No. 

I won’t make the whole case now but today I’ll discuss their claim that Roosevelt “disrespected” the Supreme Court.

At the top of this pdf from the FDR Library you’ll find Roosevelt’s May 31, 1935 press conference, discussing the Schechter v. United States decision in which the Court struck down key portions of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act empowering the president to “establish an industrial planning and research agency” to enforce “codes of fair competition” by industry. Roosevelt used this provision to create the National Recovery Administration (NRA).

The Court said Congress couldn’t give him that power because “it exceeds the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce and invades the power reserved exclusively to the States.”

Roosevelt began his press conference by reading from a series of telegrams from US businesses, expressing the hope that he would somehow be able to reestablish the NRA codes—by some form of “new legislation,” not by executive power.

He then addressed the decision itself.

in spite of what one gentleman said in the paper this morning, that I resented the decision. Nobody resents a Supreme Court decision. You can deplore a Supreme Court decision and you can point out the effect of it. You can call the attention of the country to what the implications are as to the future, what the results or that decision are if future decisions follow this decision.

Which is what he proceeded to do. He pointed out that the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause was written “in the horse and buggy age” and that now, modern transportation rendered the nation’s businesses interdependent in a way they had not been before. And that because national and international markets affected local conditions, US laws and judicial opinions had begun to recognize that interdependence by broadening the scope of what Congress could regulate under “interstate commerce.”

But now, he noted, to the contrary, the Schechter decision reposed such regulatory power solely in the states, even though the problems were national problems.

Now, this is not a criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision; it is merely pointing out the implications of it. In some ways it is probably the best thing that has happened to this country for a long time that this decision has come from the Supreme Court, because it clarifies the issue.

That is: would the federal government have any power over national social or economic policy, or would each of the forty-eight states have to work out such policy for itself? For the moment, the decision meant “we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.”

The Department of Justice, the next day, sent the president a memorandum about which agencies were affected, which could continue, and which would require new legislation. Notably, the Wagner bill then under consideration by Congress would not only preserve but strengthen the provisions protecting organized labor.¹

You can get from that summary the tenor of Roosevelt’s remarks, and of course the general plan of action he would pursue. I note, though, Roosevelt’s calm and lengthy discussion. Did he, per Moyn and Goldsmith, “disrespect” the Court? And how did his remarks compare to President Trump’s remarks today, regarding the Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump?

I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country. . . . it’s happened so often with this court. What a shame, having to do with voting in particular, when in fact they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats, and not that this should have anything at all to do with it.

They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think. It’s a small movement.

I won by millions of votes. We won in a landslide. With all the cheating that went on, there was a lot of it, we still won in a landslide. Too big to rig. But these people are obnoxious, ignorant, and loud. They’re very loud.

I would not call these responses “arrestingly similar.”

Here’s another thing to think about: unemployment in Puerto Rico as against the US overall.

There’s a lot going on here, but it is true that during the New Deal, the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration (from 1933) and then the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (from 1935) had a definite impact on Puerto Rico’s economy. Even if by 1940 the territory’s economy remained largely agricultural (and indeed, largely devoted to the single crop of sugar) significant shifts had occurred: the agricultural sector shrank by about 8 percentage points, indicating a shift of workers into transportation, trade, services and government.² During the war rum became immensely profitable, owing to the nearly total shutdown of distilling in the 48 United States. Then after the wear a period of extended manufacturing growth began—although the proceeds, like the proceeds of the sugar trade in earlier years, tended to leave Puerto Rico rather than remain there.

I heard you speak last night and had a good deal of pleasure in being the only Republican who voted for you, in a crowd of rockbound Republicans who didn’t vote for you. You may be glad to know that every one of them were delighted with it and your ears would have tingled if you could have heard their comments.¹

Auchincloss was referring to the third of Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” addressing what had been done in the hundred days. This was one of several occasions on which Roosevelt rejected the idea of a recovery solely to previous conditions.

Now I come to . . . a more lasting prosperity. I have said that we cannot attain that in a nation half boom and half broke. If all of our people have work and fair wages and fair profits, they can buy the products of their neighbors and business is good. But if you take away the wages and the profits of half of them, business is only half as good. It doesn’t help much if the fortunate half is very prosperous—the best way is for everybody to be reasonably prosperous.

