Franklin D. Roosevelt, World War II, and the Reality of Constitutional Statesmanship – Texas National Security Review

1 Herbert J. Storing, “American Statesmanship: Old and New,” in Toward a More Perfect Union, ed. Joseph M. Bessette (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1995), 413.

2 Jeffrey K. Tulis, “The Possibility of Constitutional Statesmanship,” in The Limits of Constitutional Democracy, ed. Jeffrey K. Tulis and Stephen Macedo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 112, 123.

3 Patrick Overeem, “Not Always at the Helm: The Federalist and the Modern Dismissal of Statesmanship,” American Political Thought 11, no. 4 (September 2022): 467, https://doi.org/10.1086/721953.

4 As the title of Tulis’ essay, “The Possibility of Constitutional Statesmanship,” indicates. See also Overeem, “Not Always at the Helm,” 487–89; Storing, “American Statesmanship,” 418–21.

5 Though some has. See Wendell J. Coats, Jr., Statesmanship: Six Modern Illustrations of a Modified Ancient Ideal (Selingsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), appraising the statesmanship of Washington and Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, as well as non-American leaders; Justin B. Dyer, “Revisiting Dred Scott: Prudence, Providence, and the Limits of Constitutional Statesmanship,” Perspectives on Political Science 39, no. 3 (July 2010): 166–74, on Lincoln; Justin B. Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), on Lincoln; Daniel J. Mahoney, The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (New York: Encounter Books, 2022), also on Lincoln (and non-American leaders).

6 In so doing, I address a “challenge to scholarship” Clinton Rossiter issued when he pressed researchers to elucidate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “constitutional philosophy.” See Rossiter, “The Political Philosophy of F.D. Roosevelt: A Challenge to Scholarship,” Review of Politics 11, no. 1 (January 1949): 87–95, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1404501.

7 By both explaining FDR’s conduct (according to his constitutional philosophy) and evaluating it (according to the constitutional statesmanship standard), I wish to help bridge a longstanding divide in presidency studies. Legal academics tend to judge the formal, limited, “literary” president. Political scientists tend instead to elaborate the informal, power-maximizing, “real” president. As Mansfield notes, “The realistic school of interpretation,” à la Richard Neustadt, “has never succeeded in destroying the formal school, just as the formal school” à la Edward Corwin, “has never quite succeeded in defining the reality of executive power.” Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Here, I try to sketch the ideal of constitutional statesmanship while also describing its reality.

8 Coats, Statesmanship; Overeem, “Not Always at the Helm.” The prudence of constitutional statesmanship also accords with the quality of forbearance that is central to Landy and Milkis’ description of “democratic leadership.” See Marc Landy and Sidney M. Milkis, Presidential Greatness (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

9 Throughout this article, I use “public good” and “common good” interchangeably, as many political philosophers did from the 16th to the 19th centuries. (See, e.g., John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson [Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980], passim.) By public (or common) good, I mean interests that are common to all members.

10 For an early statement of the president as a power-maximizing agent of the public, see Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960). The assumptions underpinning this conception of the president continue to dominate scholarship on the presidency within the rational choice tradition.

11 See, e.g., William E. Leuchtenburg, “The First Modern President,” in Leadership in the Modern Presidency, ed. Fred I. Greenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 7–40; Stephen Skowronek, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Modern Presidency,” Studies in American Political Development 6, no. 2 (1992): 322–58, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00001000.

12 For example, candidate Barack Obama promised supporters that “we are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” during a campaign rally in October 2008. Obama, “Remarks in Columbia, Missouri,” October 30, 2008, made available online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, comps., The American Presidency Project—Public Papers (hereinafter APP), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-columbia-missouri-0. The desirability of transformational, as opposed to “transactional,” presidential leadership was posited by James MacGregor Burns in 1978. See Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). Burns’ idea of transformational leadership shares little in common with calls like Obama’s above, however.

13 Machiavelli, however, might have supposed differently. Acknowledging that all republics start with goodness but invariably degenerate over time, they must be occasionally renewed. “The mode of renewing them,” according to Machiavelli, was not to revise their institutions to meet present challenges, but instead “to lead them back toward their beginnings,” i.e., to their first principles. While the formulation of statesmanship posited here differs by associating statesmanship with revision, it shares Machiavelli’s insight insofar as those revisions must be reconciled with the “reputation [the republic] had in its beginnings.” It also shares Machiavelli’s admonishment that if “good orders and good men” do not initiate the renewal using their “intrinsic prudence,” such renewal can more dangerously be imposed by “an extrinsic force” that so thoroughly defeats the republic that it returns to its first principles. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Book III.1, 209.

14 Landy and Milkis, Presidential Greatness, 4. In this way, constitutional statesmen compensate for the law’s inherent incompleteness by filling “gaps,” as Otto von Bismarck recommended; see Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 353.

15 Marc Landy and Sidney M. Milkis, “The Presidency in History: Leading from the Eye of the Storm,” in The Presidency and the Political System, ed. Michael Nelson, 10th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2014), 99. Similarly, “[t]he prudence of the statesman,” Steven Hayward writes, “is the combination of attachment to principle alongside a profound understanding of the circumstances.” Hayward, Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism (New York: Encounter Books, 2017), 78.

16 Nathan Tarcov, “Ideas of Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern,” in The Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 11–29, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812206074.11.

17 I use both “democratic” and “republican” in a colloquial sense. By democratic, I mean nothing more than a political order in which leaders are accountable by some method to voters. By republican, I mean simply that the order has some institutional devices designed to avoid arbitrary domination of individuals (e.g., separation of powers, enumerated constitutional rights, or federalism). Whether U.S. presidents are accountable to the American people or instead to the U.S. Constitution has been an enduring debate over the meaning of presidential representation. See Jeremy D. Bailey, The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). Whether the American constitution was democratic upon its adoption or not, most of its political leaders have treated it as such since at least the mid-nineteenth century.

18 Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801, in APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-19.

19 Interpreting Locke’s theory of executive prerogative, Tulis refers to the executive’s first-mover potential as its “prospective advantage” and the people’s evaluative power as their “retrospective advantage.” Tulis, “The Possibility of Constitutional Statesmanship,” 115.

20 Jeremy D. Bailey, Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

21 Landy and Milkis, Presidential Greatness, 4.

22 Clinton Rossiter and Charles R. Kesler, eds., The Federalist Papers (New York: Signet, 1991), 431.

23 By rules, I mean both formal constitutional rules (e.g., enumerated powers and judicial interpretations) and constitutional norms. I thank Aaron Spikol for help with the ideas in this paragraph and the next.

24 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John B. Colvin,” September 20, 1810, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 556.

25 In a survey of presidential specialists conducted this year, Roosevelt ranked the second “greatest president,” behind only Lincoln. See Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin S. Vaughn, “Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey,” white paper, available at http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf. His position at the top of such lists has been consistent over time. See, e.g.,  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Rating the Presidents: Washington to Clinton,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 2 (1997): 179–90, https://doi.org/10.2307/2657937; James Lindgren and Steven G. Calabresi, “Rating the Presidents of the United States, 1789–2000: A Survey of Scholars in Political Science, History, and Law,” Constitutional Commentary 18 (2001): 583–606.

26 In a representative appraisal, the historian William Leuchtenburg asserts that “Franklin Roosevelt so transformed the United States that it was, in essence, a different land, a different republic than when he took office.” See “Episode 7: A Strong and Active Faith,” The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, directed by Ken Burns, written by Geoffrey C. Ward (PBS, 2014).

27 Neustadt, Presidential Power; James Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, 4th edition (London: Routledge, 2016 [1972]); Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, 4th edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006 [1997]); Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, new edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017 [1987]); Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997).

28 Tulis, “The Possibility of Constitutional Statesmanship,” 112.

29 James W. Ceaser, “Demagoguery, Statesmanship, and the American Presidency,” Critical Review 19, no. 2–3 (2007): 257–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/08913810701766157; Melissa Lane, “The Origins of the Statesman–Demagogue Distinction in and after Ancient Athens,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 2 (April 2012): 179–200, https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2012.0020.

30 Each model of gauging presidential success has limitations; the one proposed herein is no different. For instance, this evaluative approach cannot solve the “one-N problem,” frustrating all attempts at comparing presidential performance across administrations. (See Gary King, “The Methodology of Presidential Research,” in Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches, ed. John H. Kessel George C. Edwards III, and Bert A. Rockman [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993], 387–412.) Roosevelt himself recognized the limitations of comparing the performance of different presidents. Commenting on Lincoln’s legacy, FDR supposed “[i]t seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another. A statesman deals with concrete difficulties—with things which must be done from day to day.” Roosevelt, “Address at the Dedication of the Memorial on the Gettysburg Battlefield,” July 3, 1938, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-dedication-the-memorial-the-gettysburg-battlefield-gettysburg-pennsylvania.

31 Storing, “American Statesmanship,” 412.

32 For a description and criticism of Lycurgus’ constitution, see Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair, ed. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin Books, 1992 [1962]), II.9.1269a29–1271b19 (139–49).

33 Storing, “American Statesmanship,” 412. While they debated which institutional arrangements would best secure this end, both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists agreed on this end. See Jeffrey K. Tulis, “The Two Constitutional Presidencies,” in The Presidency and the Political System, 12th edition, ed. Michael Nelson (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2021), 5.

34 For both Plato and Aristotle, the “architectonic art” was statesmanship. The statesman practicing the architectonic art synchronized all other arts—generalship, oratory, and legal administration—and directed all citizens. See Coats, Statesmanship, 18–20; Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. William David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954 [1925]), 1094a26–28.

