Dec 4, 2004
Happy Birthday, Rose Wilder Lane
This Sunday, December 5, I plan to open a special bottle of wine. It’s the birthday of Rose Wilder Lane, the writer who is usually mentioned, along with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, as one of the three intellectual founders of the libertarian movement in America.
Lane was born in 1886 (in a cabin in Dakota Territory), so this birthday is her 118th. Soon we will be marking the 100th anniversary of Rand’s birth, and the 119th of Paterson’s. These numbers seem enormously high, “Dakota Territory” enormously distant. But I have known many people who knew these women, knew them well; to me, they seem almost like contemporaries, friends of friends whom one simply hasn’t happened to meet.
Then, besides the overlap of generations, there’s the fact that these three women projected themselves in vivid, ageless words. When you read Mark Sullivan or Walter Lippmann or Stuart Chase or other political commentators of their time, you don’t turn the pages wondering what amazing things they will say next. No, they’re always that nice Mr. Sullivan, that nice Mr. Lippmann, and that nice Mr. Chase. Ayn, Pat, and Rose don’t have that quality. They didn’t want it. They were intellectual warriors who put the whole force of their personalities into every verbal thrust they made. And they had plenty of weapons--stories and aphorisms, jokes and polemics and arguments and satires and diatribes, and most of all their superb command of the American language.
Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) was a novelist and journalist. Her best political work is undoubtedly “Give Me Liberty” (1936), an account, at once dramatic and commonsensical, of her conversion from collectivism to individualism. Here's where you can find it:
http://www.libertystory.net/LSDOCLANEGIVEMELIBERTY.htm
Her most popular work is “The Discovery of Freedom” (1943), a more speculative approach to the subject of individual liberty:
http://www.lfb.com/index.php?parentid=44&deptid=19264
She wrote a fine book of short stories, “Old Home Town” (1935), which is largely about the individual lives of women in her generation. Her novel “Free Land” (1938) is a demonstration, in exciting detail, of the fallacy of believing that western land was ever “free” in any sense recognizable to Frederick Jackson Turner and the other historians of the “free land” or “closing of the American west” school of thought. Both these books are available at amazon.com.
Alas, Lane’s superb essays in the “Economic Council Review of Books” have not been republished. Nor has anyone edited her diaries, which are remarkable accounts of a writer’s struggle with depression. William Holtz’s biography, “The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane” (University of Missouri Press, 1993), is an excellent source of facts, although it somewhat underplays her political ideas and involvements. My own “The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America” (Transaction Publishers, 2004), provides a new account of Lane’s work as a libertarian.
But she doesn’t need other people’s books to keep her alive. Her own words are plenty good enough.
Lane was born in 1886 (in a cabin in Dakota Territory), so this birthday is her 118th. Soon we will be marking the 100th anniversary of Rand’s birth, and the 119th of Paterson’s. These numbers seem enormously high, “Dakota Territory” enormously distant. But I have known many people who knew these women, knew them well; to me, they seem almost like contemporaries, friends of friends whom one simply hasn’t happened to meet.
Then, besides the overlap of generations, there’s the fact that these three women projected themselves in vivid, ageless words. When you read Mark Sullivan or Walter Lippmann or Stuart Chase or other political commentators of their time, you don’t turn the pages wondering what amazing things they will say next. No, they’re always that nice Mr. Sullivan, that nice Mr. Lippmann, and that nice Mr. Chase. Ayn, Pat, and Rose don’t have that quality. They didn’t want it. They were intellectual warriors who put the whole force of their personalities into every verbal thrust they made. And they had plenty of weapons--stories and aphorisms, jokes and polemics and arguments and satires and diatribes, and most of all their superb command of the American language.
Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) was a novelist and journalist. Her best political work is undoubtedly “Give Me Liberty” (1936), an account, at once dramatic and commonsensical, of her conversion from collectivism to individualism. Here's where you can find it:
http://www.libertystory.net/LSDOCLANEGIVEMELIBERTY.htm
Her most popular work is “The Discovery of Freedom” (1943), a more speculative approach to the subject of individual liberty:
http://www.lfb.com/index.php?parentid=44&deptid=19264
She wrote a fine book of short stories, “Old Home Town” (1935), which is largely about the individual lives of women in her generation. Her novel “Free Land” (1938) is a demonstration, in exciting detail, of the fallacy of believing that western land was ever “free” in any sense recognizable to Frederick Jackson Turner and the other historians of the “free land” or “closing of the American west” school of thought. Both these books are available at amazon.com.
Alas, Lane’s superb essays in the “Economic Council Review of Books” have not been republished. Nor has anyone edited her diaries, which are remarkable accounts of a writer’s struggle with depression. William Holtz’s biography, “The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane” (University of Missouri Press, 1993), is an excellent source of facts, although it somewhat underplays her political ideas and involvements. My own “The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America” (Transaction Publishers, 2004), provides a new account of Lane’s work as a libertarian.
But she doesn’t need other people’s books to keep her alive. Her own words are plenty good enough.