Garet Garrett

The Cinder Buggy - part 9; Aaron discovers steel's place in history.

2011-10-29T19:55:00.002-04:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

A common feature of both Rand and Garrett was the long speech. One such speech appeared in Satan's Bushel.

Aaron's speech in Chapter VII of Cinder Buggy is an allegorical way of describing economic history and mankind's advancement from primitive times through the industrial age. In four pages, Aaron walks us through human history in terms of our standard of living and our ability to bring forth and support new generations. We see why each advancement in technology makes life easier and allows humanity to prosper. We see also why Aaron is so determined to make steel. In this segment, Aaron is talking to Esther during the events in the latter part of Chapter VII, as Aaron struggles to find the process by which he can manufacture steel:

Out there in unlimited space are the unborn . . . . Millions, infinite millions, clamoring to get born, perhaps dying because they cannot cross. Here is life on this side. There, out there, is but the hope of it. . . . . Between life that is and life unborn I see the primal chasm . . . We who live have crossed. We do not remember how. The number that can cross is small. You cannot imagine how small it is. Only one in milions has the luck to get across. The rest are crowded on the edge, weeping, reaching out their hands, silently imploring us to get them over. [p. 68] They struggle, overwhelm themselves and fall into the void like a cataract. . . . . . . "

"Why is that?" asked Esther.

"Because the number that can cross is limited by the preparations of the living," Aaron answered. "The living are selfish and forgetful. All this I see as it has been for ages, as now it is, and as it shall be. Always it has been as it is on the other side - that infinite, voiceless, despairing multitude pressing down to the brink of the void. Here in the world of the living there has been some change. We have the power of preparation. How pitiably we have exercised it! I'll tell you all that has ever happened. Long ago, before he began by imagination to extend his faculties, man was like the other animals. He had only his hands and legs, his sheer brute strength, to work with. He housed himself in holes and caves and ate what the untilled earth set forth. You must imagine then across that primal chasm a chain of human bodies, a living monkey bridge, by which the unborn came to life most dangerously. How few they were! And yet, if more had come just then they would have starved, - died here instead of there, - because the means did not exist to house and clothe and feed them. It is man's business not only to bridge the chasm; he must also beforehand prepare the world for those who cross.

Come ten thousand years through time this way. Now see him beginning to till the soil. See him building huts. More life may be sustained. Above the void a swaying bridge of sticks. More may safely get across. And yet so very few! Another thousand years. Enter [p. 69] historic man. He builds him cities and fine temples and there is a narrow stone arch to span the void. The bridge, as you will note, is at any time of that material in which mankind is working. This is better. The unborn begin to rush across. But, alas! the case is worse than ever. Many now are born that never will be fed. Why?

Imagine the world at this time in panorama. There are cities, noble cities walled about; but they are few and very far apart, and the world at large is still an untilled waste. Tillage is in small adjacent areas, and when the produce of those areas is not enough the people in the cities starve. Further away are vast fertile plains uncultivated. They are of no use because food cannot be transported thousands of miles in great quantities. The art of transportation is undiscovered. Hence frightful famines on the bounteous earth. Then in his imagination man finds a ship. That makes it possible to transport food long distances, and yet the world is hardly touched. Life is increaseable only on the rim of the sea and in the valley of the rivers. An inland city is impossible.

At length the iron age. It is our time. By mechanical means man has enormously increased his power to prepare the world for that infinite multitude unborn. It is tremendously excited - the voiceless, spectral multitude. It presses more wildly toward the void. An iron bridge has replaced the stone arch. It is a sign that many more may come. Now with railroads it is possible to bring food quickly from afar. No fertile area of the earth is inaccessible. Island cities [p. 70] may begin to rise. More life in more ways can be sustained than ever before. Nevertheless, the iron bridge is a premature sign. The material is defective. It is not hard enough to bear the strain of that host pressing upon life. Besides, by no process yet discovered can it be made fast enough.

And I see what has not yet happened. I see whole cities built higher than the tower of Babel. Those are steel buildings, sheathed with brick and stone. Brick and stone upon mortar would not stand so high. To serve but one of these cities, - to bring its food and take away its manufactures, - I see a thousand railroad trains, - trains of steel running on rails of steel. Compared with these the iron shod trains we know and think so marvellous are merely toys. I see ships of steel so vast in size that on the side of one the little vessel in which Columbus found a new world would swing like a silly skiff. I see steel in all its power - towers, tunnels, aqueducts, fantastic structures I cannot sense the meaning of. I see miles of smoking chimneys where steel is made for all these uses in unimaginable quantities. And spanning the prismal chasm I see a series of great steel bridges, multiplying as I look, seeming to cast themselves in air across the void like cobwebs. But reflect! We have not yet discovered the way to make this steel. Unless we find it quickly we shall fail that unborn host. It cannot get across; if it did it could not live. The iron bridge cannot bear its weight. Nor can the world be prepared with iron. These things of iron are premature, [ p. 71] too soft, too slowly made, not big enough. Now do you know what it is we seek?"

"Forgive me. I did not mean to speak lightly of it," Esther said. "None of this had been revealed to me."

"Nor to me," said Aaron. "Not clearly until this instant. Man works mostly in the dark, without knowing what he seeks or why . . . "
pp. 67-71

Aaron's struggle and his deep understanding of the importance of this struggle makes so much of today's political and economic discussion seem so childish and superficial.

The Cinder Buggy - part 8; (Chapters VI and VII); Esther; Steel almost comes to America; Atlantis

2011-05-31T13:00:00.002-04:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapter VI introduces a new element to the story, as Aaron and Enoch meet Esther. Esther is the daughter of the boys' banker (Bruno Mitchell).

Chapter VI describes the conversations between the boys and their banker in the "social atmosphere" of the Mitchell home:

They debated the future of iron, metallurgical processes, the blundering stupidity of Congress.
[page 38]

While this statement (about Congress) might accurately summarize the conversations of Garrett's time (1920's) (or later), it seems premature for Aaron and Enoch's time (early-mid 1800's).

Without spoiling the climax of Chapter VI, I can say that the romantic triangle involving Esther, Aaron and Enoch reminded me of the more famous triangles involving Ayn Rand's Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. The more I read of Garrett, the more I am convinced that Garrett influenced many of Rand's subplots. While Rand critics will seize upon these similarities as some sort of evidence of Rand's wrongdoing, the opposite, in fact, is true. Rand used the romantic triangles in Atlas Shrugged to develop specific philosophical points and to underscore her overall philosophy. Garrett left these points undeveloped.

The storylines for these triangles developed differently in Cinder Buggy than in Atlas Shrugged. Much as she did with pieces of The Driver, Rand took elements from Cinder Buggy, built upon them, added unique elements and took them to new levels. As I wrote here:

Ayn Rand appears to have built upon Garrett's work and improved upon it with her own elements.

and here:

Rand's plots were all her own, with only an element or two from prior novelists. Rand's novels were unique. She built on elements from prior authors, but she created something new and distinct.

and here:

While Ayn Rand may have been influenced by Garrett, the plots of her novels were far more developed and intricate than those of Garrett. Rand's novels conveyed more themes and delved more deeply into philosophy.

In Chapter VII, we see another element that Rand would ultimately build upon. Cinder Buggy calls for Aaron to make his own effort to develop the steel industry in the United States. (pp. 62-66, pp. 71-72). As I read these pages, I was reminded of Hank Reardon's efforts to develop Reardon Metal in Atlas Shrugged. The difference was that Rand used Reardon's efforts to explore the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism and objectivism. Reardon's efforts and lifelong struggle could never be duplicated by the leftists that would seize and regulate his production. Nearly a decade before the New Deal, Garrett did not foresee the need to accentuate the owner's struggle in order to combat the obligatory class warfare that would soon dominate literature and public discourse. Garrett chose instead to make a different point from Aaron's struggle (pp. 67-71) (See part 9 of my review for a lengthy quotation from Aaron in this regard).

The other element that seems vaguely Randian is the concept of the disappearing factory. While Aaron took his factory far away for reasons that relate to Esther and Enoch (p. 73) (instead of the strike in Atlas Shrugged), the concept of the factory that goes away only to reappear in faraway places years later must have intrigued Rand. More than 35 years later Rand's plot would identify entirely different causes for industrialists to abandon their work (and usually their entire factories). But a reader of both Garrett and Rand can imagine Rand's fascination with this concept as she writes of her characters searching through the ruins of a long dead factory or puzzling over the legend of Atlantis while they seek some long gone factory owner.

Click here for part 9.

The Cinder Buggy - part 7; iron blast furnace; pig iron; (chapter V)

2011-03-13T15:06:00.002-04:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapter V of the Cinder Buggy describes the creation of the iron industry in New Damascus and the roles played by Enoch and Aaron. Garrett explains how Aaron and Enoch built the first blast furnace in the United States:

Hitherto iron had been produced in this country, as elsewhere in the world, by primitive methods. Ore was wastefully smelted in rude charcoal furnaces unimproved in design since the Middle Ages. The process was of great antiquity. It was uniform in India at the time of Alexander's invasion. Its origin even then was lost in myth. Tubal Cain, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron," was master of it in the city of his distinguished ancestor, Cain, which was in the land of Nod.
(pp. 28-29)

While others had advanced beyond the use of the forge method to using blast furnaces, a blast furnace had never before been built in the United States. Garrett goes on to discuss iron in a way that has been lost to the 21st century students of the anti-industrial revolution:

The prize in both cases (forge and blast furnace) was a nugget of glowing iron, the most useful non-digestible substance yet discovered by man. It is tenacious, ductile, easily tempered, malleable at red heat, marriageable at white heat and possesses one miraculous quality. It is magnetic. It calls electricity out of the void, snares it, delivers it helpless into the hands of man. Without this blackhearted substance, fallen from the sun, natively pure only in form of a meteorite, lightning could not have been captured and enslaved on earth.
(p. 29)

While blast furnaces had been used in Europe before this point, those furnaces were heated with bituminous coal or wood. The blast furnaces of New Damascus were the first to use anthracite coal.

I had heard the term "pig iron" before reading Cinder Buggy. But I did not know how the name originated until Garrett explained the process in Chapter V (pp. 31-32). The term "pig" refers to the separate pools of iron that run off from and drain the main lake that flows out of the furnace.

Garrett does not simply provide a science lesson in Cinder Buggy. The plot advances while the reader appreciates these descriptions of iron and the furnace process. The partners' differences are shown, as Enoch focuses on details while Aaron appreciates the beauty of the process. Garrett compares that process to the creation of the Earth:

A blast furnace even then was what a blast furnace is, - the most audacious affront man has yet put upon nature. He decoys the elemental forces and gives them handy nicknames. Though he cannot tame them, he may control them through knowledge of their weaknesses. He learns their immutable habits. From the Omnipotent Craftsman he steals the true process. In the scale of his own strength he reproduces in a furnace the conditions under which the earth was made, and extracts from the uproar a lump of iron.
pages 32-33

Garrett is not afraid to describe nature as something that man can defeat. Any industrial process is the story of man defeating nature. It is no coincidence that as modern literature reverses this theme by showing nature as superior to man, western industry declines. Garrett's approach, despite its age, is refreshing.

Garrett goes on to describe how Aaron remained popular and helped build the business through his contacts and the parties that he hosted, at which the business leaders of the country came to be entertained. At the same time, the lenders came to trust the word of Enoch in business matters. "The instinct that preferred Aaron in friendship and the instinct that preferred Enoch in business could exist, and did, in the same people." (p. 35).

In this way, Garrett further explores the different personalities of the two main characters. Garrett creates an uneasy balance between Enoch and Aaron that - I believe - is leading to the confrontation that will define this story. As the boys' iron business becomes stronger and more profitable, their differences become more important and the stakes are increased for the final conflict.

Old Creveling Furnace - Danville, PA

Click here for Part 8 of my review.

The Cinder Buggy - Part 6 - the seeds of the iron industry (chapter IV)

2010-12-24T10:33:00.002-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapter IV described the characters of Aaron Breakspeare and Enoch Gib as they grew up. They were competitive, but with opposite personalities. Their childhood was defined by a series of competitions/confrontations:

They were never friends. They were rivals, unable to conceal or control their rivalry, the essence of which was antagonism. But they were inseperable. They could not let each other alone.
(p. 18)

Garrett's most interesting quote from this chapter described Enoch Gib's method of enduring the confrontations with Aaron:

Instinctively he knew that the way to save oneself in a trial of endurance is to keep one's mind not on one's own discomfort but on the agony of one's adversary.
(p. 18)

By the end of the fourth chapter, the two had reached age 21, and had resolved to go into business together. The iron industry had not yet begun, although each of them owned substantial iron ore land holdings. They envisioned the existing town being replaced by a new industrial city:

In its place will be a city that shall walk out of those mountains, - a city of furnaces, full of roaring and the clangor of metal, flaming and smoking to heaven. Your father and my grandfather imagined it. They could not themselves bring it to pass. It was not for their time. They left it for us to do. We have a destiny here. Let's take it together. Let's form a partnership and found an iron industry.
(p. 26 - quoting Aaron)

Garrett did not identify the year, but it had to be in the early part of the 19th century - almost 100 years before Garrett's description of the modern (1920's) New Damascus and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the iron industry.

I find it refreshing to read a story where characters discuss industry (including the "flaming and smoking") without lamenting over the environment or "global warming." It is refreshing also to read of characters discussing the formation of industry without babbling about how many "jobs" they will "create" like some modern pandering politician or a "journalist" who thinks about economics (if at all) backwards.

At this point, the main characters are in place and the story is ready to unfold. Without having read further, I expect a conflict between the two new partners similar to what Garrett described of their childhood (only on a larger scale).

Click here for part 7

The Cinder Buggy - part 5; Chapters II and III; Aaron Woolwine; Christopher Gib; Aaron Breakspeare; Enoch Gib

2010-12-20T13:36:00.001-05:00

Click here for parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapters II and III establish the blood lines for two of the main characters in the story. Page 11 states that Aaron Woolwine founded the town of New Damascus in 1879, but this is almost certainly a typographical error. Page 14 contains diary quotes from Aaron Woolwine in which he identifies 1774, 1781 and 1788 as the years of his three marriages. A founding date in the late 1700's for New Damascus is also consistent with the rise and fall of the iron industry. We cannot be sure whether Garrett meant 1789 (a transposition) or 1779. The difference probably does not matter to the story.

