Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Unsanctioned Voice Garet Garrett Journalist of the Old Right by Bruce Ramsey Unsanctioned Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right. This is a curious book about a curious man. It’s not a biography in a normal sense, but a biographical essay based on the limited material left behind by Garet Garrett, the journalist, novelist, and powerful voice speaking up for individualism and free markets as the New Deal eclipsed them. Bruce Ramsey, an editorial writer for the Seattle Times, has already edited three collections of Garrett’s journalism. But Garrett’s own papers were mostly destroyed except for one year’s worth of a journal; just one small book had been written about him in the 1960s by an author who had access to many people who knew Garrett directly. Ramsey had to go to such unobvious sources as biographical works by or about the likes of journalist Gay Talese, newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, and financier Bernard Baruch to get much useful secondary information. What Ramsey had access to, and condenses and explains with skill and affection, is a lifetime of printed journalism and commentary on his times from Garrett, a clear writer and interesting thinker. From that, Ramsey paints a fascinating and complicated man who championed classic American political (and other) virtues. Garrett is remembered by modern libertarians as one of their forefathers in the prewar “Old Right.” Garrett was a fellow traveler, friend, or mentor to many figures important in the early growth of the modern American libertarian movement, from FEE founder Leonard Read to novelist and polemicist Rose Wilder Lane to Richard Cornuelle, early functionary of the libertarian support organization the Volker Fund. As Ramsey demonstrates, Garrett was too individual a thinker and writer to be slotted in as simply an early modern libertarian. He’s best seen as an eclectic constitutionalist, for “an America-first foreign policy, economic laissez-faire and a gold-backed dollar.” But Garrett was not categorically for free trade and had a soft spot for national autarky, which he saw as both an economic and foreign-policy good. He was against legal gambling, free banking, and free immigration (and not just prospectively—he believed the American spirit of individualism had been sullied by the pre-World War I immigration of a European proletariat). Garrett was born in Illinois in 1878, and by age 18 (at most) had launched a lifelong career as a journalist and editorialist in the Midwest and later Washington, D.C., and New York. He got an early start studying the worlds of twentieth-century business and finance, and had a gift for winning the respect of highly placed men and difficult interview subjects such as Bernard Baruch and Henry Ford. The most educational part of Ramsey’s book to those who only know Garrett by his later political essays on the death of a free America (kept in print through much of the past 50 years by various libertarian and conservative publishers) consists of discussions of the series of novels Garrett wrote in the 1920s. All are set in the world of business and industry. His belief in the virtue and efficacy of individual effort was at the core of his social philosophy. He once wrote, “I have never seen a good farmer with a good wife in a state of failure,” which sums up his attitude toward how one succeeds. Garrett’s intellectual approach differed from the systemic rationalism of such libertarian founders as Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises. He once wrote to his friend the socialist Lincoln Steffens that “there is not one damned thing I am sure of . . . it is much more important to believe something than that what you believe should be right.” His shock at how quickly the individualist America he thought he knew from pre-New Deal days embraced creeping socialism led him to declare, “I am too humiliated to have an opinion about anything. Everything I believed about my own people was wrong.” He came to think that Americans of the postwar era were, sadly, getting exactly the type of government they wanted and that the original Americans belonged to a different breed entirely. This sense of loss led to the grim mood of the early libertarian movement—the realization that believers in limited government and free markets were fighting to reverse a defeat, not preserve a system. As the title of Garrett’s most famous essay put it, “The Revolution Was.” A major theme of Garrett’s intellectual life was especially prescient: an understanding of the importance of gold as a monetary standard, that bankers and government “must be limited by something they cannot control . . . the gold standard.” Ramsey sums up why American, and certainly libertarian, historians should remember Garrett: “Because he stood against state dominance at home and state intervention abroad, and showed that the two are connected.” Alas for Garrett’s cause, his relevance is as strong as ever. The Great Garet Garrett. Economic journalist and author Garet Garrett (1878-1954) is largely forgotten by history. Only