And to get there, Americans had to address long-standing problems. Eliminate child labor. Raise wages. Shorten hours. Reduce farm production. Manage the currency—deflation made it so “the dollar was a different dollar from the one with which the average debt had been incurred.” Roosevelt also mentioned the Civilian Conservation Corps and the $3 billion voted for the Public Works Administration. Here, as on other occasions, he distinguished the “regular” expenses of government, which he cut, from these extraordinary ones. But he didn’t shy away from outlining the scale and scope of the extraordinary measures.

I have no sympathy with the professional economists who insist that things must run their course and that human agencies can have no influence on economic ills. One reason is that I happen to know that professional economists have changed their definition of economic laws every five or ten years for a very long time.

Hard to imagine Auchincloss’s “rockbound Republican” colleagues thrilling to that, but it was a dire time and people did want something better.

Early in 1933 Congress passed a Philippine independence act over Herbert Hoover’s veto. Hoover said he thought the islands weren’t ready for self-government but also told an aide he was “afraid” Congress would during his lame-duck period dispose of so many controversial issues (including repeal of Prohibition and the Agricultural Adjustment Act) that “Roosevelt will get out of an extra session of Congress in the spring”—and if that happened, Roosevelt wouldn’t have obviously taken responsibility for the Depression.¹ But Congress was determined to set the archipelago on the path to independence. The Philippine legislature vetoed the provision in large part because wrangling over the control of sugar prices remained unsettled; the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 passed when an outline for a sugar program was mostly settled, and it provided broadly the same terms of independence as the 1933 law.²

But the Philippines’s economy remained closely tied to that of the mainland United States and the Department of Agriculture determined that the AAA’s sugar program needed to go into force there, to levy a tax on processing sugar and payments to compensate growers for reducing production. Normally, farmers would agree to sign AAA contracts and those contracts would go to Washington to be processed for payment. But the Philippines were so far away it would take mabye three months to process payment. “Such delay would be fatal to the program,” M.L. Wilson (who was Mr. Domestic Allotment) wrote.³ So the program would have to be administered in the commonwealth.

According to the summary report on the AAA, this program went into effect for about 18,200 Filipino producers and reduced the size of the archipelago’s sugar crop from about 1.6m tons to about 700,000 tons, in exchange for about $12.5m in benefit payments by 1936, when the Supreme Court voided the program.⁴

UC Davis provides affiliates with

• Google workspace accounts, which means students have access to Gemini
• A Microsoft Office site license which means students have access to Copilot
• Access to ChatGPT
• An OpenAI-powered local tool called Rocky, which I haven’t found to do much more than a sound google site search would do
• Zoom with built-in AI features

To the best of my knowledge we do not have Claude Code freely available on campus, which is odd because it is the AI application IT people are most likely to tell you does, genuinely, work as advertised.

In addition to the above, many of our students have Apple products with Apple Intelligence. When they use the library website to access monographs, they are offered AI summaries by the database provider. And of course they can go further afield and get other AI tools on their own.

As you can see, our students can scarcely escape some kind of AI.

Dan had the sunniest temperament of any professor I have known. He had a wide ready smile that seemed to persist while he talked and even over the phone—even when he was possibly quite cross—you could hear the upturned corners of his mouth. Together with his broad chin and glasses, that smile made him look uncannily like Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he shared that impression of invariable cheer and also the capacity to deliver a sly jab, the more unexpected for the enduring smile.

Now that I am closer to Dan’s age then than to my own youth I can appreciate that as his junior colleague I must have seemed to him a bit like the cartoon dog Chester, hopping up and down and around, asking his methodical companion “what are we going to do today, Spike? what are we going to do?” Except, of course, Spike would be smiling.

In another university Dan wouldn’t have had to spend as much time listening to me as he did, but there were, I think, only four post-holders in US history then and Dan was tasked with administering them. I have since learned that not all senior colleagues or administrators are as tolerant or willing to give young people free rein. But Dan was patient and supportive where many people might have been obstinate and discouraging. He let me try ambitious things.

Five or so years later—after we had both moved on—when Dan published What Hath God Wrought, the enjoyment with which I read the book brought back to me the happiness wth which I had first read Dan’s work. I am glad I got a chance to chat with him and congratulate him on it.