These chapters establish that Woolwine and Christopher Gib were business partners. The description of Christopher Gib is reminiscent of some of the Randian characters from the 1940's and 1950's, but without the depth and moral justification that Rand would provide.

Chapter II includes an interesting discussion of coal, especially the distinction between anthracite and bituminous ("soft") coal. Bituminous coal is softer and burns more easily. But anthracite is much more plentiful in the New Damascus area. Woolwine spent years trying to sell customers on the idea of buying and using anthracite, with the result that people thought he was trying to trick them with mere black rocks. A method was finally discovered (by accident) for using anthracite, but only after it was too late to benefit Woolwine.

Unappreciated innovation and invention often play a big role in Garrett's (and Rand's) writings.

Aaron Breakspeare is Woolwine's grandson, while Enoch Gib is Christopher Gib's son. Aaron and Enoch were born on the same day in an unidentified year. Chapter III ends with Breakspeare and Enoch Gib as the remaining sole heirs of Woolwine and Christopher Gib. In the first three chapters, Garrett has established the town (and the mystery of how it lost its main industry) and presumably the two main characters whose story will resolve the mystery.

Click here for part 6.

The Cinder Buggy - part 4 - Danville, Pennsylvania; the real New Damascus; Geisinger Health System; Coxey's Army

2010-12-18T20:39:00.004-05:00

Click here for parts 1, 2 and 3 of The Cinder Buggy review.

I pause from reviewing the text of the book to visit the location of the story. There is a real New Damascus, even though it does not go by that name.

Nestled in the mountain ridges of the Appalachian range in east/central Pennsylvania sits the town of Danville, along the Susquehanna River, among streets named "Mill," "Iron" and "Factory." The town contains modern businesses selling motorcycles, books or pizza with "Iron" or "Old Forge" in their names.

Garrett describes New Damascus as "the most important point of trade between Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre. . . " (p. 11). Garrett also referenced a geographic similarity with the original Damascus in Syria - "a plain bounded on one side by a river and on the other three by mountains . . . " (p. 11).

Danville is not exactly between Wilkes-Barre and Philadelphia, but the geographic description is very similar. But that is not what makes Danville the model for New Damascus. The similarity comes from the iron industry:

The Iron Age, 1829 thru 1950 and Danville, PA are truly synonymous. In 1829, the first Iron foundry was established in Danville to manufacture wagon boxes, plowshares, andirons sadiron and griddles. In 1839-1840 Iron Ore started to be mined locally and in 1840 the first Anthracite furnace to efficiently produce iron was opened in Danville. On Oct 8, 1845, the first T-rail in America was rolled out at the Montour Iron Works, the largest iron manufacturing plant in the United States. The T-rail made it possible for Pennsylvania and America to become the leader in the industrial revolution.
H/T ironheritagefestival.net

More specifically, Danville was the site of very specific achievements that Garrett would later attribute to his fictional New Damascus:

On October 8, 1845, the first T-rail rolled with iron ore, smelted with anthracite coal was produced at this mill [Montour Iron Works].

The Montour Iron Works was the largest mid-nineteenth century rail mill in the country.

In the 1850s, there were more rails produced at this iron mill than any other in the United States.

The North Branch of the Pennsylvania Canal was located near the mill and brought thousands of tons of anthracite coal, one of the ingredients necessary to produce anthracite iron, from the northeast fields to their wharves.

The Montour Iron Works, after many changes of managers and ownership, became the property of the Pennsylvania Iron Company in 1861. At that time, Thomas Beaver, one of the stockholders, became the resident overseer of the company, a position he held until 1876. It was at the beginning of their ownership that they built a grist mill to supply flour and feed to their Company Store. The Iron Mill had its most financial successful period during the Civil War, operating at full capacity, manufacturing railroad iron.

Thomas Beaver, later a generous benefactor to the town of Danville, sold his interest in the Penna. Iron Company in 1876, reserving by purchase the Mansion on the Hill.

Garrett specifically referenced the "first American rails" (p. 4) and the "canal" (p. 12) in describing New Damascus' history in Cinder Buggy. I cannot yet identify an equivalent for the real Thomas Beaver, but I am sure one exists. Beaver's "Mansion on the Hill" sounds like Garrett's "Woolwine mansion on the east hill" and the "Gib mansion on the west hill" (p. 2) and "[t]hem mansions on the hill..." that owed their existence to "that mill." (p. 7). I expect to learn more about Woolwine and Gib as Cinder Buggy goes on.

That New Damascus was eventually left with only a wrought iron industry finds a parallel with Danville's real history:

The Danville Foundry and Machine Company was founded [in 1906] on a portion of the National Iron Company Area. They manufactured fire escapes, building fronts, bank grilles and similar wrought iron products.
H/T ironheritagefestival.net/history

Garrett states that New Damascus ("this place") was founded in 1879 (p. 11), by which he must mean 1779 (or 1789) or the rest of the story (especially page 14) makes no sense. The real Danville was founded in 1792.

I found the only library copy of any Garet Garrett novel I have ever seen when I visited the Pennsylvania room of the Milton, PA public library (about 15 miles away from Danville). In that room, an original edition of Cinder Buggy sits virtually unnoticed among other Pennsylvania related books that are prohibited from circulating due to their age and historical importance. I believe another copy exists at nearby Bucknell University, in Lewisburg Pennsylvania.

On the inside front cover of my copy, there exists a handwritten note dated April 3, 1927:

Today we walked about Danville to pick out the places mentioned in the story - the old mill where the first iron rail was rolled - and the same roller is still there. The two mansions which are both now Catholic Convents. The history of the industry and the towns' rise and fall is true. The love story more or less fiction. [unintelligible] the daughter in the Bennett Mansion (Gib in the book) was kept a prisoner and was only seen when riding her bicycle about the grounds. The tobacco shop mentioned in the 1st or 2nd chapter is now just as it was and the same man running it. The "Lycoming House" where the funeral was really held is the Montour House where I spent my first two days

The note is addressed "To Harry F. Astrander" and is signed "A.L.H."

I do not know who those people are/were or any more about them than appears in that note.

The tobacco shop that A.L.H referenced is described on page 3. The mansions/"Catholic Convents" mentioned by A.L.H. are noted by Garrett on page 2 as a "nunnery" and a "monastery."

Danville continues to celebrate its iron history with a festival every year in July.

Danville is known today primarily for Geisinger Medical Center, which opened in 1915 from the proceeds of the iron business of George Geisinger. Geisinger is today one of the premier health systems in all of Pennsylvania.

Another interesting parallel arises because Jacob Coxey once lived and worked in Danville. Coxey is now obscure to all but a few Garrett readers who remember his role in Chapter I of The Driver. Is it possible that in researching Coxey's Army for The Driver, Garrett discovered the history of Danville? Or did Garrett discover Coxey's Army by researching for The Cinder Buggy? Were both stories originally intended to be combined into the same book?

Another explanation is that both Coxey's Army and the history of Danville/iron were well known to our ancestors in the 1920's such that a common link between them would not seem unusual to a writer from that period. Maybe it is only our government educated minds in the 21st century that find such subjects obscure and the connections between them coincidental or surprising.

One of my motivations for writing this blog and promoting Garrett's works is the hope that one day such historical knowledge will be common instead of being rare.

Danville, Pennsylvania

Civil War buffs have always had physical locations in which to enjoy their hobby. Gettysburg and other battlefields are crowded with many, many visitors every year. The same is true for devotees of other historic events. JFK conspiracy theorists spend much of their lives trapsing around Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Even movie fans can visit the sets or locations of some of their favorite films. But until I discovered the Danville/Cinder Buggy connection, I knew of no physical location related to the study of free market economics/history/literature.

Ayn Rand inspires as much of a loyal following as do Civil War literature and documentaries. But her stories take place in generic settings in New York City, Colorado, Leningrad, etc. Her books provide no "Gettysburg" for her fans to visit. Garrett's Driver provided something close with its walking tour of Wall Street, but that location is too common for Garrett/Rand fans to claim ownership. Danville is now the closest thing that free market historians, Randians and other followers of economic literature have to a "battlefield" that we can visit and trace the events that we have studied (depending on the outcome and quality of the story, of course). The study of Garet Garrett and free market literature as a whole just became a lot more interesting.

Click here for part 5.

Cinder Buggy - part 3 - Chapter I - New Damascus

2010-12-10T16:36:00.004-05:00

Click here for parts 1 and 2 of The Cinder Buggy review.

Chapter I of The Cinder Buggy takes place in the present (early 1920's) and sets the background for the story. The book describes the fictional town of New Damascus, Pennsylvania as Garrett envisioned it in the 1920's. New Damascus had enjoyed an industrial boom in the 1800's, as iron mills sprang to life and provided the iron needs of the world. The observer from the 1920's would notice that this industry was mostly gone by that time. Much of this chapter is spent describing abandoned portions of the town and the industry that used to exist.

Garrett points out that the wrought iron industry remains active in the town. This fact is significant, as wrought iron is a purified form of iron. Thus the opening poem grows in relevance. Based on the opening poem and Chapter I, it appears that we are about to read how the iron industry in New Damascus was destroyed somehow due to the process of refinement. I think it is obvious that Garrett means more than just the process of refining iron. This poem will somehow apply to the people of New Damascus in addition to merely the industry.

Garrett notes that the fictional New Damascus once produced the world's first iron rails, but did so no longer because all rails are now made of steel in faraway places. The same is true for iron nails, which were supplanted by steel nails. New Damascus' iron ore mining was also replaced by mines far away that produced ore at a lower price. (pp. 4-5.)

The decline of New Damascus' iron industry is ostensibly blamed on the rise of the steel industry elsewhere in the late 1800's. But there is obviously more to the story that relates to the opening poem and the symbolism flowing therefrom.

There is a brief reference to a committee of New Damascus that investigated steel as the steel industry was beginning. The committee determined that "there was nothing in it" (page 4). As a result, New Damascus' iron industry did not adapt and was rendered obsolete by steel produced elsewhere. This reference makes me wonder if we will see a parallel to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where the government-protected steel industry attempted to ignore and then destroy Rearden Metal. The events of Cinder Buggy may have influenced Rand in her creation of Hank Rearden and the challenges he faced in producing his advanced metal.

On page 1, Garrett summarizes the isolation that has overtaken New Damascus. "A generation has fled since a stranger was seen in the streets of New Damascus on an errand of business."

On page 3, the following appears, "New Damascus appears to be haunted with memories of things confusedly forgotten, as if each night it dreamed the same dream and never had quite remembered it."

But these quotes don't answer the real question, "But there is still the question: What happened to New Damascus?" (page 7).

As we seek the answer to that question, we will also learn (1) how this question relates to the opening poem's process of refinement and (2) whether Ayn Rand relics lurk on subsequent pages.

But before we move on in the story, we will visit the real New Damascus in the next installment - part 4.

Cinder Buggy - part 2 - definitions and foreshadowing

2010-11-24T22:22:00.003-05:00

Click here for part I of The Cinder Buggy review.

Between the title page and Chapter I of The Cinder Buggy, the following poem appears:

A pot-metal body
on two little wheels,
absurdly,
bow-leggedly
walking away to the dump
with the slag, the
purgings of iron, the
villainous drool of the furnace -
that is a cinder buggy.

It is also a sign
that what man refines
beyond God's content
with things as he left them
will very soon perish
for want of the dross
from which it is parted.
Why hath each thing its cinder? -
even the sweetest desire?

This poem not only defines the title of the book, it foreshadows both the deeper meaning of that title as well as potentially ominous plot developments. I have not read most of the book yet so I do not know how well this poem reflects the plot. At this point, I can only hope that the story lives up to the poem.
--------------------
Click here for Part 3.

Cinder Buggy - part I - introductory comments

2010-11-23T09:54:00.001-05:00

Cinder Buggy was the third of Garet Garrett's major works of fiction. Published in 1923, it was labeled "A Fable in Iron and Steel." This focus on one industry provided a similarity with The Driver (railroads) and Satan's Bushel (wheat). I have referred previously to Garrett's books as "industrial novels" for this reason.

I have read only a small portion of the book thus far. I will post updates as I read each portion. The discussion of the plot may become vague, as I seek to avoid plot spoilers.

From what little I have read, it appears that there may be similarities between the Cinder Buggy characters and those of Ayn Rand's novels. The characters do not appear to be identical, only similar with overlapping and rearranged elements. These similarities reinforce my belief that Garrett was one of many influences upon the later works of Ayn Rand. I have written at length about this issue in part 13 of my review of The Driver (and elsewhere). I will write more about these characters and their similarities as this review goes on.

Cinder Buggy preview from Satan's Bushel dust jacket

The inside of the Satan's Bushel dust jacket is pictured above, containing an original advertisement for Cinder Buggy.

While I will avoid revealing too much of the plot, I hope to provide information and background from the book on how this story fits into Garrett's philosophy and the political and economic situations that currently plague the United States and the western world.

The Driver was much more obviously relevant to the current financial crisis, as The Driver explicitly focused on the Panic of 1893. I do not expect Cinder Buggy to present such obvious parallels. Even without such clear battle lines as are drawn in Driver (and in the U.S. of 2010), it is possible to present industrialization as fiction in a way that promotes the idea of economic liberty.

The story will seem less focused than we might expect, as the New Deal was still a decade away at the time Garrett wrote Cinder Buggy. The New Deal drew the battle lines that define the eight decades (and beyond) that have since elapsed. From 1933 onward, economics and politics have been little more than a battle between those who favor greater government control over the economy and those who oppose such control. The battle takes many forms and is fought in many arenas, but the goals of the opposing sides remain the same (even though the opponents of gevernment control have substantially watered down their message as the decades have dragged on). A decade before the New Deal brought this battle to Washington D.C. (and beyond) in a permanent way, writers like Garrett wrote more generally and without the urgency and focus that we would expect of one who was trying to stop a government takeover.

My approach with each Garrett novel I read is to enjoy the story without looking for a political or economic message. Usually the nuggets (such as this one and this one and this one) start to appear shortly after the story begins.

Click here for part 2.

Coming soon . . . . . .Cinder Buggy

2010-11-19T21:04:00.002-05:00

Cinder Buggy

------------------------------------
update
The Cinder Buggy liveblog/review begins here.