libertarians and "Old Right" conservatives who still believe in individual liberty, free markets, small government and a foreign policy founded on noninterventionism keep Garrett's name and memory alive today. Yet, as Seattle Times editorial writer and columnist Bruce Ramsey details in his coming biography "Unsanctioned Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right," Garrett was a major figure in the American media mainstream from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s. A self-taught economist with a fiction-writer's style and a knack for clearly explaining how the real world worked, Garrett was a vocal foe of the New Deal, socialism and U.S. involvement in World War II. He was a financial writer or editorialist at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and then the Saturday Evening Post, arguably the most important middle-class media outlet of the '30s and '40s. A handful of his more than a dozen books and novels -- some of which, like "The Wild Wheel" (about Henry Ford), are in the public domain -- can be read online (links are at Garrett's Wikipedia entry). And four Garrett books, including "Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939-1942" and "Salvos Against the New Deal," both of which were edited by Ramsey, have been published by Caxton Press (caxtonpress.com). The small but freedom-friendly Idaho company, which has been printing Ayn Rand's "Anthem" in hardback for nearly 50 years, will bring out Ramsey's biography of Garrett next month. I talked to Ramsey by phone from Seattle. Q: Why does Garrett deserve a biography? A: The reason I wanted to do a biography of him was that he stated some ideas very clearly that I think are valuable ideas, even though they've become unpopular -- or at least were unpopular for a long time. . One of those ideas is a justification for a limited-government, free-market capitalist society that's based on self-reliance. He directly ties self-reliance in with the idea of freedom and individual liberty in a way that is not done by a lot of modern writers. Secondly, he has an idea of foreign policy that is America-centered -- basically from a time when America was a continental power or maybe a hemispheric power but did not have pretensions to being a world power with a lot of world responsibilities. He ties that in with the idea of a limited government by saying that when you become a world empire, as he called it, instead of a republic, you really can no longer have a limited government and true individual freedom. You can't have a limited government because you need to have this strong presidential power - the president who can take you to war on his decision is not bound very much by a constitution. And if you become a world empire you need to have a Congress that can levy all sorts of taxes on you and basically determine domestic policy on how it influences the empire or the whole world. So he made this argument for what he called a limited constitutional government in a republican form that I think is more consistent than the arguments made since then by conservatives. Also, he ought to be remembered for his writing style. He was a colorful and exact writer. As a writer I really admired him and much of the reason why I wanted to write about him instead of somebody else was that I liked his writing and I wanted to bring it back and show it off. Q: What were his politics and who would he resemble today? A: In the recent campaign it would be (Texas Republican Congressman) Ron Paul. That's for sure. It was a very much Ron Paul-type foreign policy and the emphasis on the Constitution. Even on the immigration issue, he's close to Ron Paul. Q: What were his political beliefs? A: The closest word today would be "libertarian." But he didn't use that word. He never labeled himself. But he was for a small government and basically a pre-New Deal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution; for sound money -- meaning gold-backed currency; for a mind-your-own- business foreign policy; and for an internal free market in the United States. Basically, he was opposed to the welfare state. He wanted an independent, self-reliant America that would go its own way and not be all bound up in obligations to other countries to modify and do what they wanted to do. Q: What made him different or better than the other anti-New Dealers? A: Well, some of the others focused on personality -- the personality of Roosevelt or people around him like Rexford Tugwell or the zany Henry Wallace over at the Agriculture Department. Garrett really was focusing on the economic essence of what the New Deal was trying to do. So he really homed in on the central idea of the thing -- one of which was to try to restore the previous price structure by pushing prices of things up. Garrett thought it was insane to do that in a depression -- to go around and try to push prices up -- because it made it harder for anybody to put together an enterprise and make any money, because they had to pay more for inputs, labor, whatever. It just wasn't the way we ever got out of a depression before. Q: Why should we care about Garet