Conservative Donnybrook

One of the highlights of my otherwise mundane day is receiving the Mises Daily Article in my Yahoo! inbox.  Today’s article, written by Jeffrey Tucker, examines the life and work of an often forgotten figure of American conservatism, Garet Garrett. 

In a Q & A session with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, Professor Bruce Frohnen, co-editor of American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, refers to Garrett as a galvanizing force for libertarians and traditionalists opposed to the New Deal.  Unfortunately, his answer is spurred by this question: “What’s the most obscure entry you’ve got in there?”

Garrett was a celebrated writer and editor, contributing his talents to the New York Sun, New York Tribune, and Saturday Evening Post, among others.  He was a stentorian voice against Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal and criticized his desire to intervene in WWII.  It is a wonder why Garrett’s name is all but forgotten in conservative circles.  Tucker provides the most coherent explanation available:

Despite astonishing eloquence and prescience, Garrett’s stirring attacks on the New Deal and condemnations of the American imperial mindset found few takers in the Cold War era…Whereas many intellectuals on the Right and Left regard the peaceful, bourgeois society as something of a bore — with the middle class amassing wealth and spending it on fripperies — Garrett saw peace and freedom as the essential precondition for the real drama of human life that revolves around creation, association, love, courage, and the full range of human vices and virtues that transform society in spectacular ways.

In a sense I am guilty as charged, because I have not taken the time to read as much of Garrett as I’d like.  However, if you have some free time I suggest picking up The People’s Pottage, a rather dark work that chides the welfarism of the New Deal.  Help remember Garet Garrett for something other than his parents’ droll sense of humor