Pat Buchanan quotes People's Pottage

2009-07-17T16:59:00.002-04:00

Pat Buchanan quoted Garet Garrett yesterday in his column, and was linked at the top of the Drudge Report:

After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published "The People's Pottage." A year later, in 1954, he died. "The People's Pottage" opens thus:

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."

Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.

The Driver - Part XIII; Ayn Rand; Calumet K; Secret of the League

2009-06-21T17:28:00.001-04:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of my review of The Driver.

The Driver is many things. A casual observer will blast through its pages and conclude that it is simply a story about railroads - or a fictionalized account of the Panic of 1893 - or an Ayn Rand relic. In fact, The Driver is all of these things and more.

(1) I know of very few sources of information about the Panic of 1893 (aside from the standard high school history book obligatory anti-capitalist boilerplate). I know of no fictionalized account of this Panic (aside from modern speculation about the origins of The Wizard of OZ). By remembering and fictionalizing this event despite the passage of 30 years, Garrett gave to us and future generations something to relate to as we endure the events of 2009 (and beyond). Millions of Americans have no experience or other information to place today's events in context. Government schools have completely misinformed their students about all things economic and political. Americans find themselves adrift amidst current circumstances with no context and no framework to understand what is happening.

Most fictionalized accounts of the Depression of the 1930's focus only on poverty and misery as some sort of indictment of capitalism. The Driver differs from these standard stories by focusing on capitalism itself as a solution. The Driver differs simply by presenting a solution at all.

(2) In recent years, the Ayn Rand connection to The Driver has overshadowed the real importance of this book and other Garrett writings. Commenters miss the real importance of Garrett's books and articles while seeking some basis to attack Ayn Rand. The Wikipedia (!?) entry about Garet Garrett refers to The Driver as Garrett's "most influential work." This assertion is false, as that distinction belongs to The People's Pottage. Regardless of the relative merits of these books, People's Pottage is Garrett's most often quoted work. I have noted many references to People's Pottage over many decades among other writers. The Driver was unheard of in modern times until Bruce Ramsey published Salvos Against the New Deal in 2002. The anonymous writers at Wikipedia attribute undue influence to The Driver probably as part of a backdoor attack on Ayn Rand. The Randian angle is the context in which The Driver is usually quoted.

But these attacks are unfair. Even though one character has a similar name as in Rand's most popular novel and Garrett's plot involves similar business themes, the stories are not similar enough to cry "plagiarism," and there is no language that matches in both books (except for one famous line with completely different meanings and contexts). The similarities are more complex than I am explaining here, but not in a way that constitutes plagiarism.

Ayn Rand appears to have built upon Garrett's work and improved upon it with her own elements. Numerous fictional works contributed to Ayn Rand's writings, including Calumet K (Merwin-Webster, 1901) and probably Secret of the League (Ernest Bramah, 1907). Ayn Rand even wrote an introduction in 1967 to a republication of Calumet K. The tragedy of this situation is that Secret of the League and The Driver were never republished during Ayn Rand's lifetime. Had they been republished as was Calumet K, Rand might very well have endorsed those books as well and deprived the Rand-haters of ammunition.

Rand's words in 1967 regarding Calumet K could apply equally to The Driver:

But it has one element that I have never found in any other novel: the portrait of an efficacious man.
Calumet K, p i. (1993 edition) (emphasis in original)

Whether Rand did not consider The Driver's hero to be "efficacious" or whether Rand simply forgot having read The Driver some 45 years earlier is a matter for another article. The fact remains that Rand saw in Charlie Bannon (from Calumet K) the same features that exist in The Driver's hero and in the heroes of Rand's novels.

Those who attack Rand ignore Calumet K and Secret of the League because it becomes absurd to accuse a writer of plagiarizing the same story from three different books by three different authors. The proposition almost denies itself. Yet that is what Rand's detractors must do if they are to account for the contributions of all three books while maintaining their attacks on Rand.

Rand's plots also trace themselves to Rand's early works, including Red Pawn. One who reads Red Pawn, We the Living and The Fountainhead in succession (all Randian works) will learn the origin of the plots that Rand used in her later fiction. Such a reader would lose much of his appetite for finding mischief in the pages of The Driver.

While I disagree with those who use The Driver as a weapon against Rand, The Driver does have its place as an influence upon Rand's writings. Far from serving as some sort of smoking gun, The Driver is part of a larger picture. The Driver, Secret of the League and Calumet K deserve equal billing as early influences upon Ayn Rand, even though these books take a back seat to the plot development in Rand's own early works.

The attacks upon Rand do a disservice not only to Rand, but to The Driver and other works. The Driver deserves to be known as more than a weapon to use against Ayn Rand. Those who think of The Driver in this way marginalize the book and miss the novel's role as one of our few connections to the Panic of 1893. The Driver's Panic of 1893 backdrop is more topical in 2009 than at any point in recent memory.

The Panic of 1893 demands recognition, especially since the American government now uses today's crisis to advance its own political agenda. That Panic ranks behind only The Great Depression in historical importance when evaluating today's crisis. The Driver is our window into that Panic and the solutions that would serve us today in 2009 and beyond.

The proper role of The Driver today would not merely be historical, but inspirational. Rand was correct (in her Calumet K introduction) to point out the barren wasteland that constitutes modern fiction. Today's economic and political crises cry out for a fictionalized version that captures the essence of the moment. While there is no doubt that modern writers will write such stories using the old anti-capitalist boilerplate, such propaganda misses the point. We need new Garretts to fictionalize today's events so that the true context of the headlines will not be lost upon modern observers. Renewed interest in The Driver and Garrett's other works may help spark just such an effort.

The Driver - part XII - The Driver shows the way out.

2009-03-03T11:19:00.004-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of my review of The Driver.

In Chapter 15, the main character testified before a Congressional committee in the aftermath of the battle described in Chapter 14. He provided a lesson in free market economics and the true resolution to any panic/recession/depression. I provide some plot spoilers here because the following exchange provides lessons for today:

Q [from the committee counsel]: But you will admit that you are very rich? . . .

[The left has been against wealth for so long, they are finally getting their wish as the "very rich" are disappearing in our own time. Being rich is something one "admits" to, much like alcoholism or crime. - editor]

A: Yes . . . I suppose I am.
Q: Well, as briefly as possible, will you tell this Committee how you made it?
A: . . . . I'll tell you. I made it buying things nobody else wanted. I bought Great Midwestern when it was bankrupt and people thought no railroad was worth its weight as junk. When I took charge of the property I bought equipment when it was cheap because nobody else wanted it and the equipment makers were hungry, and rails and ties and materials and labor to improve the road with, until everybody thought I was crazy. When the business came we had a railroad to handle it. I've done that same thing with every property I have taken up. . . . . In the next twelve months the Great Midwestern properties will spend five hundred million dollars for double tracking, grade reductions, new equipment and larger terminals. . .
Q: . . . [D]o you realize what it means for one man to say he will spend five hundred millions in a year? That is half the national debt.
A: I know exactly what it means . . . It means for once a Wall Street panic won't be followed by unemployment and industrial depression. . .
pp. 269-270 (original edition)

In the decades since publication of The Driver, the government has rigged the game so that the above scenario could never rescue the economy:

The government will not allow prices to fall to the point where a risk-taking entrepreneur could purchase assets and make the best use of those assets. The current administration is, at this moment, trying to reinflate the bubble.

Regulatory burdens prevent companies and investors from making necessary investments like those set forth in our main character's testimony.

Tax burdens serve as a major disincentive against new investment. This is especially true for the taxes that will be needed to finance the spending bills of just the past few weeks.

The government has removed the "driver" from the economy. We are left with unfocused public "investments," limitless public borrowing and gradual devaluation of the currency. Entrepreneurs have been marginalized and blamed for the actions of the government. They have been taxed and regulated into virtual non-existence. It is no coincidence that with the "driver" in chains, a reference to 500 million dollars as "half the national debt" would now seem quaint. Public borrowing is no substitute for a driver.
Click here for part 13 (the conclusion).

The Driver - Part XI - the climax

2009-03-01T00:54:00.002-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of my review of The Driver.

Chapter XIV of The Driver is the real climax of the novel. In this chapter, the main character's success, achievement and ability provoke the final conflict between the main character and various forces aligned against him.

This chapter will remind one of a much more simplistic version of Gail Wynand's battle to save his newspaper near the end of The Fountainhead, or the battles of various heroes in Atlas Shrugged. Lest Ayn Rand's detractors see another opportunity to cry "plagiarism," Rand's plots were much more intricate, complex and operated on a deeper moral and philosophical level.

Chapter XIV also operates as a more concrete version of Chapter 5 of Garrett's Blue Wound (1921) ("The Wages of Thrift"). That the theme of the successful man attacked because of his success appeared at all in Garrett's pre-New Deal writings reinforces Garrett's image as a prophet. That Rand explored, deepened and perfected this theme in numerous novels, articles and essays has provided moral support and fortitude to today's victims.
---------------------------------------------------------
See Part 12 - The way out..

The Driver - Part X - Panic of 1893; Grover Cleveland; Gold; the recovery.

2009-02-23T00:08:00.002-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of my review of The Driver.

Pages 136 - 225 [original edition] of The Driver focused less on the Panic of 1893 and focused more the individuals and their fight to overcome the Panic and its consequences.

This portion of the book begins with a brief explanation of steps taken by President Cleveland to stop the run on gold. pp. 136-137. These steps occurred prior to the election of 1896 and the administration of President McKinley, events that I have credited with restoring the gold standard and putting the crisis to its final rest.

Much of the plot that follows in the next 90 pages describes the actions one man takes to reinvigorate one business following the Panic. If we are to benefit from any lesson of The Driver [and these 90 pages in particular], it is the lesson that panics are not resolved by government spending. They are resolved by the entrepreneurship of individuals. Individuals lead us out of hard economic times. Individuals rescue depressed businesses, take risks and buy into down markets. The individual is the true "driver" of the free economy. The individual is the driver of freedom itself. As a result, the individual is often also made the victim of those he has benefitted/liberated - as we shall see in upcoming parts of The Driver.

See part 11 of my review here.

The Driver - Part IX - a run on the U.S. Treasury - Panic of 1893

2009-02-13T11:39:00.003-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of my review of The Driver.

Late in Chapter VI, Garrett describes a run on gold at the U.S. Treasury. In Part 7 of my review, I described the causes of the Panic of 1893:

A main factor in precipitating that crisis was the federal government's decree that Gold and Silver trade at parity with each other. The two metals were treated by Congress as equal in value, the laws of economics notwithstanding. "Naive trust in the power of words to command reality is found in all mass delusions." [p. 89].

The forced parity between the metals caused a run on gold, leading to a general credit collapse.

Garrett creates a fictionalized account of this run:

For several weeks uninterruptedly there had been a run on the government's gold fund. People were frantic to exchange white money [silver] for gold. They waited in a writhing line that kept its insatiable head inside the doors of the sub-Treasury. Its body flowed down the long steps, lay along the north side of Wall Street and terminated in a wriggling tail around the corner in William Street, five minutes' walk away. It moved steadily forward by successive movements of contraction and elongation. Each day at 3 o'clock the sub-Treasury, slamming its doors, cut off the monster's head. Each morning at 10 o'clock there was a new and hungrier head waiting to push its way in the instant the doors opened. Its food was gold and nothing else, for it lived there night and day. . . . . . It grew. Steadily it ate its way deeper into the nation's gold reserve, and there was no controlling it, for Congress had said that white money and gold were of equal value and could not believe it was not so. The paying tellers worked very slowly to gain time. . . . . the officers of the sub-Treasury had just telegraphed to Washington saying they could hold out only a few hours more. That meant the gold was nearly gone. It meant that the United States Treasury might at any moment put up its shutters . . . . Never had the line been so excited, so terribly ophidian in its aspect. Its writhings were sickening. The police handled it as the zoo keepers handle a great serpent. That is, they kept it straight. If once it should begin to coil the panic would be uncontrollable. Particles detached themselves from the tail and ran up and down the body trying to buy places nearer the head. Those nearest the head hotly disputed the right of substitution. . . . In the tense babel of voices there came sudden fissures of stillness, so that one heard one's own breathing or the far-off sounds of river traffic. At those moments what was passing before the eyes had the phantastic reality of a dream.
[pp. 127-129]

This story provides background for the main plot. It may become a reality in our own lives as the government further devalues our currency in its attempts to wish away the fundamental problems in our economy.

The Driver is not a history lesson on gold or an economics essay. For a nonfiction treatment of the government's attack on gold during the New Deal (and some history of gold in the U.S.), see Garrett's "Pieces of Money" from the Saturday Evening Post, April 20, 1935 [reprinted as Chapter 7 of Salvos Against the New Deal].
-------------
See Part X.

The Driver - Part VIII - Insider Trading

2009-02-12T09:14:00.001-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of my review of The Driver.

Chapter V featured another Ayn Rand relic - a character similar in some ways (although not in name) to one of the main characters from one of Rand's big novels. Once again I will not say too much for fear of giving away the plot. And once again Rand's character enjoyed fundamental improvements in complexity and depth. Rand's character was more thoroughly integrated into the plot than Garrett's character.

In Chapter VI, the reader is treated to the drama from inside the corporate board room, as the reality of the Panic (of 1893) becomes undeniable. In the midst of the action, as the corporate directors meet to decide the fate of the railroad, Garrett includes a passage that would be almost unthinkable to modern investors:

There is no law forbidding a director to part with his shares when the omens foretell disaster. It is commonly done in fact in the anonymous mist of the stock market, only you never mention it. The convention is that all stockholders have equal rights of parnership. But as directors are the few who have been elected by many to act as managing partners, and since it is necessary for managing partners to have first access to all information, it follows from the nature of circumstances that they are inside stockholders and that the others are outside stockholders; and it follows no less from the nature of mankind that the outsiders invariably suspect the insiders of selling out in time to save themselves.
[p. 117]

Garrett could not know that he was describing something - "insider trading" - that would later become the scapegoat used by every political analyst as the New Deal and its stepchildren programs would careen from one economic disaster to another throughout the 20th century (and into the 21st). While Garrett discussed insider trading as an element of the Panic, he recognized that such trading was a result - not a cause - of the general chaos.
-----------------------
Part IX - a run on the U.S. Treasury.

The Driver - Part VII - Panic of 1893

2009-02-11T11:59:00.003-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and part 6 of my review of The Driver.

