Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on war, race, the state, and liberty.

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

The ideals of liberty, individualism, and self-reliance have rarely had more enthusiastic champions than Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston. All three were out of step with the dominant worldview of their times. They had their peak professional years during the New Deal and World War II, when faith in big government was at high tide.

The parallels between them were not only ideological, but also biographical and personal. They were born within a span of five years, grew up in frontier areas, and endured long stints of economic hardship. They consistently preferred independence over convention and chafed at anyone's attempt to control them. Their marriages were fleeting and to husbands of unremarkable accomplishments. All three, but especially Paterson and Hurston, were often secretive about their pasts. None of them had an identifiable mentor, although Paterson had some intellectual influence on Lane, and the two were friends for a time (Kaplan 2002, 38-39, 774-81; Cox 2004, 216-18; Doherty 2007, 129).

Although the influence of one's sex may be overrated, it undeniably contributed to these women's attraction to individualist ideas. They were not the only ones. Stephen Cox, Paterson's biographer, notes that "women 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." As Cox speculates, such women as outsiders were "used to doing for themselves" and thus had "a larger conception than other people of the things that individuals can and ought to do for themselves" (2004, 195). Paterson, Lane, and Hurston's individualism drew them to strikingly similar conclusions on race, economics, war, and the growth of the state. All of them looked on the United States as the best representative of the ideals of liberty and opportunity.

Daughters of the Frontier

Despite this shared perception of the United States, the oldest of the three, Isabel Paterson, was originally a subject of the British Empire. She was born in 1886 on Manitloulin Island, an isolated place in Lake Huron. As one of nine children, she experienced the least-rewarding upbringing of the three. Her father, Francis (Frank) Bowler, was affable but irresponsible. He was a perpetual failure, and she never respected him. Every few years he pulled up stakes and dragged the family to Michigan, Utah, or another destination in a fruitless quest for stability and economic success. Isabel was closer to her mother, Margaret Bowler, a hard-working, sensible woman. Although Isabel had minimal formal education, she was unusually precocious and read voraciously (Cox 2004, 7-14, 19-20).

After leaving home, Isabel ended up in Calgary, where she worked as a waitress and secretary. She married Kenneth B. Paterson, a traveling salesman, but the match was not a happy one. They soon separated, but never formally divorced, and acquaintances knew Isabel as "Mrs. Paterson" or "Pat" for the rest of her life. In 1910, her long career as a working journalist began at the Spokane Inland Herald. Two years later, she moved to New York City, and in 1928 she became a U.S. citizen. During the four and a half decades that began in 1914, she penned several novels (Cox 2004, 23-31, 39, 45-58).

Her career really took off in 1924 after she started her regular column "Turns with a Bookworm" in the New York Herald Tribune. For the next twenty-five years, her biting wit and hard-hitting prose reached half a million subscribers. The leading authors of the time knew and sometimes feared her. Although she was not shy about giving praise, she repeatedly showed a mastery of the razor-sharp verbal barb. A favorite target was Franklin D. Roosevelt and his domestic and foreign policies. Her views did not find full expression, however, until publication of The God of the Machine in 1943 (reprinted in 1993). In this book, she explored the contrast between market dynamism and human creativity, on the one hand, and the harm inflicted by do-gooders armed with state power, on the other (Cox 2004, 62-63, 257).

Rose Wilder Lane was born in 1886, the same year as Paterson, and, like her, grew up on the frontier. In fact, it is almost impossible to discuss her apart from the history of the American frontier. She was born in De Smet, Dakota Territory, to Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she had an exciting childhood marked by crop failures, destructive fires, and the death of her only sibling in infancy. Much like the Bowlers, the Wilders were often on the move. First, they left for Spring Valley, Minnesota, then Westville, Florida, and finally Mansfield, Missouri. A string of adversities bolstered Rose's lifetime attitudes of resourcefulness, self-reliance, and stoicism (Holtz 1993, 8, 14-33). After completing school, she worked for Western Union and in 1908 ended up in San Francisco, where she married Claire Gillette Lane, a reporter. Their only child died in infancy. Like Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane did not take long to become disenchanted with her incompatible and unambitious husband. They separated after seven years and later divorced. She worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Post and the San Francisco Bulletin and wrote short stories (Holtz 1993, 48-60).