Garrett today? A: Well, because we are facing some of these same questions today. They're perennial questions about the size and power of the federal government and just what it undertakes to do and how much control it has over our lives; secondly, because he linked these two things -- the size and power of constitutional government in the domestic sphere on one hand and foreign policy. He was a man of the right. He was in those days essentially a conservative, and I think the right in America needs to rediscover somebody like this because they have gotten all seduced by a kind of a nationalist, rah-rah-rah for our side (mentality) and they don't question the bigger questions -- what the troops are deployed for, what's the purpose of it, whether it makes any sense and whether it's really in our interest. Actually, the American right got sidetracked by the Cold War. Before the Cold War, we had an attitude that was more like Garrett's and then you have four decades of struggling against the Communists. And, of course, the right wasn't going to like the Communists, and they were going to disregard Garrett's misgivings about it and go have this big battle to contain the Communists. But fighting communism changed the right. It made the right into the pro-military party -- the feeling that it was a good thing to have bases in Korea and Germany and Diego Garcia and who knows where. I think it's mistaken. You actually have more freedom as a free country if your government is smaller and you stay out of other people's problems and Garrett was someone who expressed that very clearly. A Garet Garrett Sampler. Republic or empire? Garet Garrett biographer Bruce Ramsey chose this passage for the Trib from Garrett's 1952 book, "Rise of Empire": The history of a Republic is its own history. Its past does not contain its future, like a seed. A Republic may change its course, or reverse it, and that will be its own business. But the history of Empire is world history and belongs to many people. A Republic is not obliged to act upon the world, either to change it or instruct it. Empire, on the other hand, must put forth its power. What is it that now obliges the American people to act upon the world? . It is not only our security that we are thinking of -- our collective security. Beyond that is a greater thought. Our turn to do what? Our turn to assume the responsibilities of moral leadership in the world. Our turn to maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil everywhere -- in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and Pacific, by air and by sea. . It is our turn to keep the peace of the world. . But this is the language of Empire. The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Its good intentions were peace, law and order. The Spanish Empire added salvation. The British Empire added the noble myth of the white man's burden. We have added freedom and democracy. Yet the more that may be added to it the more it is the same language still. A language of power. Other quotes from Garet Garrett. Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power. Loyalty of the law-making power to the executive power was one of the dangers the political fathers foretold. There are many aspects of government. The one least considered is what may be called the biological aspect, in which government is like an organism with such an instinct for growth and self-expression that if let alone it is bound to destroy human freedom - not that it might wish to do so but that it could not in nature do less. No government ever wants less government . that is, less of itself. No government ever surrenders power, even its emergency powers -- not really. It may mean to surrender them, but on the first new occasion it will take them all back. New Light on a Great Libertarian. One day in September 2011, I received the following email: “I’ve just ordered your book on Garet Garrett, brother to my grandmother, Gertrude Garrett Graham, and my great uncle. There are a few anecdotes from his later years of retirement in Tuckahoe NJ and his relationships with his family and I’d enjoy talking with you, once I’ve read your book.” It was signed, “Trudy Beth Bond.” Garet Garrett (1878–1954) author of The Driver , The People’s Pottage , and The American Story , was one of the great libertarian journalists of the 20th century. I wrote a book about him, Unsanctioned Voice , published in 2008. The book is more about Garrett as a writer than as a person and necessarily so. Most of his papers were lost. He had no children. His third wife, Dorothy Williams Garrett, had a son from a previous marriage, and he also had died, but I found his daughter. She had a few photos of Garrett but was too young to have known him. Digging for details more than half a century after he died, I found one person who had known him: Richard Cornuelle, who had worked with Garrett in the early 1950s (and who died on April 26, 2011). Cornuelle had gone on to become an official at the National Association of Manufacturers — and had written a book, Reclaiming the American Dream , championing the nonprofit sector as an alternative