Garrett's focus on the Panic of 1893 can be better understood in light of a brief explanation of that crisis. A main factor in precipitating that crisis was the federal government's decree that Gold and Silver trade at parity with each other. The two metals were treated by Congress as equal in value, the laws of economics notwithstanding. "Naive trust in the power of words to command reality is found in all mass delusions." [p. 89].

The forced parity between the metals caused a run on gold, leading to a general credit collapse. The story is more complicated, but the government's populist attack against gold (and previously against silver in 1873) was the root cause of the panic. The situation was not rectified until the government returned to the gold standard after the election of 1896.

Much of this information does not appear in The Driver except by passing reference.

There were other similarities with today's bubble. Just as today's elected officials have received favorable treatment from mortgage companies at the heart of the financial meltdown, "United States Senators were discovered speculating in the stock of corporations that were interested in tariff legislation, particularly the Sugar Trust." [p. 93]

Another similarity relates to Wall Street:

The name of Wall Street became accursed, not that morality was lower in Wall Street than anywere else, but because the consequences of its sins were conspicuous.
[p. 93]

It is always easy to blame "Wall Street" for the consequences of the government's currency devaluation.

A principle difference between the two crises can be seen in the solutions. While President McKinley returned the country to sound money, our government seems determined to devalue our currency to the point where U.S. Treasury bonds will be unmarketable. (This devaluation is in addition to increased political controls that will further cripple the economy, censor political opponents and ensure one party rule.) A century of currency devaluation has enshrined the power of mass delusion.

A by-product of the Panic of 1893 has been the lasting effect on American culture. The Driver's plot was based on the Panic. The Driver was one of many influences on the writings of Ayn Rand - writings that remain powerful and influential to this day.

Others have speculated about the influence of the Panic and the gold-silver controversy on the original book version of the Wizard of Oz in 1900. I have also read that the Panic, due to the rapid abandonment of newly built homes by suddenly insolvent individuals, created the legend of the abandoned, victorian haunted house that appears in so many movies, television programs and amusement parks. I will leave that speculation for others.

I will comment only that for the present crisis to have a lasting effect on our culture such that writers, readers and viewers in 100 years will see elements in fiction that grew out of this crisis, policies will have to change. We cannot bankrupt the United States and expect literature and culture to thrive in the future. Vibrant culture grows out of vibrant civilizations, not decaying, balkanized people mired in chaos over a destroyed currency. If the U.S. is reduced to a third world country, no one will remember the allegedly "historical" political events that have been celebrated in recent months, and no mythology equivalent to the Wizard of Oz/haunted house legends will emerge to commemorate our economic woes.
--------------------------------------
Click here for Part VIII.

The Driver - Part VI - Economic nightmares and mass delusion.

2009-02-10T00:10:00.001-05:00

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of my review of The Driver.

Chapter IV is entitled "An Economic Nightmare" and opens as follows:

You may define a mass delusion; you cannot explain it really. It is a malady of the imagination, incurable by reason, that apparently must run its course.
p. 86

Garrett was referring to the causes of the Panic, not some policy designed to "stimulate" the economy following the Panic. [Garrett writes often of 1894 even though the Panic is known as the Panic of 1893. Many of the consequences continued to be felt in 1894.]

Continuing on his theme of "mass delusion," Garrett writes of how people throughout history "have been mad together about a number of things, -- God, tulips, witches, definitions, alchemy and vanities of precept." [p. 87].

Leaving aside the issues related to the conflict between proponents of gold and silver, Garrett's words apply today as well as to panics of the past:

Either side was willing to see the government's credit ruined, as it very nearly was, for the vindication of a fetich. They did not know it. They had not the remotest notion why or how they were mad because they were unable to realize that they were mad at all. . . . . . Intelligence was in suspense. The faculty of judgment slept as in a dream; the imagination ran loose, inventing fears and phantasies. That the government stood on the verge of bankruptcy or that the United States Treasury was about to shut up under a run of panic-stricken gold hoarders was regarded not as a national emergency in which all were concerned alike, but as proof that one theory was right and another wrong, so that one side viewed the imminent danger gloatingly and was disappointed at its temporary postponement, while the other resorted to sophistries and denied self-evident things.
[pp. 87-88]

The discussion of gold and silver is instructive today for a people that have grown accustomed to paper dollars and the unspoken assumption that government paper has always been the only medium of exchange. But the discussion of mass delusion is even more instructive for those of us that wonder how the recent bubbles could have wrought so much havoc:

Delusions are states of refuge. The mind, unable to comprehend realities or to deal with them, finds its ease in superstitions, beliefs and modes of irrational procedure. It is easier to believe than to think.
[pp. 90-91]

Recent superstitions include the belief in 200 to 1 p/e ratios for stocks [1990's] and the notion that real estate prices would always rise [2000's]. Superstitions of 2008 and 2009 include the belief in "hope," "change" and "stimulus."

For five or six years preceeding there had been an ecstasy of great profits. The prodigious manner in which wealth multiplied had swindled men's dreams. No one lay down at night but he was richer than when he got up, nor without the certainty of being richer still on the morrow. The golden age had come to pass. Wishing was having. The government had become so rich from duties collected on imported luxuries that the Treasury surplus became a national problem. It could not be properly spent; therefore it was wasted. And still it grew. This time for sure the tree of Mammon would touch the Heavens and human happiness must endure forever.
Then suddenly it had fallen. . . . . The trunk was hollow. Everything turned hollow. People were astonished, horrified and wild with dismay. They would not blame themselves.
p. 91

If we are to survive our current crisis, we must remember how we survived past crises.
-----------------------------------
Click here for Part VII - brief background on the Panic of 1893, its impact and how it was resolved.

The Driver - Part V - Ayn Rand relics and stock prices.

2009-02-08T23:10:00.001-05:00

Click here for Part IV of my review of The Driver.

Chapter III of The Driver is heavily influenced by Ayn Rand relics. I will not identify them for fear of spoiling the fun of seeing them for yourself. The items that appear in Driver that foreshadow the Rand novels do not reflect poorly on Rand. Rand's plots were all her own, with only an element or two from prior novelists. Rand's novels were unique. She built on elements from prior authors, but she created something new and distinct. Ayn Rand's basic plot originated in Red Pawn during the 1920's, was repeated closely in Anthem and appeared in much more complex form (with many new elements and alterations) in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand's basic plot does not mirror the plot of The Driver (although the main character's battle in Driver featured some elements that would later appear in Fountainhead).

Much of The Driver involves the familiar drama resulting from the rise and fall of stock prices. At one point in Chapter III, a minor character remains notable for her silence until she asks a question that our own veterans of the 1990's stock market bubble (and its aftermath) will find very familiar - "What is the price of Great Midwestern today?" [p. 73]. This was no piece of casual dialogue. The near obsession of the characters with fluctuations in a stock price, especially in the aftermath of a general crash, has implications for our own times.

Other people have lived through stock market crashes in the past. They have sometimes found solutions instead of messiahs. Those solutions have become the subject of fiction and literature. While there is no magic solution in Driver, there is perspective.

The Driver - part IV - bankruptcy, railroads and Ayn Rand relics

2009-01-18T13:07:00.001-05:00

Click here for part III of my review of The Driver. [Click here for parts I and II.]

Chapter II is significant for some quotations that remind us of the current economic situation and possibly foreshadow the result of current policies. [Remember that this 1922 novel was a fictionalized account of the aftermath of the Panic of 1893.][Remember also that I will not reveal the plot, but will try only to pick out items of interest to the modern reader.]

On page 34(original edition), as the main character walks through Wall Street, he hears two men arguing. "One seemed to be denouncing the government for letting the country go bankrupt. 'It is busted,' he shrieked. 'The United States Treasury is busted.'"

Another notable passage begins on page 40:

In the Middle Ages Europe might have advanced, with consequences in this day not easily to be imagined, but for the time and the energy of mind and body which were utterly wasted in quest of holy grails and dialectical forms of truth. So now in this magnificent New World, the resources of which were unlimited, human progress had been arrested by silly Utopians who distracted the mind with thoughts of unattainable things.

Take the railroads. With already the cheapest railroad transportation in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air. Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster that must be chained up with restrictive laws. Sometimes they practised both these arts at once. Result: the nation's transportation arteries were strangling.

In the above quote, substitute the health care industry in place of railroads and you will have a close approximation of the campaign of demonization that has served as a prelude to socialized medicine over the past several decades - and which may see its climax very soon. Most Americans do not remember similar campaigns of demonization against all of the major industries that now seek bailouts and without which we are told the economy cannot survive (and whose decades-long demise is now blamed on George W. Bush). If you cannot remember the official attacks on American industry, read any high school history book's discussion of "robber barons" or any "official" history of the American "labor" movement.

CCL&K Railroad track - 1890's - photo (c) William Duvall

The first of the major Ayn Rand relics appear in the latter half of Chapter 2. Follow the advice from the introductory comments to my review:

I will not reveal plot spoilers from the The Driver or what I call the various Rand relics that appear from time to time in the novel. Instead of trying to prove a point one way or another, simply enjoy each Rand relic as it appears. Consider yourself to be conducting an archeological dig, in which you unearth relics in the form of characters or events that presage some element of a Randian novel.

Garet Garrett on the first 100 days

2009-01-17T16:53:00.005-05:00

The left has attempted to compare Obama's upcoming time in office with Roosevelt's New Deal. In particular, it seems that the new administration is poised to take measures that will impose sweeping changes on the U.S., far beyond those changes that would address the economic situation or any other current issue. In order to understand what the next 100 days might do to this country and how irrevocable such changes might be, we must examine the effects of Roosevelt's first 100 days and how they affect us today.

Here is Garrett's summary of the first 100 days of the New Deal, written only a few weeks after those 100 days had passed (as it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on August 12, 1933). I have excerpted a few passages:

By this definition, the country is in a state of revolution. It was unpredictable. When Congress assembled on March ninth, under an emergency call, no one knew what it was going to do, nor did it know itself what it was going to do, either at the beginning or day by day thereafter. It went from one step to another, with that kind of uncertain uncertainty peculiar to sleepwalking. It received the demands of the revolution serially in the form of pre-prepared laws, and enacted them with practically no debate and no drama. In the early morning of June sixteenth it adjourned. The entire life on the session had been one hundred days. That was all the time it took to erect a complete temporary dictatorship in the person of the President, standing for the popular will.

. . . . .

The powers transferred to the President were such, among others, as these:

1. To control and administer all business and industry in the public interest;
2. To govern production, prices, profits, competition, wages and the hours of labor;
3. To determine the economic policy of the country; that is to say, whether it shall be national or international;
4. To debase money in behalf of the debtor class;
5. To produce inflation in the interest of certain classes;
6. To reapportion private wealth and income throughout the nation, in his own judgement;
7. The power specifically to reduce the gold value of the dollar one-half - or, that is to say, the power, simply by proclamation, to double the price of everything that is priced in dollars, and to halve the value of every obligation payable in dollars, such as debts, bonds and mortgages, insurance policies, bank deposits.

Read it all.

These powers were never repealed, yet 76 years later we find ourselves in what the MSM/DNC calls a similar crisis. The difference now is that our manufacturing base is largely gone - having disappeared over the past four + decades. The track record of the New Deal (and all that followed) can be found in the headlines of the past four months. But the track record of the next 100 days will be worse.

The Driver - part III; Garrett describes Wall Street in the mid-1890's; Trinity Church; Rector Street;

2009-01-11T14:29:00.012-05:00

Click here for part II of my review of The Driver.

Chapter II of The Driver ("The Funk Idol") contains a few notable passages as the plot gets seriously underway. On pages 32 and 33 (original edition) Garrett's main character arrives on Wall Street and describes his new surroundings as of the mid-1890's:

Wall street proper, - street with a small s, - is a thoroughfare. Wall Street in another way of speaking, - street with a big S, is a district, the money district, eight blocks deep by three blocks wide by anything from five to thirty stories high. It is bounded on the north by jewelry, on the northeast by leather, on the east by sugar and coffee, on the south by cotton, on the southwest by shipping and on the west by Greek lace, ship chandlery and Trinity churchyard. It grew that way. The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at Rector Street, and Rector Street is a hand-wide thoroughfare running uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity graveyard. When you are half way up you begin to see over the top of the wall, rising to it gradually, and the first two things uou see are the tombstones of Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton. A few steps more and you are in Broadway. Rector street ends there.
Trinity church is on the west side of Broadway, thirty paces to your left. Standing with your back to Trinity church door you look straight down Wall street, with a little s. All of this is Wall Street with a big S. You are in the midst of it.

I won't try to recount the changes since the events described in The Driver (or any changes that might have taken place between the 1890's and 1922). I will leave that task to those who inhabit Wall Street today.

Trinity Church (near Equitable building under construction) @ 1914 - Library of Congress photo

Much of the plot takes place on Wall Street in the wake of the Panic of 1893. The main characters of The Driver found their own solutions, which solutions formed the basis of the plot. Many readers might enjoy the contrast between the "solutions" to which we are about to be subjected in 2009 and the actions of the characters of The Driver. As I mentioned previously, I won't reveal the plot.

recent photo of Hamilton grave [photo by Malcom Rutherford]

For those who might be tempted to wonder whether Garrett mistakenly incorporated any of 1922 Wall Street into his description of Wall Street of the mid 1890's, note that he omitted such landmarks as the Empire Building (not to be confused with the Empire State Building), which did not appear at the corner of Rector and Broadway until 1897.
-----------------------------------

Click here for part IV.

The Driver - part II

2008-12-31T21:30:00.003-05:00

Click here for part I.

Chapter I ("Phantasma") of The Driver demonstrates a point that would later introduce Garrett's most famous work, The People's Pottage. I have written previously about the effect of the New Deal on Garrett's writings. The New Deal was the focal point of the American socialist movement. Prior to 1933, leftism in America was not backed by the power of government. The New Deal changed that. The New Deal turned leftism into a powerful and pervasive force that effects every area of our lives. More than any other factor, the New Deal turned leftism into "The Drumbeat." Garrett wrote about this transformation in the introduction to People's Pottage:

A time came when the only people who had ever been free began to ask: What is freedom?

Who wrote its articles – the strong or the weak?

Was it an absolute good?