35 Storing, “American Statesmanship,” 413. Storing’s invocation of “way of life-setting” leadership is, no doubt, a reference to Aristotle’s definition of a constitution as the organic way of life of a polity’s inhabitants. See Aristotle, Politics, IV.11.1295a40 (266) and VII.8.1328b1 (413). Tulis says Storing here conflates Aristotle’s lawgiver (nomothetês), who founds the constitution and does set the way of life, with Aristotle’s statesman (politikos), who acts under the constitution. Tulis, “The Possibility of Constitutional Statesmanship,” 113. Overeem, by contrast, argues Aristotle’s politikos refers to both founders and subsequent statesmen. Patrick Overeem, “Aristotle’s Politikos: Statesmanship, Magnanimity, and the Rule of the Many,” in Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy, ed. Emma Cohen De Lara and René Brouwer (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 35–49, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64825-5_3.

36 For this reason, translators of ancient political philosophy commonly emphasize the inadequacy of “constitution” as a translation of the Greek politeia. See, for instance, the preliminary note in Aristotle, The Politics, 176.

37 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “The Idea of a Constitution,” Journal of Legal Education 37 (1987): 167–68, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42892886. Isocrates, for instance, calls the constitution the “soul of the polis,” encompassing a society’s entire social, legal, and political fabric. See Dennis C. Mueller, Constitutional Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 308.

38 Storing, “American Statesmanship,” 412–13, quoting James Madison’s Federalist No. 10, Federalist Papers.

39 All quotes in this paragraph are drawn from McIlwain’s translation of Plato’s Statesman. See Charles Howard McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947 [1940]), 31. To be certain, in both the Statesman and the Republic, Plato is describing an ideal statesman that could render constitutional rules superfluous. He recognizes that so long as the ideal statesman remains hypothetical, constraints on political leadership are appropriate.

40 Illustrative of the shift is Adam Smith’s assertion, published the same year the Declaration of Independence was written, that “every individual, it is evident, can in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him.” Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Blacksburg, VA: Thrifty, 2009 [1776]), IV.2.10 (320). Nathan Tarcov, however, finds evidence of “ancient and Machiavellian inheritances and forgotten lessons” in modern American constitutionalism. See Tarcov, “Ideas of Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern.”

41 Paul Eidelberg, On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980 [1976]), 61.

42 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Henry Lee,” May 8, 1825, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1500–1. On Jefferson’s contested authorship of the Declaration, consider Robert M.S. McDonald, “Thomas Jefferson’s Changing Reputation as Author of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 2 (1999): 169–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/3124951.

43 Consider Alexander Hamilton, Federalist nos. 15 (100–8) and 23 (148–53) and James Madison, Federalist No. 55 (338–43) in Federalist Papers; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1988 [1853]), 220–35, 239–42; James W. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), chap. 1.

44 Roosevelt, “Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club,” September 23, 1932, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-address-progressive-government-the-commonwealth-club-san-francisco-california.

45 Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 3, 1938, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-0.

46 See supra note 27.

47 Roosevelt, “Address Delivered at Green Bay, Wisconsin,” August 9, 1934, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-delivered-green-bay-wisconsin. Emphasis added.

48 Roosevelt, “Address on Agriculture,” September 28, 1935, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-agriculture-fremont-nebraska; he makes the same claim in his “Campaign Address on Prohibition,” August 27, 1932, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-address-prohibition-sea-girt-new-jersey.

49 Those who hold the Constitution in the most contempt are today some of the most astute observers of this fact. As William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, two presidency scholars critical of the Constitution, recently wrote, “The Constitution imposes a specific structure of government on the United States, and it would be extremely odd to argue that this structure doesn’t matter for how well governments perform. Structure matters to all organizations, and it matters to the American government.” Howell and Moe, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); relatedly, see Howell and Moe, Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

50 The Second New Deal generally refers to the “alphabet soup” agencies erected to implement and oversee federal policy implementation. The “Third New Deal,” so called by Sidney M. Milkis, included the Executive Reorganization Act in 1937, Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing plan, and his campaign to “purge” skeptics of the New Deal agenda from the Democratic Party in 1938. See Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Landy and Milkis, Presidential Greatness, 175–79.

51 Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 6, 1945, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/state-the-union-address.

52 Joseph M. Bessette and Jeffrey Tulis, “The Constitution, Politics, and the Presidency,” in The Presidency in the Constitutional Order, ed. Joseph M. Bessette and Jeffrey Tulis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 10. Research has indicated that voting decisions of congressmembers are strongly influenced by what they believe they can justify to their constituents back home, which suggests that presidents, especially non–term-limited ones, might behave similarly. See John W. Kingdon, Congressmen’s Voting Decisions (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 136–70.

53 Overeem, “Not Always at the Helm,” 472.

54 Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948); Michael A. Genovese, Presidential Prerogative: Imperial Power in an Age of Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), esp. “Introduction,” 1–9. The fact that exceptional circumstances like wartime do not clearly end is Mary Dudziak’s worry in War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). The “state of exception” (or state of siege) was a concept developed by Carl Schmitt. See Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 [1922]); Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2014 [1921]). As applied to the American context, see Gary Gerstle and Joel Isaac, eds., States of Exception in American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

55 See, e.g., Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 6, 1942, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/state-the-union-address-1; “Arsenal of Democracy Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-9. (Note that the constitutionally required presidential address was formally known as the “Annual Message” until 1946, though by 1942 it was commonly called the State of the Union address.) For FDR’s use of the crusade motif, see Roosevelt, “Prayer on D-Day,” June 6, 1944, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/prayer-d-day. For a version of this argument, see John Oddo, “War Legitimation Discourse: Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in Four U.S. Presidential Addresses,” Discourse & Society 22, no. 3 (May 2011): 287–314, https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926510395442.

56 At the least, we can say that presidents today have less “reconstructive” potential. Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make, 442–46.

57 Some contend no such distinction is possible. Ackerman, for instance, thinks the best leader the American system can expect is a “politician/statesman” who first does what is required to get reelected, and thereafter may use his “influence on behalf of the ‘public good’ as [he] conscientiously define[s] it.” See Bruce Ackerman, We the People (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991), 244.

58 Robert E. Sherwood quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 (New York: Vintage, 2014 [1985]), 9.

59 Quoted in Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 7; Ward, Before the Trumpet, 9; John M. Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 127; James P. Pfiffner, The Character Factor: How We Judge America’s Presidents (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 22.

60 Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet, 9. FDR’s family, friends, and foreign counterparts all agreed with the assessment of labor secretary Frances Perkins, who had known the president since before he had polio and yet considered him “the most complicated human being I have ever known.” Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (London: Hammond, 1948), 9.

61 Matthew J. Dickinson, Bitter Harvest: FDR, Presidential Power, and the Growth of the Presidential Branch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. II: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 528; Rodney A. Grunes, “The Institutional Presidency,” in A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. William D. Pederson (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 362–84; Margaret C. Rung, “Political and Administrative Style,” in A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 385–404.

62 Quoted in Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001), xii. On the origin of the name “Brains Trust” as a reference to the collection of intellectuals Roosevelt tapped for policymaking advice, see Rexford G. Tugwell, FDR: Architect of an Era (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 80; Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), 64–66.

63 Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: The Life and Legacy of FDR (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 82. In agreement, see: Nicholas Wapshott, The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II (New York: Norton, 2004), xvi; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1982]), 8–9. FDR’s contemporaries shared the same assessment. See James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1940–1945) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), preface; Rossiter, “The Political Philosophy of F.D. Roosevelt,” 90–91; Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Collins, 1948), 8–9. As biographer Joseph E. Persico wrote, “[n]othing would have pleased [Roosevelt] more than to observe historians arguing passionately about what constituted the ‘real Roosevelt.’” Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War, xii.

64 Eleanor Roosevelt once said that the president had “no real confidantes,” adding, “I don’t think I was ever his confidante, either.” See James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R.: A Son’s Story of a Courageous Man (New York: Kessinger, 2007 [1959]), 315.

65 Rossiter, “The Political Philosophy of F.D. Roosevelt,” 87.

66 Rexford G. Tugwell, In Search of Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), vii.

67 The insider story told by Sam Rosenman, an FDR advisor-turned-speechwriter, begins with a disclaimer that applies to each of these accounts: “This is a partisan book. It is written by one who believes that Franklin D. Roosevelt, with all his faults, ranks with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln as one of the greatest of American Presidents, and that he was a very great human being besides.” Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 13. Similar statements are made in most of the memoirs; see, e.g., Tugwell, In Search of Roosevelt, vii; Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 9–10.

68 Rung, “Political and Administrative Style,” 387; on wartime written correspondence, see Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War.

69 Roosevelt, “Introductions,” vols. 1933–1940 in Samuel I. Rosenman, comp., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950 [1938 and 1950]), [hereinafter PPAFDR].

70 On the revolutionary quality of FDR’s press conferences, see Leuchtenburg, “The First Modern President,” 18; Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, 566. FDR held many more news conferences than his successors would. See “Presidential News Conferences,” APP, data archive, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/newsconferences.php.

71 Quoted in Kimball, The Juggler, 7; Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), xii; Pfiffner, The Character Factor, 22.

72 Bessette and Tulis, “The Constitution, Politics, and the Presidency,” 11. Additionally, action often conforms to professed principles because rhetoric entangles the speaker who wishes to gain legitimation and avoid punishment from his audiences. See Quentin Skinner, “Moral Principles and Social Change,” in Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145–57.

73 Sherwood, quoted in Barnet Baskerville, The People’s Voice: The Orator in American Society (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 176–77; Rosenman makes a similar observation in Working with Roosevelt, 13.

74 Earnest Brandenburg, “The Preparation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Speeches,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 35, no. 2 (1949): 214, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335634909381481. According to FDR’s stenographer, Grace Tully, for several of Roosevelt’s most memorable speeches—from declaring the “date which will live in infamy” to announcing the Four Freedoms—Roosevelt dictated nearly every word in a single sitting, “carefully specifying each punctuation mark and new paragraph.” See Tully, F.D.R., My Boss (New York: Scribner, 1949), 256; on Roosevelt dictating the “Four Freedoms” in a single sitting, see Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 419–25; “FDR and the Four Freedoms Speech,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum (hereinafter, FDRPL), https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms.

