Selling laissez-faire antiracism to the black masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier.

• Author: Beito, David T.
• Position: Essay

The ideals of liberty, individualism, and self-reliance have rarely had a more enthusiastic champion than Rose Wilder Lane. A columnist and popular author, she held firm to these beliefs during the New Deal and World War II era, when faith in big government was at high fide. Through her book The Discovery of Freedom ([1943] 1984a), she became a key transitional figure from the Old Right of the 1930s to the modern libertarian movement. Of equal fascination but much less known today is Lane's sustained effort to promote laissez-faire ideas in columns for the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black newspaper in the United States. Although Lane was white, she used this unusual venue creatively to promote the philosophy of limited government. During World War II especially, her outspoken activism generated headlines. She was not only investigated by the FBI for "subversive" remarks, but denounced by Walter Winchell, the leading nationally syndicated journalist and radio commentator in the country.

It is generally forgotten now that during the 1930s and 1940s many respected blacks continued to oppose the New Deal. Among them was Oscar De Priest, the first black member of the House of Representatives from the North, and best-selling novelist Zora Neale Hurston. They favored the Republican Party not only because it had denounced the New Deal and the Fair Deal, but also because of its civil rights record. For example, conservative Republicans in Congress, such as the anti-New Deal icon Hamilton Fish, fought aggressively for antilynching and other civil rights legislation (see Jonathan Bean's introductions, congressional testimony by De Priest and Fish, and a Senate discussion on such issues in Bean 2009b, 164-70, 190-96). In 1947, the Republican majority in the so-called do-nothing Congress investigated and prevented Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi from taking his seat because he promoted coercion against black voters (Dittmer 1995, 7-8; Fleegler 2006, 1-27). Lane's story can offer new insights into the libertarian and conservative strain of this previously ignored antiracist tradition during this period, which historians have slighted.

It is almost impossible to discuss Lane's life and worldview apart from the history of the American frontier. She was born in 1886 in De Smet, Dakota Territory, to Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder and had an exciting childhood marked by crop failures, destructive fires, and the death of her only sibling in infancy. The Wilders moved frequently, living in such places as Spring Valley, Minnesota; Westville, Florida; and finally Mansfield, Missouri. A string of adversities bolstered Lane's lifetime habits of resourcefulness, self-reliance, and stoicism. After completing high school, she worked for Western Union and in 1908 ended up in San Francisco, where she married newspaper reporter Claire Gillette Lane. Their only child died in infancy. Disenchantment with her incompatible and unambitious husband soon set in, and they divorced. She went on to become a reporter for the Kansas City Post and the San Francisco Bulletin. She also wrote short stories (Holtz 1993 8, 14-33, 47-60).

Shortly after World War I, Lane began a brief but memorable flirtation with communism. She intended to join the party after hearing John Reed speak but missed out because of a bout with influenza. Although she did not sign up after her recovery, she remained "at heart a communist" until a visit to Russia in the 1920s brought her disillusionment. A peasant's remark struck a nerve. Although his village had followed communal values for generations, he surprised her by saying that central state planning "will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man's head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great head. No. Only God can know Russia" (Lane 1936, 2-8).

Lane's literary career blossomed during the 1920s and 1930s. Her articles appeared in the Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Monthly, and the Saturday Evening Post, and her books included biographies of Jack London, Henry Ford, and Herbert Hoover. A job with the Red Cross allowed wide travel in Europe and the Middle East, opening up many experiences that informed her fiction. Her most successful novels, Let the Hurricane Roar ([1932] 1985) and Free Land ([1938] 1984b), drew on the homesteading struggles of her parents and grandparents (Holtz 1993, 66-67, 91-98, 232-39, 280-83). She and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, collaborated closely on The Little House on the Prairie books. Lane's behind-the-scenes role included editing, rewriting, and some ghostwriting (Holtz 1993, 379-85).