...Since it was clear to reason that freedom must be conditioned, as by self-discipline, individual responsibility and many necessary laws of restraint; and since there was never in the world an absolute good, why should people not be free to say they would have less freedom in order to have some other good?

What other good?

Security.

What else?

Stability.

And beyond that?

Beyond that the sympathies of we, and all men as brothers, instead of the willful I, as if each man were a sovereign, self-regarding individual.

Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free. You shall not be forbidden to interrogate the faith of your fathers. Better that, indeed, than to take it entirely for granted.

So long as doubts such as these were wildish pebbles in the petulant waves that gnaw ceaselessly at any foundation, perhaps only because it is a foundation, no great damage was done. But when they began to be massed as a creed, then they became sharp cutting tools, wickedly set in the jaws of the flood. That was the work of a disaffected intellectual cult, mysteriously rising in the academic world; and from the same source came the violent winds of Marxian propaganda that raised the waves higher and made them angry.

Even so, the damage to the foundations might have been much slower and not beyond simple repair if it had not happened that in 1932 a bund of intellectual revolutionaries, hiding behind the conservative planks of the Democratic party, seized control of government.

After that it was the voice of government saying to the people there had been too much freedom.
pp. 5-6 (1953 edition)

Why does this matter in a discussion of the The Driver? The Driver was written in 1922, 11 years before the New Deal began. Socialism in America constituted nothing more than the ". . . wildish pebbles in the petulant waves that gnaw ceaselessly at any foundation. . . " to which Garrett referred in People's Pottage. They were just beginning ". . . to be massed as a creed." Garrett would have no way of knowing that the revolutionaries would soon seize control of government.

The Driver reflected this 1922 perspective (even though the story took place beginning in 1894 - "Fourth year of the soft Money Plague" - p. 1). Chapter I is sprinkled with random pebbles of leftist references in the quotations attributed to bit characters:

But a great majority of them were earnest, wistful men, fairly aching with
convictions, without being able to say what it was they had a conviction of, or
what was wrong with the world.
[p. 17]

"They blamed the money power . . . . " etc. [p. 17].

These references provided only a small influence on the plot, but the very nature of this minor role for these references reflects the times in which Garrett wrote.

---------------------------------------------
Part III of the review of The Driver.

Garet Garrett sighting; Patrick Buchanan

2008-11-01T07:26:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, Pat Buchanan quoted Garrett's 1938 essay, "The Revolution Was:"

Norman Thomas is said to have quit running for president on the Socialist ticket after six campaigns because the Democratic Party had stolen all his ideas and written them into its platforms.

Did Ike repeal the New Deal? Did Richard Nixon roll back the Great Society? Nope. He funded the Great Society. Did Ronald Reagan cut federal spending? Nope, defense spending soared. Bill Clinton slashed defense, but George Bush II set social spending records with No Child Left Behind and prescription drug benefits for the elderly under Medicare. Surpluses vanished, deficits returned, the national debt almost doubled.

Is the old republic then dead and gone, in the irretrievable past? Are we engaged in an argument settled before we were born?

In his 1938 essay "The Revolution Was," Garet Garrett wrote:

"There are those who think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of the Depression, singing songs to freedom."

That is one of Garrett's most famous and commonly cited quotes. It is a pleasant surprise to see it resurrected 70 years later as this year's election winds down.

The Driver - part I - Introductory comments.

2008-08-24T17:29:00.003-04:00

click here for E.H. Harriman's review in Time Magazine - 1923.

The Driver (1922) is interesting for many reasons:

The book is known as an Ayn Rand "relic", as there were some similarities between Rand's books and the elements and themes of The Driver.
The Driver focuses on economic cycles of "boom and bust." Many of the plot elements will sound familiar to those of us that lived through the stock market bubble of the 1990's.
The Driver is Garrett's most orthodox novel. Most of Garrett's other novels were more allegorical in nature. The Driver contained a more traditional plot.

(1) While The Driver has been the subject of much speculation over the years as it relates to Ayn Rand, such speculation is only partially valid. Having read The Driver, I found numerous elements that the book has in common with Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, including one nearly identical character name and some generally similar characters and plot lines. But the main plot of The Driver is unique and no language is identical among Garrett's work and Rand's. Rand's novels contained unique plots whose basic structure can be traced back to Rand's early writings such as Red Pawn.

While Ayn Rand may have been influenced by Garrett, the plots of her novels were far more developed and intricate than those of Garrett. Rand's novels conveyed more themes and delved more deeply into philosophy.

I will not reveal plot spoilers from the The Driver or what I call the various Rand relics that appear from time to time in the novel. Instead of trying to prove a point one way or another, simply enjoy each Rand relic as it appears. Consider yourself to be conducting an archeological dig, in which you unearth relics in the form of characters or events that presage some element of a Randian novel.

(2) The Driver centers on the immediate aftermath of the panic of 1893. Garrett does not propose solutions or advocate a position. Instead, he dramatized the steps taken by private individuals to deal with the crisis as it was. Garrett focuses on the ups and downs of one railroad in the aftermath of this panic. Keep in mind that Driver was written years before the Depression and more than a decade before the beginning of the New Deal. The idea of a government solution to this type of situation was not yet ingrained into our minds as it is today. In The Driver, calls for extreme government action form the background, while individual action by the hero forms the main plot. I wrote about the change in Garrett's focus following the New Deal in my review of Blue Wound (and some of the comments).

The Driver deals in fiction with some of the themes of the nonfiction Bubble that Broke the World. The Driver is much milder because Bubble was written at the height of the Depression around 1930. Driver was written almost 30 years after the panic of 1893, 15 years after the panic of 1907 and just as the bubble that eventually brought us the Depression was beginning. We can only wonder how the plot would be different (and sharper) had Garrett fully understood the momentous events that were only beginning to take shape as he wrote Driver.

(3) As I have written before, Garrett's novels often took the form of industrial novels:

I note here also that Garrett often writes extensively about industry. The railroad industry formed the backdrop for The Driver. Cinder Buggy was labeled "a fable of iron and steel." Satan's Bushel focused on agriculture - specifically wheat.

The Driver featured an active plot full of action, dialogue and characters - much more so than Satan's Bushel or Blue Wound. But Satan's Bushel and Blue Wound were more thought provoking than The Driver. Many modern readers blast through The Driver and cry "plagiarism" against Ayn Rand without understanding Garrett's deeper meanings. That mistake can't be made with Garrett's other novels.

The Driver - 1922 edition

As I mentioned before, I will review the book without revealing plot spoilers or the Ayn Rand relics. Half of the fun of reading The Driver is discovering the relics on one's own. I will focus, instead, on the deeper implications for the business cycle, for history and for our own times.

Click here for part II.

Time's 1923 review of Driver; E. H. Harriman

2008-01-09T17:47:00.002-05:00

From Time magazine's review - March 17, 1923

"The hero of this novel is a super-railroad magnate called Henry M. Galt. He is inferred to be a portrait or, more exactly, caricature — of E. H. Harriman. He is described as "a small man, weighing less than one hundred pounds, with a fretful, nagging body," who walks with "a bantam, egregious stride." The plot of the novel is the story of Galt's triumphs. Incident by incident they may be substantially paralleled in Mr. Harriman's career. First, a spectacular rise; second, reverses, foes, almost defeat; finally, triumph and death. Mr. Garrett has written many articles about Wall Street. What private sources of information he may have had access to is not known. But the book in general follows the broad lines of the great railroader's generally known career."

Harriman

Driver - 2007 Edition

previous - Driver - 1922 edition.
---------------------------
update - introductory comments - Driver review.

Coming in 2008 - The Driver

2008-01-05T17:31:00.000-05:00

1922

.

How I Found Blue Wound.

2007-11-22T16:50:00.000-05:00

Check here for parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and IX of the Blue Wound live blog.

I found my copy of Blue Wound in March 2004 on E-bay. It was included in one auction with seven other books from the same era. The books were inexpensive, costing between 10 and 20 dollars for the whole lot. The seller did not know what he had. [Apparently neither did anyone else, as there were no other bidders.]

The best treasures are often buried in the most inconspicuous places.

A pdf of the entire book is now available online at Mises.org.

The Blue Wound - part IX - retrospective; Isolationism and today's world; New Deal, Jeffrey Tucker

2007-09-05T22:48:00.001-04:00

Check here for parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII of the Blue Wound live blog.

As I wrote earlier, I am glad that I read Blue Wound slowly. I have met many people that have read the large novels of Ayn Rand. Most of them tell me that they read the whole book (Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged) within a couple of days. I began to realize that those who blast through these books that quickly are missing a great deal. They forget the point of the books. The books become little more than one more book that they read one day years ago. The books are forgotten and their message is lost.

Garrett's books are much shorter than Rand's, but they present their own problems that require slow absorption. Garrett's philosophy is impossible to pigeonhole. While many authors want to use Garrett as a weapon in today's political battles, the true story is not so simple. It is not common to find such a staunch opponent of the New Deal that also happens to be an isolationist. The very concept of isolationism is not simple to define. Isolationism does not mean that the U.S. should never fight a war. Nor does it mean that we should never fight on foreign soil. It does mean that we should remain independent in every way - economically, militarily, etc. Isolationism and "anti-war" are not necessarily the same thing.

Isolationism is neither the concept that has been demonized by today's conservatives nor the concept that has been hijacked by today's leftists. In fact, many of today's leftists that hasten to flee from every war would also be the first to subjugate ourselves to the U.N., foreign treaties, foreign governments, etc. The same leftists hasten to weaken our economy and destroy our domestic industries with minimum wage increases, environmental legislation, union friendly policies, high taxes, etc.

Garrett truly is an orphan in today's political spectrum. But it was not always so. Garrett's philosophy, as expressed in Blue Wound and elsewhere, has its roots as far back as the founding of this country. But because it cannot be easily pigeonholed in today's false political dichotomy, it takes more than one book (and more than one author) to fully grasp the concepts. As an example, It takes reflection, study and time to realize that it was proper to support America's fight in the cold war while also remaining an isolationist.

Many free market advocates are uncomfortable with Garrett's negative treatment of international trade. But they overlook the fact that Garrett's writings are not really a proposal for specific policies, but a description of consequences of present policies. Garrett seeks to understand history and the future through fictional scenarios. Whether we advocate particular policies or not, we should not dismiss Garrett's scenarios.

The main item that limits the usefulness of the Blue Wound is the event that intervened ten years after Blue Wound's publication. The New Deal was the largest single step in the U.S.' march to tyranny. Overnight, the government went from a simple republic to an empire. (See "The Revolution Was" for details.) In some cases, the New Deal accelerated the problems of which Garrett warned. In some cases, the New Deal dwarfed those problems. To the extent that Blue Wound (or any other pre-New Deal Garrett writing) attempted to predict the future, the New Deal stands as a prism that distorts the image projected from those writings to our eyes. It is a pity for us that Garrett did not write novels post New Deal. [American Story and A Time was Born come close to filling this role.] I would have enjoyed a novel that presents the New Deal as an allegory or a parable.

Jeffrey Tucker has expressed some concerns with Blue Wound's analogies and its failure to isolate those problems that result solely from government action:

I suspect that this early in his career, Garrett wasn't quite as alert as he would be later to the distinction between the state means and the economic means.

To the extent that such concepts were blurred in Blue Wound, the New Deal's arrival ten years later forced Garrett and other writers to face and define such distinctions much more clearly.

My advice to anyone that is interested in Blue Wound is to read it, absorb it and let its ideas ferment in your mind for an indefinite period while pursuing other reading on isolationism and the America's march toward tyranny. You will eventually find the proper context for the ideas from this and other Garet Garrett books.

The Blue Wound - part VIII - the war of 1950

2007-08-23T20:20:00.000-04:00

Check here for parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII of the Blue Wound live blog.

Chapter 14 was the final major chapter in Blue Wound. (Chapter 15 is but a brief epilogue to the plot.) Chapter 14 applies all of the allegories of the first 13 chapters to the future of America. Mered, the key character, gives his traveling companion - the narrator - a glimpse into the world of 1950.

Chapter 14 is Garrett's opportunity to predict one potential future for the United States. Essentially, Garrett predicts World War II with one major difference. Garrett, knowing nothing more than the world of 1921, foresees a military alliance between 1950 Germany and other European powers and one [unnamed] "of the great Asiatic nations." (p. 165). The major difference that Garrett foresees is that the United States, by 1950, has descended into a state of dependency that we would not, in fact, experience until our own time.

The U.S. of the early 21st century is dependant on foreign goods as never before. Not only manufactured goods and consumer products, but raw materials such as oil flow into this country through vulnerable umbilical cords. Even agriculture is headed in that direction. Garrett has unknowingly projected the United States of the 21st century onto World War II. America's dependence in Chapter 14 of the Blue Wound creates predictable results.

Much of Garrett's story centers on U.S.' dependence on the foreign chemical industry.

Predictions for the future are often less "wrong" than they are ill-timed. In this case, Chapter 14 was "wrong" only insofar as Garrett's facts occurred all at once. In the real world, these facts have occurred at different times. America's dependence on foreign industry arose long after World War II.

Garrett provides numerous additional predictions for the world of 1950, most of which I will not explain in detail. Each similarity is like a buried treasure to be discovered in Garrett's pages. Garrett predicts changes in the news distribution business that are vaguely and crudely reminiscent of our own information age. (p. 147). Garrett anticipates the age of nuclear warfare (as much as one could expect from a man writing 24 years before Hiroshima) - fictionalizing a chemical process by which an entire city (and more) could be destroyed with one bomb. (pp. 174-181). Garrett could not predict exactly how the introduction of the submarine and the airplane would affect shipping. (pp. 154-155). Garrett hinted at the third world debt forgiveness movement of our time. (pp. 166-167).

Blue Wound, including Chapter 14, hints at the themes present in Bubble that Broke the World. Because the financial crisis had not exploded by 1921, the financial themes took a back seat to the industrial and military themes in Blue Wound.

The biggest focus of those who would learn from Chapter 14 should be on the modern U.S.' relationship with and dependence on China for manufactured goods. This Chapter (and the entire book) can be promoted as a blueprint for avoiding a future disaster resulting from our dependence on China.

Chapter 14 should not be used crudely as proof that the U.S. should be either pro-war or anti-war. This Chapter has few lessons for our present battle against the jihadis (except for our dependence on foreign oil). While Garrett did not foresee the environmental regulations that make it difficult to build oil refineries in our time, such policies fit perfectly into the theme of Chapter 14.

