During WWII, while American forces battled dictatorial regimes overseas, three writers back home were unleashing a full-scale assault on the ideas at the very base of tyranny. Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, all published in 1943, launched the modern American liberty movement. These women, once described as “the three furies of modern libertarianism,” have been the subjects of separate biographies. But Freedom’s Furies by Timothy Sandefur is the first book-length exploration of their relationships and the context surrounding their 1943 books. Sandefur and I recently discussed Freedom’s Furies on the Philosophy for Flourishing podcast. Here are highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
Jon Hersey: Why do Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand matter today? Why did you take the time to write about them?
Timothy Sandefur: Well, I think their ideas are profoundly important—ideas about freedom, morality, and what sort of government we should have to protect our right to live our lives freely. Obviously, these ideas closely relate to my work as a lawyer trying to vindicate the freedoms that are promised to us by the Constitution.
But the broader answer is that I just find them to be fascinating people. I’ve always loved intellectual history, learning about how people figured things out and learned from each other. And these particular personalities are so fascinating. I initially set out to write a biography of Rose Wilder Lane, because she’s such an intriguing figure. But that’s been done before, and I decided that instead, I would focus on this curious fact that in 1943, all three of these women published books that began the free-market, individualist movement, or at least restarted it in the United States. And it turns out that they knew each other, they had similar influences, and they worked together in interesting ways.
Hersey: Could you give us a glimpse of who they were, starting with Isabel Paterson?
Sandefur: Paterson was born in 1886, on a tiny island on the north side of Lake Huron, and she grew up on the American frontier. Her family moved around in her youth, and she witnessed the end of the Pioneer era. She saw the railroads being constructed in the West. She was sixteen years old when she saw her first lightbulb. She remembered when the Wright brothers flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk and was herself a pioneer aviator. We don’t know much about her early life, but we know that she ended up being a newspaper columnist for the New York Herald Tribune beginning in the 1920s and spent her career as a columnist and fiction writer. (Interestingly, before this she had worked as a secretary for the artist Gutzon Borglum, who’s best known for carving Mount Rushmore. I suspect that he may have had some influence on The Fountainhead.)
Rose Wilder Lane was also born in 1886, also on the frontier. She was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and later became the secret coauthor of The Little House on the Prairie books. But she hated the prairie and tried to get away from it as quickly as she could and as far as possible. She moved to Albania, which is about as far away as you can go before you start coming back. She started her life as a socialist, but traveling through Eastern Europe as a reporter disabused her of her collectivist political ideas. She returned to the United States just in time for the Great Depression and became a defender of individual liberty in opposition to the New Deal.
Ayn Rand was born in Russia, witnessed the Soviet Revolution, escaped the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and fled to the United States with dreams of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter and a novelist. She ended up going to New York and meeting Isabel Paterson in 1940. Paterson and Lane had known each other since the 1920s. Paterson became kind of a teacher and mentor to both of them. Lane and Rand regarded Paterson as first among equals.
Hersey: One of the fascinating things about your book is that, although you focus on these three, you also have this much broader cast of characters, and readers end up with a great overview of this period of history. Your chapter titles—including “The Bookworm,” “The Wandering Jew,” “The Great Engineer”—are allusions to some of these figures. Can you walk us through some of these chapter titles to give people an idea of the scope of your book?
Sandefur: Yes, I’m glad you noticed that. I’ll admit that I stole that idea from one of my favorite books, The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, which is an intellectual history of the philosophy of Pragmatism. Menand titled his chapters using nicknames for the characters, and I thought that’s kind of a clever device. So, for example, Lane became fascinated early on with the myth of the wandering Jew, who according to mythology was a Jewish man who cursed Jesus when he was hanging from the cross, and as a result was himself cursed to wander the Earth without a home. When Lane heard this story as a young child, she shocked her family by saying that she wished she could be cursed the same way because she wanted to travel and see the world. So “The Wandering Jew” is the title of one of my chapters about Lane.
