It’s time for liberty lovers to (re)acquaint themselves with Garet Garrett, a prolific voice of the Old Right. It’s not that everything the largely homeschooled farm boy wrote was right – he reconciled himself to the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and some restrictions on trade and immigration – but that what his “unsanctioned voice” got right, especially about the New Deal, was analytically powerful, yet largely forgotten today. That’s unfortunate, because today’s Great Reset repeats many of the same patterns of authoritarian control that Garrett identified and excoriated. Biography, like history more generally, can contain multitudes of lessons. So I have tried, over my career, to revive several once- important but now largely obscure public figures, including forgotten financial founding father Thomas Willing, and Wilma Soss, America’s first major female financial broadcast journalist and PR consultant. As with the others, I was initially drawn to Garrett because what little we know about his personal life was just so darned interesting. He was born Edward Peter Garrett in Illinois in 1878 but, like both of his parents, he changed his first name around age 20. He pronounced his new first name (one r, one t) exactly like his last name (two rs, two ts), the same as garret (two rs, one t), the habitable top floor of Victorian- style houses. Given descriptions of Garrett’s personal style when in public, Dapper Dan might have been a more Dickensian, and accurate, moniker for himself.
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