to the welfare state. In 2007 I flew to New York City to meet him at his Greenwich Village townhouse and hear of his time with Garrett. Cornuelle, then 80, was delighted that someone wanted to know about the man who had been his mentor. My book was more about Garrett as a writer than as a person and necessarily so. Most of his papers were lost. Cornuelle gave me some personal details about Garrett, some of them incomplete. He told me one of Garrett’s sisters lived in a farmhouse on Garrett’s property at Tuckahoe. But which sister? Why was she there? What role had Garrett played in her family? He didn’t know. My book wasn’t mostly about things like that, but more personal details would have improved it. After the book came out, I wondered whether I would hear from some lost relative. Three years went by. Then came the email from his grandniece, Trudy, who lives in the very town, Port Townsend WA, in which Liberty was founded and published for more than 20 years — a town about two hours’ drive and a ferry ride from my house. Trudy was born in 1941. Through her, I got to talk to her brother Marshall, born 1943, and her sister Connie, born 1945. They knew Garrett as kids, aged 9 to 13. They were also part of a family that would have some stories about him. They might fill in some of the blanks in my account. I had known that Garrett and his third wife, Dorothy, lived somewhere along the Tuckahoe River in New Jersey. From Connie, I received a satellite photo of the property. At the beginning of the book I had listed Garrett’s siblings from Census records: Gertrude, Mary, Sarah, Thomas, and “what looks like ‘Clarra.’” But I knew nothing about them. Now I had their full names — it was “Clara” — and the dates of their births. I noticed that all but two of Garrett’s siblings were born in different towns, most of them not far from Garrett’s birthplace at Pana, in central Illinois. Garrett’s father Silas was a tinker — an itinerant tinsmith — and his family moved around. From my new acquaintances, I heard one story of the children’s youth. Garret’s father, Silas, was a Protestant. What denomination was never said, though his funeral was in a Methodist church. According to Marshall, Garet’s mother, Alice, was a devout Catholic. “They had made a pact when they married that their children would be allowed to make up their own minds,” Marshall said. “But the priest prevailed on Alice, and she did certain things behind her husband’s back, such as putting them in catechism class.” The effort backfired, and Clara, Gertrude, and Marie embraced the new religion of the time, Christian Science. Then came an email from the very town, Port Townsend WA, in which Liberty was founded and published for more than 20 years. “The Christian Science thing was a big schism in the family,” said Trudy, who was raised in that faith but abandoned it. She heard the story through her grandmother, Gertrude, who was zealous enough to become a Christian Science practitioner. Garrett was not a follower of Christian Science, and Trudy says his religious sisters disapproved of his drinking, smoking, and being married three times. But Gertrude and Marie also respected his achievement. They called him “Brother,” as if it were his name. I learned little about Clara, who had stayed in Illinois. Sarah, whom they called Sadie, married a veterinarian and lived in Missouri and Iowa. “I met my Aunt Sadie when I was 10,” Trudy said. “She seemed to have escaped the whole religion thing.” Garrett’s younger brother Thomas had been an artist, and Connie has a painting of his (“landscape on the front, female nude on the back”). Thomas died young, in 1917, of somedisease. He is buried in the same cemetery as Garet and Dorothy Garrett, in Tuckahoe, which suggests that his elder brother had taken care of him — and perhaps had removed his remains, because Garrett didn’t move from Egg Harbor, NJ, to Tuckahoe until the mid-1920s. The sister living on Garrett’s property was Marie. Trudy recalled the story that Marie had been living in Chicago. She was a man’s secretary for many years, and had become his mistress. “Supposedly his wife was sickly and when she died, he said, he would marry Marie, but he did not.” His religious sisters disapproved of his drinking, smoking, and being married three times. But they also respected his achievement. Trudy’s sister Connie writes: “As mother told me, Marie fell in love with a successful lawyer in Chicago. He was married and his wife was in a mental institution, and he told Marie there was some law that prevented a spouse from divorcing a spouse who is in an institution. So Marie consented to stay with him (my impression was that he paid for her apartment), something she otherwise would never have done.” Connie recalls her mother's stories of visiting Aunt Marie in Chicago as a kid, with her sisters Jane and Ruth, and "Uncle Walter" stopping by with candy for them. When the man’s wife died, he wouldn't marry Marie. Connie continues: “Humiliated, Marie went east to Garet’s, where she stayed on, and where Joe French, Garet’s tenant farmer, fell for her and asked her to marry him.” French was not an