“The Refugee,” of course, is Rand, who escaped the Soviet Union. “The Bookworm” is taken from the title of Paterson’s newspaper column in the Herald Tribune, which was essentially a gossip column about the publishing industry called “Turns with a Bookworm.” She was kind of embarrassed because she thought it was a cliched title, but it really stuck. “The Dictator,” refers to Franklin Roosevelt, because Roosevelt really was the closest thing this country has had to a dictator. People really underestimate how great the vogue was for dictatorship in this country when Roosevelt was elected, and many celebrated his election because they hoped he would become a dictator. One of these, for example, was William Randolph Hearst, the incredibly influential newspaper publisher and, by the way, probably one of the most malignant influences on American culture in our entire history. Hearst ended up becoming a model for the character of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead. So, the titles of the chapters are characterizations of some of the people I talked about in the book.
Hersey: You also break it down into three sections, the first of which is “The Revolt from the Village.” What was this revolt, and who spearheaded it?
Sandefur: “The Revolt from the Village” was a phrase used to describe a cultural and literary movement that started in the late 1910s and really took off in 1920 with the publication of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, which is really the greatest of all the revolt-from-the-village novels. Previously, writers such as Mark Twain described the American small town in this very benevolent sort of way. They acknowledged that small-town America had its troubles, but it still was charming and sweet. Well, this new generation had a much darker perspective of what life was like in the American small town.
Now remember, 1920 was the first time the U.S. census found more Americans living off of farms than on them, signaling a huge transition in American society. It had been primarily agricultural, but now it was becoming primarily urban. There were also immense technological changes, most significantly, the automobile, but also the radio, the airplane, and so forth. And, of course, there was also the huge upheaval of WWI. So, between, say 1890 and 1925, you have a truly radical shift in American society, which is something that I think we tend to underestimate today.
Anyway, the Revolt from the Village was fueled by this youthful generation escaping from the small town and talking about how terrible it was, essentially agreeing with what Lewis wrote in Main Street. Today, I don’t think Lewis is widely read, but he was enormously influential—perhaps the most influential American writer after Mark Twain’s death. And Americans keep rewriting Main Street, probably without even realizing it. A while back, I saw the movie called Revolutionary Road, which is just a complete remake of Main Street in today’s society. It’s about how boring, stupid, and stifling small-town America supposedly is.
The main character of Main Street is a woman who wants a life of significance and meaning, and she’s constantly frustrated by how all of her neighbors have such a small, petty outlook on life. They fail to recognize the importance of beauty and truth. Gradually, her mind breaks down, and she eventually gives up on a life of meaning. That spoke to a lot of people, especially women in the 1920s, who wanted something meaningful in their lives. And unfortunately, that desire drew many of them toward ideologies such as communism and socialism.
Hersey: William Faulkner said that Twain was “the father of American literature,” but then you have Isabel Paterson saying that, with Sinclair Lewis, American literature became “competently autonomous.” How did America go from a culture that loved Mark Twain to one that loved Sinclair Lewis?
Sandefur: I’m glad you latched onto that Paterson comment. I disagree with her about that. I think when you look at literary history, you’re constantly finding critics who say things like, “Well, now American literature is truly autonomous; now we have our own literature.” They say it every few years. I don’t buy that. I think Mark Twain was a breakthrough figure for American literature, and he was truly a native phenomenon.
Intellectuals at the time were definitely affected by Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, but we shouldn’t overestimate their influence. Just in the past few months, economic historians Phil Magness and Michael Makovi published a really interesting and important article about how little influence Marx originally had until the Soviet Union started reprinting and spreading his writings, beginning after the Soviet revolution. In the 1890s, when Paterson and Lane were growing up, Marx was not that influential.
I think what really happened was that the technological revolution took Americans away from the idea of society as being this stable hierarchy and toward a future of skyscrapers and airplanes. And that left a lot of people feeling frustrated, because they wanted a modern, meaningful life and felt they couldn’t have it. That’s a bit of speculation on my part, but I do think this was an important reason among many.
Hersey: One of those others being that not everyone really liked the technological revolution, right? I’m thinking of the 19th-century Romantic movement, which was very Rousseauian and antitechnology.
Sandefur: Yes, a figure who comes to mind, who I didn’t have space to write much about in the book, is Frank Lloyd Wright. He’s an interesting transitional figure, in part because he lived for such a long time. He was born in 1867, and he died in 1959. He was a hugely influential architect and artist. And he comes into architecture at a time when architects are trying to build houses that turn away from “the machine.” I’m thinking of Greene and Greene who built the Gamble House in Pasadena that is best known for being Doc Brown’s house in Back to the Future. That house is supposed to represent getting away from the machine and having an authentic self rooted in the Earth. It’s all wood and stone and glass. On the other hand, you have these real extremists on the opposite side, such as Le Corbusier, who say that a house is a machine for living. And he was very strict on the idea that houses should be these incredibly square things with no ornamentation.
