Defend America First

Garet Garrett
Tags: War and Foreign Policy, World History
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The U.S. entry into World War II is one of the issues that American political culture considers to be settled and not discussable. This was not the case in the run up to the war. One group of writers and intellectuals, who led a mass movement, opposed entry into the war. And not because they liked Hitler or otherwise.

Those people who opposed it had their careers and even lives run over by the war machine, but does that mean that we have nothing to learn from them? So few of their writings are around that it is hard to tell.

So in many ways, we need to be grateful to Bruce Ramsey, who has put together the writings of the most brilliant and prolific of the anti-war writers. They are by Garet Garrett, the novelist and opponent of the New Deal. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, one of the largest circulation periodicals in the country.

In editorials from 1939 to 1942, he laid out the rationale for staying out of Europe's war. As Ramsey points out in the introduction, the issues that we think about today were not issues then. There is little talk of Japan or the fate of European Jews. These were not the concerns of the war party. The real question was whether the U.S. ought to intervene in yet another European conflict that would inevitably have the U.S. linking arms with the Soviet Union.

From Garrett's point of view, American security was not really at stake. He predicted that an intervention would lead to a further loss of freedom at home, a bolstering of the Soviet dictatorship, a massive debt burden, an entrenchment of the executive state – all of which came true. Garrett saw these costs of war like few others and he made his views known.

These writings, then, are rare in our times when no one wants to think about the ways in which U.S. entry into the war sealed the "revolution within the form" that the New Deal represented. Garrett predicted that after we vanquished Nazism, we would have a further problem to deal with namely, the Soviet problem ("Having saved the world from Nazism, should we not be morally obligated to go on and save it from Bolshevism?"). He was right in every way.

This collection draws attention to the myriad ways in which U.S. involvement in the war began long before Pearl Harbor. FDR had been preparing the ground for war by abandoning American neutrality and assisting Britain in the war effort – all without approval from Congress and with very little knowledge by the American people. The tactics were an extension of those established during the 1930s.

These days nearly everyone says that the "good war" was worth the fighting but does that mean that the critics had nothing to say worth hearing? Garrett would say that this is the attitude we find in imperial dictatorships, not free countries. In many ways, then, this volume is a monument to the kind of critical thinking that freedom breeds and protects.

 

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.
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