The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Brigenbach.
January is the birth month not only of Lysander Spooner, Lord Acton and J.R.R.
Tolkien, but also of Isabel Patterson, who was born January 22, 1886, on an island in
from the Canadian portion of Lake Huron.
Who would have ventured to guess that this slight girl was destined to become, if not
necessarily to be remembered as, one of the most influential libertarian writers of the
20th century?
Mary Isabel Bowler, as she was known back then, grew up poor in small towns and on farms
in Ontario, Michigan and Points West, in both Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest of
the United States.
She taught herself to read at the age of three and was home-schooled thereafter, except for
about two and a half years of formal schooling, all of it completed by 1898, when she was
twelve years old.
The evidence strongly suggests that Isabel Patterson was one of the great autodidacts
of the last two centuries, with a voracious appetite for reading.
As a teenager, Isabelle went to work serving food in a hotel dining room, then studied
typing and shorthand and began taking secretarial positions.
She drifted into journalism shortly after taking a job as secretary to a newspaper publisher.
Apparently, she made such a nuisance of herself, criticizing the writing in his paper that,
In exasperation, the publisher offered her a job as an editorial writer.
One can almost hear him saying to himself, let's see if she can do any better than the
people she criticizes.
She did.
And one newspaper job led to another, taking her from Calgary to Spokane to Vancouver to
Seattle to San Francisco and, finally, to New York.
In Calgary, she seems to have spent a few weeks in the throes of holy matrimony, thereby
transforming herself from Isabel Bowler to Isabel Patterson.
And in New York, in her off hours and when she was between jobs, she began writing novels.
The first of these to see print was published during World War I, when she was 30 years
old.
Occasionally, she found herself between jobs and unable to immediately locate another position
Raskow is virtually forgotten today, but during his lifetime he was extremely well known.
He was one of the most important intellectual journalists of the period between the wars,
whether as the irreverent literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, 1918-1920, the New
New York Sun, 1931-1933, or Esquire, 1932-1938, or as an iconoclastic nationally syndicated
columnist appearing daily in more than 350 newspapers.
In April of 1922, Rasko was beginning a two-year stint as literary editor of the New York Tribune.
By the time he moved on, in August 1924, it had become the New York Herald Tribune.
He quickly discovered that the volume of correspondence he had to deal with in his new post was such
that he needed a secretary.
Enter Isabelle Patterson, now in her mid-thirties, the author of two unsuccessful novels and
between newspaper jobs.
But it was not long before Rasko discovered that there was a good deal more to Patterson
In 1924, when she was 38 years old, she began writing an 1800-word weekly column for the
Herald Tribune, Turns with a Bookworm.
She continued writing it through the rest of the 20s, all of the 30s, and almost all
of the 40s, along with hundreds of articles and reviews.
What her biographer Stephen Cox calls a compendium of the literary life of her period, perhaps
its largest compendium.
Cox quotes one contemporary observer as saying that Patterson had more to say than any other
critic in New York as to which books shall be popular.
The column started, according to Cox, as an outlet for literary news and respectable literary
Gossip, but Patterson quickly expanded her bailiwick, aggressively annexing whatever
territory seemed promising for the growth of more opinions, recent books, books of the
distant past, adventures of authors and would-be authors, historical issues, philosophical
issues, political issues, economic issues, sexual issues, scientific issues.
The connection was simply the fact that these things were interesting to Isabel Patterson,
who could not understand why more people are not interested in more things.
One of Patterson's deepest interests was in politics.
In 1936, Cox reports, a truly amiable correspondent wrote to the Herald Tribune to ask why Isabel
Patterson did not write on politics.
This is a refreshing novelty, Patterson replied. Others have asked us why don't we shut up about politics.
Before long even more of her readers were posing this second question, for as the Great Depression wore on and on,
prolonged and even deepened by the wrong-headed policies of the New Deal, Patterson devoted herself more and more frequently
The Theory of Money and Credit
People.
In 1926, two years after Patterson began writing her Turns with a Bookworm column, and just
after the publication of the sensational popular bestseller Notes on Democracy, Walter Lippmann
had called its author, the nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and outspoken libertarian
H. L. Mencken, who was also the founder and editor of the monthly American Mercury, the
is the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.
Early in 1933, Mencken would step down from his editorship of the Mercury and turn the magazine over to another libertarian,
the literary editor of the nation, Henry Hazlitt.
Hazlitt would hold the job for only a year or so himself, however, before defecting to the New York Times,
The American Mercury was among the most influential magazines being published at that time, as
was The Nation, but it was far from the most widely circulated or read.
That honor went to the Saturday Evening Post, whose economics editor and chief editorial
Writer was the libertarian-leaning Garrett Garrett. In the same year that Henry Haslett
took over the reins of the American Mercury, 1933, the libertarian-leaning Felix Morley
took over the reins of the Washington Post. Within three years he was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize for distinguished editorial writing. Meanwhile, the Saturday Evening Post, the
The American Mercury, The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's,
and the other popular and influential magazines of the day, to say nothing of the period's
newspapers, were filled with articles by libertarian or libertarian-leaning writers like Albert
J. Nock, John T. Flynn, and Rose Wilder Lane, as The Nation's bookstores were filled with
these same writers' books.
And for those who haunted the bookstores and tried to keep up with the latest in books,
the weekly book review of choice was the one published by the New York Herald Tribune.