Shortly after World War I, Lane began a brief but memorable flirtation with communism. She almost joined the party after heating a speech by John Reed but missed out because of a bout with influenza. Nevertheless, she remained "at heart a communist" until a visit to Russia in the 1920s brought disillusionment. A peasant there struck a nerve when he told her that 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 gained steam during the 1920s and 1930s. Her articles appeared in the Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Monthly, and the Saturday Evening Post. She wrote several books, including biographies of Jack London, Henry Ford, and Herbert Hoover (Holtz 1993, 66-67). A job with the Red Cross allowed her to travel widely in Europe and the Middle East, giving her many experiences that informed her fiction (Holtz 1993, 91-98). Her most successful novels, Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) and Free Land ([1938] 1966), drew on the homesteading struggles of her parents and grandparents. She and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, collaborated closely in writing the Little House on the Prairie books. Lane's behind-the-scenes role in these books included editing, rewriting, and some ghost writing (Holtz 1993, 232-39, 280-83, 379-85).

After the publication of Free Land, Lane concentrated on nonfiction writings, most of which championed unadulterated laissez-faire. Give Me Liberty (1936) recounts her break with communism in deeply personal terms. She turned against Roosevelt's domestic and foreign policies and befriended Paterson. Although Paterson had considerable influence over Lane, the two had highly dissimilar literary styles, argumentative methods, and temperaments (Cox 2004, 216-17, 284-86). Lane's political outlook and worldview find their fullest expression in The Discovery of Freedom ([1943] 1984), a book that by happenstance appeared in the same year as Paterson's The God of the Machine.

At the time of Discovery's publication, Lane was in the middle of one of the most remarkable, but least studied, phases in her career. From 1942 to 1945, she was a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read black newspaper in the United States. Through it, she reached several times more readers than she reached with her other writings during this period. Each issue had a circulation of 270,000, whereas the total print run of The Discovery of Freedom during Lane's lifetime was only about 1,000 (Powell 1996; Simmons 1998, 81). Via the mail and hand delivery by Pullman Porters, the Courier found its way throughout the United States, including the South (Washburn 2006, 8).

Like Paterson, Zora Neale Hurston could be highly guarded about her past. At various times, she listed her birth date as 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1910. The truth is that she was born in 1891 in the isolated rural community of Nostasulga, Alabama. When she was a toddler, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida (Kaplan 2002, 36-37). Founded in 1887, Eatonville was a zesty experiment in black self-government and one of several all-black towns during the period. In these communities, Booker T. Washington observed, "Negroes are made to feel the responsibilities of citizenship in ways they cannot be made to feel them elsewhere. If they make mistakes, they, at least, have an opportunity to profit by them. In such a town individuals who have executive ability and initiative have an opportunity to discover themselves and find out what they can do" (qtd. in Boyd 2003, 22). Zora's first memories were of a community in which blacks had complete political control. Her father helped to write many of the town's laws and served as its mayor for four years (Kaplan 2002, 37).

Like Paterson and to a lesser degree Lane, Hurston had a distant father and a supportive mother (Hurston [1942] 1984, 227). Her mother's death brought chaos to the family, and she scrambled to survive and get ahead. She spent time in a boarding school and worked as a domestic and a waitress. Unlike Lane and Paterson, she attended college, receiving a bachelor's degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1928, at the age of thirty-seven. At Columbia, she studied under the famed anthropologist Franz Boas and befriended novelist Fannie Hurst, later the author of Imitation of Life. Like Paterson and Lane, Hurston was not lucky in love. Each of her three marriages was brief and ended in divorce (Kaplan 2002, 39-41, 49-53, 775, 779-81).

During the 1920s, Hurston began to publish short stories. She was...