In a footnote to a volume of the president’s official papers, Roosevelt concedes that he would often consult with others when developing speeches. But he defends the speeches as his own creations, not Rooseveltian prescriptions generated by ghost writers. See Roosevelt, PPAFDR, vol. 1936, “Note,” 391–92. A review of his papers, insider accounts, and subsequent historical analyses endorses this claim. The thirteen-volume PPAFDR contains manifold memoranda in which Roosevelt solicits speechwriting suggestions and responds to recommendations.

Insider accounts attesting to Roosevelt’s speech authorship include: Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 262 and 419–25; Raymond Moley (with Elliot Rosen), The First New Deal, ed. Frank Freidel (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 114; and Frank Kingdon and Rex Stout, “That Man” in the White House: You and Your President (New York: Arco, 1944), 128.

Historical analyses validating FDR’s claim include: Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 477–79; Halford Ross Ryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rhetorical Presidency (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 167; Halford Ross Ryan, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Rhetorical Politics and Political Rhetorics,” in Presidential Speechwriting: From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and Beyond, ed. Kurt W. Ritter and Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 23; Thomas W. Benson, “FDR at Gettysburg: The New Deal and the Rhetoric of Presidential Leadership,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, ed. Leroy G. Dorsey (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 145–83; Laura Crowell, “The Building of the ‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” Speech Monographs 22, no. 5 (1955): 266–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637755509375153; Laura Crowell, “Word Changes Introduced Ad Libitum in Five Speeches by Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Speech Monographs 25 (1958): 229–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/03637755809375238; and Campbell Knowles, A Rendezvous with Destiny: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Philadelphia: McKay, 1956), 13.

75 Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 25–26.

76 And I do mean argue, not assume. The next section sketches the philosophy. The following sections then explain his prewar and wartime defense-related decisions in terms of that philosophy before finally evaluating them against the standard of constitutional statesmanship.

77 George F. Will, in “Introduction Episode,” to The Roosevelts.

78 See, e.g., Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 113–14.

79 Quoted in Hamilton Basso, “The Roosevelt Legend,” LIFE, November 3, 1947, 132; Philip Abbott, The Exemplary Presidency: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 24. Frances Perkins later wrote that “those two words expressed, I think, just about what he was.” Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 267.

80 Kenneth S. Davis, “Education,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times: An Encyclopedic View, eds. Otis L. Graham, Jr., and Meghan Robinson Wander (Boston: Hall, 1985), 110; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency, updated ed. (Boston: Mariner, 2004 [1973]), 114.

81 Abbott, The Exemplary Presidency, 24. What made him a successful reformer, some argue, was precisely this rejection of theory as a guide. Plenty of his subordinates believed this to be the case, too; see, e.g., Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 266–67; Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 63. For a counterargument, see Kenneth W. Thompson, The President and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

82 In FDR’s “Address at Roanoke Island, N.C.,” August 18, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-roanoke-island-nc, for instance, he lambasted Thomas Macaulay, whom he quoted liberally elsewhere (and usually without accreditation). On Roosevelt’s distinction between the “theoretical” and the “practical,” see Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 100. In each of his State of the Union addresses between 1934 and 1943, Roosevelt variously blamed “theory,” “false theory,” “theoretical hope,” “well-meaning theorists,” “doctrines,” “isms,” “philosophy,” and “philosophies” for causing rearmament, military aggression, appeasement, dictatorship, constitutional failure, and economic depression. For a rare counterexample, see Roosevelt’s 1936 State of the Union address (January 3, 1936, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-2), where he concludes by quoting “a wise philosopher” (i.e., Macaulay).

83 David J. Siemers, Presidents and Political Thought (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 135–36.

84 Neustadt, Presidential Power, 89.

85 Siemers, Presidents and Political Thought, 132. Emphases original. Frances Perkins notes FDR’s lack of theoretical knowledge in The Roosevelt I Knew, 268.

86 Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961 [1908]); Winston S. Churchill, “What Good’s a Constitution,” Collier’s, August 22, 1936, 386–93, http://cdn.constitutionreader.com/files/pdf/constitution/ch118.pdf.

87 None of this should be misunderstood as an endorsement of his constitutional philosophy. Instead, I aim to reconstruct it to explain FDR’s behavior in terms of it.

88 Ceaser, “Demagoguery, Statesmanship, and the American Presidency,” 271.

89 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 57.

90 Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-8.

91 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 57.

92 Summing up the Great Depression’s impact on public confidence, Hans J. Morgenthau concluded the crisis “was not limited to denying the ability of Americans to achieve its purpose; it put into question the purpose itself.” Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 52.

93 Karl Lowenstein quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 32.

94 McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 1.

95 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress.

96 Roosevelt, “Radio Address on Electing Liberals to Office,” November 4, 1938, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/radio-address-the-election-liberals.

97 David A. Mayers (quoting from Kennan’s diary), George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy, 53–54.

98 E. Pendleton Herring quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 8.

99 Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 4 (January 1941): 459, 467, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2769918.

100 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939, APP.

101 Compare Lindsay Rogers, “Presidential Dictatorship in the United States,” Quarterly Review 231 (1919): 127–28, where he compares the constitutional ideas of Corwin and Wilson to illustrate Wilson’s “dictatorship,” and Rogers, Crisis Government (New York: W.W. Norton, 1934), 61, 165.

102 Quoted in Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 187.

103 Quoted in Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 300. Across the Atlantic, just these kinds of “dictatorial powers” were then being bestowed. Not three weeks after Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Reichstag’s Enabling Act vested the German chancellor with effectively unlimited power.

104 Quoted in Halford Ross Ryan, The Inaugural Addresses of Twentieth-century American Presidents (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 100.

105 Alpheus Geer to Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter, March 8, 1933; J.H. Meaux to Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter, March 11, 1933; Joseph T. O’Neill to Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter, March 5, 1933. Available at FDRPL, President’s Personal File, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/dictatorship.pdf.

106 A rival Republican newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, similarly summed the mood on March 5, 1933, with the following headline: FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY. See George F. Will, “Obama to the Nation: Onward Civilian Soldiers,” Washington Post, January 27, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-follows-the-progressive-presidents-model-of-martial-language/2012/01/27/gIQAcobPWQ_story.html; Alter, The Defining Moment, 4.

107 Even Roosevelt’s praise for Thomas Jefferson stemmed less from an appreciation of Jefferson’s erudition than from his admiration of how Jefferson “knew how to carry theory into practice.” See Roosevelt, “Proclamation 2276—Declaring the Birthday of Thomas Jefferson a National Holiday,” March 21, 1938, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2276-thomas-jeffersons-birthday.

108 Wilson appointed FDR as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913.

109 Siemers, Presidents and Political Thought, 106. Wilson described himself not as a theorist in his own right, but as a translator of the philosophies of Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Walter Bagehot to an American audience (105). FDR too found Wilson an able translator, referring to him as the “clear spokesman of the Jeffersonian heritage.” See Roosevelt, “Address at Jefferson Day Dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota,” April 18, 1932, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-jefferson-day-dinner-st-paul-minnesota.

110 Wilson refers extensively to the “strict literary theory” in his Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1884]). See also Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 70.

111 See Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States. As Tulis observes, this reading of the Constitution marked a clear departure from Wilson’s earlier thinking as reflected in his dissertation-turned-book, Congressional Government, published twenty years before. Tulis, “The Two Constitutional Presidencies,” 15.

112 Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 56. The organism metaphor was not Wilson’s innovation. It is difficult to pin down the intellectual inspiration behind Wilson’s invocation of it. Around the time, the metaphor likening nations and their constitutions to organisms was used, in different ways, by the British building on Burkean conservatism like Walter Bagehot, by G.W. Hegel and neo-Hegelians like Johan Bluntschli, and by German-trained Americans, including Herbet Baxter Adams, who taught Wilson at Johns Hopkins University. Moreover, it was popularized by Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, whose readers deployed the metaphor in still more ways. (See Siemers, Presidents and Political Thought, 114.) “[T]he spectrum of opinion that went under the name of Social Darwinism” included “almost every variety of belief.” Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 431. It was used even by the Supreme Court of Wilson’s era, which held that the “[p]rovisions of the Constitution of the United States are not mathematical formulas . . . but are organic living institutions.” Gompers v. United States, 233 U.S. 604, 605 (1914).

113 Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 69–70.

114 Wilson quoted in Tulis, “The Two Constitutional Presidencies,” 15.

115 Aside from their personal relationship, as a student at Harvard, FDR studied the words of Theodore Roosevelt, who was then U.S. president. See L. LeRoy Cowperthwaite, “Franklin D. Roosevelt at Harvard,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 1 (1952): 39, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335635209381729.

116 Ken Burns’ documentary emphasizes the point; see esp. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s narration of the relationship in episode 1, The Roosevelts. See also Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 28; Siemers, Presidents and Political Thought, 131, 145.

117 Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, ed. Wayne Andrews, 2nd ed. (New York: Octagon, 1958 [1913]), 197. FDR took TR’s stewardship theory apparently more seriously than even TR, who had normalized the use of the executive order by issuing as many as nearly all his successors combined. FDR did him one better by issuing thousands more than any other president to date. See data at “Executive Orders: Washington–Biden,” APP, data archive, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php.

118 Siemers, Presidents and Political Thought, 145.

119 Though hardly ever with attribution; see supra note 83. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 63.

120 Macaulay built on The Character of a Trimmer, a 1688 essay by Viscount Halifax, whom Macaulay calls an exemplary trimmer. See the essay at https://quod-lib-umich edu.stanford.idm.oclc.org/e/eebo/A44619.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

121 Eugene Goodheart, “In Defense of Trimming,” Philosophy and Literature 25, no. 1 (2001): 46–58, https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2001.0008. Macaulay’s definition of “trimming” was distinct from, if not opposite to, the more modern definition of the word, which is used to describe an opportunistic politician modifying his position to match the day’s political winds.

