The Revolution Is!: The People's Pottage - Revisited

By James C. Bowers

This book contains extensive analysis and commentary on three Essays written many years ago by Garet Garrett. The three related Essays were eventually published together as a book in 1953 by Caxton Press under the title of, The People's Pottage. It may be one of the more insightful series of political commentaries in modern history. When reading, one quickly realizes that President Obama is the political twin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The number of other present-day applications that are presented herein is startling!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483560434

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INTRODUCTION

This book is an analysis of an impressive series of three Essays written over a period of years from 1938 to 1952 by Garet Garrett. The three were eventually published together in 1953 by Caxton Press under the title of, The People’s Pottage. It may be one of the more insightful series of political commentaries in modern history. It is important to understand that Mr. Garrett was not someone on the fringe, making far out unfounded political charges and observations. Rather he was a well-known, highly respected journalist at the time. Because of his incredible pronouncements, so far ahead of his time, a short biography is given below to document his outstanding career and credibility:

Garet Garrett was born February 19, 1878 in Illinois and grew up on a farm near Burlington, Iowa. He left home as a teenager, finding work as a printer’s helper in Cleveland. In 1898, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he covered the administration of William McKinley as a newspaper reporter. In 1900, he moved to New York City, where he became a financial reporter. By 1910, he had become a financial columnist for the New York Evening Post. In 1913, he became editor of The New York Times Annalist, a financial weekly and in 1915 he joined the editorial council of the New York Times. In 1916, at 38, he became the executive editor of the New York Tribune.

In 1922, he became the principal writer on economic issues for the Saturday Evening Post, a position he held until 1942. From 1944 to 1950 he edited American Affairs, the magazine of The Conference Board. In his career, Garrett was a confidant of Bernard Baruch and Herbert Hoover, among other prominent people.

Garrett wrote 13 books. His most-read work is The People’s Pottage, which consists of three Essays: The Revolution Was, which portrays the New Deal as a revolution within the form that undermined the American republic, Ex America charts the decline in America’s individualist values from 1900 to 1950 and The Rise of Empire which argues that America has become too much of an imperial state, trying to solve all of the world’s problems.

The organizational structure I am using for this book is quite unusual and is important for the reader to understand. The first of the three Essays by Mr. Garrett, The Revolution Was (written in 1938), is the most thought provoking of the three Essays. It also is fascinating reading when one mentally transposes President Obama’s name with that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) throughout this first Essay. I have added comments, updates, analysis and present day applications throughout all of his three Essays. My added material is highlighted in bold print, so it is easy to identify my words from Mr. Garrett’s. In addition, any supplemental material by other authors that I insert from time to time is also in bold print, but in addition is italicized.

Mr. Garrett’s thesis in 1938 was that the revolution that Obama would years later forecast he was going to bring to America (fundamentally transform us) - had already happened - 70 years earlier! Mr. Garrett makes a very strong case for his conclusions. Obviously a lot to ponder and digest!

My title, The Revolution Is, comes from my premise that it’s not quite over. Mr. Garrett states his case very effectively that, The Revolution Was - that is, it’s all over … it’s already happened. I try to show that the Revolution is still ongoing and we still have a chance to reverse this tide and reclaim America. I include an entire Chapter Four on how we can accomplish that.

CHAPTER ONE

[The added comments by James C. Bowers in 2015 are put in bold type for easy identification.]

The Revolution Was

1938

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 the 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 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.

Sound familiar? With so many accusing Obama and his Administration of being incompetent! Maybe they’re not! Maybe they know exactly what they are doing. Barack Obama’s background makes that concern realistic, since his confidants, his mentors, his father and mother, his teachers, his idols - everyone he ever spent time with his entire life had a deeply leftist worldview!!

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 technique, 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.