Then Wright comes out and gives a lecture in Chicago titled “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” which is a very interesting read because he says we shouldn’t reject the machine—we should use it for human purposes. We should find a way to integrate the machine with the human, whether it’s the automobile, or the skyscraper, or the home. This was a distinctively American twist on this debate that was going on throughout society, and it was portrayed in some literature of the time, especially in Rand’s romanticized vision of technology. She was a romantic in that she believed in a life of significance and meaning and vaunting ambition. But she was unique in that she romanticized bourgeois life. She said we don’t have to get rid of heroism in the modern day of technological mass production. There is heroism in productivity, and we should celebrate those who build skyscrapers and airplanes.
Hersey: That reminds me of a passage in your book in which Paterson was saying, in essence, we need a writer who romanticizes technology and business. And then along comes this Russian émigré who does it.
Sandefur: This was one of my favorite discoveries in writing the book, this article that Paterson wrote in the 1920s, almost twenty years before she met Rand, in which she asks, Why are there so few businessmen in fiction? Why don’t novels celebrate businessmen? On one hand, she writes, it’s understandable—because it would be awfully hard to write a novel about an architect building a skyscraper. How can you do that?
It’s kind of funny, because it reminds me of how I discovered Rand, which was through The Fountainhead movie. I was in high school at the time. I remember flipping through the channels one day, and I heard, “Coming up next, a movie about an architect who challenges the status quo.” And I remember thinking to myself, How do you make a movie about an architect? Wouldn’t it just be somebody drawing all day? And by the end of the movie, I was like, Wow, this is great!
Anyway, Paterson wrote that in the 1920s, and like I said, she first met Rand in 1940, at which point Rand was nearing completion of The Fountainhead. So, it’s not as if Paterson gave Rand the idea of writing about an architect. It’s likely that, in 1938, Rand went to see a display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that was showing the first photographs of Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. Rand loved it, and we know Wright’s work certainly inspired elements of the book.
I do suspect that Paterson told Rand about Gutzon Borglum, whom I mentioned earlier. I can’t prove that. But there’s this story that Borglum was working on Stone Mountain in Georgia and got so frustrated by the political infighting, which kept interfering with his work, that finally one day he hacked to pieces the model of the sculpture he had built, threw the pieces from the top of the mountain, and stormed out of the state, refusing to do the work. Paterson loved this story and liked to share it with people, often saying, “I come from a day when men were men,” which was a favorite line of hers. I can envision a conversation along those lines and Rand thinking, you know, Maybe I’ll have my architect blow up a housing project. But again, that’s just speculation.
Hersey: While we’re on Rand’s influences, she credited her discovery of the idea that she came to call “secondhandedness” to a conversation that she had with a coworker at the RKO wardrobe department when she was in Hollywood. Rand asked her what she wanted in life, and the woman said that if everyone else had one car, she’d want two—essentially an “outdoing the Joneses” view of evaluating oneself and one’s success solely by comparison to other people. But in your book, I got the impression that Sinclair Lewis actually anticipated this idea.
Sandefur: Lewis’s Babbitt, which Rand definitely read, is this portrayal of a truly secondhanded person, a person who has hardly any inkling of an independent personality at all; all of his ideas and beliefs and actions are basically drawn from other people. There’s one brief moment in the novel when he talks to a friend who’s a lawyer, a sort of liberal activist who persuades Babbitt of his political views. For a little while, Babbitt believes these things. But pretty soon, conservatives start to pressure him, and he surrenders his convictions.
There are similar characters throughout Lewis’s writings, and I do think they had some influence on Rand. Another example is Arrowsmith, which was as close as Lewis came to portraying something like heroism. It’s a novel about a doctor who tries to find a cure for a disease but gets influenced by other people in such a way that he ends up abandoning the experiment. However, this gains him praise. Everybody celebrates him and thinks he’s a great guy, yet he feels grotesque about being praised for doing what he did. So, to get away from people, he abandons his laboratory, moves to a rural farm, and conducts his research in private. That was the closest Lewis got to trying to describe a true individualist, and it portrays a very pessimistic view—that you can’t be an individualist around other people. I think in some ways, Rand was trying to answer that, and in The Fountainhead, she did.