122 Roosevelt, “Excerpts from Press Conference,” December 19, 1944, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-from-the-press-conference-20. Perkins thought this aptly described his approach. See Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 269.

123 It is this quality of Roosevelt’s project that made him a “conservative reformer” according to Landy and Milkis in Presidential Greatness, 163.

124 Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 111–12.

125 “Layman’s document” from Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constitution-day-washington-dc.

126 “Layman’s document.”

127 “Layman’s document.” Legal academics would characterize FDR as a “departmentalist” for his rejection of judicial supremacy. Adherents of departmentalism contend that the presidency, as a co-equal branch, cannot be subordinated to the court’s interpretation of the Constitution (or to Congress’, for that matter). Departmentalists instead believe the president remains free to interpret the Constitution in light of his executive duties. Coining the term “departmentalism,” and writing in favor of FDR’s contemporaneous fight against a “juristic” reading of the Constitution, is Edward Corwin’s Court over Constitution: A Study of Judicial Review as an Instrument of Popular Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1938), 69–84. More recent variants of departmentalism emphasize less the president’s need for departmentalism to fulfill his own duties. Instead, they assert that when the political branches engage in constitutional interpretation, policy better reflects the people who are ultimately the American sovereign. See, e.g., Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review, new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–8. Roosevelt’s departmentalist approach embraced both bases of legitimacy: because he represented the people who had registered a mandate, he thought, his interpretation of the executive’s constitutional duties and limits should prevail. If he interpreted unfaithfully, he claimed, the people would signal as much in routine elections.

128 For a survey of FDR’s use of war metaphors during the New Deal years, see William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 35–75. See also Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21–22, and Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I,” American Political Science Review 31, no. 3 (June 1937): 417–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/1948164. This was not a rhetorical strategy unique to Roosevelt; his totalitarian foes also regularly used military metaphors to justify domestic policies. See Katznelson, Fear Itself, 108.

129 Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, APP. The influence of philosopher William James’ speech-turned-essay on equivalences to war is almost undeniable. See James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1910, 436–68, https://pressbooks.pub/writingtextbook/chapter/the-moral-equivalent-of-war-by-william-james/. Roosevelt admitted to being “influenced by a vague memory” of James from his student days. Moreover, Raymond Moley, who was responsible for the speech’s first draft, was a Jamesian disciple who recommended policy to FDR based on James’ “Moral Equivalent of War” lecture. See Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper & Bros., 1939), 174, 364, and 391. Attorney General Francis Biddle, who served the Roosevelt administration during war, also made favorable references to James’ article two weeks before the president’s decision to forcibly relocate Japanese-Americans; see Biddle, “Summary of Remarks at the Fifty-Third Annual Dinner of the Brooklyn Bar Association,” February 5, 1942, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/09/16/02-05-1942.pdf. Presidents have continued to rely on James’ thinking. Jimmy Carter’s invocation of James’ phrase in an address on the oil crisis, for example, is popularly known as the “Moral Equivalent of War speech.” See Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy,” April 18, 1977, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-energy; James Reston, “Moral Equivalent of War,” New York Times, April 20, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/20/archives/moral-equivalent-of-war.html.

130 Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, APP. See John Dewey, “The Social Possibilities of War,” in Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, vol. II (New York: Henry Holt, 1929 [1918]), 551–60.

131 Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, APP.

132 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937. The day commemorates the signing of the Constitution by delegates of the Philadelphia Convention on September 17, 1878.

133 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day.” Wilson criticized the reduction of the Constitution to “a mere lawyer’s document” in his Constitutional Government in the United States, 56.

134 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day.” The line is likely a reference to Jefferson’s warning not to permit a “scrupulous adherence to the law” to “absurdly sacrific[e] the end” of constitutional government “to the means.” See Jefferson, “Letter to John B. Colvin,” 556. FDR’s speech includes other tributes to Jefferson. For example, Roosevelt asserts the Constitution should always serve “the living generation’s expectations of government,” which Jefferson had before professed when writing, “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” See Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789,” in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 451–52.

135 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day”; Neustadt, Presidential Power, 29 (emphasis original).

136 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day.”

137 See supra note 15.

138 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1935, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-3. See also similar emphases in his State of the Union addresses from 1936 to 1939 and again in 1941. All available at APP.

139 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 6, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-1. Other instances in which FDR acknowledged “the advantages of a dictatorship” include his “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, and his State of the Union addresses from 1936 to 1941. All available at APP.

140 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 53–54. On Roosevelt’s disavowal of the dictators’ methods, see Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937; “Arsenal of Democracy Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940; “State of the Union Address,” January 4, 1939; “Statement Against Discharging Loyal Aliens from Jobs,” January 2, 1942, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-against-discharging-loyal-aliens-from-jobs. All available at APP.

141 Quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 94. Roosevelt described the intent of his executive branch reorganization plan in the same terms in his “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1938, xxv, written on June 16, 1941; and in his “State of the Union Address,” January 4, 1939. The committee’s report was instrumental to the first draft of what later became the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939, the early version of which was dubbed a “dictator bill” by Congress in extraordinary bipartisan fashion. On the report, the proposed bill, and congressional reception, see Peri E. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1996, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 104–112.

142 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 6, 1937, APP.

143 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress.”

144 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress.”

145 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937.

146 Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 37, l, lii, lvii, lxvii, written on June 3, 1941.

147 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 6, 1937, APP.

148 “Must not be imperiled” from Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress.” “Horse-and-buggy” from Roosevelt, “Press Conference,” May 31, 1935, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/press-conference-23. Perkins also recalled Roosevelt’s belief that the courts ought not “to interfere with the development of law and procedures as times changed.” Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 267.

149 “Complicated legalism” from Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937.

150 Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 37, lxi.

151 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, APP.

152 Roosevelt, “Address at Roanoke Island, N.C.,” August 18, 1937, APP.

153 James Madison, Federalist No. 10, in Federalist Papers, 74.

154 Madison, Federalist No. 10, 75.

155 Roosevelt, “Commonwealth Club Adress.”.

156 Roosevelt, “Address at Jefferson Day Dinner,” April 18, 1932, APP. Drafts of the speech show FDR’s approach to prevailing tariff proposals was to “weave them together.” See Kenneth S. Davis, “FDR as a Biographer’s Problem,” The American Scholar 53, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 106.

157 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939, APP.

158 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 3, 1934, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-4.

159 Roosevelt, “Address at Montevideo, Uruguay,” December 3, 1936, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-montevideo-uruguay.

160 Roosevelt, “Address at the Opening of the New Federal Reserve Building,” October 20, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-opening-the-new-federal-reserve-building.

161 Roosevelt, “Address at the Dedication of the Memorial on the Gettysburg Battlefield.”

162 Roosevelt, “Commonwealth Club Address.”

163 “Presidential power is the power to persuade.” Neustadt, Presidential Power, 11.

164 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939, APP.

165 As Schlesinger wrote about FDR’s prewar leadership, “Roosevelt knew where he wanted to go and where he believed the nation had to go. But he did not want—and this was why he was one of the greatest Presidents—to go there alone.” Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 114.

166 On courage as an element of statesmanship, see Roosevelt, “Statement on Signing the Stabilization Extension Act,” June 30, 1944, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-stabilization-extension-act; “Tribute to Grover Cleveland, to NY Times Journalist Dr. John H. Finley,” March 1, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tribute-grover-cleveland. On Kennedy’s characterization of lonely statesmanship, see Wills, Certain Trumpets, 23.

167 “Refine and enlarge” from Madison, Federalist No. 10, 76. Here Madison was expounding the benefits of the proposed Constitution’s republican form of government over those of a “pure democracy.” By delegating power from the many to the few, the public’s “temporary and partial considerations” would be mediated through representatives who could “refine and enlarge” them.

168 Roosevelt, “Commonwealth Club Address.”. Roosevelt “believe[d] it is entirely fitting that a statesman” like Thomas Jefferson “should have also been an educator.” See Roosevelt, “Address at the College of William and Mary upon Receiving an Honorary Degree,” October 20, 1934, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-college-william-and-mary-upon-receiving-honorary-degree.

169 Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 95. Perkins too noted FDR saw it as an essential element of his job to educate the public on the intricacies of government policy; see Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 281, 310.

170 Roosevelt recalls the fearmongering charges in his “Introduction,” PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxviii; see also Rosenman, “Introduction,” PPAFDR, vol. 1941, xvi–xvii. On the president’s use of apocalyptic imagery, see supra note 56.

171 His declaration of an unlimited national emergency on May 27, 1941, was “an act without known precedent,” as one newspaper put it. It would also be the only unlimited emergency ever declared and was not repealed until 1952. See “Unlimited Emergency Gives F.D.R. Wide-Range Powers,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, May 28, 1941; “Radio Address Announcing an Unlimited National Emergency,” May 27, 1941, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/radio-address-announcing-unlimited-national-emergency; “Proclamation 2487—Proclaiming That an Unlimited National Emergency Confronts This Country, Which Requires That Its Military, Naval, Air, and Civilian Defenses Be Put on the Basis of Readiness to Repel Any and All Acts or Threats of Aggression Directed Toward Any Part of the Western Hemisphere,” May 27, 1941, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2487-proclaiming-that-unlimited-national-emergency-confronts-this-country. Other declarations of emergency included Roosevelt, “Proclamation 2352—Proclaiming a National Emergency in Connection with the Observance, Safeguarding, and Enforcement of Neutrality and the Strengthening of the National Defense Within the Limits of Peace-Time Authorizations,” September 8, 1939, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2352-proclaiming-national-emergency-connection-with-the-observance.