America's current dependence on foreign industry is not popular to discuss because the solutions are difficult to arrive at and implement. But a book like Blue Wound that warned us of and even fictionalized this problem long before it occurred is a good place to start.
---------
click here for part IX.

The Blue Wound - part VII - the Earth and its resources; isolationism and independence

2007-08-21T23:21:00.000-04:00

Check here for parts I, II, III, IV, V and VI of the Blue Wound live blog.

Chapter 12 is entitled, "The Answer" and includes a major step in the plot. I don't want to reveal plot twists, so I will focus on a few interesting points from that chapter.

Page 127 briefly explores the proper roles of man and the Earth. The Earth is a resource for us to use - not a god to be worshipped or protected for its own sake.

Most of the chapter explores Garrett's views on international trade and self-sufficiency. I know that the previous sentence sounds boring and will undoubtedly send readers to the bookstore looking for something more lively, but Garrett does not discuss trade deficits, currency fluctuations or other such temporal minutiae. He discusses broader concepts such as the survival of civilization, the umbilical cords of civilization, the stability of civilization, the natural state of man's social organization and the relation of trade to war.

I note here also that Garrett often writes extensively about industry. The railroad industry formed the backdrop for The Driver. Cinder Buggy was labeled "a fable of iron and steel." Satan's Bushel focused on agriculture - specifically wheat. While Blue Wound has been more comprehensive, industry and agriculture have formed the background for the plot and the fables contained therein.

Chapter 13 is the most anti-war sounding chapter thus far. I use the word "sounding" because Garrett's writings have sometimes been used by the modern anti-war crowd in their attempts to justify retreat before any enemy. But Garrett's opinions were more subtle than that. In this chapter, Garrett sought not peace at any price, but isolationism. Garrett sought to prove that Germany could have survived indefinitely without going to war had she remained independant of foreign trade. To prove this thesis, Garrett's main character pointed out that Germany survived for four years during (what we call) World War I without access to its overseas markets.

If any war served as a good example to support the concept of isolationism, World War I was that war. Had we not interfered in that war, we would have avoided needless deaths and weakened the great credit bubble that would pop more than a decade later. Garrett would provide more details of this argument in The Bubble that Broke the World in the beginning of the 1930's. The difference between the two books is that Bubble made arguments from specific facts related to the war and war debt. Bubble cited speeches, specific policies and specific financial consequences. Blue Wound was an allegory based on the simplest elements of the story. [And Garrett did not know, in 1921, that the credit expansion that funded the war would contribute to a financial crisis within a decade after Blue Wound's publication.]

Garrett's arguments regarding trade, independence and isolationism will become more relevant as our own modern dependence on foreign products creates bigger problems. The umbilical cord stretches thinner and thinner in our time.

Despite the ominous warnings contained in Blue Wound, it is almost comforting to read a story in which a character with special knowledge and insight accompanies the narrator and provides a window into the past, the future, other places or the entire world at once.
----------------------
Check here for part VIII.

The Blue Wound - part VI - Ivory and Apes and Peacocks

2007-08-16T00:11:00.000-04:00

Check here for parts I, II, III, IV and V of the Blue Wound live blog.

The key to understanding Garrett's writing is the New Deal. The New Deal was the defining moment not only for the United States and its journey from republic to empire, but for Garrett's writing. Read the Foreward to People's Pottage for more details. With the coming of the New Deal, all of the class envy propaganda that had existed for decades found an outlet and came sharply into focus. As a result of this revolutionary government program, the battle lines were drawn. All other issues took a back seat. Garrett (and others) would write specifically against the very concepts of class warfare, envy and anti-rich demonization.

But in the decade prior to the New Deal, it was not unusual for Garrett to pursue arguments on tangential subjects in which the class envy issue was obscure. In "Ivory Apes and Peacocks" - Chapter 11 - Garrett appears to be critical of wealth and ostentation. In fact, the truth is more subtle. Garrett is critical of those who waste labor for the purpose of ostentation. He points out that the "unrich, aping the rich, waste very much more in the same spirit." (p. 104). Garrett argues that ostentation is one's way of showing superiority by wasting the labor of others. Singled out for special criticism are those who waste the labor of others while complaining about waste, ostentation and their own poverty.

The character Mered refers to ostentatious waste as "conspicuous . . . and for that reason it provokes social complaint and excites envy in the hearts of the multitude." (p. 102). This sentiment conflicts with Garrett's "Notes of These Times," October 8, 1932 (chapter #1 of Salvos Against the New Deal). The difference is that by 1932, Garrett was more focused on the class envy issue and the need to be clear that his opposition to destructive conduct was not intended to support class warfare and other weapons that the left would exploit for the purpose of social revolution.
----------------
update
Click here for part VII

The Blue Wound - part V - Apex - Japan

2007-08-13T11:47:00.000-04:00

1921

Check here for parts I, II, III and IV of the Blue Wound live blog.

Chapter 10, "Apex" describes the history of Japan from the middle of the 19th century until 1921. Garrett does not use that name, but it becomes obvious what country he writes about.

Garrett provides the best explanation I have ever seen for an isolationist trade policy, which explanation he summarized on page 89:

The point never to be lost sight of was that the people who made their own things so far as they could, instead of buying them from foreigners, were always more prosperous than those who sold the raw produce of their fields and mines and bought manufactured goods from others.

The reasons for this belief were greater than the mere desire to increase wages for laborers or promote special interests. Garrett told the story of how this island gradually lost control of its own formerly idyllic way of life and then fought to establish itself as a leading economic power and contend for control of greater Asia.

The reader could only guess how the story would end, as Garrett's characters predicted vaguely the outbreak of World War II 20 years later (". . . the feud will reach its apex").

-----------------------------------------

update - Click here for part VI of this live blog.

The Blue Wound - part IV - looking down on the Earth

2007-08-12T22:02:00.000-04:00

Click here for parts I, II and III of the Blue Wound live blog.

I have read Chapters 8 and 9. Here are some random thoughts:

I am glad I am reading this book slowly. The chapters are small enough that I could read this book in a much shorter time, but the material needs time to sink in. The book is short, but deep.

The Blue Wound includes a plot, even though I haven't focused on it as much as the deeper lessons. The allegory is presented as part of the plot, which the main characters discuss and observe. I have tried to downplay the plot, as it is part of an unfolding mystery.

Garrett's political views may be confusing, as one of the characters refers to employees in the same category as slaves and does not recognize the liberating effects of technology. This discussion does not reflect's Garrett's views as expressed in The People's Pottage (especially the Foreward) and many of his writings for the Saturday Evening Post.

Chapter 9 applies the lessons of Chapters 3 and 4 (and others) to the Earth as a whole. The characters stand inside a mysterious domed structure looking down on the Earth watching the 19th century take shape. The characters observe the industrialized countries becoming dependant on the third world for labor and raw materials, much like the cities of Chapter 3 depended on the outside world for sustenance, and could thus be destroyed by marauding barbarians.

The characters watched plumes of smoke emerge where cities had become industrialized. They watched ships travel oceans and become more advanced as the years passed quickly before their eyes. They watched armies push against each other as the famous wars of the 19th century unfolded.

The European powers were vulnerable because they depended on virtual slave labor in the colonies for raw materials. The United States avoided this fate because the native populations of North America would not be enslaved. The Europeans could not use them the way they used the Chinese, Indians or Africans. The colonists found that they had virtual unfettered access to the continent. This access produced control and independence from Europe and the old world.

The threat to this independence comes from political attempts to obtain cheap labor through unfettered immigration. Remember that Garrett wrote these words in 1921 (and remember what I wrote in Part II about Garrett's predictive abilities):

"Meanwhile, finding more drudgery to do than it had the patience or time to perform for itself, your country imported tame slaves from all over the world, in vast numbers, to make railroads, build highways, dig in the mines, tend the furnaces and gut the forests - calling it immigration."
"Immigrants are not slaves, however," I said. "They are admitted to citizenship and enjoy full political rights."
"They are free to come and go," said Mered. "Therefore you do not call them slaves. But they call themselves slaves - wage slaves. Their part is drudgery. Upon it you have reared an edifice of wealth unique. It is insecure. Those whose toil it consumes in a reckless manor have eyes to see and hearts wherewith to be envious and revengeful. They pity themselves as oppressed. They complain, then demand, and at length revolt. Then the terrifying discovery is made that their toil, though it has been despised, is vital. If the sultry masses who dig the coal and mine the iron suddenly refuse to be docile hewers and bringers, what will happen? You may say they will in that case destroy
themselves. That is nothing. People are continually destroying themselves, and yet they go on forever. But civilization is rare and fragile. The power to destroy it lies in the hands of those whose labour it wastes contemptuously and by whom it is hated accordingly."
pp. 75-76

This speech addresses the real problems with immigration - problems that cut to the heart of any civilization. I believe that many of today's ordinary opponents of increased immigration somehow feel the danger to our culture and civilization - even though the issues end up being expressed in terms of minutiae and explanations that mean little after today's headlines fade.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
update - click here for part V.

The Blue Wound - part III.

2007-08-11T15:21:00.000-04:00

Click here for parts I and II of the Blue Wound "live blog."

In the past couple of days, I have read chapters 4 through 7. I believe that Chapters 3 and 4 should be required reading at the beginning of every history class in every school.

I wrote about Chapter 3 here, in which I discussed Garrett's description of the rise and fall of cities.

Chapter 4 is a more comprehensive description of the rise and fall of one city and one civilization. This chapter, entitled "All East of Eden," appears to describe most closely the life of ancient Rome. Not every civilization follows exactly the same formula, but human nature remains a constant. Every great civilization fits somewhere on to this continuum. History can be reduced to the discovery of where any particular civilization fits, at any given time, into the arc described in "All East of Eden." It would serve us well to learn this lesson, as the end of any civilization is usually long and painful. Garrett's fictional city, which had begun in idyllic circumstances, was ultimately reduced to using slaves, enforcing tribute, outright piracy and other programs necessary to pay for a lifestyle that a free economy would not support. "All East of Eden" ends when a barbarian horde "mercifully terminated the tragedy."

But these chapters are more than a mere history lesson. Garrett presents no dates, names or facts. He tells a simple story in brief allegory form. It is almost as if Garrett has reduced large portions of Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization" to a work of art. Ayn Rand wrote that art serves the purpose of objectifying man's values and placing them into a form that all can experience. If that description is accurate, then Garrett produced a work of art in these chapters, by reducing history to an objective, simple story that we can experience and a framework in which we can understand almost anything that has happened in man's past.

Chapter 5, "The Wages of Thrift," is also a true classic. This chapter should be required reading at the beginning of every economics class. But it is much more than economics. This chapter is about morality, philosophy and much more. And it presents the least dry treatment I have seen of these subjects outside of Ayn Rand. The point of this Chapter is the inevitable punishment that those who work, earn and produce must endure at the hands of those who would reap the benefits. Again, the lesson is presented in the form of a brief story, starring fictional valley dwellers, being observed silently by the narrator and the mysterious man that started "the war" referenced at the beginning of the book.

At this point, I believe Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of Blue Wound rival Absalom Weaver's speech from Satan's Bushel or the Foreward to People's Pottage as true classic gems from Garrett's writings.

As I proceed through these chapters, I come closer to an explanation of how these stories relate to that devastating war. Today's pundits, rather than endlessly debate the minutiae of today's war, would do better to step outside of today's debate and examine Garrett's simple allegories.
----------------------------------
update - click here for part IV.

Blue Wound - part II - the perspective of time.

2007-08-10T08:08:00.000-04:00

Click here for part I or here for part III.

I have read three chapters of the Blue Wound thus far. I have noticed an element that I often see in Garrett's writings. Garrett writes allegorically.

It is often impossible to discuss ultimate issues in the language of a simple narrative. It is impossible to understand ultimate issues unless the writer adds some element to the story. In Garrett's case, that element is perspective. Garrett's writings have always been about perspective and Garrett always finds a way to provide perspective.

In the early chapters of Blue Wound, Garrett provides the perspective of time. Garrett presents the image of an open plain in which many cities rise and fall, such as would happen over many centuries. The main character is permitted to watch, from a distance, as cities spring into being, become wealthy and ostentatious and are destroyed by marauding hordes. He provides the following explanation:

A city is like a giant hanging by the umbilical cord. Its belly is outside of itself, at a distance, in the keeping of others. Cut it off from its belly and it surrenders or dies. As the first city was so the last one is. No city endures.
pp. 23-24 (italics added)

The narrator then sees multiple cities rising on the same distant plain, only to attack one another. The surviving city possessed a "great tower" and ". . . was the most beautiful one and I had almost prayed that it should have the victory, for I hated to see it fall."

But even that city succumbed. It succumbed to internal strife instead of marauders from beyond its walls. The result was the same. "The tower burned and fell." (p. 25).

I read and promote Garet Garrett not because I believe him to have possessed psychic powers. I read his works because he had perspective. He could observe events of the 1920's and draw the right conclusions. By thinking forward, ignoring petty political arguments of the moment, and remembering history, he could write words that future generations might confuse with prophesy.

In fact, Garrett drew on the lessons of Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Babylon, Dehli, and countless other cities that fell to internal strife or marauding hordes or both. From those lessons and the trends Garrett observed in his own time, it was not hard for Garrett to filter out the "issues of the day" and predict the events of the future.

Garrett presents his story by speeding up the chronology and allowing one observer to narrate centuries of history in two or three pages. When we see the centuries unfold before our eyes, we gain perspective. We see the forest instead of a few trees.

Garrett was not some Nostradamus, predicting specific future events like an oracle to be deciphered. He possessed wisdom and experience, not intuition. He provides perspective, not revelation.

Garrett wrote in the age when the skyscraper was rapidly overtaking the landscape of modern cities. Knowing the fate of previous civilizations, knowing the reasons for those fates and seeing the path upon which America was then beginning to embark - it was not difficult for Garrett to foresee the future of our greatest cities. He never knew of the World Trade Center and did not predict which marauders would destroy it. But had Garrett seen the film from our own recent history that has become ingrained in our own memory, he would not have been surprised.