After the publication of Free Land, Lane concentrated on nonfiction writings, most of which championed unadulterated laissez-faire and opposition to Roosevelt's domestic and foreign policies. During this period, she befriended Isabel Paterson, an influential columnist for the New York Herald Tribune "Books." Paterson, like Lane, was a novelist and a libertarian-minded thinker. Paterson's most important philosophical work was The God of the Machine ([1943] 1993), which explores the contrast between market dynamism and human creativity, on the one hand, and the mischief inflicted by do-gooders armed with state power, on the other. Although Paterson greatly influenced Lane's ideas, the two were highly dissimilar in literary style, argumentative methods, and temperaments (Cox 2004, 62-63, 216-17, 257, 284-86).

Give Me Liberty (1936) recounts Lane's break with communism in deeply personal terms, but her political outlook found fullest expression in The Discovery of Freedom. Her philosophical system rested on the premise that each autonomous individual possesses in equal measure a kind of "energy." Governments are incapable of marshalling this energy, but societies that leave people alone to exercise their "inalienable" rights will flourish: "Each living person is a source of this energy. There is no other source ... individuals generate it, and control it." By contrast, the centralizing state, whether Communist, Nazi, or New Deal, rests on a "pagan faith" that an outside "authority" of some type controls or should control individuals ([1943] 1984a, xi-xiv, 3).

Because The Discovery of Freedom appeared in the same year as Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand's individualist novel The Fountainhead, Stephen Cox calls these authors collectively the "Libertarians of '43" (2004, 281). The parallels between them go beyond ideology. All three were ruggedly independent career women who overcame modest origins and had troubled romantic relationships, usually with men who were not their equals in ability or ambition. Given this background, an individualist worldview had understandable appeal. As Cox explains, "[W]omen were more important to the creation of the libertarian movement than they were to the creation of any political movement not strictly focused on women's rights.... People who were used to doing for themselves might have a larger conception than other people of the things that individuals can and ought to do for themselves" (2004, 195, 281).

The heyday of Lane, Paterson, and Rand was also that of the American Old Right. More a political tendency than a movement, it entailed a distrust of centralized power, the New Deal, and foreign intervention and alliances. Leading figures included Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio; John T. Flynn, the head of the New York City chapter of the America First Committee; and Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune (Moser 2005). Most were Republicans and midwesterners. Old Right leaders accused Roosevelt of conspiring to subvert the Constitution through an all-powerful federal government and foreign adventurism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of them fought against Truman's Cold War policies, such as U.S. membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Doherty 2007, 59-66).

Like others on the Old Right, Lane feared that Roosevelt's prewar foreign policy imperiled liberty at home and fed a senseless war fever. Much more than Paterson and Rand, she embraced political activism. In the late 1930s, for example, she campaigned for the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum for Congress to declare war. Although she rejected pacifism, she did not want young men to be drafted again "to fight on foreign soil in a foreign war for foreign interests" (Lane 1939a, 4). If the United States compromised its neutrality, Lane warned, a return to the barbarism of World War I was in store, "when mob-hates are loose and police power rules, when an unpopular opinion is a crime" (1939b, 4). Although Lane always distrusted Roosevelt's intentions and methods, she backed the U.S. war effort after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Confident in the ultimate triumph of a relatively free society over totalitarianism, she asked: "Win this war? Of course, Americans will win this war." The only possible impediments to success were New Deal bungling and bureaucratic hubris ([1943] 1984a, 262; see also Holtz 1993, 309-11).

When The Discovery of Freedom appeared, Lane was in the middle of the most remarkable but least-studied phase of her career as a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American black newspaper of the time. Her weekly column appeared from 1942 to 1945 and reached several times more readers than anything else she wrote during this period. The circulation of a typical issue was 270,000 (Simmons 1998, 81), whereas the total print run of The Discovery of Freedom during Lane's lifetime was only about one thousand (Powell 1996). Via the mail and hand delivery by Pullman porters, the Courier gained distribution throughout the United States, including the South (Washburn 2006, 8).

When Lane began her association with the Courier, it was riding high. The man...