Roosevelt’s Attorney General Francis Biddle also prepared a lengthy memo on wartime presidential powers “for use in emergency situations.” See “The Powers of the President in Times of War,” memorandum, FDRPL, Biddle Papers, box 7, ER Papers. On the “inherent-power” theory, see Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, ed. E.B. Stason (New York: Knopf, 1947), 36–38; Louis Fisher, “‘The Law’: Presidential Inherent Power: The ‘Sole Organ’ Doctrine,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2007): 139–52, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619299.

172 Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801, APP.

173 Roosevelt to Norman Thomas, letter, May 14, 1941, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., The Roosevelt Letters: Being the Personal Correspondence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vol. 3 (London: Harrap, 1952), 368.

174 “[D]ecision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch,” collectively, are what Alexander Hamilton called the presidency’s “energy.” Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, Federalist Papers, 421–29. Roosevelt spoke of the “range and speed” of modern warfare in his “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939; “Radio Address Announcing an Unlimited Emergency,” May 27, 1941; “Arsenal of Democracy Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940; and “Press Conference,” from April 15, 1939, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/press-conference-11, all available at APP.

175 It was on these grounds that John Locke, whose writing influenced the design of the American presidency, justified the exercise of executive “prerogative” to ensure the state’s “self-preservation.” Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), §149 (78) (emphasis original). On Locke’s theory of “executive prerogative,” see also Second Treatise, §§159–168 (83–88). On the claim that Lockean prerogative had been employed by American presidents before FDR, see Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 218; Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency, 8–10, 23, 25, 35–36, 60, 263; Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), passim.

176 Roosevelt marked his transition from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win-the-War” in winter 1943. See Roosevelt, “Excerpts from the Press Conference,” December 28, 1943, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-from-the-press-conference-8.

177 Roosevelt, “Arsenal of Democracy Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940.

178 Roosevelt quoted in, inter alia, Kimball, The Juggler, 3. War did sometimes challenge New Deal priorities, of course. For example, to aid Britian and the USSR and later to arm the nation itself, Roosevelt came to rely on many of the “economic royalists” and “oligarchs” of private manufacturing he had railed against for years. See, e.g., Roosevelt, “Veto of the Bonus Bill,” May 22, 1935; “Address at Madison Square Garden,” October 31, 1936; “Fireside Chat,” May 26, 1940, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-10. Roosevelt himself acknowledged the tension between some New Deal goals and preparing for war, admitting it was “darned hard” to simultaneously “pursue two equally important things” like common defense and general welfare. But when pressed to justify spending billions of post–1937 recession dollars on guns over social welfare, he ultimately defended the former as the better guarantor of Americans’ security. See James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), x.

179 Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 172.

180 Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 22.

181 Corwin, Total War and the Constitution; Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787–1957 (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 237, 262. “The War Before the War” is the title of the first lecture and chapter of Total War and the Constitution; Corwin uses the phrase throughout.

182 “Elements” from Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 3, 1936. “Unmistakably” from Roosevelt, “Introduction,” PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxiii, written on July 10, 1941. However, as Roosevelt would write a week later, it was not until “the beginning of 1938” that “the matter of national defense became” the “dominant concern” and not until “the fall of 1940” that the “purpose of arming ourselves to the teeth” and “helping Great Britain” became America’s chief “aim.” See Roosevelt, “Introduction,” PPAFDR, vol. 1940, xxvi, xxvii, written on July 17, 1941.

183 Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “As the World Moved Toward War, FDR Watched and Worked for Peace,” New York Times, July 6, 1969, https://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/06/archives/as-the-world-moved-toward-war-fdr-watched-and-worked-for-peace.html. Though Churchill first published the essay in 1935 in Strand magazine, he repeated “this mystery of the future that history will pronounce Hitler either a monster or a hero” in his 1937 revision of the essay. See Richard M. Langworth, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What He Actually Did and Said (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 115.

184 Gloria J. Barron, Leadership in Crisis: FDR and the Path to Intervention (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973), 30; Frances Perkins notes that “the war problem had begun long before” the public realized. See The Roosevelt I Knew, 278.

185 Though popularly remembered as the “day of infamy” speech, Roosevelt referred to December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.” Roosevelt, “Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War with Japan,” December 8, 1941, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-congress-requesting-declaration-war-with-japan.

186 Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency, 114.

187 Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 103.

188 Jon Meacham in “Episode 6: The Common Cause,” The Roosevelts.

189 On the tendency toward and consequences of reading history backward, see Aroop Mukharji and Richard Zeckhauser, “Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis,” Journal of Applied History 1, no. 2 (2019): 5–27, https://doi.org/10.1163/25895893-00101002.

190 The lend-lease policy was congressionally authorized by “An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States,” Public Law 77-11, H.R. 1776, 55 Stat. 31, enacted March 11, 1941.

191 Portions of this subsection and the following two appeared in different form in Luke J. Schumacher, “Proving Democracy Works,” The National Interest 178 (March/April 2022): 57–61, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-biden-prove-democracy-works-201026. I thank the Center for the National Interest for permission to reproduce some of this material. The approval rating comes from Matthew A. Baum and Samuel Kernell, “Economic Class and Popular Support for Franklin Roosevelt in War and Peace,” Public Opinion Quarterly 65, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 200n1, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3078802. Baum and Kernell note the August 1939 poll was the first and only time Roosevelt’s approval rating dropped below fifty percent. Corroborating is “Presidential Approval Highs & Lows,” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 2024, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/presidential-approval/highslows.

192 On the “dictator bill,” see supra note 142.

193 Quote from Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 3, 1940, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-the-congress.

194 Richard Hofstadter believed Roosevelt “was content in large measure to follow public opinion.” See Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1943), 316. Similar assessments are made in Kenneth Davis’s FDR, 4 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1973, 1985, 1993, 2000); Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), 3.

195 See, e.g., Rosenman, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1941, xx. After the sampling method gained steam in 1935, FDR spoke with the leaders of major public opinion gathering institutions, including George Gallup. Those pollsters were unable to “change his mind” about which policies to adopt but confessed that FDR “did base his strategy a great deal on these results.” See Carol Gelderman, All the Presidents’ Words: The Bully Pulpit and the Creation of the Virtual Presidency (New York: Walker and Co., 1997), chap. 1

196 Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 634.

197 Quoted in, inter alia, Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

198 As Roosevelt once told a student, “If you ever sit here [as president], you will learn that you cannot, just by shouting from the housetops, get what you want all the time.” Quoted in Joseph S. Nye, Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 38; Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935, 529.

199 FDR inherited what Tulis calls “the second constitution.” Under the first constitution, presidents avoided popular rhetoric for fear that it would look demagogic. Beginning with TR’s use of the bully pulpit (a phrase of TR’s creation), Wilson cemented the second constitution, which rejected the norm against popular presidential rhetoric. See Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency. On the Founders’ concern that popular rhetoric would promote demagoguery, see Ceaser, “Demagoguery, Statesmanship, and the American Presidency,” 257–98.

200 As is suggested by Rosenman, in “Introduction,” PPAFDR, vol. 1941, xvi–xviii.

201 Roosevelt, “Quarantine Address at Chicago,” October 5, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-chicago; Dorothy Borg, “Notes on Roosevelt’s ‘Quarantine’ Speech,” Political Science Quarterly 72, no. 3 (September 1957): 405–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2145326.

202 Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxviii, written on July 10, 1941.

203 Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 162. The people’s reluctance was not without reason. Many felt betrayed by a president, who a year before had declared, “I hate war.” (See Roosevelt, “Address at Chautauqua, NY,” August 14, 1936, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-chautauqua-ny.) As unemployment again approached twenty percent, many thought the country should focus on getting “our own national house in order,” as Roosevelt had entered office resolved to do, before turning outward. (See Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933, APP; on unemployment at the time, see “Recession of 1937–38,” Federal Reserve History, available at https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/recession-of-1937-38.) Americans could dodge Europe’s next bloodbath by minding its own Western-hemispheric business and best buttress democracy by modeling its peaceful benefits. Others worried FDR’s internationalism would only benefit the war profiteers he had earlier reproached. (See supra note 179.) Still others, like the progressive historian Charles Beard, considered the speech a deliberate diversion from domestic problems. Charles A. Beard, American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 187.

204 Representative Louis Ludlow’s self-described attempt to “democratize the war power” among those who shoulder war’s “burdens and costs” was criticized by Roosevelt as “impracticable in its application and incompatible with our representative form of government.” See David A. Horowitz, Beyond Left & Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 168. On the public’s support for the amendment from 1935 to 1939, see Horowitz, Beyond Left & Right, 168–69. On Congress’ voting on the proposed amendment, see Ronald E. Powaski, Toward an Entangling Alliance: American Isolationism, Internationalism, and Europe, 1901–1950 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 74; Benjamin D. Rhodes, United States Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period: 1918–1941: The Golden Age of American Diplomatic and Military Complacency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 151.

205 “President Roosevelt to the Speaker of the House of Representatives (Bankhead),” January 6, 1938, in U.S. Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 400–401; digital transcription at https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/interwar/ludlow.htm.

206 Hadley Cantril, ed., Public Opinion, 1935–1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 957–77.

207 “Wholly excellent” from Roosevelt quoted in Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 102; “clearly and unequivocally” from Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 3, 1936.

208 Roosevelt conveyed this worry in a statement to Congress, which appears in Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948), 271–72.

209 Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxxii, written on July 10, 1941.

210 Roosevelt to William E. Dodd, letter, December 2, 1935, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, vol. III, 1928–1945 (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 530–31; scan available at http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/m/psf/box32/a299w02.html.

211 Cantril, ed., Public Opinion, 1935–1946, 1158–59.

212 Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 4, 1939. He restated his argument in “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxxiii–xxxiv, written on July 10, 1941.

213 On Roosevelt’s prevarication after the State of the Union address, see Roosevelt, “Press Conference,” January 13, 1939, FDRPL, President’s Press Conferences, box 517, available at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/pc/pc0076.pdf; Roosevelt, “Press Conference,” January 17, 1939, FDRPL, President’s Press Conferences, box 513, available at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/pc/pc0076.pdf. On his evasion of specifics following the Quarantine Speech, see Roosevelt, “Press Conference,” October 6, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/press-conference-19.

