Our forgotten goddess: Isabel Paterson and the origins of libertarianism.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America - Book Review

The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America, by Stephen Cox, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 418 pages, $39.95

THE HISTORY OF libertarianism has played out in the catacombs of standard American intellectual history. And so, even after an age of feminist theory and history, it is little noted that in 1943 three foundational documents of modern libertarianism were issued, as the journalist John Chamberlain put it, by "three women--Mrs. [Isabel] Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand--who, with scornful side glances at the male business community, had decided to rekindle a faith in an older American philosophy. There wasn't an economist among them. And none of them was a Ph.D."

The works included Ayn Rand's first successful novel, The Fountainhead, in print constantly ever since. It has imbued generation after generation with admiration for a hero, Howard Roark, who acted on the belief that no man had a legitimate claim on his liberty, his energy. Most readers end up cheering Roark as he blows up an unoccupied government housing project for the poor. (He had his reasons.)

Another, less well-known work published that year was an extended essay on history and political philosophy called The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority. That book was written by novelist and journalist Rose Wilder Lane, best known nowadays as the daughter of (and possibly ghostwriter for) Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame.

The third book was by a woman yen less remembered now. She was a formerly influential New York literary critic and novelist who, like Lane, ended her public career with a work of uncompromisingly libertarian nonfiction published in the midst of war collectivism, after a decade of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had made classical liberalism dangerously out of touch with the zeitgeist. Her name was Isabel Paterson, and her book was The God of the Machine. Her first biography, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America, has just been published, written by Stephen Cox, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego. Cox has done a smart, thorough job of explaining and contextualizing this unusual figure. He explores her connections to Lane and Rand, shining welcome light on an unfairly dark corner of 20th-century American intellectual history.

Paterson swam against a mighty tide with The God of the Machine. Old Right journalist Albert Jay Nock believed, with much evidence, that individualists were "superfluous men" in Roosevelt's America. Libertarian ideas, he thought, were like a delicate candle flame ever threatening to gutter; they could only be tended to monkishly by a tiny and obscure remnant. These three books published in 1943 tried to bring the philosophy to a wide, popular audience that the authors hoped was ready for it.

Nock declared that Lane's and Paterson's works were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." The two female journalists had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally.... They don't fumble and fiddle around--every shot goes straight to the centre."

Not just to the center, but to the root. The two books Nock wrote of--along with the novel by Rand, who was a close friend to Paterson (who was a close friend to Lane)--were each obsessed in their way with the origins of phenomena. In Paterson and Lane's case, the phenomenon was American political and economic success. In Rand's case, it was human greatness--and human depravity.

Two of these women died in obscurity; the third died as a lonely, embittered figure who was nonetheless loved by millions. They all paid a price for being uncompromising defenders of unpopular beliefs. They were all childless, but their ideological offspring have defined the libertarian movement in the postwar era. Paterson was one of the earliest synthesizers of the mixture that defines the still-growing political-ideological movement and tendency known as libertarianism, combining, as Cox aptly sums it up, "a belief in absolute individual rights and minimal...