The Cinder Buggy

Garet Garrett
Tags: Media and Culture
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Garet Garrett's fiction deals with the social impact of economic transformations. In The Driver, he deals with railroads, while Satan's Bushel examines agricultural. The Cinder Buggy, his second in the trilogy, is the longest of the three and his true epoch novel and unforgettable masterpiece. With a great story, and tremendous literary passion, it chronicles the transformation of America from the age of iron to the age of steel.

It covers the period between 1820 and 1870 and its dramatic technology march. The plot concerns an ongoing war between two industrialists, one the hero who is beaten in the first generation and the other who is malevolent but initially wins a first round in the competitive drive. The struggle continues through the second generation, which leads to a titanic battle over whether steel or iron would triumph and why.

Wrought iron is what made New Damascus tick and the two men who made it happen were named Aaron Breakspeare and Enoch Gib. Aaron is beloved but not a great businessmen. He dreamed of the steel age but failed to make it happen. Enoch is a good businessman but dour and widely loathed for his miserliness and treatment of others. A feud over a banker's daughter leads to the initial dissolution of the partnership, and the son of the resulting union, John Breakspeare, returns to New Damascus to enter the iron business.

This leads to a fascinating repeat of events that causes another dissolution, this one more bitter and shocking than the last. The feud continues over iron and then over steel until steel wins the victory after many fits and starts. In the course of the story, the reader discovers how it is that technology has such a dramatic effect on society, and how risk and entrepreneurship are at the very heart of it all.

Whereas this genre of fiction usually deals with real war, Garrett employs every literary device to make commerce itself the setting for great acts of courage, heroism, sacrifice, and tragedy. And as with his other books, the central mover of events here is the price system. It is the signal for and cause of the most notable changes in the plot. The reader discovers economics in a way that might otherwise not be possible, and it is hard to imagine that anyone would come away with anything but love of the whole subject of enterprise.

Garrett does not portray the market as some idealized utopia. We have here the full range of human emotion and motivation at work: arrogance, pride, malice, love, compassion, jealousy, rage, and everything else. What is striking is that all these emotions play themselves out in a setting that is ultimately peaceful. No one can fully control price movements, and it is these that act to reward virtues and punish vices.

We also have here a realistic portrayal of the truth about innovation. It is not enough to come up with a good idea. That idea must be embodied in real production that takes place in a cost-reducing way, and then marketed in the service of society. The unity of technology, accounting, and marketing must all come together to make possible such things as technological revolutions.

There has never been, before or since, economic fiction that can compare with the super-high quality standards set by Garrett in these smashing novels. The Cinder Buggy could easily be considered the best of his work in this area. It is a wonderful novel for anyone who loves, or wants to more deeply understand, American history, economic theory, and the place of technology in the molding of society.

The Cinder Buggy by Garet Garrett
Meet the Author
Garet Garrett

Garet Garrett (1878–1954) was an American journalist and author who was noted for his critiques of the New Deal and US involvement in the Second World War.

Insatiable Government
Mises Daily Garet Garrett
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.
The Church of Keynes
Mises Daily Garet Garrett
The work cumbersomely entitled, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, now commonly abbreviated as "The General Theory," was published in 1936. Probably no other book has ever produced in so little time a comparable effect, writes Garet Garrett. It has tinctured, modified, and conditioned economic thinking in the whole world. Upon it has been founded a new economic church, completely furnished with all the properties proper to a church, such as a revelation of its own, a rigid doctrine, a symbolic language, a propaganda, a priestcraft, and a demonology. The revelation, although brilliantly written, was nevertheless obscure and hard to read, but where one might have expected this fact to hinder the spread of the doctrine, it had a contrary result and served the ends of publicity by giving rise to schools of exegesis and to controversies that were interminable because nothing could be settled. There was no existing state of society in which the theory could be either proved or disproved by demonstration — nor is there one yet.
The World That Might Have Been
Mises Daily Garet Garrett
One great discovers another: Garet Garrett reviews two books by Ludwig von Mises in this newly discovered essay from 1945. Garrett writes: Ludwig von Mises writes tragedy in the language of political economy. There is in man the very principle of frustration. Once, and perhaps for the first time, he did find the right way. Beginning with the optimistic social philosophy of 18th-century liberalism he discovered the solutions of the free market, free competition, free private enterprise — that is to say, capitalism — and how at the same time to put government in its place. After that he had only to go in a straight line toward a world of peace and unlimited plenty. For a while he did go in a straight line and there was the 19th century, in which political freedom and material well-being advanced together, inseparably and wonderfully. But the government, which he had put in its place, began to overtake him, offering to do him good and to help him on his way.
View Garet Garrett bio and works
References

E.P. Dutton, 1923