educated or worldly man. His claim to fame was playing baseball in the minor leagues in San Francisco, Topeka, Sioux City, Dubuque, Peoria, and Beaumont in the years before World War I. Trudy recalls that his fingers had been broken from playing catcher. As Connie recalls the story, Marie went to Garet and asked his advice, telling him, “Imagine. That man is no more than a tenant farmer and he wants to marry me!” To which Garet replied, “At least he wants to make an honest woman out of you.” Trudy says that Marie married French “under duress from Garrett, who didn’t want to support Marie for the rest of his life.” In none of Garrett’s writings does he talk about taking care of his family, or the stress of an obligation to do so. Garrett left his family in Iowa in his mid-teens. Several of the characters in his fiction are without family, and none of his fiction or his vast amount of journalism focuses on family issues or champions family loyalty. He addresses other things. Yet he takes care of his sister when the gamble of her life fails. He nudges her into a marriage with a man who loves her, and he provides them both with a house. It is what honorable people do, if they can, when there is no welfare state. Trudy, Marshall, and Connie recall Garrett as the success, the urban sophisticate, of the family — and, of course, much older than they. As preteens and early teens, they moved with their parents from suburban Chicago to New York City in 1953. She believes they were the only relatives of her generation who lived close enough to visit Garrett, and the only ones today who remember him. In none of Garrett’s writings does he talk about taking care of his family, or the stress of an obligation to do so. From the summer of 1953 to Garrett’s death in late 1954, they visited Tuckahoe often, staying at Marie and Joe’s, in the farmhouse on Garrett’s property. This other building was not a farmhouse really. It was a three-story brick house, covered with ivy. It had a ship’s binnacle on the porch, and Connie remembers it as “the captain’s house.” The place was the subject of a feature story in the Atlantic City Press . (Trudy has the clipping.) Part of the Stille Homestead, the house had been built in 1795 “by slaves,” the newspaper said, using “bricks brought from England.” It had thick walls and five fireplaces, two of them in the basement, “where in the cold winter time the first families cooked, ate and kept warm.” Upstairs it had a “borning room” where mothers gave birth, and outside was a small graveyard. One of the side buildings had been made into a glassblowing studio for Garrett’s wife, Dorothy. Connie has a small bottle that Dorothy created, with a dime in it. Trudy turned 13 in 1954. Of the captain’s house she remembers “a wonderful attic where I spent many, many hours reading old Saturday Evening Posts ” that Garrett had kept in bundles. His articles were mostly above her head, but she saw his name on them in the Post . “It wasn’t really until then that I knew what Uncle Garrett did.” Garet and his wife lived several hundred yards from the old house in a new house he had built. “Garet and Dorothy's house was enchanting to me,” Connie recalls. “It had the biggest fireplace I had ever seen and I remember very well the bust of Nefertiti that you mention in your book, as well as the high bookshelves that flanked the fireplace.” Trudy remembers Garrett’s room with the two-story ceiling and the big fireplace. “The room had a cozy feel to it, almost like you would feel in a log home. Garrett was the boss of that room. Really he was the boss of the whole place. Dorothy was pretty much in her cups all the time.” I had mentioned Dorothy’s alcoholism in the book, and all three of Gertrude’s descendants remembered it. They remembered Garrett drinking, too, but not being drunk. They also remembered the outbuilding Garrett called his “cave,” where he wrote. “He built that,” Marshall recalled. “He was proud of that. He had a little storage area underground where he kept his ink cool. He had these big bottles of Scripps ink. Four of them. He’d refill the well on his desk.” I had quoted Richard Cornuelle in the book about how Garrett would research a topic, keeping everything in his head, “muttering and fuming quietly. Then, suddenly, he would seize an old-fashioned pen holder, jam a new point into it, and scrawl on white foolscap, often for hours, panting and sweating, jabbing the pen in the ink now and then, until he had it all down.” Scripps ink, from big bottles. I had said in the book that Garrett sometimes hid in his “cave” from kids, and Connie, who turned 9 in Garrett’s last year, recalls: “Although we did often go over to Garet and Dorothy's house, and I did catch my first fish off their dock, and Garet helped me unhook it, on the whole not too much happened of a family gathering nature when we were over there. We kids generally weren't allowed in his little building where he did his writing, but sometimes we were sent out there to fetch him or take him a snack, and I would look around in awe at all the books and papers around him.” Trudy and Marshall remember Garrett showing