Garet Garrett's The People's Pottage: The Revolution Was, Ex America, The Rise of Empire [Paperback]

Garet Garrett (Author), Ian Hutton (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Everything that has happened to money was done to it by government, beginning with the deceptive separation of people from their own gold, then a confiscation of the gold, then making it a crime for a private citizen to own gold, together with a law forbidding contracts to be made in any kind of money but irredeemable paper currency, and finally the dishonorable repudiation of the promissory words engraved on its bonds. All of this with an air of leave-these-things-to-the-wisdom-of-the-government, as if people could not understand the mysteries of money. That was absurd. The controlling facts about money are not mysterious. By contrast, in 1896, there was a very grave monetary question to be settled. It was silver versus gold; or inflation versus sound money. It was taken to the people, and the people, not the government decided it. The people voted for sound money.

About the Author

Garet Garrett was born in Illinois in 1878. When he was twenty-five he was star writer for the old New York Sun. Thirteen years later he was executive editor of the New York Tribune, having been in the meanwhile financial writer with the New York Times, the Evening Post and Wall Street Journal, and editor of the New York Time Annalist. At thirty-eight he retired from newspaper work to devote himself to free-lance writing. Between 1920 and 1932 he published eight books and a number of widely circulated articles on financial and economic matters. With the advent of the New Deal he vigorously attacked its neo-Marxian premises and its economic fallacies in a series of articles that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. His writing there created much bitter controversy and caused the New Deal to threaten the life of that magazine. In 1940 he became editorial-writer-in-chief of the Saturday Evening Post, after the death of its famous editor, George Horace Lorimer. In 1944 he wrote the notable political monograph entitled The Revolution Was, which went through many editions. This was followed in 1951 by ExAmerica and in 1952 by The Rise of Empire. These three essays, taken serially, give a dramatic account of what has happened in this country during the last twenty years - to the spirit, to the mind, and to the social environment of a people who after a century and a half of being wonderfully free began to ask, "What is freedom?" Mr. Garrett has recently retired to a cave on a river bank at Tuckahoe, New Jersey, where he lives very quietly with his wife, still making notes and comments on the passing show of monstrous human folly. He has just finished a book entitled The Wild Wheel, the theme of which is the death of Henry Ford's world of laissez-faire. Mr. Garrett died in 1954. The above page of biographical notes appeared on the jacket of the first edition of The People's Pottage in 1953.

Product Details

• Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: The Truth Seeker Company; TS ed edition (December 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0840379943
• ISBN-13: 978-0840379948
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #867,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The American Socialist Revolution, December 27, 2003

By 

B. King (Pittsburgh, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Garet Garrett's The People's Pottage: The Revolution Was, Ex America, The Rise of Empire (Paperback)

In November, 1932 the American people, frustrated with the failure of the Hoover administration to lead the nation out of financial panic, elected the patrician Franklin Roosevelt as president. The FDR campaign platform called for balancing the federal budget by curtailing wasteful and excessive federal expenditures, encouraging private investment and job creation, and keeping the dollar stong. Immediately after FDR's landslide election, the national banking crisis worsened. Capital fled the U.S., via boatloads of gold headed overseas. Banks failed by the thousands. Millions were thus impoverished and ruined.

In the four months between election day of 1932 and his swearing-in in March of 1933, FDR refused all opportunities to cooperate with the outgoing President Hoover in dealing with the banking crisis. By the day FDR ascended to office, the Great Depression had reached a nadir of national despair.

Immediately upon entering the White House, FDR closed the banks, using a document that had been prepared months earlier by Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury. Soon thereafter, departing from the script left by Hoover, FDR called in the nation's gold. That is, FDR asked the American people to assist their government by lending it their gold for the duration of the crisis. Trusting citizens by the millions went to their banks and handed over gold coins and bullion, in return for which the U.S. government issued gold certificates that specifically promised to repay the bearer in an equal sum of the yellow metal. But by mid-1934, FDR had devalued the nation's currency by over 40% and repudiated the promise to return the gold to the people.

This tyrannical act of gold confiscation, and numerous other of FDR's imperial actions as president, form the subject of Garet Garrett's writing. Mr. Garrett views what happened to the U.S. under FDR's governance through a lens of revolutionary analysis. That is, FDR and his advisors were creatures of a socialist and collectivist mindset. They foisted, in essence, a socialist revolution upon the U.S. of the 1930's. But instead of a violent revolution leading to the overthrow of the existing ancien regime, similar to what occurred in Russia and other European nations, the FDR revolution hauled down the stars & stripes and in its place replaced it with ... the stars & stripes.

Without changing one word of the U.S. Constitution, FDR and his administration essentially re-wrote the document from the inside-out. FDR et al. overthrew the structures of government power that had prevailed in the U.S. since 1789, and replaced these structures with the origins of the modern U.S. welfare state. Tax-tax, borrow-borrow, spend-spend have been the hallmarks of federal governance since 1933.

