FDR was a fascistic traitor

 

FDR and the End of Constitutionally Limited Government

“If the Constitution, intelligently and reasonably construed stands in the way of desirable legislation, the blame must rest upon that instrument, and not upon the court for enforcing it according to its terms. The remedy in that situation – and the only true remedy – is to amend the Constitution.”

George Sutherland

U.S Supreme Court Justice in 1937

To say that Franklin Roosevelt was a Fascist and a traitor causes most folks to bristle and object because conventional wisdom has it that FDR saved us from both Communism and Fascism in the 1930's and 40's. He's a hero for Pete's sake, his head is on the dime and there's even a monument to him in DC. However, the fact is that in a treasonous manner he led this nation down a fascistic path. The well informed people of his day knew it and opposed it, but all of that has been lost in the wash of rewritten history. Nonetheless, we can discern that true history if we are courageous and honest enough to look.

FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, at a time of frightening national turmoil. He told us in his first inaugural address that, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Even with those brave words, fear still stalked the land. People were running on the banks, taking out their money for fear the bank would collapse the next day. Banks were indeed collapsing and the economy was coming down around our (and FDR's) ears.

Consequently, on March 9, 1933, a bill, officially titled the “Emergency Banking Relief Act, Public Law 73-1, 48 Stat. 1,” was introduced, passed by unanimous vote in both the Senate and House of Representatives, and signed by the President. All that was done before midnight of the same day. The President had asked for powers, to deal with the ongoing emergency, that would be equivalent to those he would get when waging war. Congress clearly agreed to give him those emergency powers.

With those powers, and generally by going through Congress, FDR made sweeping and unprecedented changes to our nation, especially to our economic system. Early on, he seized all privately held gold to stabilize markets. He initiated his famous first one hundred days, establishing what came to be known as the “Alphabet soup” of various federal agencies designed to micromanage virtually every action in the free market.

Some of it got ridiculous. Under the emergency authority the federal government picked up their power to regulate interstate commerce (Art.I, sec.8, subsec3), and using it like a membrane that can be infinitely stretched, presumed that it covered any imaginable economic activity.

So much so that federal law extended to a live poultry market, owned by the Schechter brothers, and mandated, among other things, that in the name of fairness, the customer could not pick out any specific chicken to be taken and slaughtered, but that the customer must reach in and blindly choose the first chicken that came to hand.

After the Schechters had been criminally charged and convicted of violating these federal laws, the case was heard on appeal in the US Supreme Court. In a landmark decision, handed down May 27, 1935, he court declared the NRA, the National Recovery Act, to be unconstitutional. In the words of the New York Times, “the court held that no economic emergency could justify the breaking down of the limitations of Federal authority as prescribed by the Constitution or of those powers reserved to the States through the failure of the Constitution to place them elsewhere.”

In that same edition, May 28, 1935, the NY Times ran a sampling from editorial pages around the country. In reading them we can clearly hear many voices, from coast to coast, warning that what FDR was doing, and attempting to do, closely approximated the Fascism, the one man dictatorship, that Mussolini had brought to Italy. Here are some of those editorial samplings.

From The Des Moines Register: “The high court has by unanimous vote demolished the pretty idea of just delegating to the President, or worse yet to industrial groups, large and undefined lawmaking powers over the economic life of the country. The Register has often made the point that this scheme was pure ‘corporative stateism’ of the kind Mussolini has given Italy. Too many things of too dubious value were done too impetuously and with too little regard for the Constitution back in 1933. The worst and foolishest was NRA.”

From the Los Angeles Times: “The Supreme Court knocks the main foundation stone from under the whole structure of administration policy in its ruling that emergencies do not create constitutional powers and that Congress may not delegate to the President the right to do as he sees fit. Since it is on this plea that most of the New Deal processes of national regimentation have been predicated, the rulings devastatingly inclusive character is obvious. It makes abundantly clear that the days of a virtually uncontrolled one-man dictatorship in the United States are at an end.”

From The St. Paul Pioneer Press: “The decision overthrowing practically all that is vital in the NIRA does far more than merely to invalidate the codes as they stand. It is really notice that the historic and fundamental division of powers between the State and the Federal governments cannot be revised by judicial rewriting of the Constitution. Liberals and conservatives on the bench alike agree that the Constitution does stand as a bulwark against usurpation by the Federal Government of the powers over business and industry which were regarded as the province of the states.”