214 Tom Connally (with Alfred Steinberg), My Name Is Tom Connally (New York: Crowell, 1954), 226.

215 Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, 68–69. On the administration’s intent to obscure its primary intent for seeking repeal—helping France and England—FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull later wrote, “With isolationism still powerful and militant in the United States, it would have been the peak of folly to make aid to the democracies an issue in connection with neutrality legislation.” See Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. I (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 684.

216 Walter Johnson, The Battle against Isolation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 34; Barron, FDR and the Path to Intervention, 50.

217 “Roosevelt Confidential Memo to Attorney General Frank Murphy,” July 1, 1939, available at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.117530/page/n169/mode/2up. “Layman’s common sense” from Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, APP.

218 This was the vice president’s opinion according to Roosevelt’s summary; see “Roosevelt Confidential Memo to Attorney General Frank Murphy.”

219 United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 319 (1936).

220 Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 634–55 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring). Though Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion (at 582–633), it was the concurring opinion of Justice Robert Jackson, Murphy’s successor as FDR’s attorney general before moving to the bench, that endured as precedent. Seemingly borrowing from Murphy’s logic in the memo, Jackson’s opinion argues presidential power varies: It is at its “maximum” when authorized by Congress, in a “zone of twilight” when Congress is silent, and at its “lowest ebb” when used to contravene Congress’s express or implied will.

221 Justice Department memo to Murphy quoted in Sarah Burns, The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 144. Emphasis original.

222 Roosevelt, “Press Conference in Hyde Park, New York,” August 8, 1939, FDRPL, http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/php8839.html.

223 Sixty percent of the public now supported repealing the acts. See Burns, The Politics of War Powers, 145.

224 Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” September 3, 1939, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-13.

225 Roosevelt to Harold Ickes, memorandum, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, vol. II, 1905–1928 (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1948), 922; Roosevelt to Lord Tweedsmuir, letter, in Roosevelt, ed., Personal Letters, vol. II, 934.

226 James Roosevelt (with Bill Libby), My Parents: A Differing View (London: W.H. Allen, 1977 [1976]), 163. Many of FDR’s friends and family members had reservations about a third term; see Roosevelt, My Parents, 162–63. For example, FDR’s cousin, the Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, told a reporter, “I’d rather vote for Hitler than vote for Franklin for a third term.” In kind, FDR told his wife, “I don’t want to have anything to do with that damned woman again.” See Carol Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth (New York: Putnam, 1988), 194.

227 Roosevelt to Hamilton Holt, letter, November 20, 1944, reprinted in Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44–46. FDR’s attorney general, Robert Jackson, estimated that Roosevelt sincerely only pursued reelection because of the “breaking-out of war in Europe” (46). Before Congress’s declaration of war, Roosevelt considered the stakes of the emerging world war to be “unprecedented.” See Roosevelt, “Press Conference,” March 7, 1939; “Press Conference,” April 15, 1939; “Arsenal of Democracy Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940; “State of the Union Address,” January 6, 1941; “Radio Address Announcing an Unlimited National Emergency,” May 27, 1941, all available at APP.

228 Roosevelt, “Radio Address from the White House,” October 5, 1944, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/radio-address-from-the-white-house.

229 As summer passed and British ship losses increased, so did the number of destroyers Churchill requested. By July 31, 1940, Churchill was now asking for “fifty or sixty” U.S. destroyers. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. II: Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 24–25, 401–402; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–1940 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952), 749–51.

230 Langer and Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 218; Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 103.

231 Roosevelt, “Address at the University of Virginia,” June 10, 1940, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-university-virginia.

232 Burns, The Politics of War Powers, 147. Emphasis original

233 Among the 800,000 members were a former president, two future ones, and a host of celebrities led by their spokesman, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh. See Johnson, The Battle against Isolation, 62–75; Katznelson, Fear Itself, 281.

234 Barron, FDR and the Path to Intervention, 67; Dean Acheson et al., “No Legal Bar Seen to Transfer of Destroyers,” New York Times, August 11, 1940, 8–9.

235 Richard M. Pious, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Destroyer Deal: Normalizing Prerogative Power,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 2012): 200, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41427456; W.R. Casto, “Advising Presidents: Robert Jackson and the Destroyer-for-Bases Deal,” American Journal of Legal History 52, no. 1 (January 2012): 9, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41345493.

236 When asked whether the deal “require[d] Senate ratification” like any treaty, FDR ignored the question and simply replied, the deal “is all over; it is all done.” Roosevelt, “Press Conference on Board President’s Train En Route to Washington, D.C.,” September 3, 1940, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/press-conference-board-presidents-train-en-route-washington-dc.

237 Quoted in Tully, F.D.R., My Boss, 244; Kimball, Forged in War, 58.

238 Robert H. Jackson, “Opinion on Exchange of Over-Age Destroyers for Naval and Air Bases,” The American Journal of International Law 34, no. 4 (October 1940): 728–36, https://doi.org/10.2307/2192238, invoking the language of Curtiss-Wright. FDR remained relatively silent on the deal before and after concluding it. In press conferences, he simply stated he would rely on Jackson’s opinion (which he directed that Jackson write). Roosevelt guessed that the isolationists “will get into a terrific row over your opinion instead of over my deal, but after all, Bob [Jackson], you are not running for president.” See Jackson, That Man, 99.

239 The subtitle of Corwin’s op-ed sums up both why FDR believed it was legitimate and why many constitutional scholars thought otherwise. Edward S. Corwin, “Executive Authority Held Exceeded in Destroyer Deal: Regardless of Public Approval and Attorney General’s Opinion, the Consent of Congress Is Regarded as Necessary Under Constitution and Statutes,” New York Times, October 13, 1940, https://www.nytimes.com/1940/10/13/archives/executive-authority-held-exceeded-in-destroyer-deal-regardless-of.html. Corwin’s scathing op-ed appeared only months after he was relieved as an adviser to the president on constitutional matters. Corwin developed his criticism further in The President: Office and Powers, 238–39, and throughout his Total War and the Constitution. For thorough analyses of Jackson’s opinion, consider: Casto, “Advising Presidents,” 1–135; Pious, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Destroyer Deal,” 190–204; Richard M. Pious, “Inherent War and Executive Powers and Prerogative Politics,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 1 (March 2007): 66, 73; Robert J. Dalahunty, “Robert Jackson’s Opinion on the Destroyer Deal and the Question of Presidential Prerogative,” Vermont Law Review 38 (2013): 65–102; Martin S. Sheffer, “The Attorney General and Presidential Power: Robert H. Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Prerogative Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 12, no. 1 (January 1982): 54–65; Herbert W. Briggs, “Neglected Aspects of the Destroyer Deal,” The American Journal of International Law 34, no. 4 (October 1940): 569–87.

240 Kimball, Forged in War, 60.

241 Quote from Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1937, liv, written on June 3, 1941.

242 Roosevelt to King George VI, letter, November 22, 1940, FDRPL, Significant Documents section, box 27, available at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/resource/november-1940-14.

243 It is doubtful this coincidence was lost on Roosevelt. He had repopularized the anniversary of the Constitution’s signing with his controversial “Address on Constitution Day” in 1937, gave several more Constitution Day addresses thereafter, and in 1939, declared “I Am an American Day” (September 17) an official day of observance.

244 On the historical significance of the act, see J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, The First Peacetime Draft (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986). So controversial did the military draft remain that when the extension came to a vote the next year, it was saved by a single vote in the House. “House Vote on Draft Bill,” New York Times, August 13, 1941, https://www.nytimes.com/1941/08/13/archives/house-vote-on-draft-bill.html.

245 Rep. Usher Burdick (R-ND), quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 312.

246 Sen. Burton K. Wheeler (D-MO), quoted in Horowitz, Beyond Left & Right, 171.

247 On Roosevelt’s coordination and the turning tide of public opinion on military conscription, see Schumacher, “Proving Democracy Works,” 60–61.

248 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 310–11. Willkie’s endorsement shocked the Republican Party. The country’s largest Republican newspaper, the Washington Post, had run a headline referring to the Selective Service Act as the “Dictator-Draft Bill” on August 18, 1940; see Katznelson, Fear Itself, 311.

249 With the fall of France came a rise in support for compulsory service: up from 39 percent in December 1939 and 50 percent in June 1940, 63 percent supported a draft once Germany captured Paris. See John G. Clifford, “Greenville Clark and the Origins of Selective Service,” Review of Politics 35, no. 1 (January 1973): 32, https://doi:10.1017/S0034670500021653. By August 1940, 71 percent of Americans supported “the immediate adoption of compulsory military training.” See “What the U.S.A. Thinks,” LIFE, July 29, 1940, https://books.google.com/books?id=xz8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA20&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false.

250 “America Answers Hitler with Draft Act Putting Its Manpower into Army,” LIFE, September 30, 1940, https://books.google.com/books?id=C0oEAAAAMBAJ&q=answer+to+hitler#v=snippet&q=answer%20to%20hitler&f=false.

251 Roosevelt, “Campaign Address in Boston, Massachusetts,” October 30, 1940, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-address-boston-massachusetts. This promise was a campaign motto, echoing Wilson’s 1916 campaign promise to “keep America out of the war.” Like Wilson, FDR won reelection and then took the country to war.

252 Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 242; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 190–91, 201.

253 James H. Madison, Wendell Willkie: Hoosier Internationalist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 107.

254 Madison, Wendell Willkie.

255 Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 283; Barron, Leadership in Crisis, viii. In fact, FDR had predicted U.S. involvement two decades before. While campaigning for the vice presidency in 1920, he alleged “every sane man knows that in case of another world war America would be drawn in.” “Cleveland, OH—Campaign Speech,” FDRPL, file No. 219, series 1, available at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/msf/msf00222, 4. This does not mean, however, that FDR considered U.S. major involvement as inevitable. On FDR’s desire and steps to minimize the American casualty count, see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 3–23.

