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Opinions/Editorials Title: Remembering a libertarian pioneer Remembering a libertarian pioneer By ALAN W. BOCK Senior Editorial writer The year 1943 was a significant year for a philosophical tendency that apparently had been reduced to a "remnant" by the success and popularity of the New Deal: Americans who believed the country was about individual liberty and that this implied an economic system of minimal taxation and regulation and maximum free enterprise, or laissez-faire. Four books that would help to revive the tendency were published that year. Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," later made into a movie starring Gary Cooper, was the most popular, and, with her later novel, "Atlas Shrugged," had perhaps the biggest impact on popular culture. But "Discovery of Freedom," by Rose Wilder Lane, who had helped her mother with (and some say had actually written ) the "Little House on the Prairie" books, also found a wide readership. Less popular but more substantive was "The God of the Machine," by Isabel Paterson. You could say, then, that the modern libertarian movement had three Founding Mothers. All three knew and respected one another in 1943, although these stubborn individualists would break relations and Rand would object to being described as a libertarian. They were also acquainted with Albert J. Nock, the immensely erudite and studiously cranky proto-anarchist essayist whose "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" - an underappreciated classic in my view - also came out in 1943. In 1943 Isabel Paterson may have been the best-known of the four to the general public. Since the 1920s she had written the "Notes from a Bookworm" column for the weekly New York Herald-Tribune books section, which had a substantial national circulation. There she had crossed intellectual swords with countless eminentoes and was either loved or hated by most readers. Today she may be the least known. "The Woman and the Dynamo," by Stephen Cox, who teaches literature at UC San Diego, could do much to correct that lapse in our historical knowledge. It is a balanced and readable account of her life, suffused with admiration while not shrinking from her quirks and shortcomings. Born in 1886 on Manitoulin Island, on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, Isabel Mary Bowler grew up in the West - the family moved from Manitoulin to Michigan to Utah to the Canadian Northwest Territories. She adored her mother, despised her ne'er-do-well father and knew first-hand about life in shacks and tents with wooden floors. With perhaps three years of formal schooling but a love of reading that began at age 3, she left home for Calgary at 18, getting a secretarial job with R.B. Bennett, an attorney for the Canadian Pacific Railway and future prime minister of Canada. She married Kenneth Paterson, about whom we know little except that he played a mean guitar, in 1910 and seems to have broken with him almost immediately but without apparent rancor. She seldom spoke of him again as she drifted into newspaper work in Spokane and then Vancouver. In 1912 she moved to New York City, where she worked for several newspapers and published a couple of novels, "The Magpie's Nest" and "The Shadow Riders." Although she wrote several more novels (Cox analyzes them insightfully; I'll bet he's a good teacher), and worked for a while for Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mt. Rushmore, she came into her own when Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the old Tribune, hired her. In 1924, when the paper became the Herald-Tribune, she started her column, which she wrote every week (along with separate book reviews) until 1950. I read "The God of the Machine," which argues that the individual mind, free to invent and trade, not the central planner, is the indispensable source of energy that fires the "long circuit" that makes civilization possible, in the 1960s, and I've admired her ever since. While this book makes it clear that she must have been exasperating at times, it also brings out her humor, her charm and, most importantly, her way with words. The many quotes are enough to make it a pure delight. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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