An interesting article highlights the actions of a congressional committee aligned with President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1940’s. You will find actions and maneuvers that are quite reminiscent of what we have seen during recent years: HT: AAPS
(Senator Hugo Black) engaged in efforts to intimidate and silence critics of FDR and the New Deal…
(Black’s committee) claimed the power to examine millions of telegrams sent to and from activists, journalists, and lawyers, and, with the cooperation of the IRS, the tax returns of administration enemies (a latter-day tactic first employed at the instigation of FDR). Not only was this unprecedented governmental surveillance, but the Black committee, with the likely covert support (and probably aid) from the White House, enthusiastically smeared administration opponents with charges of racism and anti-Semitism…
Black’s successor as Senate committee chairman, Sherman Minton, though less celebrated as a judicial giant,was equally effective at using investigative means for silencing and harassing New Deal critics…
The Black and Minton committees, with the encouragement of the president, then engaged in unprecedented and abusive surveillance of the Roosevelt administration’s critics. It often had the desired effect of neutralizing or silencing them. Yet even more effective were the administration’s efforts through newly created administrative agencies, such as the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), to promulgate the administration’s views and to discourage opposition. Unearthing a little-known episode in media history, Beito shows both how FDR monopolized and weaponized the popular new radio technology, and how his government’s monitoring of that medium empowered him, by the FRC’s purported regulation in the “public interest,” to censor critics…
The airwaves were soon controlled by the largest broadcasters, who carefully maintained their hegemony by operating in a way congenial to the administration…
(Z)ealous prosecutors… employed dubious means to tar opponents with sedition.
Actually goes back further than that. FDR learned his fascist tactics serving in the Wilson administration during WWI, the war to make the US unsafe for democracy (it being a Plandemic-like reign of witches for US citizens). FDR was a dishonest and tyrannical trasher of the Constitution. He was mean as a snake. And worse, he was the sine qua non of Stalin and Mao’s success.
Of course, Black got a Supreme Ct appointment out of his senatorial iniquity.
Healey, thanks, I did not know or remember about FDR’s service under Wilson. Clearly, he is not nearly the virtuous saint that the left celebrates. I hate the idea that he has a monument on the National Mall.