From The Kansas City Star: “The Constitution is supreme; it cannot be made to mean what it does not say or stretched to cover a broad and virtually unrestricted grant of power even in the name of an emergency. Aside from its constitutional phases, the experience with the operations of the National Industrial Recovery Act demonstrated that on the whole it has retarded recovery. But there were certain features of the codes that ought to be lived up to. Business would make a fatal mistake if it tried to take advantage of the decision to bring back sweat-shop conditions, throw men out of work and return to child labor.”

From The Portland Oregonian: “The Supreme Court has re-established the fact that there is no room within the Constitution for centralized government. Its unanimity even disposes of the prospect that by reorganizing and liberalizing the court, safe conduct could be obtained around constitutional barriers for the power yearnings of young intellectuals of the administration. Attempt by new law to salvage anything from NRA wreckage would be but a forlorn, face saving enterprise. The reverberations of its collapse have shaken AAA, the Securities Bill, the Wagner Labor Disputes Act. ‘Back to the Constitution’ is no longer a forceful slogan. We are there.”

From The Philadelphia Inquirer: “The Supreme Court here epitomizes representative government as it was envisioned by the founders. It establishes the truth that no matter what wrecking crew attempts to destroy the vitality of American principles, it must eventually face the highest legal authority for the ratification of its acts, so long as the Constitution is in force. If the wreckers want to change American doctrine, they must first annul the Constitution, not by indirection or evasion, but by common consent and lawful agreement.”

Finally, even this entry from crosstown rival the New York Herald Tribune made its way onto the pages of the New York Times on this momentous day.

“The consequences of the NRA decision are unquestionably far-reaching. The demise of the Blue Eagle (the symbol of the NRA) is not exactly startling news- the President was about the only one left in Washington who refused to concede its failure and collapse. But the Wagner bill and the AAA amendments seem equally cast out by the logic of the decision. If the term interstate commerce is to be held to its clear meaning as consistently interpreted by the Supreme Court and as now reiterated, then all the clever phraseology by which the New Dealers are seeking to evade the Constitutional clause will be so much vain trickery. The AAA has yet to come before the Supreme Court, and, in so far as it depends upon voluntary cooperation by the individual farmer, it may survive. Yet the trick by which compulsion was applied to the cotton farmer seems a blatant evasion of the Constitution; and the whole device of a processing tax may ultimately go overboard.

The course of the President remains to be decided. If he is candid and has been sincere in his radical policies he will seek the amendment of the Constitution to alter its basic structure and permit the socialization and regimentation of industry. Thereby would be raised an honest and straightforward issue which could be fought out on its merits. But the blow to the President’s pride is heavy. The damage to his prestige is great. He is shown after two years, by the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, including all its most liberal and progressive members, to have been leading the country down a blind alley.”

FDR did not take this ruling to heart, nor did he take it lying down. Rather, he forged ahead with his agenda, shrugging off his loss, and continuing to implement policies of dubious constitutional nature, but which he knew would be popular among the people. One of those was to establish, later in 1935, our system of Social Security. He knew that any resulting setbacks in the Supreme Court would not come until after the 1936 presidential election, which he intended to win in a landslide due to his popular programs.

In the election of 1936, the Democrat Party platform called for the enactment of some new constitutional amendment to properly delegate the fascistic powers to the federal government that FDR wished to wield. He was re-elected, on that platform, in a landslide, and took that as a mandate to continue his agenda. He did not, however, call for the enactment of a new constitutional amendment.

Instead, in his famous “Court Packing Fireside Chat” in March 1937, he pretended to have sincerely considered such an amendment, but rejected that course for three reasons.

First, he claimed it would take too long, and the ongoing emergency required rapid action. This is disingenuous to the extreme, because he, himself, had proposed, passed through Congress, and gotten ratified through the states the 21^st Amendment, which repealed alcohol prohibition, in the course of single year, 1933. So he knew a popular amendment could be enacted rapidly.

Also, the ongoing economic emergency was his fault. In 1937 we suffered what author Amity Schlaes describes in her book , The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression , (2007 HarperCollins Publishers) as, “A depression within a depression,” The nation was again gripped by dire economic fear, something which FDR cynically used to his political advantage.

In that “Fire Side Chat” he also bemoaned the idea that no one could really agree on what kind of amendment to pass, and so that would cause more delay, if not end his agenda. Third, in a related objection, he claimed that whatever new amendment might be enacted, it would only work if the right kind of justices sat on the Court. Justices, who would interpret it according to modern concerns about the need for centralized economic control.

