Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the "Saturday Evening Post," 1939-1942

by Garet Garrett, Bruce Ramsey (Editor)

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press
Even the "Good War" had its critics.  Sixteen months before Pearl Harbor, Garet Garrett wrote, "If this country should come awake one morning to read in the newspaper headlines, or hear by radio, that it had walked backward into war, nobody would be able to say quite how or why it happened."  This collection of essays by Garet Garrett lay out the argument against the backing into war that he, and others, believe was Roosevelt's intent all along.

Genres: History, World War II, Politics

285 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Garet Garrett was born in 1878 in Illinois. By 1903, he had become a well known writer for the Sun newspaper (1833–1950) in New York. In 1911, he wrote a fairly successful book, Where the Money Grows and Anatomy of the Bubble. In 1916, at the age of 38, Garrett became the executive editor of the New York Tribune, after having worked as a financial writer for The New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Wall Street Journal. From 1920 to 1933, his primary focus was on writing books.
Between 1920 and 1932 Garrett wrote eight books, including The American Omen in 1928 and A Bubble That Broke the World in 1932. He also wrote regular columns for several business and financial publications.

Reviews

[Stuart Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the leadup to WWII Garrett wrote a column for the Saturday Evening Post. The American public was decidedly against joining the war in Europe and so was Garrett. Roosevelt spoke publicly against involvement but worked feverishly behind the scenes to get American into Europe. Garret was not a naive pacifist, his arguments were mostly that what Roosevelt was doing was unconstitional, which it was. When Roosevelt gave Britian 50 destroyers in defiance of existing treaties, and especially with the passing of the Lend-Lease Act, Garrett's arguments changed. He understood that America was effectively if not technically at war, and if it was to be war then America should act appropriately. For him that meant that America should not be Roosevelt's Arsenal of Democracy, but a Fortress of Democracy. Instead of shipping armaments overseas America should build up its military and prepare for defense. We should have a two fleet navy, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific. And the army needed massive buildup, as at the time America had fewer tanks than Germany had in a single Division. Here Garrett for the first time fails to have faith in American industry. He believed America could defend itself or help Britian, but not both. He was proven wrong.

The times were different then. America had just 20 years earlier gotten involved in a European war and gotten nothing out of it. Americans considered this one just another European war, like the Franco-Prussian War or the Crimean War. Europeans were always fighting each other, no need for America to be involved. The League of Nations had been rejected and the United Nations did not exist. The idea of an existential threat to world civilization did not exist, even Napoleon had not been a threat to America. The reality of a government set on world domination like Nazism and the Soviet Union had not entered the American consciousness. Garrett's predictions of a supremely powerful America influencing world politics proved immensely prophetic.