New book on libertarianism's founding mothers

Timothy Sandofur's new book on the founding mothers of libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand.

The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism | Reason magazine - Marcus Witcher: 

Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95

March 2023 - "With Freedom's Furies, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.

"Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio's literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis' books 'expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience and cravenness.' Each joined Lewis in rejecting conformity, but they resisted his dismissal of all bourgeois virtue—and Rand also rejected his pessimism.

"The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was 'almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets.' The furies realized they would have to produce their own.

"And so Paterson's The God of the Machine (a philosophical treatise), Lane's The Discovery of Freedom (a pop history crossed with a manifesto), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a didactic novel) were published in 1943. All three writers believed that the morality of self-sacrifice should be rejected. Rand and Paterson both argued for a form of ethical egoism, and they would long debate who influenced whom. But the two differed greatly in their style: Rand was deeply influenced by 19th-century Romanticism while Paterson was committed to naturalism. For her part, Lane argued that human energy produced human flourishing and that 'every human being, by his nature, is free.' Humanity simply needed to discover this truth; hence her book's title.

"All three authors independently developed some of the most important insights of classical liberal academics. Paterson's criticism of the New Deal, for instance, included the argument that central planning was impossible because bureaucrats 'would have to know "absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made."' These arguments capture some of the insights of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, who were not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Likewise, The God of the Machine anticipated Karl Popper's critique of 'the arrested society,' which he wrote two years later. Paterson recognized that all utopias 'are final…they are static societies'; as such, she suggested, they could not adapt, because 'creative processes do not function to order.' In short, 'To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.'

"Lane anticipated Hayek's critique of government planning in a short 1936 book titled Give Me Liberty. She argued, in Sandefur's words, that 'to truly organize an economy…government bureaucrats would, in principle, need infinite knowledge.' Lane also hit on some important insights later associated with the economics of public choice. The idea that bureaucrats could better manage the economy than individuals was, she wrote, the 'dominant fallacy' of the 1930s. Instead, Lane insisted that 'there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.'

"Sandefur also details the trio's views on religion and how those related to their defense of liberty. While all three believed that natural rights existed independently of government, they arrived at this conclusion in different ways. Lane and Paterson both argued that the existence of a deity was necessary. Rand, an atheist, disagreed; she believed that human beings could reason our way to a justification of natural rights.

"Lane irritated the other two women with her insistence that Christian ethics could be reconciled with a robust defense of individual liberty. Her argument that people have a moral sense that leads us, by nature, to care for our neighbor annoyed Rand and Paterson, who felt that man should look after his own happiness and had no moral obligation to others. Paterson took umbrage at the vagueness of Lane's 'all men are brothers' thesis and retorted, 'Stalin is no brother of mine.' This helped end Lane and Paterson's friendship. Lane's religious views and Rand's atheism likewise made any deep friendship between the two women difficult, and they met in person just once....

"Although this is an exceptional book, it is not flawless. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of attention to the ways the furies applied their individualism to minorities. Sandefur does note that 'on matters of race relations, freedom of speech, and sexual autonomy, they were decades ahead of their time in embracing views later classified as "liberal"' [but] ... it is frustrating that the book doesn't delve into that point in more detail. Sandefur mentions, for instance, that Lane was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the largest black newspapers in the country) in 1942, but he doesn't detail any of the arguments she made in her essays there.... For more than two years at the Courier, Lane applied the ideals of individual liberty and her unique conception of human energy to black Americans and their struggle....

"Still, this book's flaws are small compared to its contributions. Freedom's Furies offers hope to a new generation of classical liberals and libertarians living through the threat of authoritarianism abroad and illiberalism at home. Compared with the domestic overreach of the 1930s and '40s and the rise of fascism and communism abroad, our own troubles don't seem quite as bad.... Individual liberty and self-reliance are still the keystones, and the furies' successors will surely continue to promote liberty in the face of the darkness today.'

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/02/11/the-founding-mothers-of-libertarianism/

Timothy Sandofur on Freedom’s Furies: Three Women Who Sparked a Revolution, Goldwater Institute, March 9, 2023:

Order Freedom's Furies at Amazon.com.

A graphic novel on libertarian Rose Wilder Lane

Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story by Peter Bagge | Drawn & Quarterly:

"Peter Bagge returns with a biography of another fascinating twentieth-century trailblazer —the writer, feminist, war correspondent, and libertarian Rose Wilder Lane.... Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story is a fast-paced, charming, informative look at the brilliant Lane. Among other achievements, she was a founder of the American libertarian movement and a champion of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in bringing the classic Little House on the Prairie series to the American public....

"Bagge’s portrait of Lane is heartfelt and affectionate, probing into the personal roots of her rugged individualism. Credo is a deeply researched dive into a historical figure whose contributions to American society are all around us, from the books we read to the politics we debate."
Read more: https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/credo-rose-wilder-lane-story
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Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story – Reason.com - [from article intro by Brian Doherty]:

June 2019 -  "Rose Wilder Lane was born on December 5, 1886, in the territory of South Dakota. Her early years were a hardscrabble settler's life similar to that of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder.... After an early career writing for newspapers and penning popular biographies of figures such as Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford, Lane worked with the Red Cross in Europe in the 1920s. She adventured through Albania and parts of the Middle East....

