ZGram - 4/25/2003 - "The 'Good War' and 'Defend America First'"

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ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

April 25, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Another worthy book for your perusal!

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The 'Good War' and
Defend America First

by Bruce Ramsey

Garet Garrett was the most eloquent opponent of U.S. involvement in 
World War II. Unlike his jeremiads against the New Deal and the Cold 
War - "The Revolution Was" and "Rise of Empire" - he did not put his 
arguments against intervention into a book. They appeared as the 
anonymous editorial voice of the Saturday Evening Post. Week after 
week in 1940 and 1941, Garrett, the magazine's chief editorial 
writer, thundered against the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt.

"This country now goes where it does not look and looks where it does 
not go," Garrett wrote in the issue of Sept. 7, 1940. "If it should 
come awake one morning to read in the newspaper headlines, or hear by 
the radio, that it had walked backward into war, it would take it no 
doubt as having been somehow inevitable from the first, and yet 
nobody would be able to say quite how or why it happened."

Fifteen months later, on Dec. 7, 1941, it did happen in just that way 
- and not without many warnings.

My new collection of Garrett's war editorials, Defend America First, 
tells much of the story of how Pearl Harbor happened - not the secret 
plottings, but the plottings in the open, the things obvious to 
anyone listening to the radio and reading the newspapers at the time. 
Much of it amounts to thinking on the meanings of words and acts, and 
arranging them with a sense of history. It is not the history of 
hindsight, but of what was known at the time, mostly things that have 
been forgotten in the 60 years since.

The first editorial in the series is from the issue of April 8, 1939, 
dated five months before the German and Russian invasion of Poland. 
(The dates are about one month after the pieces were written.) 
Garrett writes:


"Never was a stranger thing than that the American people should be 
inviting themselves to another world war before it happens.

"At frequent intervals those who sample the waters of public emotion 
heave their questionnaires into the stream - such as, 'If England and 
France were attacked by the dictators, will this country have to do 
something about it?' or, 'Shall the democracies of the world at any 
cost, stand together?' - and when what comes up is put through the 
sieve that separates the ayes and noes, the tabulated result shows 
the steady onset of the idea that we shall have to save the world for 
democracy again. But you do not need the statistics. You can feel it. 
There is all at once an intellectual cult of interventionists. The 
feet of many pacifists are running in the paths toward war."


Garrett's style is not modern, and may take some getting used to. You 
have just read a sentence of 86 words, which in the hands of most 
writers would turn the reader blue in the face. Garrett does it with 
grace.

He was a self-educated man. Born in the 19th century on a 
horse-powered farm, he dropped out of grammar school and learned from 
reading books. He left home by jumping a train. By 1900 he was a 
financial journalist on Wall Street and by World War I was on the 
editorial board of the New York Times. In 1922 he began writing for 
the Saturday Evening Post, which was the most influential voice to 
the American middle class. In the 1930s he attacked the Roosevelt 
government's economic quackery and sabotage of the Constitution in 
many Post articles, some of the best of which are included in my 
first Garrett collection, Salvos Against the New Deal (Caxton, 2002).

Garrett came to the preliminaries of World War II believing that 
World War I had been a total loss, and that the U.S. Treasury loans 
to Britain and France during that war and to Germany afterward had 
been a futile exercise in saving Europe. The course of wisdom in a 
European fight was to stay out of it. That did not make Garrett any 
kind of pacifist. Just after the fall of France, for the issue of 
July 20, 1940, he wrote:


"It is too late to debate whether our foreign policy shall be that of 
the turtle or the bald eagle. The eagle is our symbol. A solitary 
people, devoted to peace, yet dangerous to any degree."


He would have liked the yellow Gadsden flag with the motto, "Don't 
Tread on Me."

To Garrett, the question was not whether Hitler was dangerous. That 
was obvious, and Garrett argued that German militarism justified a 
compensating military buildup. America had to get ready for a 
possible war with Germany. The question was whether there was any 
need to go to Europe and pick a fight with Germany.

In the issue of Sept. 7, 1940, he wrote:


"Who is going to put the German thing back? The British? They are not able.

"Shall we do it? Unless we are willing to go to Europe and destroy it 
there, we may as well make our minds up now that we shall have to 
live in the same world with it, maybe for a long time, whether we 
like it or not. None the less, for that reason, only all the more, we 
should, we must, create on this continent the incomparable power of 
defense. After that we shall see. For after that we shall be again 
what we were, safe and free and dangerous."

Safe and free and dangerous. That is much different from the cowering 
image one absorbs from the word "isolationist," which is the word 
Roosevelt and the war party flung at people like Garrett (and which 
is flung today upon LewRockwell.com).


