Pat Buchanan quotes People's Pottage

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 II

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.

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Part III of the review of The Driver.

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

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.
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update
Click here for part VII

Empire of Debt

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.

People's Pottage quotes

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?
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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.