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 .

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 last week 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: Was he well-known?

A: Yeah. He was the principal writer on The Saturday Evening Post from 1922 to 1942. He became friends with Herbert Hoover. He was a lifelong friend of Bernard Baruch, who was a kind of Democratic senior statesmen. In the circle of political types, he was well-known.

Q: Was he famous?

A: Yes. He was known mostly as an economic writer. He wrote extensive on things like foreign policy, on trade, on foreign debts from World War I, the whole issue of repayment by the French and the British and the Germans; he wrote a lot of pieces on the New Deal and he became famous as attacking the New Deal; an then as World War II got closer he became a spokesman for an America First point of view. He wanted to try to stay out of the war but at the same time arm in case we had to go in it.

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 are his least-likable beliefs -- things that you might find embarrassing yourself?

A: He expressed at the end of his life that he thought that America had let in too many immigrants in the early 20th century and basically that they had brought in a lot of European ideas -- particularly socialism and internationalism --that had watered down the kind of opinions that America held when he was young. In his last book, he had the line "The Copper Woman had done her work." Another belief he had was that he was sometimes was a protectionist. He had an interesting argument for it. He wasn't averse to tariffs. I'm basically a free-trader. I don't think tariffs make a lot of sense, so we're different there. He credited tariffs for crating the American steel industry and the steel rail industry and the steel wire industry and some other things in the 19th century. So he thought it was OK to have a tariff. He didn't want the government to manage who traded with whom though.

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. And another thing some of the Roosevelt people had was this vision of a more stable society -- that society under capitalism was too erratic and they wanted more of a steady-state society. Garrett thought that was terrible because there would be no progress in it.

Q: What would he think of the size and scope of the federal government today?

A: He'd say it was way too big, because he would have the government be more like the size it was about a century ago -- more like 5 or 6 or 7 percent of GDP instead of 20 percent. He'd still have an Army and a Navy and some of the traditional functions, but he was not in favor of the Social Security program and he didn't even envision Medicaid, Medicare and all the stuff that costs all the money now -- or military bases in 130 countries around the world.

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.

It is our turn.

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.

Go to www.fff.org to see a chapter of Garrett's 1953 book, "The People's Pottage."

A Box of Books

One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation by George Will (Crown Forum)

George Will's latest book, a 400-page collection of his syndicated newspaper columns and reviews from the last five years, applies his famous erudition, wit and conservatism to the eclectic people, Middle-American places and often forgotten historical events that he believes make America the distinctive and mostly blessed place it is today. From recalling how FDR set the price of gold in bed each morning and making a visit to Milwaukee to mark the 100th birthday of Harley-Davidson to his commentaries on Brooks Brothers, good government, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the state of Major League Baseball, Will demonstrates why he remains the country's most widely read and influential conservative.

Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R.C. Gutzman (Crown Forum)

Constitutions are written down so that politicians running the government would know exactly what they could not get away with. Unfortunately, as Woods and Gutzman show by dissecting 12 of the most egregious assaults on the Constitution, our great framing document is all but dead and those who have pledged their oath to uphold the Constitution all these years have merely been moving their lips. The authors say a bipartisan parade of presidents, congresses and judges has willfully ignored, dodged, stepped on or just plain defied the Constitution's limits on government power. Whether it's been presidents usurping Congress' war-making powers, congresses ending discrimination by practicing discrimination, or FDR swiping the populace's gold, the process of killing off the Constitution is long, ugly and sad. The great liberty-loving Judge Andrew Napolitano said the book is a "no-holds-barred, no-nonsense, non-ideological, profound analysis" of how those whom we've entrusted to protect and preserve the Constitution have instead "intentionally exterminated it." Publishers Weekly called it a "constitutionalist jeremiad" --- not necessarily a bad thing -- that will appeal to both the left and the right.

Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery by Jim Powell (Palgrave Macmillan)

Did the United States have to fight the Civil War to end slavery• Powell, a Cato Institute fellow and author of such Roosevelt-unfriendly books as "FDR's Folly" and "Bully Boy," thinks our bloodiest war could have been avoided. His account of how an institution as old as human civilization suddenly disappeared in the Western Hemisphere in just a century makes the case that the more peaceful the emancipation process was, the better the eventual outcome. Powell focuses on the United States, Haiti, the British Caribbean, Cuba and Brazil, where most of the 7 million slaves who were freed lived, to show that equal civil rights were achieved sooner and more smoothly by societies that freed their slaves without violence because they were spared decades of the backlash that could not be controlled by their governments.

Book Review:

Putting women in control By Donald Collins

More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want by Robert Engelman (Island Press)

As my wife and I enjoyed a recent quiet dinner with Robert Engelman, the seasoned journalist described how in 1991 he finally realized that what he was learning was a bigger truth than he was allowed to tell in his news stories and columns:

Simply, that the population of Earth had exceeded the resources of our planet on a sustained basis.

Engelman's odyssey from professional news gatherer to seasoned planetary observer took him overseas to places Americans don't often visit and it revealed poverty and hardship on a scale he realized could not be understood without definition.

And that is exactly what reporter/family-planning expert Engelman gives us in what his publisher says is an exploration of "how population growth has shaped modern civilization -- and humanity as we know it": a historical perspective on why we must seek to curb human numbers ASAP.

Many efforts have been initiated to do this, but none with enough money or freedom to accomplish the task of stopping the net increase of over 70 million additional people per year to our current population of 6.7 billion -- which is likely to be nearly 10 billion by 2100.

Clearly, offering adequate money to provide the services women demand -- which has never been done -- needs to be done now.

But Engelman, now a Worldwatch Institute vice president, has a very smart insight, which while not new in the minds of many professionals, is certainly a branch of the same stem of thinking that drove Riane Eisler to write her famous book "The Chalice & the Blade," which showed the importance of bringing equality to our sexes.

In short, Engelman argues that the best way to "control" population is to give up control -- by giving women the power to decide for themselves when to bear a child.

So simple does this rubric appear that it seems irrelevant, but if one thinks about that important human right, one is reminded of the fantastic job done by a Senegal-based organization, TOSTAN, which began some 20 years ago just teaching women that they had human rights, rights that culture, custom and cruelty had failed to give them.

Many women in that nation suffered from the centuries-long practice of female genital cutting, which, like foot binding of Chinese women until its abandonment in the early 20th century, was felt to make women more attractive as marriage candidates.

Turns out that when the physical dangers of genital cutting were made known to enlightened men such as the imams and chiefs of several villages, they helped women there to expand its abandonment in over 3,000 villages, so that it has reached "the tipping point" in that country.

Surely the same thing could happen with free or nearly free contraceptives, which would be freely and easily available to women everywhere.

The failure to do this was just underlined by a brutal new study by the World Bank that revealed that lack of access to contraceptives led to 51 million unplanned pregnancies in poor nations and that incorrect use of birth control measures caused 25 million more unplanned pregnancies.

Equality of the sexes means we can fully utilize the talents and abilities of women, not just for their unique ability to produce children. The evolution of that right into an international standard is basically what Engelman has proposed.

It is not only timely -- and vital -- that we implement an increase in family planning programs (only about $5 billion total is spent per year worldwide), but also that we inject this policy objective into the bloodstream of every government.

The writer lives in Washington, D.C., and frequently writes for the Trib on issues of family planning and immigration.