If you subscribe to the thesis that the economic underpinnings of the U.S. welfare state are commencing to unravel, you should read up on Garet Garrett. If you believe that the U.S. dollar is dropping in value, and falling in a financial death-spiral as the nation inwardly liquidates after 70 years of living with FDR's legacy, then you should review what Garet Garrett had to say.

Garet Garrett is a lost master of social and economic analysis. But he was and remains a prophet of the long-term folly of FDR's Depression-era revolution.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars From Republic to Empire as the People sleep, September 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Garet Garrett's The People's Pottage: The Revolution Was, Ex America, The Rise of Empire (Paperback)

An excellent overview of the gradual infection by socialism of the once healthy American republic. If Mr. Garret had understood the federal taxing scheme as it actually exists (and did so even in his time), his understanding of the usurpation by the Momey Power would have been complete.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They don't teach this in school, October 17, 2009

By 

B. C. Richards (Tucson, AZ, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Garet Garrett's The People's Pottage: The Revolution Was, Ex America, The Rise of Empire (Paperback)

Garet Garrett was one of the standard-bearers of the Old Right: the pre-war conservatives who opposed the expansion of both the welfare and the warfare state. In this book, a collection of three long essays, he details powerfully and compellingly the course the United States took to transform itself from a limited, constitutional Republic, into a voracious, insatiable empire, regulating every detail of its citizens' lives at home and thrusting itself into every possible context abroad. This is the most important book I read this year, and it receives my highest recommendation.

Note: This book is available for free download on the von Mises website.

The first essay, "The Revolution Was", is the most important in the book. It was written in 1938, and Garrett shows how the Roosevelt New Deal constituted a revolution that overthrew the American form of government. The first two paragraphs are so powerful, I will simply quote them: "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. There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, `Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out.' Those were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when `one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.'"

He then goes on to detail the process by which this was accomplished, consciously, fraudulently, and against the will of the people. Roosevelt's platform contained three main planks, things for which he unceasingly criticized Hoover in the first election: (1) a drastic reduction of the size of government, to reduce spending by at least 25%; (2) a balanced federal budget; (3) a "sound currency maintained at all hazards". These were the policies for which he was elected to office. He was a liar and a traitor. Federal spending, government agencies, and federal deficits exploded to previously unimaginable sizes in the first two years of his administration (sound familiar, anyone?). Roosevelt demanded the American people exchange their privately held gold for government bonds that promised to repay in gold, but before that legislation was even passed the legislation was already drafted to default on the promise and seize the American people's gold. Garrett has quotes from Roosevelt's notes that show that he never intended to keep these promises: but he knew what he had to say to get elected. By these steps, and many others, a revolution was accomplished in the American government, and total power was centralized in the hands of an omnipotent federal bureaucracy, the one thing the drafters of the Constitution wanted to guard against at all hazards.

The second essay, "Ex America" examines the policies pursued during and following the Second World War, and especially how Roosevelt, once again lying to the American people and proceeding against their will, aggressively pursued involvement in the war, and was illegally carrying out war measures many months before Pearl Harbor was attacked. He shows how all the changes that had occurred in the last fifty years were effected before the people knew what was happening, when it was too late. The people did not vote for getting into World War I. They elected Wilson in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." They did not vote for the New Deal. They elected Roosevelt on his promises of less government, balanced budgets, and sound money. They did not vote for World War II. They elected him again in 1940 on promises that he would keep them out of foreign wars at all hazards. They never voted for the welfare state. They never voted for United Nations. They never voted for a interventionist, meddling foreign policy. All of this was financed by confiscatory taxation, and, more importantly, inflation. But as these changes were effected, one by one, they were accepted with resignation, and there is no going back. Government only grows bigger, never smaller.

The third essay, "Rise of Empire", details the transition from a non-interventionist foreign policy, to imperialism: squandering the people's confiscated wealth on foreign aid in every corner of the world; putting power to declare war into the hands of the President so that we can be plunged into war at any time; subordinating every domestic concern to the militarism required by our new foreign policy of aggression; transforming a huge segment of the economy into war industry; entangling us in an enormous network of satellite nations that have to be continually supported and appeased; and using the environment of fear and war as the excuse for limitless expansion of state power and spending.

All of this is highly relevant now. "The People's Pottage" is a reference to Esau in the Bible, who sold his birthright for a "mess of pottage". Our birthright was freedom, and it was taken away without protest. The reason I believe this books is so important, is that it shows clearly that we did not lose our freedom with the election of Bush, as the leftists think. We did not lose our freedom with the election of Obama, as the neocons think. The Republican and the Democratic parties are the complimentary wings of the same monster: the American empire. The left supports war as long as it can have the welfare state, and the right supports the welfare state as long as it can have war. The result is what we have now, and it hasn't changed in my lifetime, nor is it likely to change before the empire bankrupts itself, as all empires in history have done. It happened long ago. "The Revolution Was."