them his artesian well, and how he had piped the water into his house. Garrett did his own plumbing. In Unsanctioned Voice , I quote Cornuelle saying that Garrett had buckets of silver dollars under his porch as insurance against a feared inflation. (If he had lived another 20 years, they would have paid off.) Trudy and Marshall remember the stories of buried coins, either silver or gold. Marshall recalls that silver coins were found inside the ship’s binnacle, under a layer of sand. When Garrett died, his property went to Dorothy. She died six months or so later, willing the property to her son, James. That was a setback for Marie and Joe, because they had to move out of the captain’s house into town. Perhaps Garrett had an influence on the family. Connie was the closest to Garrett in her career: she became a writer and editor of Smithsonian magazine. Marshall is the closest to Garrett in his philosophy. “I don’t think anybody knew about libertarianism then, if they called it that,” he says. “Most of us are still quite conservative, maybe not to the extent of libertarianism, but pretty near.” “When I read about the attitudes of Garet Garrett, I see my brother,” Trudy says. Trudy was an attorney, teaching classes in how non-attorneys could file papers and defend their rights. She recalls once going out with a man who admired Ayn Rand, and telling him, “ I am the grandniece of Garet Garrett.” About Bruce. Bruce A. R amsey ([email protected]) is a Washington writer and researcher retired from a 37-year career in journalism in Seattle and Hong Kong. He was born in Seattle and grew up in Edmonds along Puget Sound. He studied business at the University of Washington and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career in 1976 as the business and real estate reporter at the Bellevue Journal-American, was a reporter at Marple’s Business Newsletter and a business reporter and columnist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In 1989 he moved to Asia for four years as a senior writer at Asiaweek magazine. He returned to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1993, and in 2000 joined the Seattle Times as a columnist and member of the editorial board. For his Post-Intelligencer series on the 1982 failure of the Seattle-First National Bank he won the Champion-Tuck Award for Economic Understanding, and in the year of his retirement, 2013, he received the Sigma Delta Chi award for editorial writing. During his newspaper years, Ramsey edited four volumes of the works of the 20th century financial journalist Garet Garrett and wrote a biography of Garrett, Unsanctioned Voice , all published by the Caxton Press. Upon his retirement he began researching The Panic of 1893 . He is now at work on a second book of Northwest history. Ramsey lives in Seattle with his wife, Anne, a former Citibanker. Their son, Morgan, is a software engineer and their daughter-in-law, Helen, is a medical student. Four Approaches to Foreign Policy. I went to a talk early in November by a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter Russell Mead. With regard to foreign policy, he sorts Americans into four types: Wilsonians, Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, and Jacksonians. These four, he says, appear and reappear throughout our his- tory, and are all at play now in this fight against Islamic terrorists. The Wilsonians believe in an international order based on law. They favor multilateralism, nation-building, human rights, and high-minded intervention. They would make the anti-terror crusade into a war for international law. Clinton was a Wilsonian. The Hamiltonians believe in pursuing national interests, including economic interests, sometimes through multilateral coalitions and sometimes not. Whatever works. They believe in international order based on a balance of power. Bush is a Hamiltonian. The Jeffersonians believe in defending the home territory against clear and present threats, and worry that militarism will reduce domestic liberty. They aren’t interested in international order. Nor do they focus on national honor, and tend to be more critical of their own country’s acts abroad. After Sept. 11 the Jeffersonians were the ones -asking what America had done to provoke such an attack. The Jacksonians are believers in national honor, courage, and the well-being of the majority. They are pro-military, populist, unilateralist, and individualist. They are not interested in international law or of “blaming America first” for breaking it. They do not seek out foreign wars, but if they’re in one, they want to win it. They opposed the war on Serbia – a Wilsonian war – but were willing to commit ground troops once we were in it. They are 100% behind the attacks on Afghanistan. John McCain might be called a higher Jacksonian, with the lower variety being the man with a flag sticker on his truck. Libertarians are Jeffersonians – in theory. Judging from what Liberty has published in its last two issues, there is a strong Jacksonian strain in them – much more than there would be in left-wing Jeffersonians. There is a bit of Hamilton, too. Not much of Wilson.