"A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state." -- Isabel Paterson
Isabel Paterson (January 22, 1886, — January 10, 1961) was a Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, and leading literary critic of her day. Along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson, she is one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism.
Paterson's best-known work, her 1943 book The God of the Machine, a treatise on political philosophy, economics, and history, reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy.
Her biographer Stephen D. Cox (2004) believes Paterson is the "earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today." Ayn Rand wrote in a letter in the 1940s that The God of the Machine "does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity".
"As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid.""No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government."
Born Isabel Mary Bowler in rural Manitoulin Island, Ontario, she moved with her family to the west when she was very young. She grew up on a cattle ranch in Alberta. Paterson's family was quite poor and she had eight siblings. A voracious reader who was largely self-educated, she had brief and informal public schooling during these years: about three years in a country school, from the ages of 11 to 14. In her late teen years, Bowler left the ranch for the city of Calgary, where she took a clerical job with the Canadian Pacific Railway. As a teenager, she worked as a waitress, stenographer, and bookkeeper, working at one point as an assistant to future Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett.
This hardscrabble youth probably led Paterson to attach great importance to productive "self-starters". Although she was articulate, well-read, and erudite, Paterson had extremely limited formal education, an experience she shared with Rose Wilder Lane.
In 1910, at the age of 24, Bowler entered into a short-lived marriage with Canadian Kenneth B. Paterson. The marriage was not happy, and they parted in 1918. It was during these years, in a foray south of the border, that Paterson landed a job with a newspaper, the Inland Herald in Spokane, Washington. Initially she worked in its business department of the paper, but later transferred to the editorial department. There her journalistic career began. Her next position was with a newspaper in Vancouver, British Columbia, where for two years she wrote drama reviews.
Writer and critic
In 1914, Paterson started submitting her first two novels, The Magpie's Nest and The Shadow Riders to publishers, without much success. It wasn't until 1916 that her second novel The Shadow Riders was accepted and published by John Lane Company, which also published The Magpie's Nest the following year in 1917.
After World War I, she moved to New York, where she worked for the sculptor Gutzon Borglum. He was creating statues for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and would later carve the memorial at Mount Rushmore. Paterson also wrote for the World and the American in New York.
In 1921, Paterson became an assistant to Burton Rascoe, the new literary editor of the New York Tribune, later the New York Herald Tribune. For 25 years, from 1924 to 1949, she wrote a column (signed "I.M.P.") for the Herald Tribune's "Books" section. Paterson became one of the most influential literary critics of her place and time. She covered a time of great expansion in the United States literary world, with new work by the rising generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others, African Americans of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the first American generation of the great waves of European immigrants. In 1928 she became an American citizen, at the age of 42.
She was notorious for demonstrating her sharp wit and goring of sacred cows in her column, where she also first articulated many of the political ideas that reached their final form in The God of the Machine. Her thinking, especially on free trade, was also foreshadowed in her historical novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Paterson opposed most of the economic program known as the New Deal which American president Franklin D. Roosevelt put into effect during the Great Depression. She advocated less government involvement in social and fiscal issues. She led a group of younger friends, many of them other Herald Tribune employees, who shared her views. One was the young Ayn Rand.
Paterson and Ayn Rand
Paterson and Rand promoted each other's books and conducted an extensive correspondence over the years, in which they often touched on religion and philosophy. This correspondence ended after they quarreled in 1948. An atheist, Rand was critical of the deist Paterson's attempts to link capitalism with religion. Rand believed the two to be incompatible.
As a sign of the political tenor of the times, The God of the Machine was published in the same year as Rand's The Fountainhead and Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom. Albert Jay Nock noted that Lane's and Paterson's books were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." The two women 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."(quoted in Doherty 2005)
Later years
Paterson influenced the post-WWII rise of lettered American conservatism through her correspondence with the young Russell Kirk in the 1940s, and with the young William F. Buckley in the 1950s. Buckley and Kirk went on to found the National Review to which Paterson contributed for a brief time.
In her retirement, Paterson declined to enroll in Social Security.
Paterson is interred in Saint Mary's Episcopal Churchyard in Burlington, New Jersey.
"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... ...when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object." (The God of the Machine)
Cox, Stephen, 2004. The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America. Transaction Publishers.
Beito, David T. and Beito, Linda Royster, "Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty", Independent Review 12 (Spring 2008).