Consider that Obama was more open in his true intentions than Roosevelt. By now our population has become so brainwashed, uniformed and apathetic, Obama was comfortable openly proclaiming that he wanted to, fundamentally transform America. He also knew that today’s mainstream media would cover for him no matter what he said or did. Liberal bias in the media has been documented and openly acknowledged by both sides for decades, but with Obama it has reached an unprecedented level - as some liberals have belatedly acknowledged! Did most of us really want to fundamentally transform the greatest country in the history of the world? Mr. Garrett felt that after only two terms, Roosevelt had already accomplished that goal. If not, we gave Obama two terms to try and finish the job! Mark Levin, the constitutional lawyer and author of several best-selling books, said on his radio talk show of November 19, 2014 that President Obama has completed a silent coup that does complete the job. He feels that we are now living in a post-Constitutional period in our country. He does believe that we can recapture our country, but the situation is dire. [Chapter FOUR of this book will offer specific suggestion on how to recover.]

No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time that comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place. Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technique; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion, a certain end held constantly in view, was relentlessly pursued. The end held constantly in view was power!

A new documentary movie, AGENDA 2: Master’s of Deceit, exposes the fact that this exact strategy is now being used to finish what the New Deal started. [See: AgendaDocumentary.com, for info on this new film and related products.] Many people today, due to what they have been taught in school, believe that Roosevelt delivered us from the Great Depression. People at that time were so desperate that they clung to every word FDR spoke in his cleverly orchestrated radio Fireside Chats. As with Obama, even though things were not improving after his first term, people believed in Roosevelt and re-elected him four times because he, really cared. However, the facts on FDR’s failure are now easy to document. Even at that time, his own Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, bluntly acknowledged that fact when he stated, We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. He concluded, I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … And an enormous debt to boot!

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.

As mentioned earlier, during his election campaign, President Obama repeatedly talked about, fundamentally changing America. Many people took that in a good way, which is one reason he was elected. For me it was a little eerie. It brought back to my mind an incident that my father had told me about when I was only a young man and at that time I did not realize its significance. I have never heard or read anything about this anywhere since. My Dad had been an Army Officer during WWI. At the time this incident occurred in the late 1930’s, Dad was a civilian, managing the airport at South Bend, Indiana. Thirty years later in the 1960’s is when my Dad told me about the time he was unexpectedly visited by the Army Chief of Staff. In apparently a very private meeting at his airport, he was told that the top military brass had gotten together and decided that if President Roosevelt used the depression, presently going on in the country, as an excuse to declare martial law in order to establish a dictatorship, the top military people had agreed among themselves that they had made an unprecedented decision to ignore Roosevelt’s orders and come out on the side of the people. I never asked for details. I didn’t know or understand enough to ask. I don’t know if the General came to him because my Dad was the manager of an airport or because he had been an Army officer, still in the Reserves. I also didn’t ask if he knew how many others were informed. (It had to be quite a few.) My Dad was never a political person. This conversation just came up one time and was never discussed again. It was only much, much later, after I had become more informed by reading various books that discussed how many of Roosevelt’s leftist confidents had urged him to make the move that I then realized the significance of what my Father had said and how close we had come to a take-over from within - way back then! That same fear was later revisited when I heard Obama’s Chief of Staff, Ron Emanuel, talk about, never letting a crisis go to waste. Déjà vu!

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. Until it was too late, few understood Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law… so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law?

For a significant illustration of what has happened to words — of the double meaning that inhabits them — put in contrast what the New Deal means when it speaks of preserving the American system of free private enterprise and what American business means when it speaks of defending it. To the New Deal these words — the American system of free private enterprise — stand for a conquered province. To the businessman the same words stand for a world that is in danger and may have to be defended. The New Deal is right. Business is wrong! You do not defend a world that is already lost. When was it lost? That one cannot say precisely. It is a point for the revolutionary historian to ponder. We know only that it was surrendered peacefully, without a struggle, almost unawares. There was no day, no hour, no celebration of the event — and yet definitely, the ultimate power of initiative did pass from the hands of private enterprise to government. There it is and there it will remain until, if ever, it shall be reconquered. Certainly government will never surrenders without a struggle. To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan’s first view of China — so rich, so soft, so unaware. No politically adult people could ever have been so little conscious of revolution. There was here no revolutionary tradition, as in Europe, but in place of it the strongest tradition of subject government that had ever been evolved — that is, government subject to the will of the people, not its people but the people. Why should anyone fear government?

