Garrett was born February 19, 1878, at
Pana, Illinois, and grew up on a farm near
Burlington, Iowa. He left home as a teenager, finding work as a
printer's devil in
Cleveland. In 1898, he moved to
Washington, D.C., where he covered the administration of
William McKinley as a newspaper reporter and then changed his first name to "Garet", which he pronounced the same as "Garrett." 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 new financial weekly later known simply as
The Annalist, 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. Garrett wrote 13 books:
Where the Money Grows (1911),
The Blue Wound (1921),
The Driver (1922),
The Cinder Buggy (1923), ''Satan's Bushel
(1924), Ouroboros, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind
(1926), Harangue
(1927), The American Omen
(1928), A Bubble That Broke the World
(1932), A Time Is Born
(1944), The Wild Wheel
(1952), The People's Pottage
(1953) and The American Story'' (1955). Garrett's most-read work is ''The People's Pottage'', which consists of three essays. "The Revolution Was" 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. "Rise of Empire" argues that America has become an imperial state, incompatible with Garrett's views, "a constitutional, representative, limited government in the republican form." Garet Garrett was married three times: to Bessie Hamilton in 1900, to Ida Irvin in 1908, and to Dorothy Williams Goulet in 1947. He had no children. He died November 6, 1954, at his home in the
Tuckahoe section of
Upper Township, New Jersey, while inspecting the proofs of
The American Story. ==Political viewpoint==