At the time of Blue Wound's publication (1921), the New Deal was little more than a decade away. The intellectual forces that propelled us down that road already existed. Those forces had found voice in academic institutions and were rapidly remaking the intellectual landscape of our culture. By the 1920's, those voices were quite loud and militant. Those voices had already found safe haven around the world. America was one catalyst away from crossing a Rubicon of its own making.

I don't expect all of the answers from Blue Wound. But I expect a little more insight into the world of 1921 and how we fell into the clutches of the New Deal and, ultimately, our present situation.

The Blue Wound - "live blog"

2007-08-08T19:24:00.000-04:00

As promised, I begin my "live blog" of Garet Garrett's Blue Wound, published in 1921. Blue Wound was Garrett's first novel.

Prior to this week, my only knowledge of this book came from Bruce Ramsey's brief description in the "Introduction" to Salvos Against the New Deal. Ramsey (p. 12) described Garrett as having imagined, in 1921, a war of the future taking place in 1950.

I have read the foreward (or "Proemial"), which begins the plot by depicting a newspaper office. A mysterious visitor leaves a manuscript describing the visitor's quest to discover and interview the man responsible for starting "the war".

On that note, the story is off and running. I will not provide spoilers in this "live blog." I will not describe the plot twists as I discover them. Instead, I will provide my own impressions and the lessons that Blue Wound has for all of us.

The Garrett works I have read have always been imaginitive. His fictional works create scenarios out of historical events that provide insight and perspective. My experiences reading these works have created expectations for me. The Proemial has sharpened these expectations. I hope not only to enjoy a story but to benefit from Garrett's message about the world of 1921 and his expectations for the world of 1950.

I want to see not only how close Garrett's predictions were to the actual world of 1950, I want to learn something about 1921 that the intervening years prevent us from seeing. Garrett's novels have always remained as mysterious as the fictional manuscript that the editor found on his desk in Blue Wound. Little is known about these novels, as they have become quite rare. But Garrett was favorably reviewed and somewhat influential in his time.

Today, with a financial crisis looming over the United States and government growth out of control, I am driven to discover how Garrett's writings may help lead the way back to the Republic that once existed in this country.

update - click here for part II.

Coming in 2007 - The Blue Wound

2007-01-26T16:55:00.000-05:00

1921

Satan's Bushel finally appears

2006-12-16T21:42:00.000-05:00

I have previously written here about Garrett's 1923 novel, Satan's Bushel. The aforesaid link includes links to my lengthy review of the book's contents. My previous post describes how I found a serialized copy of the novel in the basement archives of the state library. I had been reading and reviewing the book without ever having seen the actual copy:

I have tried, without success, to find a copy of Satan's Bushel for almost two years. I have never yet seen a copy of the book.

My review was based solely on the serialized magazine version of the book.

All of that changed within the past year when I found an original hardback edition of the book on E-bay.

with dust jacket

without dust jacket

The inside of the dustjacket included a preview.

I don't remember what I paid for it, but it was only slightly more than $10.00. Whoever sold it to me didn't know what he had. Now if I only had the time to lobby publishers to publish a new edition . . . .

Empire of Debt

2006-06-04T16:27:00.000-04:00

There has been a recent Garet Garrett sighting in the newly published book, "Empire of Debt," by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin. "Empire" was published in November 2005.

Garrett is quoted on pp. 87-89 of the book. The authors missed a great opportunity by quoting only some anti-war comments of Garrett's. The authors failed to quote the majority of Garrett's work over the decades, much of which focuses on the very same financial issues with which "Empire" deals.

"Empire" touches only lightly on the role of the New Deal in creating an all-powerful government. Garrett's signature work, "People's Pottage" as well as "Salvo's Against the New Deal" provide much greater insight into that era and the New Deal.

"Empire" focuses heavily on World War I. But the authors get sidetracked with discussions of internal European politics and battlefield movements instead of the financial issues. By contrast, Garrett's "Bubble that Broke the World" addresses the WWI loans from the United States that worsened the war and hastened the post-WWI world wide financial crisis.

The authors also became bogged down in a lengthy discussion of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, French military tactics and other peripheral issues.

The authors gave the impression of having read a few mainstream books (plus one book of John Flynn) on various topics. The authors then cobbled these works together into a brief history of the world. The authors tried to do too much. The authors' goals might have been better served had the authors stuck to Garrett, Flynn, Will Durant and a few other writers not so strongly influenced by modern thought fashions.

But "Empire of Debt" does have its moments. The authors provide the following quotation on page 290 (writing about financial bubbles and their aftermath):

Generally, the force of a correction is equal and opposite to the trend that precedes it. And the pain it causes is directly propertional to the pleasant deception that went before it.

The authors also write in favor of gold and correctly identify 1971 as the year President Nixon closed the gold window. (But they ignore the numerous anti-gold steps that preceded this action, including the outlawing of private ownership of gold from the New Deal through the middle of the Ford administration). Any author that speaks of gold's history to any extent deserve some credit.

On page 329, the authors say the following:

Gold was around millions of years before the U.S. dollar was invented. It will probably be around a billion years after. This longevity is not in itself a great recommendation. It is like buying a suit that will last longer than you do; there is no point to it. But the reason for gold's longevity is also the reason for its great virtue as money: It is inert; it yields neither to technology nor to vanity.

The authors suffer also from the tendency to try to squeeze every octogonal problem into the round hole labeled "empire." The authors ignore the political reality that has pitted empire builders at home against those who seek to stop them. The authors merely label all policies since 1913 as being products of American "empire."
Garrett provides a much more realistic explanation, labeling Roosevelt's New Deal policies as imperial, while marveling at the naivite of New Deal opponents who warn that "empire" might arrive if we don't stop additional New Deal policies.

Click here for Sue Bob's commentary on "Empire of Debt".

Most importantly, the authors predict dire consequences from the current real estate bubble. These consequences will be compounded by our growing national and individual debt, the lack of manufacturing in the United States and our growing dependence on manufactured goods from China and other foreign countries.

I recommend the final chapter, if for no other reason than it contains warnings and facts regarding the financial situation of the last five years. As for the rest of the book, writings of previous "Cassandras" are more thorough, consistent and enlightening.

Letter from Literary Digest

2006-06-04T15:39:00.000-04:00

An interesting letter is up for sale on E-Bay. The publishers of Literary Digest wrote to Garrett in 1936 to inquire as to the pronounciation of his name.

The letter reads as follows:

October 12, 1936

Mr. Garet Garrett

Tuckahoe, N.J.

Dear Sir:

We have been asked for the correct pronunciation of your name, and as none of your books of reference indicate it, may we ask you to please give us the pronunciation-- both of the given name and the surname, showing the syllables to be stressed. We wish to have this correct for our files for future reference.

Thanking you for your cooperation

Yours Truly,

Chalres E. Funk.
---------------------------

Garrett's reply appears at the bottom:
"I pronounce it as garret, for the room on the top floor, and both the same. Garet Garrett (Signature)"

This is not my e-bay sale.

The link for the sale is here.

The letter appears to provide one tiny window into the workings of the publishing world of the 1930's.

The American Omen - new E-bay sale

2006-01-23T23:15:00.000-05:00

The American Omen is up for sale on E-bay again.

I don't know what the reserve is, but the last time I saw a copy for sale (with a dust jacket) the sale price ended up at $ 73.00.

I don't know what condition the book is in or anything about the seller (and it is not my sale) but the occasion of the auction provides a good excuse to post this blurb about the book (courtesy of Bruce Ramsey in Salvos Against the New Deal (page 13):

At the high note of the roaring twenties, Garrett laid out his vision of the "new economy" in the American Omen (1928) - a largely non-union world of professional management, time-saving machines, just-in-time inventory control ("hand-to-mouth buying") and high wages. It was a world in which people accepted inequality of income and wealth. "There is no evidence that men want to be equal," Garrett wrote. "Here, if a man says the state owes him liberty, protection, equality of opportunity, that is already acknowledged. These are political benefits. But if he says the state owes him a living, he is ridiculed."

As soon as I read my own copy, I will post a more thorough description, explanation and review of The American Omen (as I intend to do with all of the Garrett books that I own).

1928

-----------------------------------------
update

The e-bay auction ended with one bid for $ 9.99. The auction page indicated that the reserve was not met.

Weblog Awards - final results

2005-12-28T21:13:00.000-05:00

Thank you to all who voted for this blog in the recent Weblog Awards online poll. As you can see from the results, this blog finished near the bottom, but it received more attention in that two week period than it had received in weeks.

Numerous like-minded people discovered Garrett's works and someone even bought a copy of Insatiable Government through the Amazon button on this blog (btw, I have yet to see a dime from all of the online purchases that have been made through my two blogs).

For those who are new to this blog and to Garet Garrett, please check back in from time to time. I have renewed incentive to post more items here now that I have a small audience.

This blog will never challenge the major blogs for traffic, but the specialty nature of this blog insures that those who have a specific interest in constitutional government, early 20th century literature, the New Deal, etc., will have a place to go for information and enlightenment.

People's Pottage quotes

2005-12-08T14:00:00.000-05:00

Over the past few days I have included quotes from Garrett at my other blog in an effort to attract traffic here and to promote this blog for the Weblog Awards.

The quotes appear on page 85 of The People's Pottage:

Why do we suffer the censorious opinions of the world to be as sackcloth on our skin and ashes on our forehead? Why must we accept the expectations of other people as the measure of our obligation to them?
.....................
About 1900 began the flowering of that alien graft upon our tree of sapience called the intellectual. He was the precious product of our free, academic world - a social theorist who knew more than anybody else about everything and all about nothing, except how to subvert the traditions and invert the laws.

The People's Pottage is Garrett's most famous work (actually a collection of three essays written in three different decades). That book will take numerous posts to fully describe, review and appreciate. I intend to undertake that task after I explore more of Garrett's novels.

Another Garet Garrett sighting at Joe Sobran's page

2005-12-08T13:41:00.000-05:00

Joe Sobran has quoted Garet Garrett again. This quote appeared in the November 24th column. These Garrett quotes by modern writers are so rare that they are worth repeating whenever they occur:

Garet Garrett, another critic of Roosevelt, understood that the United States was undergoing a revolution — of the kind Aristotle had called “revolution within the form."

Sobran wrote more extensively about Garrett [and Sobran's own discovery of Garrett] here. I will comment on that column in the future.

2005 Weblog Awards

2005-12-06T19:51:00.000-05:00

This blog has been nominated for the 2005 Weblog Awards in the Best of the Rest category. This is the category for the smaller blogs that do not yet generate much traffic.

For those of you that have been directed here from the awards/voting page, this blog promotes the writings of early 20th century conservative writer Garet Garrett. I seek to rediscover conservatism's roots by reviewing Garrett's little known novels and, ultimately, Garrett's political essays during the New Deal.

Garrett has long been rumored to have influenced the writings of Ayn Rand. Many similarities exist between Garrett's novels, particularly The Driver, and various Rand novels and plays.

Garrett is enjoying a mini-renaissance lately due to the recent publication of various compilations of his Saturday Evening Post essays. You can find links to and descriptions of these and other works of Garrett throughout this blog.

The rules allow you to vote early and often, please do so here.

Insatiable Government, Bruce Ramsey

2005-11-27T18:42:00.000-05:00

Bruce Ramsey has published a new collection of Garrett's writings:

Includes writings from 1923-1950

I have not read this compilation yet, but that day is coming.

Thanks largely to Bruce Ramsey, Garrett's writings have seen more "buzz" than at any time in the last 40 years.

Salvos Against the New Deal

2005-11-27T18:31:00.000-05:00

Three days ago, I listed "Salvos Against the New Deal" as this month's book-of-the month selection at my other blog. Someone actually followed the link and bought a copy already! I will have more to say about this book later.

Harangue sighting on e-bay - $99.99

2005-11-03T22:54:00.000-05:00

An original edition of Harangue is currently being auctioned at e-bay. I offer no opinions as to the asking price. I bought my copy for much less on e-bay two years ago.

But I can confirm that the description of an original edition Harangue as "very rare" and "very hard to find outside of a library" is accurate. My own struggle to find even a magazine reproduction of Satan's Bushel is described here. Garrett's novels each come available on e-bay about once a year or less.

BTW - this is not my sale. I simply find it noteworthy whenever there is a Garrett novel sighting anywhere. The last such e-bay sighting for Harangue occurred eleven months ago, which listing was withdrawn before any bids were made.

Garet Garrett sighting - Joe Sobran

2005-08-03T17:14:00.000-04:00

Garet Garrett was mentioned in Joe Sobran's column on July 5th:

We may as well face it: the American Republic whose birth we celebrate every July 4 has ceased to exist. It succumbed long ago to what Garet Garrett used to call “revolution within the form.” The names of the old things have been preserved, but their meanings have entirely changed.

How I Found Satan's Bushel

2005-07-28T23:03:00.000-04:00

Satan's Bushel review parts I, II and III.

As I wrote in a previous post, my interest in Satan's Bushel was raised when Bruce Ramsey referred to that book in his introduction to Salvos Against the New Deal:

Satan's Bushel (1924) was an allegory of agriculture and its
struggle with overproduction. ("Satan's Bushel" was the bushel that broke the price.)

I discovered that the story was about much more than that, but getting to that point required a journey.

I have tried, without success, to find a copy of Satan's Bushel for almost two years. I have never yet seen a copy of the book. Bruce Ramsey wrote to me that a copy of the text could be found in back copies of the Saturday Evening Post. Indeed, most of Garret's fiction books can be found serialized in the pages of the Post in the 1920's. Satan's Bushel is one exception to that rule. After I wrote back to Mr. Ramsey and informed him that the Post had come up dry on Satan's Bushel, he told me he would try to remember where he had seen it and get back to me. (Ramsey had previously discarded his photocopies of the Post when he gradually accumulated the actual books with considerable effort over a fair amount of time).

After having one of those "eureka!" moments, Ramsey wrote to me that the actual magazine that contained Satan's Bushel was called The Country Gentleman. While I was glad to have received renewed hope of finding the text, Ramsey's news was not the end of the story.

Upon arriving at the State Library, I was told that The Country Gentleman was not published in 1923 and had merged with the Saturday Evening Post by that time. This information was false, and I persisted in my request that the librarians find the Country Gentleman copies in their stack of microfilms in the basement. After the librarians informed me that they would notify me if anything turned up, I once again gave up hope and returned home.