Both of those objections are easily refuted. FDR should merely, and forthrightly, called for the repeal of the 10^th Amendment. That was the one that was causing him all his trouble; that was the one the Supreme Court had relied on to overturn his policies in Schechter. That was the one Justice Sutherland was referring to when he stated, in the quote at the top of this post, “If the Constitution, intelligently and reasonably construed stands in the way of desirable legislation, the blame must rest upon that instrument, and not upon the court for enforcing it according to its terms. The remedy in that situation – and the only true remedy – is to amend the Constitution.”

If FDR had called for the repeal of the 10^th Amendment, which states,

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”,

everyone would have clearly understood what was being called for. If he had succeeded in repealing the 10^th, no justice of the Supreme Court would have had the temerity to misconstrue it.

So it must be wondered; why did he not act in that forthright manner? The answer is obvious. If he had called that question, and lost, his entire agenda would have been canceled and he didn't want to take that chance.

Instead, he moved forward with his scheme to pack the Court, even though it was instantly controversial. With this bluff on the table, and the ongoing dire economic downturn causing the nation to verge into the realm of panic and anarchy, the Supreme Court was intimidated into giving FDR his way. The dire economic situation was used to bully the court. A court that just two years previous had ruled his policies unconstitutional, now turned, and in a 5-4 ruling agreed to let them stand.

The famous headline the next day was, “A switch in time saves nine,” referring to the fact that the changed opinion of one justice had preserved the nine seat court by dissuading the president from further pushing his scheme to place more justices on the Court to get the outcomes he wanted. It has been off to the races with America's peculiar form of fascism ever since, with the federal government having virtually no limit on its' scope or powers.

“In a nutshell, a document of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers became in short order a document of effectively unenumerated powers, limited only by rights that would thereafter be interpreted narrowly by conservatives on the Court and episodically by liberals on the Court. Both sides, in short, would come to ignore our roots in limited government, buying instead into the idea of vast majoritarian power – the only disagreement being over what rights might limit that power and in which circumstances.” As quoted from Roger Pilon

FDR's Folly, by Jim Powell, by Jim Powell (2003, Crown Forum)

Which is exactly what FDR wanted.

Consider this excerpt from FDR’s Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937.

“We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.”

A morally better WORLD, not just nation, is what FDR wanted, and Fascism was his preferred tool to get that accomplished.

So, in one long strategy carried out through the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt foisted two terrible mistakes on the American people. First of all, he centralized government to an extent never imagined by any of the founders, and which was warned against by the best of them. Second, he accomplished this dubious goal by ignoring and circumventing the Constitution itself in violation of his oath of office. In sum, he delivered us up to an all-powerful government and went a long way toward eroding any sense of citizenship in the hearts and minds of the people.

To describe him as a fascist and a traitor might seem very harsh, but it is probably the only truthful way to describe him.

Consider this linked definition of Fascism

https://lifeinafascistcountry.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-defintion.html

What's more, his treason went beyond merely violating our Constitution, but was a betrayal of the eons long human effort to achieve good government. He did this, deviously changing the role of the federal government from one of limited enumerated powers to one of unlimited powers to be used however the Congress and the President saw fit. His biggest betrayal was that he accomplished these changes by frankly usurping powers from the states and localities, and not by forthrightly using the constitutional amendment process available to him.

Finally, and in FDR’s defense, many of the excesses of big business that he was trying to fix were terrible and needed fixing. Nonetheless, his mistake, and the mistake of almost every one at that time, was thinking that only the federal government could control runaway corporations. That mistaken idea was placed in our minds by that wrong-headed undeclaration of the U.S. Supreme Court when it was used to establish the concept of “corporate personhood” in 1886.

“Corporate personhood” ignited an engine that worked to systematically dismantle America’s original plan of local community self-government, usurping the powers of economic self-determination from states and localities and thereby degrading our culture. By the time Franklin Roosevelt was finished, most of the powers and responsibilities of social self-determination (the social programs) had, likewise, been usurped, or were going to be further usurped by his spiritual heirs, from those same local and state governments and invested in the federal government, worsening the effects of that original engine of destruction.

In addition, FDR ignited yet another culturally corrosive engine, in the form of Social Security which, along with federal socialism in general, has worked as an addictive, corrosive poison on the communities and families of America. This issue will be examined in another linked essay.