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NOTE Isabel Paterson: Early Libertarian

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Brigenbach.

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January is the birth month not only of Lysander Spooner, Lord Acton and J.R.R.

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Tolkien, but also of Isabel Patterson, who was born January 22, 1886, on an island in

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from the Canadian portion of Lake Huron.

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Who would have ventured to guess that this slight girl was destined to become, if not

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necessarily to be remembered as, one of the most influential libertarian writers of the

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20th century?

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Mary Isabel Bowler, as she was known back then, grew up poor in small towns and on farms

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in Ontario, Michigan and Points West, in both Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest of

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the United States.

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She taught herself to read at the age of three and was home-schooled thereafter, except for

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about two and a half years of formal schooling, all of it completed by 1898, when she was

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twelve years old.

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The evidence strongly suggests that Isabel Patterson was one of the great autodidacts

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of the last two centuries, with a voracious appetite for reading.

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As a teenager, Isabelle went to work serving food in a hotel dining room, then studied

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typing and shorthand and began taking secretarial positions.

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She drifted into journalism shortly after taking a job as secretary to a newspaper publisher.

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Apparently, she made such a nuisance of herself, criticizing the writing in his paper that,

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In exasperation, the publisher offered her a job as an editorial writer.

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One can almost hear him saying to himself, let's see if she can do any better than the

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people she criticizes.

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She did.

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And one newspaper job led to another, taking her from Calgary to Spokane to Vancouver to

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Seattle to San Francisco and, finally, to New York.

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In Calgary, she seems to have spent a few weeks in the throes of holy matrimony, thereby

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transforming herself from Isabel Bowler to Isabel Patterson.

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And in New York, in her off hours and when she was between jobs, she began writing novels.

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The first of these to see print was published during World War I, when she was 30 years

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old.

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Occasionally, she found herself between jobs and unable to immediately locate another position

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Raskow is virtually forgotten today, but during his lifetime he was extremely well known.

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He was one of the most important intellectual journalists of the period between the wars,

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whether as the irreverent literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, 1918-1920, the New

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New York Sun, 1931-1933, or Esquire, 1932-1938, or as an iconoclastic nationally syndicated

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columnist appearing daily in more than 350 newspapers.

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In April of 1922, Rasko was beginning a two-year stint as literary editor of the New York Tribune.

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By the time he moved on, in August 1924, it had become the New York Herald Tribune.

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He quickly discovered that the volume of correspondence he had to deal with in his new post was such

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that he needed a secretary.

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Enter Isabelle Patterson, now in her mid-thirties, the author of two unsuccessful novels and

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between newspaper jobs.

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But it was not long before Rasko discovered that there was a good deal more to Patterson

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In 1924, when she was 38 years old, she began writing an 1800-word weekly column for the

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Herald Tribune, Turns with a Bookworm.

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She continued writing it through the rest of the 20s, all of the 30s, and almost all

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of the 40s, along with hundreds of articles and reviews.

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What her biographer Stephen Cox calls a compendium of the literary life of her period, perhaps

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its largest compendium.

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Cox quotes one contemporary observer as saying that Patterson had more to say than any other

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critic in New York as to which books shall be popular.

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The column started, according to Cox, as an outlet for literary news and respectable literary

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Gossip, but Patterson quickly expanded her bailiwick, aggressively annexing whatever

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territory seemed promising for the growth of more opinions, recent books, books of the

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distant past, adventures of authors and would-be authors, historical issues, philosophical

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issues, political issues, economic issues, sexual issues, scientific issues.

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The connection was simply the fact that these things were interesting to Isabel Patterson,

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who could not understand why more people are not interested in more things.

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One of Patterson's deepest interests was in politics.

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In 1936, Cox reports, a truly amiable correspondent wrote to the Herald Tribune to ask why Isabel

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Patterson did not write on politics.

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This is a refreshing novelty, Patterson replied. Others have asked us why don't we shut up about politics.

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Before long even more of her readers were posing this second question, for as the Great Depression wore on and on,

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prolonged and even deepened by the wrong-headed policies of the New Deal, Patterson devoted herself more and more frequently

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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People.

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In 1926, two years after Patterson began writing her Turns with a Bookworm column, and just

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after the publication of the sensational popular bestseller Notes on Democracy, Walter Lippmann

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had called its author, the nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and outspoken libertarian

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H. L. Mencken, who was also the founder and editor of the monthly American Mercury, the

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is the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.

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Early in 1933, Mencken would step down from his editorship of the Mercury and turn the magazine over to another libertarian,

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the literary editor of the nation, Henry Hazlitt.

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Hazlitt would hold the job for only a year or so himself, however, before defecting to the New York Times,

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The American Mercury was among the most influential magazines being published at that time, as

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was The Nation, but it was far from the most widely circulated or read.

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That honor went to the Saturday Evening Post, whose economics editor and chief editorial

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Writer was the libertarian-leaning Garrett Garrett. In the same year that Henry Haslett

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took over the reins of the American Mercury, 1933, the libertarian-leaning Felix Morley

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took over the reins of the Washington Post. Within three years he was awarded a Pulitzer

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Prize for distinguished editorial writing. Meanwhile, the Saturday Evening Post, the

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The American Mercury, The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's,

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and the other popular and influential magazines of the day, to say nothing of the period's

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newspapers, were filled with articles by libertarian or libertarian-leaning writers like Albert

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J. Nock, John T. Flynn, and Rose Wilder Lane, as The Nation's bookstores were filled with

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these same writers' books.

