The Revolution Was: 1938 - #tcot

by GARET GARRETT on MAY 14, 2012

ed.: An amazingly insightful article reprinted by  Conservative Action Alerts. Apparently journalists, at that time, could be patriots as well.

Garet Garrett (1878-1954) is a voice largely forgotten or altogether unknown today. Born in Illinois, by the age of twenty-five he was a staff writer for the New York Sun. Thirteen years later he was an executive editor at the New York Tribune, after having been a financial writer for the New York Times. After the advent of the New Deal, Garrett, then writing for The Saturday Evening Post, was a strong voice for limited government and an staunch opponent to Roosevelt’s agenda. Garrett authored a total of sixteen books including The Revolution Was, A Bubble That Broke The World, A Time Is Born, and The American Story.

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.”

These 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.”

Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme.

It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technic it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake.

The test came in the first one hundred days.

continued…

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