FDR: Enemy of Civil Liberties
In 2018, the Siena Poll of 157 presidential scholars reported that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt were the top five U.S. presidents. Siena Poll director Don Levy noted that the four on Mount Rushmore plus FDR were “carved in granite with presidential historians.”
In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is regularly rated among the top five U.S. presidents when professional academics in history or political science are surveyed. In 2015, the American Political Science Association even rated FDR third on its list.
But does Roosevelt deserve such acclaim? Burt Folsom, professor emeritus at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal? certainly disagrees, arguing that David T. Beito’s new book, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance, “illuminates Roosevelt’s desire for power and his efforts to punish those who tried to thwart him.”
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