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And for those who haunted the bookstores and tried to keep up with the latest in books,

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the weekly book review of choice was the one published by the New York Herald Tribune.

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As Stephen Cox puts it, Herald Tribune Books was a distinguished venue, publishing commentary

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by everyone of consequence in literature, from Robert Frost to John Steinbeck, Alan

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from Glasgow to Andre Morois, Sinclair Lewis to Virginia Woolf.

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And unlike most other distinguished journals, it enjoyed a very large circulation, about

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500,000 in 1937.

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It was a nationally circulated publication that had thousands of subscribers outside

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New York.

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In the mid-30s, 30,000 copies of each issue were distributed to bookstores nationwide.

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Books had an audience that actually bought books. Francis Newman, herself a critic and

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avid student of the literary marketplace, expressed the conventional wisdom when she

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said that the Herald Tribune reached more important people than any other review. And

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the deputy editor and feared weekly columnist at Herald Tribune Books was, as we have seen,

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This group of writers, Mencken, Haslett, Nock, Lane, Morley, Flynn, Garrett, have sometimes

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been called the old right, but they were never on the right.

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They were old-time liberals on whom Franklin D. Roosevelt had turned the tables.

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Roosevelt had run for the presidency in 1932 as an advocate of smaller, less intrusive

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government.

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would run, that is, on a liberal platform, as the term liberal was understood in the

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early years of the 20th century, as the term liberal had been understood in this country

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for something over a hundred years.

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Once in office, of course, FDR threw the democratic platform and traditional democratic party principles

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in the ashcan, and proceeded to show that he could do strong central government, meddlesome

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and economic regulation and political favors in return for votes and donations better than

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any Republican who'd ever come down the pike.

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Worse yet, he announced to the world that he was a liberal and that the name of his

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program was liberalism.

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Old-time liberals like Mencken, Nock, Lane, Morley, Hazlitt, Flynn, Garrett, and Isabel

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Isabel Patterson, critics of the phony liberalism FDR called the New Deal, found themselves

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making common cause with a bunch of Republicans whose only real objection to the New Deal

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was that they weren't running it.

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This did not, however, make the old-time liberals conservatives or right-wingers.

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Isabel Patterson voted for FDR in 1932, but by 1940, when he sought an unprecedented third

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term in the White House, she began to feel so desperate to get rid of him that she actually

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endorsed Wendell Wilkie, an establishment Republican candidate to whom she could offer

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only lukewarm support at best.

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And her ardor cooled even further as Wilkie's campaign unfolded.

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Nonetheless, it was through the Wilkie campaign that she made perhaps the most important intellectual

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contact of her career.

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In 1940, through the Wilkie campaign, Isabel Patterson met a young Russian-American novelist,

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playwright and screenwriter named Ayn Rand, who felt passionately against Roosevelt, though

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she too had voted for him in 32.

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Unfortunately Rand knew little about political philosophy and less about American history

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and politics.

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Rand, in her mid-thirties, with one moderately successful Broadway play and one unsuccessful

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novel to her credit, quickly became a Patterson protege.

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The evidence suggests that for the next few years Rand sat at the feet of Patterson, now

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Now in her mid-fifties, and widely read in American history and in political philosophy,

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and learned from Patterson what became the essence of her own theory of government and

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of individual rights.

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In a presentation this past October at the Cato Institute in Washington, Jennifer Burns,

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the University of Virginia historian who recently published a book on Rand, goddess of the market,

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said Patterson's influence on Rand can scarcely be exaggerated.

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I think Patterson's influence on Rand has really been underestimated and underappreciated

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because I think their initial encounter is lost to history because it was mostly verbal

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or oral. I see so much in Patterson that's in Rand. She used to say A equals A. She talked

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about reason being important. All of their ideas about the philosophers, they go right

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into Rand.

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Rand's is not alone in thinking this. Another writer who agrees with her is Justin Raimondo.

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Raimondo, in his recently reprinted book, Reclaiming the American Right, suggests that

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it was Isabel Patterson who taught Rand American history and politics, as well as much of what

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Rand knew about political philosophy.

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Today Ayn Rand is herself probably the single greatest intellectual influence on the modern

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and Libertarian Movement.

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During her lifetime, she never acknowledged Patterson's influence on her thinking.

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But she did put a certain amount of energy into resurrecting Patterson's 1943 book,

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The God of the Machine, the only non-fiction book Patterson ever published, an attempt

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at a detailed, systematic presentation of her political ideas.

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By the 1960s, twenty years after its original publication, The God of the Machine was pretty

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much forgotten.

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But Rand wrote about it in the Objectivist newsletter, and the Objectivist.

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Rand saw to it that the Nathaniel Brandon Institute's NBI book service offered copies

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of The God of the Machine for sale.

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Such small fame as Patterson's book enjoys today, most of it within the libertarian movement,

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is largely owing to Rand's ongoing efforts on its behalf beginning in the 1960s.

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But wait, there's more.

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It's largely because Rand chose to rescue Patterson's book from oblivion that people

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gradually became sufficiently interested in Patterson herself to look into the details

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of her own life and career.

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And that, in turn, led to the discovery of what Rand had arguably tried to hide, Patterson's

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immense influence on Ayn Rand's thinking.

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In other words, it was only by employing an intermediary named Ayn Rand that Isabel Patterson

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was able to become one of the most influential libertarian writers of the 20th century.

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And it was only because her intermediary chose to rescue Patterson's book on history and

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and Politics from Oblivion, that eventually made it possible for the mentor herself to

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begin receiving some of the credit to which she had long been due.

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Ah, the ironies of human action.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.