"Throughout the 1930s, Lane assisted her mother with her fabulously successful series of children's books.... During that same period, under her own byline, Lane was a successful novelist and one of the most popular fiction writers for the Saturday Evening Post, a leading bastion of anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal sentiment. Lane worked with proto-libertarian editor Garet Garrett until he was no longer welcome at the publication, which reversed its stance after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

"As war approached and the state grew, Lane saw her vision of old-fashioned American liberty on the ropes. In response, she produced one of the ur-texts of the modern American libertarian movement, 1943's The Discovery of Freedom, a song of praise to human growth and political liberty's role in furthering it.

"Lane was a revolutionary; while believing America's experiment in liberty arose organically from its frontier experience, she thought the American model could and should spread beyond the nation's borders. America 'is a totally new world,' she wrote. 'This new world is an intricate interplaying of dynamic energies, a living network enclosing the whole earth and linking all human beings in one common effort, one common fate'....

"The Little House books remain part of the American canon, with the Wilder family still standing as the template of the self-sufficient pioneer spirit. Lane herself was childless, but she had a habit of quasi-adopting young people, one of whom went on to change the political history of libertarianism: her 'grandson,' the eventual Libertarian Party presidential nominee Roger MacBride. Though her own writing is now less well-known, Lane undeniably served as an intellectual foremother to a foundational generation of mid-century libertarian educators and activists."
Read more, and see sample pages: https://reason.com/2019/05/01/credo/

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More sample pages here: https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/sites/default/files/docs/samples/credo.sample.pdf

Wilder & Lane's Libertarian House on the Prairie

Wilder’s ‘Little House’ on a libertarian prairie - San Francisco Chronicle - Christine Woodside:

December 26, 2016 - "Libertarian ideas are woven into the very fabric of American life.... I think of the libertarian branch of the Republican Party as the 'Little House on the Prairie caucus.' Why? Because the beloved Little House children’s book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder was full of free-market ideals.

"Wilder was a chicken farmer and occasional journalist who became the author and heroine of the Little House books about her 1870's-80's pioneer childhood. Wilder’s secret collaborator, her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, infused the books with libertarian views....

"In 1930, during the Great Depression, Wilder and Lane were 63 and 44 years old and living on the family farm in southern Missouri. At Lane’s request, Wilder sat down and wrote of the family’s migration from Wisconsin to the future state of Kansas to Minnesota to Dakota Territory, with her Pa, Ma, and sisters, looking for the ideal farm.

"In Wilder’s early drafts, the family withstood frontier life staunchly, jaws set. Wilder told her daughter the Ingallses never showed emotion. But as Lane rewrote Wilder’s notes, she removed difficult events, like a baby brother’s death or the government’s subsidy of their blind sister’s schooling, and inserted plenty of happy dialogue with no bitterness, resentment or remorse.

"Within a few months, Lane had sold the first book, Little House in the Big Woods. One editor said it was 'the book no Depression could stop.' Readers asked for more, so the two women wrote seven more books together.

"The books extolled the power of ordinary people to make their own destinies. Consider this scene in The Long Winter, the sixth book: When frequent blizzards kept trains from bringing supplies to their Dakota Territory town, the storekeeper tries to overcharge starving neighbors who want to buy the last stock of wheat. A riot seems imminent until Pa speaks up: 'Don’t forget that every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever, and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over.' It’s an appealing distillation of the idea that a free market can regulate itself....

"The series has sold millions of copies and inspired the TV show Little House on the Prairie.

"With the comfortable income provided by book royalties, Lane helped fund a free-market academy in the early 1960s in Colorado called the Freedom School [run by Robert Lefevre - ed.]. Two of the graduates were perhaps the most profoundly influential donors in modern conservatism: Charles and David Koch. Both joined the new Libertarian Party, along with Lane’s heir, Roger Lea MacBride, in the 1970s, before later returning to the Republican Party."

Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wilder-s-Little-House-on-a-libertarian-10819927.php
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See also: Wilder's Little House books as libertarian propaganda

Laura Ingalls Wilder as 'libertarian matriarch'

The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, One of America’s First Libertarians | TIME - David Boaz:

May 9, 2015 - "Laura Ingalls Wilder is a bestselling author again, 83 years after she began publishing her Little House on the Prairie books and 58 years after her death at age 90. Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is a 472-page edition of Wilder’s original memoir, for which she couldn’t find a publisher in 1930....

"Wilder was born just after the Civil War in the Big Woods region of Wisconsin. Life was hard on the frontier, and with her parents and then her husband she moved to Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Florida, and eventually Mansfield, Missouri. She also became, unexpectedly, a sort of libertarian matriarch.