But I am always going to remember Dan for the way he spoke and how evidently happy he was for others to succeed. I will always remember both in the voice message he left for me, eight time zones away, when he called to tell me I had got the job—which I felt meant I was going to have an academic career after all.

“Hullo, Eric! this is Dan Howe. I’m calling with”—long, thoughtful pause; I expect he was deciding how discreet this recording had to be—“good news!” Sometimes he was; it seemed like he always wanted to be.

is that in such an event it becames the joint concern of a whole continent in which we are all neighbors.

Just a few days before, the United States had joined the other American nations at Montevideo in agreeing to a convention including the provision, “No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.” Roosevelt had already publicly stated he wanted to get rid of the Platt Amendment, guaranteeing the US right to intervene in Cuba; the Montevideo conference generalized that idea, and his speech in Washington extended it to a broad modification of the Monroe Doctrine.

Ernest Gruening, an anti-imperialist journalist and historian of Mexico who had served as an aide to the US delegation in Montevideo, wrote,

this epoch-making policy has gone far to remove the accumulated suspicion and fear inculcated by a generation of military and financial penetration. The Franklin Roosevelt extension of the Monroe Doctrine had replaced the Theodore Roosevelt intensification of that doctrine of 30 years ago.

It meant “the New Deal is being extended, as far as lies within our province, to the New World,” and that the administration was “giving up the pursuit of empire.”¹

The president explained there would be modern plumbing, wiring, and air conditioning, as well as increased office space:

But the structural lines of the old Executive Office Building will remain. The artistic lines of the White House buildings were the creation of master builders when our Republic was young. The simplicity and the strength of the structure remain in the face of every modern test.

So you needn’t worry: nobody was going to add “some strange new Gothic Tower, or a factory building or perhaps a replica of the Kremlin.” You see, the new construction was a metaphor for the New Deal:

the new structure shall blend with the essential lines of the old. . . . All that we do seeks to fulfill the historic traditions of the American people. Other nations may sacrifice democracy for the transitory stimulation of old and discredited autocracies. We are restoring confidence and well-being under the rule of the people themselves.”

It’s a fascinating speech in other ways—Roosevelt talks here about the “three R’s,” which are actually four, and about including the American people of the territories in his conception of the nation. But for some reason the White House renovation metaphor struck me.

“Look out you don’t make the mistake of liking Roosevelt. . . . I’ve seen people taken in by it.”

“By what?” he was asked.

Macy groped for words, finally burst out with, “By a perfectly grand political personality, you fool!”¹

Anyway, the mayor elect of New York met the president today. The president remarked of the mayor elect, “he’s a big fan of the New Deal I guess.”

There are two (2) historiographical traditions in US policy history that have had genuine serious consequences on US policy—and both of them for ill. To be clear: I distinguish here between history of policy that is consequential on policy, that is, which affected thinking, and that which merely reinforced existing prejudices; there is a lot of the latter.

The first is the Dunning School of Reconstruction, which held that rather than being an essential project of guaranteeing the civil rights of Black Americans, the period was one of unique corruption best left behind. By the 1930s this idea was commonplace among white Americans. When Claude Bowers published The Tragic Era, Franklin Roosevelt wrote him of his experience talking to his friends—“and they have not been confined to Georgians or southerners”—about the book, which “more than any other book in recent years, had a very definite influence on public thought.”² Even some of Roosevelt’s advisees who actively favored and promoted civil rights, like Harry Hopkins, echoed this view, referring to “the incredibly vicious period of Reconstruction.”³ So although Roosevelt did some things to promote Black civil rights—creating the civil rights section in the Department of Justice—he might have done a good deal more were it not for the pervasive acceptance of the Dunning School among white policymakers.⁴

The second historiographical school with significant policy influence is the literature denigrating the New Deal itself. Generally this kind of history sets at zero the value of efforts at relief and reform, and asks, how well did the New Deal promote economic recovery?

I have written about this view at some length in my Myth America chapter so I will say here only two brief things. First, even if we stipulate that the New Deal slowed recovery, it didn’t slow recovery enough to prevent quite a rapid recovery.

