If Garrett is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of intellectuals who wrote in opposition to the state planning of the New Deal and the regimentation of national life that it brought about. They were a rare breed, and largely forgotten. But there is much more to Garrett than that.
Years ago, I read everything by him I could find, found myself amazed he was not better known, and so brought it all back into print. Garrett is a case study of a forgotten genius, which often happens in times of depression and war when even the most popular writers are forgotten by history. He began to write fiction after Warren G. Harding had called for a “return to normalcy” after World War I. But for Garrett, “normalcy” was civilization itself.
As a financial journalist, Garrett began as a featured contributor to America’s most successful periodical, The Saturday Evening Post, but his contributions were not limited to this publication. He also wrote for Collier’s, Everybody’s Magazine, and The New Republic. His topics usually centered on financial matters. Garrett was at the top of his game and became one of the most widely read writers on economics in the country.
He then embarked on the new venture of novel writing, producing his three best one year after another.
Through outstanding managerial sense, good pricing, excellent service, and overall business savvy, Galt outcompetes all the big names in the business while making a fortune in the process. Garrett has a way of illustrating just what it takes to be a businessman of this sort, and how his mind alone enables him to access a fantastic revenue stream.
But his success breeds trouble. The government conspires with envious competitors to regulate his business using the Sherman Antitrust Act, calling him a monopolist and accusing him of exploiting the public. There is a courtroom scene that allows Galt to explain to an assembly of legislators how investors and capitalists are helping society in ways that politicians can’t possibly imagine. What the politicians see as shady is really a form of public service that enriches the whole country.
A recurring literary motif throughout the book has people asking, “Who is Henry Galt?” The shades of Rand here are obvious, and some writers have speculated that she borrowed Garrett’s literary motif, which may or may not be true.
In any case, the novel is brilliant and thrilling, one that provides an excellent lesson in how entrepreneurship works.
The story is set in the iron town of New Damascus. The two partners in iron production are Aaron Breakspeare and Enoch Gib. Aaron is beloved but not a great businessman. He dreams of the steel age but fails to make it economically viable. Enoch is a good businessman but dour and widely loathed for his miserliness and treatment of others. A feud over a banker’s daughter leads to the initial dissolution of the partnership, and the son of the resulting union, John Breakspeare, returns to New Damascus to enter the iron business.
This leads to a fascinating recurrence of events that causes another dissolution, more bitter and shocking than the last. The feud continues over iron and then over steel until steel wins the victory after many fits and starts. In the course of the story, the reader discovers how it is that technology has such a dramatic effect on society, and how risk and entrepreneurship are at the very heart of it all.
Garrett employs every literary device to make commerce itself the setting for great acts of courage, heroism, sacrifice, and tragedy. And as with his other books, the central mover of events is the price system. It is the signal for and cause of the most notable changes in the plot. The reader apprehends economics in a way that might not otherwise be possible, and it is hard to imagine that anyone can come away from the story with anything but love for the whole subject of enterprise.
Garrett does not portray the market as some idealized utopia. We have here the full range of human emotion and motivation at work: arrogance, pride, malice, love, compassion, jealousy, rage, and more. What is striking is that all these emotions play themselves out in a setting that, despite all the metaphors involving battles and wars, is ultimately peaceful. No one can fully control price movements, and it is these that act to reward victors and punish losers. Here we have the manly virtues playing themselves out not on bloody battlefields but in the peaceful marketplace.
We also have here a realistic portrayal of the truth about innovation. It is not enough to come up with a good idea. That idea must be embodied in real production that takes place in a cost-reducing way, and then marketed in the service of society. The unity of technology, accounting, and marketing must all come together to make possible technological revolutions and other advances.
“The Cinder Buggy” could easily be considered the best of his work in this area. It is a wonderful novel for anyone who loves, or wants to more deeply understand, American history, economic theory, and the place of technology in the molding of society.
As implausible as it may sound, the central figure in this book is the price of wheat. It is the main source of the drama. The settings are the wheat pit at the Chicago exchange (circa 1915) and the Kansas wheat fields. Linking those two radically different universes, through speculative buying and selling, is the mission of this book.