256 On the relationship between lying, American politics, and democracy, see Hannah Arendt, “Lying: Reflection on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1972), 1–48.

257 For a discussion of “deception” and its multiple manifestations in politics, see John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15–24.

258 Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxvi–xxvii, written on June 3, 1941.

259 Roosevelt quoted in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 286.

260 Churchill, Their Finest Hour, 404.

261 Churchill quoted (indirectly, from cabinet meeting minutes) in David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 71; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 285; “War-Entry Plans Laid to Roosevelt,” New York Times, January 2, 1972, 7, available at https://www.nytimes.com/1972/01/02/archives/warentry-plans-laid-to-roosevelt-britain-releases-her-data-on-talks.html.

262 Stimson quoted in Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Reality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 517–19. For a thorough history of this period, see William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941: The World Crisis and American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952).

263 The 1940 Selective Service Act expressly limited draftees to service in the “Western Hemisphere.” Aside from avoiding the engagements Roosevelt was seeking to orchestrate, another reason policymakers focused on the Western Hemisphere was the widespread belief that Nazi attempts at subversion were under way in Latin America.

264 For accounts of the Greer incident, see Dallek, FDR and American Foreign Policy, 285–88; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, 742–50; Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance: 1937–41, chap. 8; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 497–99; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, 143–44; John M. Schuessler, “The Deception Dividend: FDR’s Undeclared War,” International Security 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 133–65, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40784564; Waldo Heinrichs, Thresholds of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 166–68; Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 46–47.

265 Quoted in Kimball, The Juggler, 7; Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), xii; Pfiffner, The Character Factor, 22.

266 Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” September 11, 1941, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-11.

267 Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, 47; Dallek, FDR and American Foreign Policy, 287.

268 Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” September 11, 1941.

269 Roosevelt, “Address for Navy and Total Defense Day,” October 27, 1941, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-for-navy-and-total-defense-day. The documents were British forgeries, and there is reason to believe Roosevelt knew as much. See Henry Hemming, Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 252–53; Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 667.

270 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 499.

271 James Roosevelt, My Parents, 160–61.

272 Until Congress decided to institute a new one in 1947, whose induction provisions expired in 1973 with the introduction of the all-volunteer force.

273 The Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, proposed after Roosevelt’s death and ratified in 1951, constitutionalized the norm.

274 Roosevelt, “Introduction,” in PPAFDR, vol. 1939, xxxii.

275 Locke, Second Treatise, §160 (84). Emphasis added.

276 This is because though “Roosevelt had probably never looked at the Second Treatise since Harvard, if he had ever looked at it then . . . the Lockean doctrine of emergency prerogative had endured because it expressed a real, if rare, necessity in a free state.” Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency, 114.

277 Locked called this power the people’s “appeal to heaven.” See Locke, Second Treatise, §149 (78), §161 (85), §168 (87). Tulis calls this the people’s “retrospective advantage” in Tulis, “The Possibility of Constitutional Statesmanship,” 115.

278 Pious, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Destroyer Deal,” 201. Arguably, Congress further mooted the president’s overreach when it passed the Lend Lease Act the following spring. See “An Act to Further Promote the Defense of the United States,” Public Law 77-11, H.R. 1776, 55 Stat. 31, enacted March 11, 1941.

279 Burns, The Politics of War Powers, 141. See 140–53 for her entire discussion on FDR’s use and abuse of war powers. For a discussion on Jefferson’s use of prerogative and willingness to “‘throw himself’ on the people for judgment,” see Bailey, Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power.

280 Arguing that Lincoln consciously avoided “legalizing” his resorts to prerogative power so as to protect the Constitution from blemish, see Benjamin A. Kleinerman, “‘In the Name of National Security’: Executive Discretion and Congressional Legislation in the Civil War and World War I,” in The Limits of Constitutional Democracy, ed. Jeffrey K. Tulis and Stephen Macedo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 91–111.

281 Roosevelt told Colonel Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, that he expected to lose the election over the deal. See Langer and Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 765. The Chairman of the Joint Board of the Army and Navy warned Roosevelt that he would be impeached if Great Britain fell after the United States provided aid. See “Episode 6: The Common Cause,” The Roosevelts.

282 Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 4, 1939, APP.

283 Eleanor Roosevelt described her husband’s reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor as “deadly calm.” (For a synopsis of FDR’s reaction, see Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Home Front in World War II [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994], 288–90.) Postmaster General Frank Comerford Walker similarly reckoned that, after learning of the attack, “the Boss really feels more relief than he has had for weeks.” Quoted in Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 304. Roosevelt’s branding of December 7, 1941, as a “date which will live in infamy” comes from his “Address to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War with Japan,” December 8, 1941, APP.

284 Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 304.

285 As Roosevelt did, in eschatological terms, in his “Radio Address Announcing an Unlimited National Emergency,” May 27, 1941, APP.

286 For instance, against the backdrop of a series of military setbacks in the Pacific, he delivered a fireside chat in February 1942. See Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” February 23, 1942, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-6. Part geography lesson, part strategic explanation, the address was so effective in raising public morale that the White House was flooded with telegrams beseeching him to deliver daily radio addresses. See “Episode 6: The Common Cause,” The Roosevelts.

287 In a letter to a prominent banker imploring him to deliver more speeches, Roosevelt explained, “I cannot afford to take this time away from more vital things” like directing military strategy and the wartime economy. Moreover, Roosevelt feared “my talks should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness.” See Roosevelt to Russell C. Leffingwell, letter, in Roosevelt, ed., Roosevelt Letters, vol. 3, 422.

288 Walter Lippmann, “Wake Up, America,” New York Herald Tribune, December 9, 1941 (read into Congressional Record, vol. 87, part 14 [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941], A5502-03).

289 Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 276; Katznelson, Fear Itself, 353.

290 Like Lincoln and Wilson before him, Roosevelt did seek to exploit the reconstructive potential of war to expand constitutional rights, through a so-called “second bill of rights,” and human rights, in the form of the “four freedoms.” (The Four Freedoms were announced in Roosevelt’s “State of the Union,” January 6, 1941, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-congress-the-state-the-union. The Second Bill of Rights was announced in FDR’s “State of the Union,” January 11, 1944, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/state-the-union-message-congress, and reiterated in his “State of the Union Address,” January 6, 1945.) Here, however, I focus not on Roosevelt’s contributions to postwar constitutional order, but on how his wartime decisions squared with the domestic constitutional order he inherited.

291 Perkins called her boss’ idea “a foolish and dangerous” attempt to exert “control over human beings.” See Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 299–300. On the negative reactions to the proposal from Congress, labor unions, and the wider public, see Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 114. On Roosevelt’s admiration for Britain’s general conscription law, see Barron, FDR and the Path to Intervention, 40.

292 James Madison (writing as “Helvidius”), Letters of Pacificus and Helvidius on the Proclamation of Neutrality of 1793, Helvidius No. IV, September 14, 1793, available at https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/frisch-the-pacificus-helvidius-debates-of-1793-1794.

293 Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” September 7, 1942, APP. Corwin called the president’s September 7, 1942, fireside chat the “high point in F.D.R.’s explicit claims for Presidential prerogative” and “the most exorbitant claim for Presidential power ever made by a President.” See Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 65, 77 (emphasis original). Similarly, other presidency scholars called the address “the most aggressive assertion of the ‘stewardship theory’” ever articulated by a president; see Christopher H. Pyle and Richard M. Pious, The President, Congress, and the Constitution: Power and Legitimacy in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1984), 72. As Katznelson argues, FDR’s “claim to embody a singular popular will” was also strikingly similar to the personal relationship the totalitarians claimed to share with their subjects; see Katznelson, Fear Itself, 122–23.

294 “An Act to Amend the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, to Aid in Preventing Inflation, and for Other Purposes,” Public Law 77-729, 56 Stat. 765, enacted October 2, 1942.

295 “Fine print” from Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, APP.

296 Roosevelt, “Memorandum for the Attorney General,” May 21, 1940, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CHRG-REHNQUIST-POWELL/pdf/GPO-CHRG-REHNQUIST-POWELL-7-3-3-5.pdf; Nardone v. United States, 302 U.S. 379 (1939).

297 Roosevelt, “Memorandum for the Attorney General.”

298 Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 95, 99; Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (New York: Viking, 2022), 237–50; Athan G. Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1991), 180–3.

299 Louis Fisher, Nazi Saboteurs on Trial: A Military Tribunal and American Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 40. Defendant Herbert Haupt was a U.S. citizen by virtue of his parent’s naturalization when he was a minor. The court declined to resolve the question of whether Haupt had abandoned his citizenship by his conduct. Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 20 (1942). Another defendant, Ernest Burger, had previously served in the German army, which the court seemingly concluded had forfeited his citizenship. The court made no mention of Burger’s citizenship status.

300 Roosevelt, “Proclamation 2561—Denying Certain Enemies Access to the Courts,” July 2, 1942, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2561-denying-certain-enemies-access-the-courts.

301 The precursor to today’s Uniform Code of Military Justice.

302 Roosevelt quoted in Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 330. In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled that Abraham Lincoln’s use of military tribunals, where civil courts were operational, was unconstitutional. See Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 121–22 (1866). For similar sentiments Roosevelt expressed to his attorney general Francis Biddle, see Roosevelt, “Memorandum for the Attorney General,” June 30, 1942, Justice 1940–44, box 56, President’s Secretary files, FDRPL.

303 Roosevelt quoted in Biddle, In Brief Authority, 331.

304 Though the Supreme Court released a per curiam opinion affirming the constitutionality of the military commission on July 31, 1942, the opinion explaining the court’s reasoning was not released until October 29, 1942. See Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942). Six of the eight convicted personnel were executed on August 8, 1942; the other two, including (the arguably) U.S. citizen Ernest Burger, received presidential commutations to life sentences for their cooperation.

