David Beito – The Case against FDR

January 9, 2026·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

Historian David Beito argues FDR expanded state power aggressively and violated civil liberties, dispelling the sanitized hero narrative.

The premise is openly adversarial. Glenn Lowry starts with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a giant in the American imagination, then gives David Beito room to push against the cleaned-up version. Beito does more than object around the edges. He argues that Roosevelt's career has to be judged through state power, civil liberties, relief politics, and choices at home and abroad that still sit badly. The gold story does a lot of work. In the peak excerpt, Beito describes Roosevelt setting the price of gold over breakfast with advisers, including Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. The scene is almost funny until it is not. Roosevelt's explanation, that three times seven equals twenty-one, becomes, for Beito, a sign of how casual and superstitious the process could get. Morgenthau saw the risk. As Beito tells it, his fear was that the public would revolt if people knew monetary policy was being handled that way. Beito broadens the case with care. He connects the gold experiment to Charles Warren's theory that raising the gold price could raise commodity prices, while noting Keynes's sharp dismissal of the idea. The policy eventually failed. The economics are not left totally neat, though, since Beito also says gold inflows into the United States during the thirties helped steady things. Those inflows had grim roots. He attributes much of the movement to people, including Jews, moving gold out as the Nazis advanced. The exchange stays interview-driven. Lowry sets the stakes, lets Beito make the case, and closes by treating the book as something worth arguing with seriously. Beito wants argument, not reverence. Near the end, he says he wants critics to bring the book into the light of day and show where he is wrong. The politics do not sort cleanly. He says the book is not a standard right-wing brief, especially on civil rights and civil liberties, where he thinks left-leaning readers may find something useful. The ending is grave but open. Lowry agrees the biography deserves attention, and the episode lands less like a verdict than an invitation to argue about Roosevelt without automatically bowing to the legend.

As heard by us

A sober reassessment of FDR as a political operator, not the sanitized figure of memory.

David Beto makes a forceful case against the polished Roosevelt legend on The Glenn Show, and Glenn Lowry keeps the exchange tied to history, policy, and moral tension.

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Why you'd press play

You want a sharp challenge to the Roosevelt story.

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