The new deal was a raw deal.(Off The Shelf)(Book Review)

Salvos Against the New Deal: Selections from the Saturday Evening Post 1933-1940 By Garet Garrett, edited by Bruce Ramsey Caxton Press, 282 pages, $12.95

Economic journalist Garet Garrett (1878-1953) was one of the most brilliant and steadfast members of the pre-Cold War Old Right. While most famous for The People's Pottage, his critique of America's transformation from a republic to an imperial welfare state, he addressed subjects from technology to finance and trade in his books and essays--and wrote novels besides. This selection of Saturday Evening Post essays shows Garrett at his best: well-informed, lucid, insightful, strong-minded, always vigorous but never ranting.

Bruce Ramsey, also an economic journalist, edited this volume superbly. His introduction provides a useful survey of Garrett's life and works. Major historical figures in Garrett's essays receive concise biographical footnotes, and brief but illuminating introductions and epilogues set the essays in context and explain the outcome of issues and events still pending when they appeared.

Garrett ably captured the demoralization and fear that gripped America in the grim winter of 1932-1933. The "chagrin, amounting to a sense of guilt, at the spectacle of unemployment" gave Americans an unprecedented willingness to turn to President Franklin Roosevelt "for some quality of experimental boldness they feel in him;' handing him an almost "unlimited mandate to act." By 1936, Garrett detected widespread loss of America's old faith in herself.

One of Garrett's great strengths was his ability to present complex economics in clear, readable prose. One of the best essays, "A Particular Kind of Money;' is a thorough account of the New Deal's departure from the gold standard, devaluation of the dollar, and confiscation of gold in 1933. These measures, he argued, were failures as well as unnecessary. One marvels at Garrett's performance and wonders how many economists and journalists today could match it--especially considering that Garrett's "formal schooling ended at the third grade. He learned thereafter by reading books."

Garrett's prescience shines through, too. In 1933, even before the Supreme Court began to invalidate New Deal legislation, Garrett observed that while the Court was intended to be free of Congressional or Presidential interference, "by an act of legislation, Congress may increase [the number of Justices] at will or reduce it." Both, he pointed out, had been done for political purposes. Four years later, Roosevelt tried to pack the Court.

Labor relations were one of the ...