And second, saying effectively, “setting aside relief and reform, how well did the New Deal do at recovery” is in effect saying, “How well did the New Deal restore things to where they were”—an aim Roosevelt expressly and repeatedly rejected. The effect is to produce an entire body of literature which finds—perhaps not surprisingly!—that this popular and effective Democratic policy program didn’t do all that well at promoting a Republican agenda.

And yet, of course, that’s the view of the New Deal that was current among members of the Barack Obama administration, including the president himself; it was frequently referenced by conservatives during the debate over relief and reform during the 2008 financial crisis.

So: two historiographical traditions consequential for US policy—producing bad outcomes. Boo! That’s your Halloween Historiography Hot Take.⁵

In the course of defending democracy, he argued, the New Deal had achieved the highest form of conservatism.

Never has a Nation made greater strides in the safeguarding of Democracy than we have made during the past three years. Wise and prudent men—intelligent conservatives—have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time. In the words of the great essayist—‘The voice of great events is proclaiming to us—Reform if you would preserve.’ I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.

Anyway it seems like some people need to hear this sort of thing.

James MacLafferty, one of Hoover’s aides and fixers, kept a diary and in the entry for April 14, 1932, he wrote about what he called a “morning after” scene in the Cabinet room of the White House.

Cigarette and cigar ends were crowding ash trays to their full capacity, empty cigarette packages were on the cabinet table and on the floor as were also wadded pieces of paper on which memorandums had been made. On the floor, by the President’s chair, were four paper bands that had once been around cigars the President had smoked. I recognized them at once and I picked them up determined that I would make them a part of this history.

MacLafferty pasted a couple of Hoover’s cigar bands into his diary. (Because he kept the diary in duplicate, there are two in each copy. One’s in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, and the other is in the Hoover Institution Archives in Stanford, California.)

MacLafferty was commemorating one of Hoover’s successful lobbying efforts: the President had cajoled Congress into cutting federal salaries as a Depression-fighting measure.

Now you can say this episode shows that Hoover had terrible instincts, so far as macroeconomic policy goes, but I wouldn’t say it shows he didn’t know how to do politicking. He was able by dint of traditional jawboning and soft-selling to get his bad ideas through a Democratic House majority. He was a very good politician—which doesn’t by any stretch mean he had good policies.

Fintan O’Toole writes about Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s history of fascism in Ireland, including “the IRA’s collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War (on the time-honoured but idiotic grounds that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’).”

The book also discusses the Irish Blueshirts, fascists who opposed the Irish government, which they believed “a crowd of Spaniards, Jews and Manxmen” O’Toole aptly notes, “I have yet to discover what the Irish fascists had against the Manx, but the point is obvious enough – it is the far right that generates the alien threat and not the other way around.”

Charles Darwent reviews Andy Friend’s study of the Artists International (swiftly renamed the Artists International Association, to avoid unwanted if accurate associations), a leftist anti-fascist organization. Though the book covers the period up to 1943, the essay doesn’t mention how the AIA dealt with the pact. I guess I have to read the book.

Catherine Taylor writes about Sally Carson’s recently reprinted Crooked Cross, a 1934 novel about how the rise of the Nazi government affects a family in a small Bavarian mountain town. I picked up a copy earlier this year when I was in Britain and read it then. It’s so prescient, it’s difficult to believe it was written before the Hitler government had long been in power. Indeed Carson died before the Nazis’ horrors could be fully revealed: she passed away on June 21, 1941, as the Germans were just invading the Soviet Union.

As part of this revision of hemispheric policy, the Roosevelt administration also adjusted US relations to the territories it would not relinquish: Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Alaska, and Hawaiʻi. Each of them would get its own version of the New Deal, including relief, public works, and programs for economic development.

The implementation of the New Deal in Puerto Rico was vexed, to say the least: for all that it achieved, much remained undone, and no party or faction in Puerto Rican politics lacked a critique of the Roosevelt administration’s policies. But many Puerto Rican politicians nevertheless preferred the New Deal to the treatment of their island “as a Caribbean Gibraltar”—that is, as a strategically located military outpost, whose inhabitants’ welfare was of little interest to Washington.³

Anyway it seems Marco Rubio has announced that Plattism is back. And it has brought Puerto Rico-as-Gibraltar with it.

