American Omen
Garet Garrett knew where FDR’s policies – and Bush’s
– would lead
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
DIGG THIS
 In
an America in which a Republican administration has nationalized
the financial sector and both Left and Right call on the government
to save them, the authentic conservative is a stranger in his own
country. The old signposts are missing, and he travels on roads
he’s never seen.
Conservatives looking for direction, for some clue as to how to
get out of their present conundrum had best look to where they’ve
been. One who has traveled that way before can tell them what lies
ahead and how best to face it. In the case of the road we are now
traveling, there was a wayfarer who knew this trail by heart: his
name was Garet Garrett.
 One
of the first financial journalists in the country, a writer of nonfiction
and sometime novelist, a polemicist and prose stylist without equal,
Garrett was born on a farm in the Midwest in 1878, the year Edison
patented the gramophone. Apprenticed at 16 to a printer, he fell
into the business of journalism and made his way to the big cities,
winding up in New York. There he joined the staff of Adolph Ochs’s
New York Times, where he served on the editorial board. He
specialized in business and became the chronicler of the Roaring
Twenties. In the heyday of untrammeled individualism and capitalism
untamed, he was the chief celebrant of the New Era of prosperity
and seemingly unlimited economic ascent. Later he became the historian
of its betrayal and decline at the hands of its own defenders.
The stock market Crash of 1929 augured the end of the world he
had known and the beginning of something new in American history:
what Garrett called “a revolution within the form.” Reading
of his agony at the victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a chill
of déjà vu crawls up the spine of today’s conservative:
“Our fighting base is gone. Formerly we could say the people
had voted for the New Deal. Now they have voted for it in a positive,
overwhelming manner. Then what? … Where is the new base? I
don’t see it. Where is the fighting position? I haven’t
any. No one else seems to have one. Hearst and [Al] Smith and Rockefeller
embrace it. The Republicans are saying they must reorganize the
party on a liberal platform.”
Read
the rest of the article
December
13, 2008
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2008 The American Conservative
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