"Laura’s only child was Rose Wilder Lane. Lane was born in DeSmet, South Dakota, and grew up on her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. After high school she drifted to San Francisco, married briefly, and began a career as a writer.... [B]y the 1930s ... she was a staunch libertarian. In 1935 she wrote in the Saturday Evening Post:

I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better — and more productive, even in material ways — than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends.

"Those ideas can be found in the Little House books, which Lane is said to have helped edit or ghostwrite. In Little House on the Prairie, young Laura hears the Declaration of Independence read and thinks, 'Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. … When I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good'....

"Lane wrote two novels of her own about her family’s homestead, Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) and Free Land, which made her a bestselling, well-paid writer. But her interests turned more to politics, and she became a vociferous adversary of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, which she saw as 'creeping socialism'....

"In the dark year of 1943, during World War II, Lane and two other remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern Libertarian movement. Lane published a passionate historical book called The Discovery of Freedom....

"Also in 1943 Lane met Roger MacBride, the 14-year-old son of her editor at Reader’s Digest. MacBride was fascinated by her ideas, visited her frequently at her Connecticut home, and came to think of himself as her ''dopted grandson.'

"[MacBride] was made a Republican elector in Virginia in 1972.... He cast his electoral vote for the new Libertarian Party ticket of philosopher John Hospers and journalist Tonie Nathan, the first woman to receive an electoral vote. He became the 1976 Libertarian presidential candidate and put the party on the map with ballot status in 32 states, a widely distributed campaign book, and a distant third-place finish....

"As Lane’s heir, he published another of Wilder’s manuscripts, The First Four Years, arranged for the popular 1970s television series, and wrote eight novels of his own about Rose’s early life, continuing in the vein of Little House."

Read more: http://time.com/3848967/laura-ingalls-wilder-is-back/
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Ayn Rand at 110

Ayn Rand at 110 | Cato Institute - David Boaz:

February 2, 2015 - "In the dark year of 1943, in the depths of World War II and the Holocaust, when the United States was allied with one totalitarian power to defeat another, three remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian movement. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had written Little House on the Prairie and other stories of American rugged individualism, published a passionate historical essay called The Discovery of Freedom. Isabel Paterson, a novelist and literary critic, produced The God of the Machine, which defended individualism as the source of progress in the world.

"The other great book of 1943 was The Fountainhead, a powerful novel about architecture and integrity by Ayn Rand. The book’s individualist theme did not fit the spirit of the age, and reviewers savaged it. But it found its intended readers. Its sales started slowly, then built and built. It was still on the New York Times bestseller list two full years later. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the 1940s, millions eventually, some of them because of the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and many of them were inspired enough to seek more information about Ayn Rand’s ideas. Rand went on to write an even more successful novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957, and to found an association of people who shared her philosophy, which she called Objectivism....

"George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged 'the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace.' Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: 'Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.'

"Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings.

"Her books garnered millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of vivid, can’t-put-it-down novels. The people who read Ayn Rand and got the point didn’t just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.

"Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of irrationality and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of “do your own thing” and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the “Me Decade” but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.

"Throughout those decades her books continued to sell — 30 million copies over the years, and they still move off the shelves. The financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts gave Atlas Shrugged a huge push. A Facebook group titled 'Read the news today? It’s like Atlas Shrugged is happening in real life' was formed. More than 50 years after publication, the book had its best sales year ever. And sales have remained high — more than a million copies of Rand’s books were sold in 2012."

Read more: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/ayn-rand-110
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Wilder's Little House as libertarian propaganda

'Little House' Is Not a Big Libertarian Conspiracy - Bloomberg - Megan McArdle:

August 13, 2013 - "Did Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, turn the 'Little House on the Prairie' stories into libertarian propaganda? That’s the argument of a long article in the Boston Globe.... Christine Woodside, the author of the Boston Globe piece, argues that Lane imposed her own politics on her mother’s narrative....

"Bold claims! Unfortunately, they are not bold claims backed up by excellent evidence.... For example, here’s one of the most damning bits of evidence that Woodside offers:

"In the fifth book, for example, “By the Shores of Silver Lake,” Laura promises to become a teacher to pay for her older sister Mary to attend a college for the blind. Wilder’s own account of her life reveals that although Wilder’s sister did attend a college for the blind, in reality it was the government of Dakota Territory -- and not the family’s hard work -- that covered the bills....

"That the Dakota Territory government paid Mary’s tuition at the Vinton, Iowa, college for the blind has been well known to Ingallsologists for some time; it’s mentioned in Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, by Pamela Smith Hill. However [according to Smith Hill], ...

Dakota Territory actually paid for Mary’s tuition; the family paid for her room and board, books and supplies, and clothing.

"Woodside’s passage implies that Wilder basically lied about having to work hard to keep her in college, but .[Wilder's account was] ... not nearly as misleading as what Woodside wrote, if Smith Hill has the right of it. And [Woodside] doesn’t offer any proof that this was politically motivated."

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/-little-house-is-not-a-big-libertarian-conspiracy.html
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