Jan 20, 2006
Isabel Paterson at 120
Sunday marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Isabel Paterson (1886-1961). As I argued in my book, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America (Transaction, 2004), Paterson may have been the first person to assemble the little constellation of ideas and attitudes that we know as modern libertarianism.
Two of her own books are in print: her original theory of history and politics, The God of the Machine (1943), and one of her fine novels, the introspective Never Ask the End (1933). Paterson’s ideas are hard to summarize, because she is such a good writer, sentence by sentence, that one often ends up just quoting what she had to say. So here’s a quotation from one of her 1250 columns in New York Herald Tribune “Books.”
It is dated May 23, 1943--a time when virtually no one publicly agreed with her about anything, certainly not about the nature of American ideas and ideals. Besides, there was a war going on. That didn’t stop her. If anything, it led her to state her views even more plainly. Despite the bluntness of the sentiments that she expresses here, one can study paragraph 4 for a long time without exhausting all it has to teach about writing sentences.
Isabel Paterson:
“We want to speak further of ‘The Wright Brothers,’ by Fred C. Kelly. Though it is not a great book, it has a great subject. . . . It is the American story, brought to a focus on one unique historical event.
“Now we’d like to inquire why, in view of such an achievement, Americans should be forced to listen to self-appointed apologists who go around begging the rest of the world to take everything we’ve got--the product of self-respecting and intelligent men like the Wrights--and please excuse this country for existing at all. Is there any sufficient reason why Americans should crawl in the mud and say: ‘Of course, we were all wrong; we must learn from other countries how to stand in line for rations and live by permission and thank you for being so good as to accept these inventions at our expense; and if we beg hard enough may we have just an interview to gaze at a dictator and take down his words through an interpreter? That is all we ask.’ That is where Americans have got to since forty years ago.
“There were two Americans who asked nothing of anybody; they could earn what they needed, and mind their own business; and out of their native genius they solved a scientific problem which gave mankind the mastery of the air.
“They had a shed for a workshop and a pasture field for an experiment station. We like particularly the episode of the selection of Huffman’s field. It was part of a farm owned by a Dayton banker. The Wrights asked the owner if they could rent it. Mr. Huffman said they could use it free; he only requested them incidentally to ‘drive his cows to a safe place and not run over them!’ We shall never know whether Mr. Huffman thought anything would come of the Wrights' experiments; but that was the American way, too--let them use the field, they wouldn't do any harm. Oh, no, no charge. It was private property, so there was no red tape. At about the same time another man, the head of an endowed institution, with $50,000 of government funds and $20,000 as a special gift, was trying to invent a flying machine; and he got nowhere with it. But the two who needed nothing whatever except their own brains, their own earnings and their own leisure time at their own disposal, performed the feat. That is what we are now urged to be ashamed of, to ignore, to repudiate and deny and destroy. That is the United States; that is the capitalist system.”
Two of her own books are in print: her original theory of history and politics, The God of the Machine (1943), and one of her fine novels, the introspective Never Ask the End (1933). Paterson’s ideas are hard to summarize, because she is such a good writer, sentence by sentence, that one often ends up just quoting what she had to say. So here’s a quotation from one of her 1250 columns in New York Herald Tribune “Books.”
It is dated May 23, 1943--a time when virtually no one publicly agreed with her about anything, certainly not about the nature of American ideas and ideals. Besides, there was a war going on. That didn’t stop her. If anything, it led her to state her views even more plainly. Despite the bluntness of the sentiments that she expresses here, one can study paragraph 4 for a long time without exhausting all it has to teach about writing sentences.
Isabel Paterson:
“We want to speak further of ‘The Wright Brothers,’ by Fred C. Kelly. Though it is not a great book, it has a great subject. . . . It is the American story, brought to a focus on one unique historical event.
“Now we’d like to inquire why, in view of such an achievement, Americans should be forced to listen to self-appointed apologists who go around begging the rest of the world to take everything we’ve got--the product of self-respecting and intelligent men like the Wrights--and please excuse this country for existing at all. Is there any sufficient reason why Americans should crawl in the mud and say: ‘Of course, we were all wrong; we must learn from other countries how to stand in line for rations and live by permission and thank you for being so good as to accept these inventions at our expense; and if we beg hard enough may we have just an interview to gaze at a dictator and take down his words through an interpreter? That is all we ask.’ That is where Americans have got to since forty years ago.
“There were two Americans who asked nothing of anybody; they could earn what they needed, and mind their own business; and out of their native genius they solved a scientific problem which gave mankind the mastery of the air.
“They had a shed for a workshop and a pasture field for an experiment station. We like particularly the episode of the selection of Huffman’s field. It was part of a farm owned by a Dayton banker. The Wrights asked the owner if they could rent it. Mr. Huffman said they could use it free; he only requested them incidentally to ‘drive his cows to a safe place and not run over them!’ We shall never know whether Mr. Huffman thought anything would come of the Wrights' experiments; but that was the American way, too--let them use the field, they wouldn't do any harm. Oh, no, no charge. It was private property, so there was no red tape. At about the same time another man, the head of an endowed institution, with $50,000 of government funds and $20,000 as a special gift, was trying to invent a flying machine; and he got nowhere with it. But the two who needed nothing whatever except their own brains, their own earnings and their own leisure time at their own disposal, performed the feat. That is what we are now urged to be ashamed of, to ignore, to repudiate and deny and destroy. That is the United States; that is the capitalist system.”