One of the most interesting parallels between Rand’s work and Lewis’s is the character of Dominique in The Fountainhead, who I think is sort of a ramped-up version of the main character in Main Street, Carol Kennicott. Dominique is like Carol on steroids. She’s so disgusted and feels so let down by the failed promises of heroism, which turned out to be just papier-mâché copies, that she finally decides that she will not desire anything. She tries to get rid of her capacity to desire. So, Dominique is like a character out of a Sinclair Lewis novel, and Rand is answering Lewis and saying, No, heroism is possible—success is achievable—happiness is a goal that we can realistically hope for, if we have integrity enough to insist upon it.
Hersey: Would you say that, in a different way, she was also answering Nietzsche?
Sandefur: I think there is a degree to which The Fountainhead is Rand wrestling with Nietzsche, who had an influence on her in her younger years. This is the Gail Wynand-Howard Roark dynamic. Wynand has this Nietzschean attitude that the only way you can possibly survive and not end up a victim of the mob is to rule the mob. It’s either/or in Wynand and Nietzsche’s view. And Roark’s answer is, No, just don’t let them have any control over your life—don’t let them dictate who you are or how you live.
Hersey: Moving from literary influences on the three furies to political influences, could you talk a bit about the second big section of your book, titled “The Forgotten Man”?
Sandefur: The furies’ political context was dominated by the twelve-year presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, whose control over the American economy and American society was extremely pervasive, to a degree that we have largely forgotten. Thanks to a historiography profession that has, in many ways, purposely neglected it, the true history of the Great Depression is what we’d today call “erased history.” Most history professors prefer not to talk about what happened in this country during the New Deal. Roosevelt controlled the media, for example. During his presidency, the Federal Communications Act was passed. It required radio stations to obtain a federal license every six months. The commission was entirely appointed by Roosevelt. So, if you owned a radio station, you were not going to allow criticism of the president on the air, because you wouldn’t get your license.
Now combine Roosevelt’s control over the media with his incredibly pervasive control over the economy. Enormous masses of people were on the government payroll. They had been unemployed thanks to the Great Depression. So, Roosevelt’s “solution” was to hire people onto the government payroll and pay them with taxpayer dollars. Well, they’re going to be loyal to the government after that, right? And so he excluded any effective political opposition over the course of those twelve years. Paterson said that his reelection would be the first election for which the votes were funded entirely by the American taxpayer. That pervasive, growing government control over society persuaded all three that America may very well be facing destruction, which they also took to mean the destruction of civilization.
That may sound like a real exaggeration in retrospect. But remember that Lane and Paterson were born in 1886. They remembered the Industrial Revolution. These were people who had lived at the speed of the horse. They had lived in a world lit only by fire. They knew what it was like to have a society without the benefits of technology. They saw Europe—Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union—descending into that same kind of retrogression. And there was no reason in the world why it couldn’t happen here. So, they were very afraid—and with good reason—that Roosevelt’s strangulation of the economy might very well spell the end of technological, economic, and social progress.
Hersey: So, we now know a bit about what the furies agreed on. What did they disagree on?
Sandefur: Lane’s most fundamental views were this strange combination of materialism and religion. She said she didn’t believe in mysticism, but she seems to have thought that the laws of economics and morality emanated from some sort of order-giving authority. It’s hard to describe because she was very vague in her own writing on this. Later in life, she tried to set out these views in a philosophical treatise, but she never completed it. So, we don’t know her final thoughts on those kinds of questions.
Lane’s religious views were, of course, part of her differences with Rand. Rand and Lane met in person only once, and apparently their conversation turned to religion at some point. Lane told this story fifteen years later to Jasper Crane, who was a devoutly religious businessman. She told him that they argued about God, and she said that order must come from God. Reportedly, Rand said, well, then where does God come from? And Lane said that was a stupid question. But she didn’t say how she answered it. Lane told Crane that after she and Rand argued about religion, they never spoke again, but that’s not so. Apparently, Lane had a great time speaking to Rand. She wrote her a letter the next day saying, please come back, I really enjoyed our conversation. But religion remained a divisive issue for them.
