Remembering Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane
At a time when too many people seem intent on sending freedom to the dustbin of history, Women’s History Month offers an opportunity to pay tribute to women whose ideas and words have renewed the love of freedom for generations of readers.
“Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind. A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or control … it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument.”
Those are the words of Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. Born in 1905, she came to the United States in 1926 and found work in Hollywood, where she pursued a career as a screenwriter. Best known as the author of the novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” she sought to create heroic characters who depicted man at his best, and in doing so she identified the philosophical principles that made those heroes possible. After the 1957 publication of “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand wrote articles, essays and newspaper columns that described and applied her philosophy, which she named Objectivism. Her continuing influence can be measured in book sales — according to the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Santa Ana, every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, with more than 25 million copies sold. Hundreds of thousands of copies of her books are sold every year.
Read her description of how dictatorships hold power: “It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.”
Now read her description of how freedom survives: “If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights; if one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness — which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights — which means: the politico-economic system of capitalism.”
In 1943, Rand praised a new book titled “The God of the Machine” as “a document that could literally save the world.” The author of that book was Isabel Paterson, a journalist, novelist, political philosopher and prominent literary critic. Born in Canada in 1886, Paterson came to the United States as a young child and lived in rural Michigan. Except for two years of formal schooling in a tiny schoolhouse, she was entirely self-educated.
“The God of the Machine” is a masterpiece that chronicles the connection between different political systems and the economic consequences they produce, presented as an engineering problem. She shows that the American system, based on individual rights, unleashed the dynamo of production and prosperity unlike anything that had ever been seen in human history, even as other political systems continued to produce hardship, famines and wars.
In a chapter titled, “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine,” she writes, “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.” Paterson illustrates the chilling historical record of societies organized around the idea that “everyone should live primarily for others.”
She writes wryly, “Is each person to do exactly what any other person wants him to do, without limits or reservations? And only what others want him to do? What if various persons make conflicting demands? The scheme is impracticable … Of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”
Paterson argues for liberty and her arguments are fierce. “The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others,” she writes.
In a chapter on “The Structure of the United States,” Paterson finds that the founders “solved the problem on which the Roman Empire had failed.” The principles of the Constitution “embody relations,” she wrote, “and are thus capable of infinitely complex application.” Because of the existence of the United States, “what happened was that the dynamo of the energy used in human association was located. It is in the individual … the dynamo is the mind, the creative intelligence.”
Echoing this insight was Rose Wilder Lane, who engaged with both Rand and particularly Paterson. Lane was born in the Dakota Territory in 1886 to Almanzo Wilder and author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who is best known for writing “The Little House on the Prairie” series.
Like Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane became a journalist. Initially interested in communist ideology, she became disenchanted after visiting the Soviet Union. “I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom,” she wrote.
In the years that followed, Lane became a strident critic of the racism of her times — calling on Americans to renounce the “ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race” — an opponent of the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal, and a defender of the limitations on power put in the place by the Constitution of the United States.
In a powerful 1936 essay, Lane asked, “Will an American defend the Constitutional law that divides, restricts, limits and weakens political-police power, and thus protects every citizen’s personal freedom, his human rights, his exercise of those rights in a free, productive, capitalist economy and a free society? Or will he permit the political structure of these United States to be replaced by a socialist state, with its centralized, unrestricted police power regimenting individuals into classes, suppressing individual liberty, sacrificing human rights to an imagined ‘common good,’ and substituting for civil laws the edicts, or ‘directives,’ once accurately called tyranny and now called administrative law?”
These are the questions Americans must continue to ask themselves today.
All three women — Rand, Paterson and Lane — understood the value and fragility of liberty. We commend their contributions to human freedom and encourage all Americans to consider reading their works.