Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness
The end of this month is the Libertarian National Convention, so I’m looking this month at some of the thought leaders of the Libertarian movement, starting with this week’s book, Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness by Timothy Sandefur.
Freedom’s Furies is a brief biography of each of the ladies, and covers which life experiences led them to develop, each on their own, their philosophies on individualism, which philosophies led to the creation of the Libertarian Party, and one of Lane’s proteges, Roger MacBride, would be the second presidential candidate the Libertarian Party would field in 1976. But that’s in the future, where our story starts.
Isabel Paterson was born Isabel Mary Bowler on January 22, 1886, in Canada and would eventually immigrate to the western Canadian planes with her parents before moving into the United States. She married Kenneth Paterson in 1910 but they separated after a few weeks, and he died sometime after that. Since they never divorced, she kept his name when she moved to Spokane, Washington and began writing editorials for various papers, which she signed with her initials, I.M.P. In 1912 she moved to New York, where she was horrified by the measures Wilson implemented as the country moved to war in 1916.
By 1924 Paterson was hired to write a weekly column, Turns with a Bookworm, first with the New York Tribune, which merged a year later with another paper, becoming the Herald Tribune, which she would write for weekly until her last column was published on January 30, 1949. This column was less a book review, although her thoughts on literature were certainly discussed, and more a stream of consciousness connecting various works of literature with what was going on with the world. And it was through her column that she would meet and befriend Lane.
Rose Wilder Lane is probably better known to most of us than we realize, as she was born December 5, 1886 in DeSmet, Dakota Territory, to Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls Wilder….yep, if you were a fan of the Little House books or TV series, Rose is the daughter mentioned in the final book of that series, The First Four Years, and would be instrumental in assisting her mother to write those stories. That is ALSO in the future, as far as Freedom’s Furies is concerned.
After leaving DeSmet, the Wilder’s eventually settled in Missouri and that’s more or less where Rose grew up, although she spent some time with an aunt in Louisiana, where she graduated high school. By 1908 she was living in San Franscisco where she met and married her husband Clair Gillette Lane in 1909. The couple traveled all over the country chasing various schemes of Clair Lane’s until Rose gave birth to a stillborn son and underwent surgery as the result of the stillbirth that left her unable to bear additional children. The marriage failed not long after that, but Lane never remarried, instead turning to publishing works of her own, fiction and biography, before traveling to Albania in 1921. She fell in love with the country and would have been happy to set up a bohemian author’s shop unless she kept running out of money. She did travel quite a bit in Europe, striking up a friendship with Dorothy Thompson, who would go on to marry Sinclair Lewis.
Lewis was the premier author of a literary movement that was called Revolt from the Village and was characterized by sort of an ennui against small town life and the conformity found therein. Lewis’s book Main Street was initially an inspiration for both Paterson and Lane, although Lane would eventually rethink her take on Main Street and write her own homage to small town America with Old Home Town.
In 1928 Laura would summon Rose home and Rose would not return to Albania, getting pulled instead into the Great Depression and the political movement that heralded the death of individualism, aka The New Deal.
It was during the depression that Rose would help Laura write her Little House Series, and the author of this book, Sandefur, did an absolutely masterful job pulling out the sections from the individual books that really spoke to the pioneer mindset that Rose inherited and turned into her contribution to individualism philosophy.
I actually wanted to send a quick should out to my parents here, mom for reading me the Little House Series until I got old enough to read them myself and purloined the family copies, which are currently boxed in my attic, with the covers falling off of them. And Sandefur mentions in here that while Laura actually disliked fiction, Rose liked it fine and among her favorite authors were Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. So, shout out to my dad who read me Heinlein when I was a kid. I actually laughed when I read that and realized that with those two literary influences in my young life, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Robert A. Heinlein, I mean, is anyone actually SURPRISED I turned into an anarcho-capitalist libertarian douchebag as an adult?
Anyways, back to the third fury, Ayn Rand. Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, Russia and her family was a fairly wealthy Jewish family. She was the oldest of three girls and was certainly old enough to remember the Bolshevik revolution and the horrors that brought about in the aftermath. She did receive a college education in Russia but was unable to secure work under the increasingly repressive regime, so in 1925 the family secured what they knew would be a one-way visa for her to visit extended family in Chicago. She hopped the plane to America and never looked back, working as a playwright, screen writer, and novelist in America, working on her own philosophical ideas. She became friendly with first Paterson and then Lane.
So, the three ladies did know each other and exchanged letters until their friendships fell apart, in the case of Paterson her own irascibility drove Lane and Rand away, and in the case of Lane and Rand, Lane could not really reconcile herself to Rand’s atheism.
But for about 15 years there was a great deal of overlap and the ladies’ shared ideas and bolstered each other’s writing careers. And in 1943, each of them published a book for which each would garner a fair amount of fame in their own time, all of which are considered classic Libertarian literature.
Isabel Paterson’s contribution was called The God in the Machine and is a manifesto in which she explains the concepts of economics and politics in engineering terms. Rose Wilder Lane wrote The Discovery of Freedom, which focused on the history of freedom, going back to biblical times, and discussing the “self-directed capacity of living things to create meaning in a universe of inanimate matter.” Where Paterson and Lane’s contributions are treated as non-fiction philosophy, Rand’s book, The Fountainhead, was epic fiction, celebrating excellence and individualism in the face of conformity and mediocrity.
Each of them was horrified in their own way as the decades of the 1930s and 1940s unfolded, and pushed back in their writing at the fascism that FDR was unfolding in America. We can argue over whether his policies were fascist or communist and ultimately, it’s irrelevant, as anyone who studies history will tell you that the two ideologies are two sides of the same coin. Paterson wrote scathing commentary in her weekly column until she left the paper in the face of the increasingly left hand bent of the paper’s editors.
Rand and Lane each testified before the House Un-American Activities committee. One story about Lane was particularly fun to read. When FDR implemented Social Security, she refused to participate, did everything she could to keep her income below the tax threshold and going off grid, planting her own food and trading with neighbors. When there was a radio broadcast about social security, she wrote a postcard to the station on which she asked why the nation was bothering to fight Germany if it was simultaneously adopting that country’s policies, writing “All these ‘social security’ laws are German, instituted by Bismarck and expanded by Hitler. Americans believe in Freedom, not in being taxed for our own good and bossed by bureaucrats.” The postmaster turned the card over to the FBI, who visited Lane at her home, where she promptly booted them off her property, telling them that “I am an American citizen. I hire you; I pay you. And you have the insolence to question MY attitude? The point is that I don’t like YOUR attitude. What is this---the Gestapo?”
She then published the story as a pamphlet, and it received fairly wide circulation with the National Economic Council. And the FBI even confirmed it happened. Ah the good old days…. when you could tell the FBI to fuck right off, and they would fuck right off.
This book was masterfully written, covering the history and times, and even explaining quite succinctly why Hoover failed so spectacularly in the immediate aftermath of the stock market collapse. Sandefur wove together the literary influences and historical events that shaped they way these ladies thought, and clearly shows how what they in turn wrote impacted the American Political scene, which would eventually give birth to the Libertarian party, which would field it’s first candidate in 1972.
I quite enjoyed this book, it’s made me want to go back and re-read the Little House Series, and Ayn Rand, and I added The God in the Machine to my read pile for this year, that will be in November. And that’s it for this week.