Paterson was also somewhat religious, but the prime source of conflict between her and the others was her personality problem. I think Paterson had a streak of depression. She tended to be very abrasive, and she had a very short temper. She was particularly angry at the way businessmen refused to stand up for their rights. It really bothered her. At one point later in her career, she wanted to start a free-market magazine, and Rand tried to help her by introducing her to wealthy businessmen who might be able to provide capital. But Paterson would just insult them to their faces, saying things like, “Why don’t you do more to fight the government?” and “You’re taking subsidies from the government!” The meetings would just break down, and it got worse and worse, particularly toward the end of her life, when one of Paterson’s closest friends committed suicide, which I think contributed to her depression. Paterson’s behavior got to the point where Rand just could not be close to her anymore. So, they had ideological differences, but they factored less into their disagreements.
Hersey: You mentioned businessmen not standing up for their rights. The furies had major ideological differences with others seeking to defend freedom, right?
Sandefur: The best example of this would be Friedrich Hayek. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom came out in 1944, the year after all three of these women published the books we’ve been discussing. His basic argument was that if you start regulating one part of the economy, eventually everything’s going to get regulated. And pretty soon, you’re on the road to serfdom. It’s a good observation, and a lot of Hayek’s economic observations are interesting and useful. But he doesn’t make a moral argument for liberty; he doesn’t say that people have a moral right to be free. On the contrary, he seems to accept a sort of pragmatist-collectivist view that the individual consciousness is a creation of his cultural milieu and that individualism can be legitimately limited. He uses the term “circumscribed.” Even if individualism is circumscribed quite narrowly, he says, the individual still is free, which suggests that it’s OK for the government to circumscribe individual rights—and the word “rights” never even appears in the book. I think Rand and Lane specifically (Paterson doesn’t seem to have read Hayek) were really bothered by this. Lane wrote a review of the book for a magazine called the New Economic Council Review of Books, which she edited. And she said that this was like a doctor saying that you can take a 10 percent shot of syphilis and still be healthy, because Hayek said, well, you can have a little bit of a welfare state and still have capitalism.
Rand was particularly bothered by his refusal to endorse a consistent moral case for liberty as a first principle. Hayek wrote this famous essay called “Why I am not a Conservative,” but the reality is that he was. Hayek was really more of your Burkean type of conservative, and all of his arguments basically boiled down to the idea of: be careful. OK, that’s good advice. But it doesn’t really tell you what the legitimate role of government is, or what rights human beings have, or how a person should aspire to design his life. And those are the things that Rand and Lane thought were much more important. So that was a huge part of their problem with the emerging free-market movement at the time.
They also had some problems with other writers like Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt—Mises, in particular, because he was a true moral relativist. He thought there was no objectivity to morality, that whatever the majority believes is right by definition. Rand thought this was totally wrong, and yet she thought it wasn’t really essential to what Mises wrote and that, if we set it aside, we can still appreciate Mises’s economic insights. But it really bothered Lane, and she wrote this review of Human Action where she said his moral relativism is completely wrong. Later on, she had the chance to correspond with Mises, and Mises said that he refused to speak to somebody who said that all of his work was wrong.
Hersey: If the furies were alive today, what issues do you think they would find most pressing?
Sandefur: That’s a good question, and it would be very hard to narrow down. I think that if you asked Rand, she would say that it’s irrationality writ large. Irrationality manifests itself in various ways. Within politics today, there’s this lust for the strongman, this desire for somebody to come in and implement his will and impose some people’s desires on others, which is very much what was going on in the 1940s.
I suspect that if you asked Lane, the single thing that would bother her most is the lack of knowledge of American history. She would be really bothered by the fact that so few people understand and appreciate the facts of American history, and that we have these intellectual frauds such as the 1619 Project that get all the attention, whereas the true stories of the great accomplishments of Americans—resulting from America’s constitutional system and the American mores of individualism—have been buried.
It’s hard to imagine what Paterson would have said. If you asked her, “What’s the biggest problem in America today?,” I think she would have slammed down the phone and said, “All right, how much time do you have?” But she probably would have started with American businessmen refusing to stand up for their rights. As Reagan used to say, businessmen like to feed the alligator in hopes that it will eat them last.
Hersey: Ha ha! Well, I loved your book, and I hope people will check it out. It’s a thick read, but it’s well worth the time.
Sandefur: If you don’t have the endurance for four hundred pages, I will read it to you on Audible.com.
Hersey: Excellent. Thanks for taking the time to discuss it.
Sandefur: Thanks very much, Jon.
Click To Tweet
You might also like