As Stephen Cox puts it, Herald Tribune Books was a distinguished venue, publishing commentary
by everyone of consequence in literature, from Robert Frost to John Steinbeck, Alan
from Glasgow to Andre Morois, Sinclair Lewis to Virginia Woolf.
And unlike most other distinguished journals, it enjoyed a very large circulation, about
500,000 in 1937.
It was a nationally circulated publication that had thousands of subscribers outside
New York.
In the mid-30s, 30,000 copies of each issue were distributed to bookstores nationwide.
Books had an audience that actually bought books. Francis Newman, herself a critic and
avid student of the literary marketplace, expressed the conventional wisdom when she
said that the Herald Tribune reached more important people than any other review. And
the deputy editor and feared weekly columnist at Herald Tribune Books was, as we have seen,
This group of writers, Mencken, Haslett, Nock, Lane, Morley, Flynn, Garrett, have sometimes
been called the old right, but they were never on the right.
They were old-time liberals on whom Franklin D. Roosevelt had turned the tables.
Roosevelt had run for the presidency in 1932 as an advocate of smaller, less intrusive
government.
would run, that is, on a liberal platform, as the term liberal was understood in the
early years of the 20th century, as the term liberal had been understood in this country
for something over a hundred years.
Once in office, of course, FDR threw the democratic platform and traditional democratic party principles
in the ashcan, and proceeded to show that he could do strong central government, meddlesome
and economic regulation and political favors in return for votes and donations better than
any Republican who'd ever come down the pike.
Worse yet, he announced to the world that he was a liberal and that the name of his
program was liberalism.
Old-time liberals like Mencken, Nock, Lane, Morley, Hazlitt, Flynn, Garrett, and Isabel
Isabel Patterson, critics of the phony liberalism FDR called the New Deal, found themselves
making common cause with a bunch of Republicans whose only real objection to the New Deal
was that they weren't running it.
This did not, however, make the old-time liberals conservatives or right-wingers.
Isabel Patterson voted for FDR in 1932, but by 1940, when he sought an unprecedented third
term in the White House, she began to feel so desperate to get rid of him that she actually
endorsed Wendell Wilkie, an establishment Republican candidate to whom she could offer
only lukewarm support at best.
And her ardor cooled even further as Wilkie's campaign unfolded.
Nonetheless, it was through the Wilkie campaign that she made perhaps the most important intellectual
contact of her career.
In 1940, through the Wilkie campaign, Isabel Patterson met a young Russian-American novelist,
playwright and screenwriter named Ayn Rand, who felt passionately against Roosevelt, though
she too had voted for him in 32.
Unfortunately Rand knew little about political philosophy and less about American history
and politics.
Rand, in her mid-thirties, with one moderately successful Broadway play and one unsuccessful
novel to her credit, quickly became a Patterson protege.
The evidence suggests that for the next few years Rand sat at the feet of Patterson, now
Now in her mid-fifties, and widely read in American history and in political philosophy,
and learned from Patterson what became the essence of her own theory of government and
of individual rights.
In a presentation this past October at the Cato Institute in Washington, Jennifer Burns,
the University of Virginia historian who recently published a book on Rand, goddess of the market,
said Patterson's influence on Rand can scarcely be exaggerated.
I think Patterson's influence on Rand has really been underestimated and underappreciated
because I think their initial encounter is lost to history because it was mostly verbal
or oral. I see so much in Patterson that's in Rand. She used to say A equals A. She talked
about reason being important. All of their ideas about the philosophers, they go right
into Rand.
Rand's is not alone in thinking this. Another writer who agrees with her is Justin Raimondo.
Raimondo, in his recently reprinted book, Reclaiming the American Right, suggests that
it was Isabel Patterson who taught Rand American history and politics, as well as much of what
Rand knew about political philosophy.
Today Ayn Rand is herself probably the single greatest intellectual influence on the modern
and Libertarian Movement.
During her lifetime, she never acknowledged Patterson's influence on her thinking.
But she did put a certain amount of energy into resurrecting Patterson's 1943 book,
The God of the Machine, the only non-fiction book Patterson ever published, an attempt
at a detailed, systematic presentation of her political ideas.
By the 1960s, twenty years after its original publication, The God of the Machine was pretty
much forgotten.
But Rand wrote about it in the Objectivist newsletter, and the Objectivist.
Rand saw to it that the Nathaniel Brandon Institute's NBI book service offered copies
of The God of the Machine for sale.
Such small fame as Patterson's book enjoys today, most of it within the libertarian movement,
is largely owing to Rand's ongoing efforts on its behalf beginning in the 1960s.
But wait, there's more.
It's largely because Rand chose to rescue Patterson's book from oblivion that people
gradually became sufficiently interested in Patterson herself to look into the details
of her own life and career.
And that, in turn, led to the discovery of what Rand had arguably tried to hide, Patterson's
immense influence on Ayn Rand's thinking.
In other words, it was only by employing an intermediary named Ayn Rand that Isabel Patterson
was able to become one of the most influential libertarian writers of the 20th century.
And it was only because her intermediary chose to rescue Patterson's book on history and
and Politics from Oblivion, that eventually made it possible for the mentor herself to
begin receiving some of the credit to which she had long been due.
Ah, the ironies of human action.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.