305 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 569 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

306 Roosevelt, “Statement Against Discharging Loyal Aliens from Jobs,” January 2, 1942, APP.

307 Roosevelt, “Arsenal of Democracy Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940. His attorney general had similarly remarked, “[w]e shall not defeat the Nazi evil by emulating its methods.” Francis Biddle quoted in Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 80. Just two weeks before FDR signed the executive order authorizing forcible relocation, Biddle had publicly rebuked the “outcropping of vigilantism.” See his “Remarks at the Fifty-Third Annual Dinner of the Brooklyn Bar Association,” February 5, 1942, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/09/16/02-05-1942.pdf.

308 As emphasized by former Roosevelt Attorney General-turned-Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy in his Hirabayashi concurring opinion and in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu. See Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 109–114 (1943) (Murphy, J., concurring); Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. at 233–242 (Murphy, J., dissenting).

309 The estimate comes from Greg Robinson’s By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For Francis Biddle’s first-hand account of the policy’s formulation and implementation, along with his later appraisal, see Biddle, In Brief Authority, 212–26.

310 Roosevelt, “Greeting to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign-born,” January 9, 1940, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/greeting-the-american-committee-for-protection-foreign-born.

311 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, APP.

312 See, for instance, Curtis B. Munson, “Report and Suggestions Regarding Handling Japanese Question on the West Coast,” December 20, 1941, John Franklin Carter file, box 27, President’s Secretary files, FDRPL.

313 Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 283.

314 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937. He was almost assuredly speaking here about the enthronement of what he often called the “economic royalists,” but the majoritarian sentiment remains the same.

Frank Murphy, “‘Civil Liberties’ Radio Address,” in George T. McJimsey, ed., Documentary History of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidency, vol. 32, Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Domestic Surveillance, 1939–1942 (Bethesda, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 12.

316 On the popular demand for relocation, see Robinson, By Order of the President, 97–104.

317 This irony of Warren’s and Hoover’s respective positions is noted in Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 84. Hoover accused the Army of “getting hysterical” with theories of Japanese-American sabotage. See “Suppression of Evidence in 1943 Cited,” New York Times, June 21, 1985, A12, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/21/us/suppression-of-evidence-in-1943-cited.html.

318 McCloy quoted in Michael Nelson, The Evolving Presidency: Landmark Documents, ed. Michael Nelson, 6th edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2019), 170. It seems Roosevelt agreed. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote, “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step. He was never theoretical about things. What must be done to defend the country must be done.” See Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 322.

319 See supra note 241.

320 Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 98. The congressional statute that outlawed noncompliance with Executive Order 9066 was the untitled, single-sentenced Public Law 503, 56 Stat. 173, enacted March 21, 1942, https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/56/STATUTE-56-Pg173b.pdf.

321 The following rate Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 as the greatest violation of civil liberties in American history: Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 91; Kenneth David Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008), 4; Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 79. The court validated the executive order in Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943); Yasui v. United States, 320 U.S. 115 (1943); and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).

322 Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 88. See also Robert Shaffer, “Cracks in the Consensus: Defending the Rights of Japanese Americans during World War II,” Radical History Review, no. 72 (1998): 84–102, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449883. The American Civil Liberties Union, for its part, issued only a timid complaint. See Peter H. Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese-American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 128–38.

323 Roosevelt, “Address on Constitution Day,” September 17, 1937, APP.

324 Attorney General Francis Biddle first argued that internment was “for the protection of the Japanese themselves.” See Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties, 87. He did not repeat this claim after the evacuation was carried out.

325 Corwin, Total War and the Constitution, 99–100; see also Scott M. Matheson, Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 66.

326 Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 6, 1945. Emphasis added.

327 Madison, Federalist No. 10.

328 Hamilton, Federalist No. 71.

329 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Princes and the Discourses, trans. Luigi Ricci and E.R.P. Vincent (New York: Random House, 1950), Discourses on Livy (1532), Book I.34, 203.

330 Machiavelli, The Princes and the Discourses.

331 Machiavelli, The Princes and the Discourses. Machiavelli insisted that every republic needs the ability to appoint one individual with extraordinary but temporary power to address the particular crisis for which he was appointed. Otherwise, a republic will either be “ruined” by observing its law or set a dangerous precedent by violating it. See Discourses, I.34, 203.

332 But see Adam Lebovitz, “Dictatorship in the American Founding” (unpublished manuscript, September 29, 2023). Lebovitz shows that many political thinkers who influenced the American founders praised the Roman institution of dictatorship. He argues that following the dictatorship of George Washington during the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution did not dispense with the device of Roman dictatorship so much as it “absorbed,” routinized, and even enlarged it in the institution of the presidency. For a counterargument, see Michael W. McConnell, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

333 Roosevelt, “Remarks at Poughkeepsie, New York,” November 6, 1944, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-poughkeepsie-new-york.

334 Jackson, That Man, 74. James Roosevelt arrived at a similar conclusion in My Parents, 168.

335 Jackson, That Man, 110.

336 Biddle, In Brief Authority, 219.

337 Biddle later expressed great regret on his role in enforcing and justifying the president’s Japanese-American evacuation and internment order. See Biddle, In Brief Authority, chap. “On Japanese Evacuation.”

338 In his famous opinion in Youngstown (see supra note 221), Jackson concurs with the majority to enjoin Truman from seizing domestic steel mills amid a labor strike during the Korean War. For an attempt at squaring this opinion with Jackson’s other jurisprudence emphasizing deference to a wartime president, see Jack Goldsmith, “Justice Jackson’s Unpublished Opinion in Ex parte Quirin,” The Green Bag 9, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 229–30, http://www.greenbag.org/v9n3/v9n3_articles_goldsmith.pdf.

339 Goldsmith, “Justice Jackson’s Unpublished Opinion,” 229.

340 Goldsmith, “Justice Jackson’s Unpublished Opinion,” 227, note 28.

341 Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 245 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). For a reappraisal of Jackson’s dissent, see John Q. Barrett, “A Commander’s Power, a Civilian’s Reason: Justice Jackson’s Korematsu Dissent,” Law and Contemporary Problems 68, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 57–79.

342 Both during pre-internment discussions and in his memoirs written after the war, Biddle doubted the constitutionality and morality of the internment. “The mass evacuation,” he wrote, demonstrated “the power of suggestion which a mystic cliché like ‘military necessity’ can exercise on human beings.” He regretted that through the decision, “a superb opportunity was lost by the government in failing to assert the human decencies for which we were fighting.” See Biddle, In Brief Authority, 226.

343 Biddle, “Remarks at the Brooklyn Bar Association,” February 5, 1942.

344 Quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 3. Churchill’s rendition is better known: “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” See Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 370–71.

345 Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 237. Put differently, Corwin writes that in World War II, “there is not only ‘the war before the war,’ but the ‘war after the war’,” too (262). For an extended investigation of this point, see Dudziak, War Time, chap. 2, “When Was World War II?” 33–62.

346 See supra note 221.

347 Tom C. Clark, memorandum to Harry S. Truman, July 17, 1946 (with Truman’s signed concurrence), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CHRG-REHNQUIST-POWELL/pdf/GPO-CHRG-REHNQUIST-POWELL-7-3-3-5.pdf.

348 J. William Fulbright quoted in Dallek, FDR and American Foreign Policy, 289. In a reprinting of Fulbright’s speech, a magazine quotes Fulbright as saying that Roosevelt’s and Truman’s actions do not diminish the “banefulness” (vice “blamefulness”) of the precedents they set. See Senator J. William Fulbright, “The Decline—and Possible Fall—of Constitutional Democracy in America,” Computers and Automation (June 1971), 20. This general point about the duplicity of FDR’s position on the war and the dangerous precedent it set is also anticipated in James Roosevelt, My Parents, 161.

349 Fulbright, “The Decline—and Possible Fall—of Constitutional Democracy in America,” 20.

350 On the Johnson administration’s plans to force a confrontation, see H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017 [1997]), 213. Reminiscent of FDR’s fireside chat about the “Greer incident,” Johnson referred to the attacks as “deliberate” and “unprovoked” acts of “aggression by terror” on the “high seas.” See Johnson’s “Radio and Television Report to the American People Following Renewed Aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin,” August 4, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/radio-and-television-report-the-american-people-following-renewed-aggression-the-gulf; “Special Message to the Congress on U.S. Policy in Southeast Asia,” August 5, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-us-policy-southeast-asia.

351 Strictly speaking, FDR had not even tried to secure a declaration of war from U-boat attacks on the U.S.S. Greer and U.S.S. Kearny. His aims at the time seemed limited to repealing the remaining neutrality constraints.

352 Johnson, “Remarks in Memorial Hall, Akron University,” October 21, 1964, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-memorial-hall-akron-university.

353 This is not to deny that LBJ earnestly believed, like FDR, that his war aimed at the public good and thus justified his deception. See, e.g., Andrew Preston, “Monsters Everywhere: A Genealogy of National Security,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 3 (2014): 477–79, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhu018.

354 But constitutional politics over the legality of military commissions has continued since the Bush administration made this case. For the inter-institutional “dialogue,” see Hamden v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 577 (2006); the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Public Law 109-366, 120 Stat. 2600, enacted October 17, 2006; and Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008). That Congress, the executive, and the courts continue to wrestle over the constitutionality of U.S. treatment of detainees indicates that FDR’s interference in the Quirin case did not bend the rules so badly that they ceased functioning. It suggests instead that the allocation of constitutional authority to determine these issues was and remains unsettled.

355 On the legalization of Lockean prerogative, see Burns, The Politics of War Powers, esp. chaps. 7 and 8.

356 Jefferson, “Letter to John B. Colvin,” 556.

357 Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1937, APP, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-7.