Much to my surprise, I received a phone call several days later from the librarian. Not only had they found the issues of Country Gentleman in question, they had also found, as a result of this search, the library's entire series of Country Gentlemen microfilms that had been misfiled and lost for years.

I have written in a previous post that Satan's Bushel reflects much of our culture that has now been lost or forgotten. A piece of the dying American culture had been essentially buried in the rubble and had languished unnoticed and unappreciated. I thought of this obscurity several days later as I watched the librarian carry the microfilm to one of the ancient microfilm machines so that I might copy it.

Many of the ancient writings from the Roman civilization were destroyed by marauding barbarians who burned cities with little regard for what they destroyed. The barbarians did not even understand the concept of literature or the role of literature in preserving civilization.

I felt that I was reversing the ancient Roman scenario by rescuing Garrett's literature with the help of one who had no idea what she was carrying (or what her coworkers had discovered in the basement). Those of us who rescue forgotten American writing, especially literature with a capitalist theme, will do so in relative obscurity without the understanding of those who might still possess the treasures we seek.

The image of this obscurity was reinforced as I scrolled through the microfilm and discovered the hastiness with which the pages had been copied. Half of most of the pages were too blurry to read. I had to copy many pages two or three times just to get a clear image of each word in the text.

But now, one more copy of Satan's Bushel exists outside the confines of some library basement. The most thorough discussion of this book ever created now exists on the internet. Absalom Weaver's speech can now take its place alongside the speeches of Ayn Rand's great characters. More such discussions of Garrett's books will follow on these pages.

Satan's Bushel - part III

2005-07-23T23:04:00.000-04:00

Click here for part I and part II.

The time elapsed since my last post here makes it obvious that I am no longer attempting to "live-blog" Satan's Bushel. I finished the book months ago and have been trying to find time to sit down and complete my thoughts.

In some ways, Satan's Bushel exceeded my expectations. In other ways, my hopes were left unfulfilled. The plot and the storyline of the book were tremendous. I won't give away any more of the story than I have already written in previous posts. Suffice it to say that the book is worth reading for the story alone.

I was hoping for more economic insight, especially insight into the nature of overproduction, inflation and the consequences of these phenonema for ordinary people. Garrett wrote about farmers that lived with the consequences of overproduction. But the main focus of the story was on three people whose lives transcended that problem. The book was written in 1923 and I suppose it did not seem imperative to delve into a story relating to the consequences of economic conditions prior to the crises that would soon engulf the world. As I wrote in my last post:

We can forgive Garrett for failing to apply Weaver's lesson to broader government policy. Such a comprehensive approach did not seem as imperative in the pre-New Deal days of 1923.

I am still not sure exactly what I am looking for, but I find only hints of it in Garrett's fiction writings (and none of it anywhere else). Dramatization of the harm wrought by the economic policies that wrecked the 20th century is very rare. Otherwise, such policies would never have become entrenched.

It is very common now to hear dispassionate explanations of why socialism or government interference makes no sense. Such discussions only rarely touch upon the folly of fractional reserve banking. Garrett's nonfiction dealt with fractional reserve banking more so than most writers of the 20th century. Such factors as confidence, the effect of government policy on prices and the unique problems of industrialization would provide the backbone of Garrett novels such as Satan's Bushel and the Driver. While these novels would not necessarily make for good recruitment tools for the free market philosophy, they provide good background for those who are acquainted with such philosophy and who want to know more.

Satan's Bushel is not dry by any means - even though I might make it sound that way by my description. The economic context of the novel makes the story that much more real. The economic context to the story bridges the 80+ years between Satan's Bushel's publication and today.

Aside from the economics, Satan's Bushel provides a model of American culture. There is much we have forgotten in recent decades about the "old values" - trite as that expression may seem. Satan's Bushel is intertwined with old fashioned American values and culture without being clumsy or obvious about it. The old fashioned manners, the work ethic, chivalry, professionalism, honesty and other virtues form the supporting cast for Garrett's main characters. The book is not intended to be a lesson in morality, but the pervaviseness of the above mentioned values in the story's background speaks louder than the most direct sermon. Garrett probably never gave this aspect a second thought, as he was simply placing his characters into the context of his time.

By reading the book, you lose yourself not only in the world of wheat farming, you lose yourself in a much broader world that has since disappeared. Despite its disappearance, the world of Satan's Bushel seems comfortable and right to the reader in a way that one can describe only with reference to the things we have lost over the past 8 decades.

-----------------

For those who wish to escape into the wheatfields of 80+ years ago, don't wait to find the book on e-bay or Amazon.com. You might wish to search antique book stores. But your best bet is to visit your local university library and ask for the 1923 editions of "Country Gentleman" magazine. Satan's Bushel begins in the October 27th edition. On October 20, 1923, the editors described the upcoming serialization:

The struggle of humanity for food is like a mighty flood - too vast, it would seem , for any to presume to stem or to direct it; yet those there are - gamblers in mankind's daily bread - who seek to do these things. These gamblers - the men of prophetic foresight whose battleground is the wheat pit; their petty imitators in the small-town bucket shop; even the farmer himself who grew the wheat - are shown in stark flesh and blood in Garet Garrett's vivid new novel, Satan's Bushel, which begins next week. Real wheat ripening in the Kansas sun; phantom wheat sold by the millions of bushels on our boards of trade; the great wheat corner; the jounrey's end of a man and woman who set forth on a world-wide quest - these are part of this truly great story of what is perhaps the greatest drama in the world, the fight for daily bread.

Satan's Bushel - II

2005-02-15T23:08:00.000-05:00

Click here for part I.

On further reading of Satan's Bushel, I discovered a speech that rivals any of the great speeches I have read in any work of fiction. It certainly deserves its place with the speeches of Roark or John Galt (although it is not as comprehensive as the speeches from those characters).

One of the main characters, Absalom Weaver, sits listening to a sales pitch for the local farmers to join a marketing cooperative. At the end of the sales pitch, the farmers persuade Weaver to rise and give his opinion:

. . . He had not yet begun to speak, but he was peering about in the grass, stooping here and there to pluck a bit of vegetation. He walked as far as the fence for a bramble leaf. Returning he snapped a twig from the elm above his head and faced them.

"This towering elm," he began, with an admiring look at the tree, "was once a tiny thing. A sheep might have eaten it at one bite. Every living thing around it was hostile and injurious. And it survived. It grew. It took its profit. It became tall and powerful beyond the reach of its enemies. What preserved it - cooperative marketing? What gave it power - a law from Congress? What gave it fullness - the Golden Rule? On what was its strength founded - a fraternal spirit? You know better. Your instincts tell you no. It saved itself. It found its own greatness. How? By fighting. Did you know that plants fight? If you could only see the deadly, ceaseless warfare among plants this lovely landscape would terrify you. It would make you think man's struggles tame."

"I hold up this leaf from the elm. The reason it is flat and thin is that the peaceable work of its life is to gather nourishment for the tree from the air. Therefore it must have as much surface as possible to touch the air with. But it has another work to do. A grisly work. A natural work, all the same. It must fight. For that use it is pointed at the end as you see and has teeth around the edge - these. The first thing the elm plant does is to grow straight up out of the ground with a spear thrust, its leaves rolled tightly together. Its enemies do not notice it. Then suddenly each leaf spreads itself out and with its teeth attacks other plants; it overturns them, holds them out of the sunlight and drowns them. Marvelous, isn't it? Do you wonder why the elm does not overrun the earth? Because other plants fight back, each in its own way. I show you a blade of grass. It has no teeth. How can it fight? Perhaps it lives by love and sweetness. It does not. It grows very fast by stealth, taking up so little room that nothing else minds, until all at once it is tall and strong enough to throw out blades in every direction and fall upon other plants. It smothers them to death. Then the bramble. I care not for the bramble. Not because it fights. For another reason. Here is its weapon. Besides the spear point and the teeth the bramble leaf you see is in five parts, like one's hand. It is a hand in fact, and one very hard to cast off. When it cannot overthrow and kill an enemy as the elm does, it climbs up his back to light and air, and in fact prefers that opportunity, gaining its profit not in natural combat but in shrewd advantage, like the middleman. Another plant I would like to show you. There is one nearby. Unfortunately it would be inconvenient to exhibit him in these circumstances. His familiar name is honeysuckle. He is sleek, suave, brilliantly arrayed, and you would not suspect his nature, which is that of the preying speculator. Once you are in his toils it is hopeless. The way of this plant is to twist itself round and round another and strangle it."

"This awful strife is universal in plant life. There are no exemptions. Among animals it is not so fierce. They can run from one another. Plants must fight it out where they stand. They must live or die on the spot. Among plants of one kind there is rivalry. The weak fall out and die; the better survive. But all plants of one kind fight alike against plants of all other kinds. That is the law of their strength. A race of plants that had wasted its time waiting for Congress to give it light and air, or for a state bureau with hired agents to organize it by the Golden Rule, or had been persuaded that its interests were in common with those of the consumer, would have disappeared from the earth.

"The farmer is like a plant. He cannot run. He is rooted. He shall live or die on the spot. But there is no plant like a farmer. There are nobles, ruffians, drudges, drones, harlots, speculators, bankers, thieves and scalawags, all these among plants, but no idiots, saying 'How much will you give?' and 'What will you take?' Until you fight as the elm fights, take as the elm takes, think as the elm thinks, you will never be powerful and cannot be wise."

This speech is the ultimate rejoinder to those who preach "compassion" as the justification for socialist economic policy. This speech denies and disproves any policy that would use government obstacles and barriers against those who must fight for survival (all of us - not just farmers). This speech helps us understand our own nature and how that nature is suited to the capitalist economic system.

While Weaver's speech needs context for it to have the most impact, that context would soon be provided by the policies of the New Deal. We can forgive Garrett for failing to apply Weaver's lesson to broader government policy. Such a comprehensive approach did not seem as imperative in the pre-New Deal days of 1923.

Satan's Bushel

2004-12-19T23:01:00.000-05:00

Many bloggers use their sites to "live-blog" television broadcasts, such as the Presidential debates or press conferences. In this case, I am going to live-blog a book. I started reading Garet Garrett's 1923 novel, Satan's Bushel, about two weeks ago.

I have never actually seen the book. I photocopied my copy from the microfilms of "The Country Gentleman" magazine, where the book was serialized in six editions in late 1923.

I don't fully know what to expect, but I found this passage particularly striking early in the book, as Garrett describes the travels of a wheat speculator in western Kansas on his first trip outside the city:

Riding by railway through the wheat fields on a very warm May evening is an
exquisite experience if you give yourself to it. All sounds are
muted. Those that are naturally harsh become pleasing and satiny. I
suppose this is from the fact that the grassy ocean absorbs them, somewhat as
snow does. The shriek of the locomotive at road crossings is like an
echo. The wheels on the rails sound like a lathe tool cutting soft
iron. You would think the train was stealing its way on tiptoe for fear of
waking something. And all the time the air is vibrant and musical with the
rhythm of phantom castanets playing just over and under the lowest pitch audible
to the human ear. You rather feel than hear it. And that aromatic
pungency of the growing wheat! The smell of the sea, so fresh and clean is
a fabricated, purified smell. This is a living, untainted essence,
originally sweet - - distillation of sunlight trapped in the dew.

My expectations from this book were created by two writings. In
2002, Bruce Ramsey and Caxton Press published a collection of Garrett's
Saturday Evening Post articles. The collection was entitled Salvos
Against the New Deal. [I will have more to say about that in a later
post.]

In the introduction, Ramsey summarized Garrett's novels. I had never heard of any of these books before. The reference to Satan's Bushel stated the following:

Satan's Bushel (1924) was an allegory of agriculture and its
struggle with overproduction. ("Satan's Bushel" was the bushel that broke the price.)

I haven't reached that part yet.

Ramsey's description reminded me of Chapter 4 of A Bubble that Broke the World. That chapter dealt with pre-Hitler Germany, and its flirtation with financial disaster through a policy of flooding the world with cheap goods made by means of cheap credit supplied by Western governments. Garrett wrote "Bubble" and its component articles in 1930-1932. When I read that chapter around January, 2002, I was fascinated for reasons I still don't fully understand. [I will write more about "Bubble" in future posts.]

When I saw Ramsey's description of Satan's Bushel, I was left to wonder if Garrett had managed to fictionalize the events of @ 1930 Germany - half a decade before they occured!

I am about to find out over the coming days and weeks.

Harangue

2004-12-13T14:23:00.000-05:00

Harangue

A 1927 original edition of Harangue is up for sale now on e-bay. Again, I do not plan to make it a habit to quote e-bay information, but this is a rare find. I bought my copy of Harangue more than a year ago (on e-bay) and I haven't seen it available since then. (Of course I still haven't read it yet, but more on that later.)

The opening bid is $15.00 and there are no bids yet (and no, this is not my sale). The seller probably doesn't know what he has in his possession (and apparently neither do any buyers).

Normally, if you want to read this book, you have to go to a university or state library and photocopy the microfilm versions from the old Saturday Evening Post or Country Gentleman. That is what I did to obtain copies of the Driver and Satan's Bushel - but more on that later.

American Omen

2004-12-05T23:21:00.000-05:00

$ 73.00

American Omen sold on e-bay for $73.00 on Wednesday, November 24th, 2004. I would not normally post e-bay sale information, but the price was good. And no, it was not my sale.

I will post more about this book in the coming weeks.

Introduction

2004-11-28T23:20:00.000-05:00

I created this blog for the purpose of storing and spreading information about the mainly lost works of Garet Garrett. While the whole idea might sound uninteresting to those of you who have not heard of him or his work, keep an open mind.

Garrett was an early to mid 20th century conservative writer whose books and articles challenged the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt. He also did much more than that. As a novelist, essayist and editor for the Saturday Evening Post, Garrett provided a remarkable advocacy of capitalism and freedom.

Garrett's writings foreshadowed many of the later writings of Ayn Rand. For those who have read the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, certain unknown novels of Garrett would evoke a certain familiarity. While Ayn Rand appears to have built on those works and added much that was unique, revolutionary and brilliant, Garrett's works provided certain unmistakable elements for the Randian novels. Despite Garrett's obscurity, his ideas live on today in the works of modern writers and books.

There are enough Garrett books, articles and stories (together with related economic and political news) to blog for many years. Check back here every so often to see what is new (and what is old). You will gradually gain an appreciation for Garrett's works and for old fashioned capitalism.