Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2022
404 pp. $19.95 (paperback)
In 1943, the world was at war, and the barbaric regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan occupied much of Europe and Asia. America, the “sleeping giant,” had awakened to thrust its industrial might against those regimes. Yet, on American soil, leading thinkers had embraced versions of the authoritarian ideologies of Europe and attacked the nation’s classical liberal foundations. They proclaimed a new era in which top-down control by a political elite would replace individualism. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “the day in which individualism was made the great watchword of American life” had ceased (118).
Yet in that same year, three books pushed back against the authoritarian tide and forever changed the course of American political thought. Two of the books examined the importance of individual liberty to human flourishing: Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine and Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom. The third was a “hymn to individualism” more broadly and became a blockbuster: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (306).
How these three authors radically opposed prevailing trends, became friends, and gave birth to the modern American liberty movement is the topic of Timothy Sandefur’s Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness.
Freedom’s Furies is primarily an intellectual and artistic biography of its three subjects, including summaries of many of their works with elucidating commentary. The book is organized into three sections: “The Revolt from the Village,” “The Forgotten Man,” and “A New Birth of Freedom,” with each segment unfolding in chapters bearing evocative titles, such as “The Bookworm,” “The Refugee,” “The Revolutionary,” and “The Self-Starter.” This structure not only provides a chronological framework for the subjects’ journeys but also enhances our understanding of the overarching themes that defined their lives.
Paterson and Lane are largely unknown today. Yet for twenty-five years (1924–1949), Paterson sat at the pinnacle of the nation’s literary world as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Lane—the secret coauthor of her mother’s (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s) classic series of children’s books The Little House on the Prairie—was “one of the most popular and best-paid novelists in the country” (39). In addition to their literary successes, both Paterson and Lane had a keen interest in America’s unique political achievement—a focus held in common with their younger friend, Ayn Rand.
Sandefur brings these underappreciated heroes of the American freedom movement to life. Unlike existing biographies of the three, Freedom’s Furies sets their stories in a wide historical context. With carefully selected detail, Sandefur captures essential currents of 20th-century thought with its seismic shifts in politics, literature, and cultural values. He shows how the three “furies” used their philosophic understanding to criticize and undermine these trends—and replace them with a new vision of freedom and human flourishing.
Unique among scholars of Paterson, Lane, and Rand, Sandefur undertakes a thorough examination of the literary movement known as the Revolt from the Village (1915–1940). The authors of this movement—Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson—delivered a devastating critique of bourgeois life in small-town America, satirizing it as bigoted, petty, and mean-spirited. Sandefur artfully weaves the central themes of Lewis’s works—idealism versus mediocrity, the status of bourgeois culture, and the quest for personal authenticity—into the overall tapestry of the book. His intricate exploration of how Paterson, Lane, and Rand responded to and sometimes incorporated Lewis’s ideas in their work adds a layer of captivating complexity.
The New Deal was another major element of the context in which the furies worked. It had its roots in the so-called Progressive Movement and the work of 19th-century socialists such as Edward Bellamy, echoing collectivist trends in Europe.
Sandefur shows how Paterson, Lane, and Rand identified these new political trends as an assault on the country’s Lockean foundations, and he gives a riveting account of the New Deal and the furies’ response to it. With the National Labor Relations Act, National Recovery Act, and a plethora of government directives, the New Dealers relentlessly attacked private enterprise and individual rights. The New Deal exacerbated the economic recession following the stock market crash of 1929—already made worse by foolhardy interventions such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and legislation to keep wages artificially high—leading to the Great Depression. The furies had much to say about this. Paterson, a crack shot in economics, used her public prominence to expose the fallacies underlying Roosevelt’s policies. As for Rand, Sandefur observes, “The New Deal appeared to her as little more than a variation on the collectivist politics she had fled” by leaving communist Russia (259). For Lane’s part, writes Sandefur, “it seemed that the America she cherished—proud, self-reliant, and unafraid—was gone forever” (206).
The furies did not hinge their arguments for capitalism (as against socialism) on which system produced the most goods as so many did. Sandefur emphasizes that to the furies, the real issue was whether the individual has the “right to exist for his own sake” (292, 305). Whereas collectivism, which undergirds socialism, says no, individualism ardently says yes.
As Sandefur explains, Rand developed new ethical ideas rooted in individualism—ideas that Paterson supported: “A morality of rational self-interest, [Paterson] thought, was proper for human beings who are inherently individual beings responsible for their own lives” (267). All three thought that the common ideal of self-sacrifice was contrary to genuine morality. “In their eyes, the argument for self-sacrifice was typically used as a way to trick people into subordinating themselves to the state” (306).
Paterson held that literature was the means for transmitting a new moral ideal. As far back as the 1920s, she realized:
In a capitalist society, the great undertakings that make for superlative novels were not found on battlefields or the high seas, as in ages past, but in the office buildings of businesses—with architects, engineers, and geniuses of finance. Their “‘pure creative work”’ represented a new kind of heroism. It was regrettable that authors had not yet learned how to make fiction out of such material. (29)
Rand would do just that. She took on the Herculean task of formulating the philosophical underpinnings of individualism, which she expressed in The Fountainhead and later, Atlas Shrugged (1957). She created heroes for the modern age of American-led capitalism, a world of unprecedented technological creativity, at its zenith fulfilling the promise of the nation’s founding principles.
Sandefur’s style is well-concretized and accessible but always manages to maintain a tie to the broader context of the furies’ perspectives and the historical backdrop. Freedom’s Furies is tightly integrated around the narrative of how Paterson, Lane, and Rand “found liberty.” As Sandefur writes, “this volume is meant as a portrait of a brief time in the lives of three outstanding American intellectuals” (3).
Sandefur does not delve into the wider philosophical accomplishments of Rand. He mentions her philosophy of Objectivism in only one passage where he briefly but adeptly summarizes its key points (266–67).
Nonetheless, the book is a tour de force of biographical storytelling. Sandefur’s meticulously researched accounts brim with the adventures, heroism, and poignant moments that defined the lives of the book’s larger-than-life subjects.
Another reason to delve into this book—especially for those already familiar with the lives of the furies—is the nuanced portrayal of their intricate relationships with one another. In the case of Paterson and Rand, their connection extended to “long, late-night telephone calls, overnight visits at each other’s homes, and a correspondence that must have been voluminous,” much of it since lost (37). With keen sensitivity to their distinct personalities, Sandefur deftly navigates their similarities and differences, highlighting their agreements, disputes, and interpersonal high and low points.
In this compelling story of the founders of the modern liberty movement, Sandefur ably demonstrates how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand penetrated to the core of the illiberalism that engulfed the world. These illiberal impulses are very much alive today, but Sandefur builds the case that, owing to the achievements of “freedom’s furies,” our power to defend liberty is more formidable than ever.
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