Esau had traded his birthright for a mess of pottage, and the American people did the same in rallying behind FDR and the New Deal, a program that not only failed spectacularly but seriously damaged American freedom.
Thus the title of the book that immortalized Garet Garret, the writer whose name had been familiar to American readers in the 1920s and 1930s but who turned against the regime and paid a serious price for it.
This is the 50th anniversary edition of this classic work, with an introduction by Bruce Ramsey, who tells the story of Garrett's life and the place of this book in it.
This book is the darkest of all his works, but he tells the full truth about the disaster of the New Deal. It contains three eloquent and long essays: “The Revolution Was,” which explains how the revolution came to the U.S. “within the form”; “Ex-America” which attacks the heart of the New Deal, and “The Rise of Empire,” which critically links the New Deal to the drive for entering World War II as an extension of the collectivist ambitions of Roosevelt.
Here we have an illustration of the reality that the “conservative” idea did not begin with William F. Buckley, as people sometimes believe. Garet was passionate, erudite, and compelling, and he understood what the newly born American right of the mid-1950s wanted to erase from memory: the welfare and warfare states are two sides of the same stolen coin.
Murray Rothbard adored the book and tried to keep its memory alive. For it truly would have been a classic that every generation of political thinker would have read, but for the fact that it appeared in 1954, just before the New Right decided to blackout all memory of the genuine right that resisted the New Deal.
But now Garet Garrett is back and he is speaking again. What an enormous talent and what a heroic battler for liberty he was! This is his indispensable work.
159 pages, 0-87004-442-7, Hardback