In the naive American mind the word revolution had never grown up. The meaning of it had not changed since horse-and-buggy days, when Oliver Wendell Holmes said: Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles. It called up scenes from Carlyle and Victor Hugo, or it meant killing the Czar with a bomb, as he may have deserved for oppressing his people. Definitely, it meant the overthrow of government by force; and nothing like that could happen here. We had passed a law against it. Well, certainly nothing like that was going to happen here. That it probably could not happen, and that everybody was so sure it couldn’t made everything easier for what did happen.

To get an overview of just how effective President Obama has been in transforming America, I wrote a Letter to the Editor which summarizes the situation as far back as 2010:

January 24, 2010

St. Petersburg Times

Editor:

It was refreshing to read the candor in your lead editorial of January 24th concerning President Obama’s, Productive Two Years. Most knowledgeable liberals and liberal organizations have been very quiet on this subject, while the less informed liberal groups have been howling over President Obama compromising with the Republicans on the modest tax cut agreement and not closing Guantanamo. As I shall attempt to summarize, President Obama has already accomplished more fundamental change (as he promised) in two years than FDR did in four terms.

The complaining on both sides has provided the cover needed for Obama to almost complete his massive goal. During his brief time, the government has taken at least partial control of:

1) The Auto Industry [GM & Chrysler].

2) The Financial Industry all of it.

3) The Entire Healthcare Industry.

4) The Housing Industry.

5) The Student Loan Program.

6) The Food Supply.

In addition, this Administration has prompted basic changes to our American culture and our way of life as seen by:

7) The ability to control all businesses by allowing the EPA edicts (that strangle business) to stand as law, without any Congressional input, plus thousands of pages pf new regulations.

8) The ability to control the Internet by FCC edicts, not Congressional actions.

9) Allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the Armed Forces, breaking over 200 years of tradition.

10) On the horizon will be the application of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, to undermine Fox News and all of Talk Radio.

The Federal Government has always had the constitutional authority to control the military, which is a large part of our budget. They have always had indirect control of our money supply (See Edward Griffin’s book and YouTube speech on the Federal Reserve System), interest rates and inflation - which affects everything. In addition, the Federal Government has indirect control over the price of oil and gas. Add to all of this is the unbelievable fact that here in the land of private property, the state and federal governments own 40% of all of our land! Other than land for buildings and Parks, why should they own any?

After two years of Obama, the obvious question now is: What’s left? The answer is: Almost nothing! Think about that. The Federal Government now has almost total control over every aspect of our lives and will soon be able to silence all of the voices of information or opposition.

Each of the ten items listed above have been publicized. The problem is most Americans don’t correlate the news items as they develop. Many get upset in a certain area, but by the time the next item comes along, they don’t relate it to the last one - to see the overall picture of the total transformation taking place. Most are too busy with their jobs or family and their own lives.

Dr. James C. Bowers

Revolution in modern times is no longer an uncouth business. The ancient demagogic art, like every other art, has, as we say, advanced. It has become in fact science — the science of political dynamics. And your scientific revolutionary in spectacles regards force in a cold, impartial manner. It may or may not be necessary. If not, so much the better; to employ it wantonly, or for the love of it, when it is not necessary, is vulgar, unintelligent and wasteful. Destruction is not the aim. The more you destroy the less there is to take over. Always the single end in view is a transfer of power!

Outside of the Communist party and its aurora of radical intellectuals, few Americans seemed to know that revolution had become a department of knowledge, with a philosophy and a doctorate of its own, a language, a great body of experimental data, schools of method, textbooks, and manuals — and this was revolution regarded not as an act of heroic redress in a particular situation, but revolution as a means to power in the abstract case. There was a prodigious literature of revolutionary thought concealed only by the respectability of its dress. Americans generally associated dangerous doctrine with bad printing, rude grammar, and stealthy distribution. Here was revolutionary doctrine in well printed and well written books, alongside of best sellers at your bookstore or in competition with detectives on your news dealer’s counter. As such it was all probably harmless, or it was about something that could happen in Europe, not here. A little communism on the newsstand like that might be good for us, in fact, regarded as a twinge of pain in a robust, somewhat reckless social body. One ought to read