David Beito’s The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (Oakland: Independent Institute, 2023) is one of at least four recently published and forthcoming books to pummel the four-term administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), especially its so-called New Deal policy platform.
It’s about time, as the ninetieth anniversary of FDR’s first term and the (in)famous First Hundred Days passed earlier this year with the banners of FDR hagiographers and New Deal acolytes still firmly in possession of the historiographical battlefield. Beito, though, has helped to expose a flank that a brigade of New New Deal historians could exploit.