Roosevelt's idea was involvement by salami-slice. The first slice was 
that America should help the British and French by measures greater 
than words but "short of war." That came early in 1939, the last year 
of European peace. To Garrett, this was taking sides in a war about 
to erupt. If we would take sides, we would get drawn in. Also, the 
policy was Roosevelt's personally, done as a challenge to Congress to 
do anything about it. Today's reader might say, "Of course war is the 
President's policy." But the republican tradition was stronger then.

Wrote Garrett in April 1939, of Roosevelt:


"He cannot declare war. Only the Congress can do that. Nevertheless, 
he can, if he is so minded, provoke war. He can create situations and 
entanglements such as to make war inevitable."


Which is what Roosevelt proceeded to do. One of his most famous moves 
was on Sept. 2,1940, two months after the fall of France, when, 
without asking Congress, he gave the British government 50 destroyers 
from the U.S. Navy. In exchange he got the use of British military 
bases in Canada and the Caribbean.

Garrett responded in the Oct. 12, 1940, Saturday Evening Post:


"Measures short of war. What, at first, did you understand that 
formula to mean? That England and France should have access to the 
private industrial resources of the United States, which would be 
internationally lawful, would not involve the Government at all, and 
would be still a tremendous advantage to the Allies, with Germany 
blockaded? But your Government understood it to mean much more than 
that; the British government understood it to mean much more...

"So you see what else your Government does. As it leads the country 
to war, saying it will keep it out, it tells you only what it thinks 
it will be good for you to know, and cannot always afford to tell you 
the truth, because you may not have been enough accustomed to the 
idea. As, for example, when the news was out that your Government was 
negotiating with Great Britain for air and navy bases on the fringe 
of this hemisphere, it told you that this had nothing whatever to do 
with the fifty destroyers for which the British had put forth a great 
propaganda in this country. Simply, that was not so."


In November 1940 came the national election, Franklin Roosevelt 
versus Wendell Willkie. It was a fine time for a democracy to offer 
the people a choice between peace or war, but it did not do that. It 
offered two candidates who were eager to be involved but unable to 
say so. Roosevelt brazenly lied, promising to keep the nation at 
peace. Garrett recounts how the propaganda for involvement diminished 
almost to zero before the election, only to come roaring back 
immediately afterward. Before he could be sworn in for a third term, 
Roosevelt announced that Britain had run out of credit, and that 
America's security required legislation that would grant him the 
power to give any amount of military supplies to any country he 
wanted.

That was Lend-Lease. To Garrett it was the real declaration of war, 
and when it was enacted in March 1941, he flatly said that the 
argument about whether to go to war was over.

In the issue of March 29, 1941, he wrote:


"We have broken with our past. We have thrown away our New World, our 
splendid isolation, our geographical advantage of three to one 
against all aggressors, our separate political religion. There is no 
longer a New World, nor an Old World, but now one world in which the 
American people have been cast for a part they will have to learn as 
they go along.

"There is no longer a Monroe Doctrine. In place of it there is an 
American Internationalism. We do not yet know what this means.

"From now on for us there is no foreign war. Any war anywhere in the 
world is our war, provided only there is an aggressor to be 
destroyed, a democracy to be saved or an area of freedom to be 
defended."


In defining the war as being for freedom - that is, for an ideology 
rather than the homeland - America, he wrote, would "assume a role in 
which it must either go on and on until it has gained moral hegemony 
of the whole world - or fail."

Moral hegemony of the whole world. That was a new thought in the 
spring of 1941.

Then, in June 1941, came the German attack on Russia. Then it was no 
longer a question of aid to Winston Churchill's Britain but aid also 
to Joseph Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

And what would that mean? If Stalin prevailed over Hitler, Garrett 
wrote in the issue of Nov. 8, 1941, "Soviet Russia, in that case, 
would be the paramount land power of Europe.

"What should we do about that? Having saved the world from Nazism, 
should we not be morally obligated to go on and save it from 
Bolshevism?"

All this was written and published before Pearl Harbor.

It is fitting that Defend America First is published by the Caxton 
Press of Caldwell, Idaho, which used to publish many libertarian and 
Old Right books, including Garrett's most famous essays, "The 
Revolution Was" (1944), "Ex America" (1951) and "Rise of Empire" 
(1952), and the collection of those three essays in The People's 
Pottage (1953).

Many libertarians, who have old Caxton books on their shelves, 
assumed the publisher must have gone out of business. It is still 
there, as may be verified at www.caxtonpress.com. As Caxton's 
ownership passed through various members of the Gipson family, its 
management lost interest in political books, and, apart from Ayn 
Rand's Anthem, which has been a constant money-maker, and a couple of 
others, the offerings have tended to frontier tales, ghost towns, 
Indian stories and other Western Americana. The company's young 
leader, Scott Gipson, has an interest in political books, and is 
cautiously entering the field again. Following Salvos Against the New 
Deal, Defend America First is the second such book.

April 22, 2003

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Bruce Ramsey is a journalist in Seattle.  Email:  bramsey at seattletimes.com