I wonder what will become of the current vice president’s similarly excretory remark about the health and human services secretary’s senatorial critics. Will the likes of Peter Baker (cited above) feel they must clean it up for publication? Or have we entered an era of greater authenticity in rendering vice presidential speech?

I’m pretty sure—especially from the description in the US Navy Historical Command’s history of the USS Houston—that the caption, written on the original photo, is intentionally whimsical, and the person wearing the feathered cape and headdress of Hawaiian aliʻi (familiar to viewers of Chief of War) is actually Duke Kahanamoku, Olympic swimming champion, longboard surfer, and then-serving sheriff of Honolulu. Duke Kahanamoku would also greet Ernest Gruening, as administrator of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, in 1937—though apparently without the special garb.

Roosevelt’s 1934 trip was a combined Good Neighbor Policy / Territorial relations tour. He would first visit Haiti, from which he had ordered the accelerated end of the US occupation (reversing not only US policy but his own earlier views, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson); he would also go to Colombia.

Maybe more importantly, he visited Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and afterward Hawaiʻi (the first sitting president to do so). He had just created the Division of Territories and Island Possessions to administer the New Deal in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Hawaiʻi, and Alaska—the territories whose people were US citizens—and on this trip he would explain that US citizens in the territories were as much a part of the “American family” as anyone else.¹

The most important immediate result of the conference was probably the plan for the Combined Bomber Offensive, but the more important in terms of strategy—and one that was very much, like the “United Nations,” like the prioritization of North Africa, Roosevelt’s personal preference—was the announcement of an Allied policy to demand unconditional surrender.

Roosevelt believed peace could only come with the utter defeat of the fascist powers. Not the destruction of their people, as he was quick to stipulate: but the destruction of their ability to make war. For him, the war was, necessarily, a war against fascism, not merely against a particular enemy, and fascism needed to be not only defeated but widely seen to have been defeated.

The demand for unconditional surrender was, and remains, debated in its wisdom. As Marc Gallicchio’s Unconditional establishes quite clearly, though, it was the New Dealers’ position; people on the political right—the pre-war isolationists, chiefly—were the ones who preferred an accommodation with the fascist powers.¹

First, he said, the plan needed to run “bottom to top and not from top to bottom”—in contrast to the recently created Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which put some billions of dollars “at the disposal of the big banks, the railroads and the corporations of the nation.”

He said that even a large emergency public works program “would be only a stopgap,” and said that really what the nation needed was a “cure.”

He then sketched three basic ideas: pushing up the prices of farm commodities “to restore purchasing power to the farming half of the country”; protection for homeowners from foreclosure by protecting the smaller banks and lending companies; lowering tariffs “on the basis of a reciprocal exchange” with other countries.

He said these would be “only a part of ten or a dozen vital factors.” But that “temporary relief from the top down” would not suffice; the nation needed “permanent relief from the bottom up.”¹

The New York Times editorial board were shocked at this “demagogic claptrap.” The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was “conceived by the best financial and business brains of this country.” As for the smaller banks, “the closing of these little local banks has been stayed and almost stopped.” It had not, of course, been stopped on what the governor would have called a “permanent” basis and would resume and accelerate later in the summer.²

Roosevelt enjoyed “the howl from the New York Times and other leading papers,”³ as he wrote to Josephus Daniels, who had been his boss in the Navy Department. For his part, Daniels said, “you hit the bullseye”:

We cannot win by letting the folks think the Republican party is 51% bad and we are only 49% bad. Some of our folks in Washington have thought if we acted not quite as subservient to the big interests as the Republicans we could win. You have shown that we must have a definite policy and that prosperity cannot be invoked by incantations and lending money to people who do not use it to start the wheels of industry.⁴

Roosevelt would come to emphasize a large program of public works more, later in the campaign; at one point he would say that his proposed reforestation program alone—the idea that became the Civilian Conservation Corps—might employ a million workers.⁵ And he would continue to campaign on the ideas of propping up farm prices, lowering tariffs, and protecting the smaller lenders and borrowers.

I have a contract with the Government and it has been broken. Retired? Don’t put it that way. I’ve had a tin can tied to the end of my coat tail.

He had very recently been yelled at by Secretary of Labor William Doak in front of reporters for disputing a bright employment forecast.