bit on FDR’s free speech record. There was a Congressional committee during the 1930s called the Black Committee that went and did a mass subpoena. They got copies of all private telegrams sent in and out of Washington from every member of Congress. In the end, the Black Committee looked at something like 3 million private telegrams. That would be similar to looking at 3 million text messages today without a subpoena and 3 million email messages, because that’s about 50% of long distance communication.
The Palmer Raids and race riots
PERRINO: Did Wilson get worse as his presidency went on?
COX: Yes. It is, in a sense, coincident with the war. While it’s true that it’s not an excuse that there’s hysteria or what have you, in fact in Wilson’s case, a lot of that hysteria was whipped up by the Committee on Public Information and by his own administration. It’s also true, and I think this explains FDR’s thinking in being so callous about internment: “When the nation is at war, we set aside our normal sensibilities and say, ‘Well, everything is different now and all the rules are out the window.’” Wilson certainly had that view. I think it helps a president rationalize what they’re doing when they can say it’s all because of war.
The second thing that happened is Wilson ended up having a serious stroke. All the people around him said he had changed and hardened. He was already known as a stubborn man, all the way back to his Princeton days when he had such serious battles with his board of trustees that they were trying to get rid of him at the time he jumped into elected politics. But now that stubborn streak expressed itself even more significantly.
Finally, because Wilson left the country for six months to go over to France to personally negotiate the treaty, as no president had ever done before nor has one ever done so since, he was not paying attention. And so, the combination of his being medically out of it at the very end, his being gone from the country and out of communication with the country for many months prior to that meant that somebody like Palmer could go off and do his thing with minimum supervision.
PERRINO: And Palmer was his attorney general, correct?
COX: Yes. He had been a member of Congress prior to that.
PERRINO: Can you just describe to our listeners what the Palmer Raids were? These raids were precipitated by a concern that some within the country might have loyalty to a foreign country, right?
COX: We have Palmer coming to the Congress and testifying about how they are investigating and arresting people that are suspected radicals, and literally saying that Black people in America fall squarely in this category because they’re so susceptible to all of the Bolshevist propaganda and so on that they were special targets.
PERRINO: This was quite an incredible period during American history if you think about it. The Palmer Raids resulted in somewhere around 6,000 people being arrested across over 30 cities. You had over 500 people who were deported. There was this broader concern about the Bolshevik revolution, this is what’s popularly termed the first Red Scare, at the same time that you had World War I, at the same time when you had the movement for women’s right to vote, and at the same time you had a burgeoning civil rights movement and riots across the country. He was dealing with, if you put yourself in his shoes, quite the confluence of emergencies.
COX: Yes, although some of those emergencies were of his own making, specifically the race riots. The overt racist policies of the Wilson administration, which simmered for a long time, and then came to a boil, came to a boil when he was missing in action. A lot of people did not want him to leave the country and go over to France. There was a poll of newspaper editors, for example, across the country, and overwhelmingly they did not want him to go. Everyone was worried that domestic issues would be completely neglected, and that’s what happened. So, that was a choice that Woodrow Wilson made. It did not turn out to be a smart tactical move to appoint himself as negotiator. He would have had more power if he had stayed stateside. The United States was the major predator to all of the nations that were at the Paris Peace Conference and had a lot of clout and we didn’t exercise it very well.
FDR and Wilson on censorship
PERRINO: Professor Beito, you have this helpful comparison in a chapter of your book, “A Good War for Free Speech,” in which you highlight an ACLU press release that stated by the end of August 1943, the federal government had initiated only 25 legal actions for utterances or publications alleged to obstruct the conduct of World War II. Compared to an estimated 100,000 such cases during World War I involving over 1,500 people. But you say that you couldn’t find an instance in which a subordinate was pushing FDR further along the censorship route than FDR was willing to go himself. Was that the same with the internment of somewhere around 120,000 Japanese Americans?
BEITO: There was massive pushback. That’s a part of the story that isn’t told. Again, FDR’s own attorney general was against internment. His FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was against internment. His secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, a lot of his top military advisors were also against internment. What’s often forgotten is that internment occurred about two months after Pearl Harbor. The initial response from the press and from other people was “Look, they’re American citizens like we are. They should have the same rights.” There was even an early poll that was done by the government which found satisfaction with existing government policy post-Pearl Harbor, which is basically just monitor them, keep an eye on them, that kind of thing, not put them in concentration camps.
FDR was not pushed into internment. It is often blamed on the hysteria of the moment. That is not true. Again, there was a lot more opposition to it than is often made out. He was very much involved in the process as well. A lot of people will say, “Well, he was distracted.” Of course, he had a lot of things to be distracted by. But he was hands-on, involved in the process. Having said that, FDR always had deniability. He always had people out front arguing like Sen. Black earlier. He had people like Gen. DeWitt in internment. He kept in the background. But if you look at his private conversations, what he said – To give you an idea of how bad FDR was on this, by 1943 we’d won great battlefield victories against the Japanese. They were on the run. And the Japanese were serving in the military to much acclaim.
And a lot of FDR’s advisors, even more than before, were saying, “Isn’t it time to release the Japanese?” Guess what FDR said? He said to them, “Well, we’ve got an election coming up.” In other words, he kept Japanese Americans in concentration camps through the 1944 election. And the Japanese were getting good PR at that point. He could have easily said, “Look, these are men who are serving our country in Europe.” And he could have made that argument, but no, he didn’t. He kept them there. And I think that is one of the most cold and cruel actions that FDR was involved in. But he did it without apparently any sort of second thought. Well, we’ve got an election coming up.
PERRINO: Did Woodrow Wilson also sort of hang out in the background where the censorship actions were concerned? Did he try to create a sense of plausible deniability?
COX: Oh yes. Woodrow Wilson did such a good job that generations of biographers have been able to say, well, his cabinet appointees did this. Someone else in the administration did this. He, Woodrow Wilson, would not have gone for it. But as Prof. Beito has explained with respect to FDR, these presidents, it was even more true in Wilson’s time, were hands on. The federal government was much smaller then. The thing that impressed me over 14 years of research writing my book was the extent to which the president himself was doing things that by the time I worked in the White House in the 1980s would all be staff duties. All the way down to writing his own speeches, Woodrow Wilson was personally responsible.
And he was even more responsible than he needed to be because he never trusted anyone else to understand his own thoughts. He literally told one of his advisors that’s why he ultimately went to Paris to negotiate the peace treaty because he didn’t trust anyone else to know his mind. He was directly involved in all of the major decisions concerning civil liberties and free speech that we’ve been talking about here.
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