The Revolution Was
Garet Garrett at The Ludwig von Mises Institute paints FDR's New Deal as a revolution within the form of the US Constitutional Republic. They switched America from free-market capitalism to European socialism, and very few people noticed because the transition was mostly peaceful, and the words remained the same, even though their meanings were now diametric opposites. First published in 1938. Interesting.
In a revolutionary situation, mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent.
At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said, "It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully."
Peacefully if possible -- of course.
But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people's first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.
And also (at Wolfekipedia
And also (at Wolfekipedia with links to many at Mises.org)
Garet Garrett (1878-1954, born Edward Peter Garrett)
Journalist, novelist - in great depression of 1890s
Books:
Where the Money Grows and Anatomy of the Bubble (1911)
The Blue Wound (1921)
The Driver (1922, novel on railroad reorg. in 1890's depression)
The Cinder Buggy (1923, novel on iron & steel)
Satan's Bushel (1924, novel, ~agricultural overproduction)
Ouroboros or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (1926, novel)
Harangue (1927, novel on socialist takeover of ND {NPL} in 1919)
The American Omen (1928, PDF, 15 MB, novel on economic utopia)
Other People's Money (1931, pamphlet)
A Bubble That Broke the World (1932)
The Revolution Was (1938, in The People's Pottage HTML)
Rise of Empire (1941)
On the Wings of Debt (1943)
A Time Is Born (1944)
The Wild Wheel (1952)
Burden of Empire: The Legacy of the Roosevelt-Truman Revolution (1952)
The People’s Pottage (1953)
The American Story (1955)
But don't forget
Wolfekipedia
John Thomas Flynn (1882-1964)
Journalist, commentator
Books (many online LvMI):
God's Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Times (1932)
Country Squire in the White House (1940)
Men of Wealth: 12 Fortunes from the Renaissance to the Present Day (1941)
As We Go Marching (1944)
The Epic of Freedom (1947)
The Roosevelt Myth (1948)
The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution (1949)
While You Slept (1951)
The Lattimore Story (1953)
Decline of the American Republic: And How to Rebuild It (1955)
"But a commentator does have opinions. I have mine. For years I was the kind of Democrat who voted for candidates like Bryan and Wilson and Roosevelt in 1932. ... I believe I may lay claim to being a liberal, who is well left of center, who thinks that the capitalist system may well be doomed through the unwillingness of its own defenders to do the things necessary to save it, but who also believes that its collapse in this country now would be the worst of all calamities."
By era at least, they kinda go together.
--J.
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