Garet Garrett

Fifty years ago, the classical liberal author and journalist Garet Garrett published a collection of essays called The People's Pottage (1953). In the midst of the Korean War, he tried to persuade the American people that the United States was on a new course that conflicted with the original conception of the nation ... Garrett summarized what he considered the requisite signs of the emerging American Empire ... Out of the ashes of the Second World War, Garrett argued, the United States had taken on the status and position of a global policeman responsible for the "the peace of the world."

This recalls the opening of Garet Garrett's 1952 philippic, Rise of Empire, wherein he diagnosed the essential indeterminacy of the transition: "We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not matter. There is no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.'" The usually prescient Garrett got it somewhat wrong ... I'm back to Garet Garrett, who never fails to come up with some apt aphoristic prognostication, this one being from his classic The Revolution Was ...

Garrett was born Edward Peter Garrett in Iowa. He became a printer's apprentice and then moved into reporting, working at a number of papers in the Midwest. He moved to Washington, DC, where he covered our first truly imperial administration and adopted the pen-name Garet Garrett. ... Garrett began writing a series of novels – The Blue Wound, The Driver, The Wild Wheel – all of which reflected his belief in the moral soundness of the American way of life and competitive capitalism. ... His one departure from a 'pure' free-market defense of capitalism was his espousal of protective tariffs.

Garrett wrote novels in his youth, short stories and serials for the old Saturday Evening Post – he later became the magazine’s chief editorial writer – and his flair for the dramatic, the unexpected turn of a phrase, embellishes his later essays and nonfiction books. His classic trilogy of booklets, The Revolution Was, Ex America, and Rise of Empire ... In a last burst of eloquence he turned out three books in the final few years of his life, including The American Story – a history book such as could not be written (or published) today.

Garet Garrett is a man of special flavor on the Right ... In the 1920s he wrote about international finance and about the push for a federal bailout of farmers; in the early 1930s, about bank failures and the international debt crisis of 1931. Beginning in 1933, he turned his rhetorical cannon on the New Deal. In his day, Garrett was thought of as a conservative – a hard-core conservative. If we remember him now a libertarian, it is because, conservatives are not nearly so hard-core today. His argument for liberty was not from natural rights, and though his arguments were very often economic, his basic premises were not.

Garet Garrett is another prominent representative of the isolationist movement who recognized the important links between domestic economic policies of the New Deal and interventionist foreign policies adopted during World War II and the postwar period. ... Among the fundamental characteristics of Empire Garrett listed: a strong executive power, subordination of domestic to foreign policy, ascendancy of the military over the civilian mind, a dominant psychological sense of constant fear, and a 'vast system of entanglement' which would automatically involve the United States in any conflict that erupted in any part of the world.

In 1952 the journalist and novelist Garet Garrett (1878–1954) took up this question in contemplating post-World War II America. The resulting essay, "The Rise of Empire," is included in his anthology, The People's Pottage. It bears close study today. Garrett was an important figure in what has come to be known as the "Old Right," an eclectic group of writers and politicians (mostly Republican) who emerged in the 1930s to oppose militarism and the centralization of power under the New Deal ... Garrett began with this somber message:

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire ...

If Garet Garrett (1878-1954) is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of intellectuals who wrote in opposition to the New Deal planning state and the regimentation of national life it brought about ... Garrett is a case study in a forgotten genius ... Despite astonishing eloquence and prescience, Garrett's stirring attacks on the New Deal and condemnations of the American imperial mindset found few takers in the Cold War era. Meanwhile, his earlier career as a business journalist and wonderful novelist in the 1920s had been entirely forgotten by the 1950s.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. ... All of this is said by one who believes that people have an absolute right to any form of government they like, even to an American Welfare state, with status in place of freedom, if that is what they want. The first of all objections to the New Deal is neither political nor economic. It is moral.