The action further explores the meaning, morality, and utility of wheat speculation, which was increasing in sophistication during this period of history. The plot is centered on the turn of the century, a critical period when the agricultural economy was giving way to a fully industrialized one, and farmers were panicked over the alleged problem of falling prices. There is nothing lost in the passage of time; the allegory could equally apply to the computer industry today.
The book tells the story of one man’s discovery of a brilliant speculator and his relationship with an old and legendary farmer/mystic and his daughter. The mystic embodies both the highest wisdom and the greatest economic fallacies of the day. The question that must be confronted is how to make farms profitable in times of falling prices, and the novel shows that speculation, even with all its human foibles, makes a contribution to stabilizing the market.
Here is one of hundreds of brilliant passages describing the speculator:
“No rule of probability contains him. To say that he acts upon impulse, without reflection, in a headlong manner, is true only so far as it goes. Many people have that weakness. With him it is not a weakness. It is a principle of conduct. The impulse in his case is not ungovernable. It does not possess him and overthrow his judgment. It is the other way around. He takes possession of the impulse, mounting it as [if] it were the enchanted steed of the Arabian Nights, and rides it to its kingdom of consequences. What lies at the end is always a surprise; if it is something he doesn’t care for, no matter. Another steed is waiting. Meaning to do this, living for it, he has no baggage. There is nothing behind him. If he has wealth it is portable. He is at any moment ready.”
In a plot twist that foreshadows the New Deal, one person attempts to destroy the wheat crops with a fungus, thinking that he is doing the farmers a favor by reducing supply—based on logic he learned from unworkable government schemes. The reader is confronted with the challenge of coming to understand whether this is really beneficial to farmers, and if not, why not? (Keep in mind that “Satan’s Bushel” was written a full decade before FDR attempted the same tactics by force at the federal level.)
Another dramatic scene involves the arrest of an opponent of America’s entry into World War I. There are also plot twists that turn on romance, sorcery, criminality, mob behavior, psychological possession, price controls, and government interventions, alongside other surprises, including wholly unimaginable things like water witchery and a teak tree in Burma. The central action, however, deals with the core of economics and the place of production and speculation.
And for financial historians, there is the very special treat of observing the great drama of the early years of the Chicago commodities market—written from the vantage point of one generation in the future. There are scenes in the wheat trading pit that just take your breath away. This novel demonstrates yet again that no one can make the stuff of enterprise dramatic, tragic, and heroic like Garrett.
The effect is to so closely link the most outlandish and far-flung economic activities to human frailties and uncertainties that one gains not only an understanding of how commodity markets worked early in the last century—and how price movements work in all times and all places—but also a love for the craft.
Several passages beautifully provide insights into how the speculator thinks and how the speculator’s actions work to reduce destabilizing price fluctuations. But the commodities market is also shown to be a very human institution, subject to whim but also to learning. Also, the government comes across as nothing short of egregious and destructive.
He goes further to provide rich and detailed portrayals of all the main activists who are drawn to socialism. He shows how the experiment fails on economic and political grounds. As a novel, “Harangue” is just as competent as his others, but it takes a different angle: It explores the dangers of the intellectual and political world as a contrast to the creative world of commerce.
On the night of Jan. 18, 1930, Garrett was shot during an attempted robbery at a New York City speakeasy while he was having dinner. He was shot three times: in the shoulder, hip, and lung. He recovered, but his health suffered and he was left with a raspy voice (which wasn’t helped by his lifelong chain-smoking habit). Still, his association with the Post continued through the Great Depression, until it became impossible for anyone who opposed U.S. entry into World War II, as he did, to work in the media.
To Garrett, there is no heroism in war or statism, but only in creativity and production, and no folly greater than overthrowing the institutions that make creativity and economic progress possible. He was not just a great writer of fiction, not just a courageous opponent of state planning and war; he was a prophet of the fate of America under government control, a brilliant intellectual force in the 20th century, and a wise and eloquent spokesman for freedom itself.
I’m proud to say that I played the central role in bringing most of Garrett’s works back into print, and they are now available on Amazon and in many other places. His style alone makes for a fascinating study: crisp, evocative, to the point, with no fluff. The novels really do hold up, even though nearly a century has gone by since they were written.
