Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America / Stephen Cox

Isabel Paterson First published 2004 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2004045872 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cox, Stephen D., 1948- The woman and the dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the idea of America / Stephen Cox. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0241-4 1. Paterson, Isabel. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biogra- phy. 3. National characteristics, American—Historiography. 4. United States—Civilization—Historiography. 5. Journalists—United States. I. Title. PS3531.A774Z53 2004 813'.52—dc22 2004045872 ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0241-5 (hbk) To Muriel Welles Hall Contents Acknowledgments vii 1. The View from the Wing1 2. O Pioneers7 3. The Unsheltered Life 23 4. Authorship and Exile 41 5. A Matter of Style 65 6. Queen Hatshepsut 83 7. Then or Anywhen 97 8. Never Ask the End 107 9. Let It All Go 125 10. Not Mad—But Atlantean 147 11. The Principle of the Lever Remains the Same 165 12. Spring Day, Too 183 13. Implications of Individualism 193 14. Others 205 15. Attacks and Counterattacks 223 16. War and the Intellectuals 237 17. The Grand Perspective 253 18. The Libertarians of ‘43 281 19. The Mustard Seed 297 20. The Committee of One Will Now Adjourn 315 21. Completing the Circuit 325 22. Friends 333 23. The Heart and Soul 343 24. Rays of Light 355 Notes 365 Index 411 Illustrations follow page 204 Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to people who knew Isabel Paterson or her friends and were willing to share their memories or permit access to historical material: Tom Bevans, Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, John Chamberlain, Muriel Hall, Bernice Henderson, Robert Hessen, Erika Holzer, Henry Mark Holzer, John Hospers, Russell Kirk, John McLaren, Rebecca Metzger, Edmund Opitz, Mabel Owen, Eleanor Perényi, and Gertrude Vogt. For their gracious permission to quote from unpublished docu- ments, I wish particularly to thank William F. Buckley, Jr., and Annette Kirk. Permission to include excerpts from the writings of Rose Wilder Lane has been granted by the copyright owner, Little House Heritage Trust. One of the pleasures of writing this book has been the opportu- nity to learn from professional librarians, curators, and archivists. I want to acknowledge a special debt to Dwight Miller and Lynn Smith of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Rosa Portell of the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Robin Borglum Carter of the Borglum Archives, Jeffrey Korman of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Nancy Shawcross of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania. My relationships with other scholars in the field have been the source of pride and intellectual profit. In this context, I think espe- cially of R. W. Bradford, Barbara Branden, Bettina Bien Greaves, William Holtz, Valerie Legge, Thomas Maeder, Bruce Ramsey, Chris Sciabarra, and Amy Jo Tompkins. Pamela Clark, Peter Rickgauer, and Paul Hochstetler gave me the inestimable benefit of their computer expertise. My student Cory Craig assisted me greatly in finding and preserving Patersoniana. Garrett Brown and Chris Capen offered untiring support and en- couragement. My editor, Laurence Mintz, transformed the process of publication from a grief to a pleasure. As always, Paul Beroza let vii viii The Woman and the Dynamo me test my ideas on him and loyally repressed all impulses to beg for mercy. Three people were of extraordinary importance to my work: Mrs. Muriel Hall, Isabel Paterson’s friend and executor; Dr. Irving Louis Horowitz, Editorial Director of Transaction Publishers; and the late Dr. Russell Kirk, Editor of Transaction’s Library of Conservative Thought. Dr. Horowitz and Dr. Kirk invited me to publish my early findings as an introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Paterson’s The God of the Machine and warmly encouraged me to write a full account of her life. From their example I learned that individualism, intelligence, and decisive judgment still have a place in publishing. Without Muriel Hall, who preserved the written records and the vital memory of Paterson’s life, this book could never have been written. She welcomed my research, gave me unlimited access to Paterson’s papers and her own rich recollections, provided wise advice on work in progress, and left me completely free to express my own ideas. From our first meeting, she has been as good a friend to me as she was to Isabel Paterson. The dedication of this book is only a small indication of my debt to her. 1 The View from the Wing Isabel Paterson summarized her life by saying that she had “lived from the stone age to the air age.” She also said that her girlhood “was rather dull, being spent in the Wild West.”1 But if the West wasn’t wild enough to suit her, it did have its exciting moments. She saw her neighbors, the Blackfoot Indians, conducting their great Sun Dance, and she saw the huge mogul engines of the trans- continental railroad rushing down the mountains and across the prairies, messengers of a new industrial civilization. Soon she saw the peculiar sight of an automobile “scurrying along the horizon” like “a large black beetle.” By the time she encountered her first airplane, she was prepared to think that “of course, people could fly. In this country at that time any one could do anything.”2 And when she got her own chance to fly, she set a record. The place was New York City; the date was November 5, 1912— an appropriately symbolic moment for her to enter the drama of American progress. November 5 was Election Day, and progress was the issue. The candidates were Woodrow Wilson (Democrat), William Howard Taft (Republican), Theodore Roosevelt (Progres- sive), and Eugene Debs (Socialist). Roosevelt’s party was the only one that named itself “progressive,” but all four candidates de- manded progress, and all believed that it required, not just the invention of more powerful machines, but the invention of more powerful political machinery, machinery capable of controlling the economic system that had been the maker of progress.3 The four men denounced and ridiculed one another; still, they agreed that the era of uncontrolled individualism had ended. Many intellectuals also agreed. Frederick Jackson Turner, the distinguished historian of American progress, put the prevailing 1 2 The Woman and the Dynamo idea in its most influential form. He noted that the vast free lands of the West were now occupied; the frontier was closed; an age of nearly anarchic freedom had passed away, and an age of limitation had arrived. Turner foresaw an era of “greater social control.” Yet limitation could also be a means of progress, a means by which “civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good.”4 About such ideas Paterson would later express her own, vigor- ously dissenting views. She would make her mark on American history as a political theorist who argued that the extent of progress is determined by the extent of individual freedom, that “the strength of a nation” is “directly proportionate to the freedom of the individual.”5 But on that November afternoon in 1912, when she was twenty-six years old, Paterson had something different in mind. She wanted to fly. At Oakwood Heights on Staten Island, the Aeronautical Society had announced an exhibition. The climax, the last of twenty-five flights, would be an attempt by a pilot named Harry Bingham Brown to set an American record for altitude with a passenger on board. Ten thousand spectators assembled, their imaginations stimulated by the risk of tragedy. Newspapers regularly reported the grisly deaths of pilots and passengers who had foolishly meddled with the new machines. On Staten Island, the only official safety pre- caution was a posse of mounted policemen who tried to keep spectators off the field. Isabel Paterson, mysteriously known as “Mrs. Paterson,” since there was no sign of a husband in her vicinity, had heard that Brown was looking for a woman to fly with him. She immediately volun- teered. Now, in the late afternoon of a beautiful Indian summer day, she seated herself beside him in the cloth and wood frame- work of his little Wright biplane. A photographer snapped their picture—Brown posing with both hands on the levers of control, Mrs. Paterson sitting next to him, wrapped in several layers of cloth- ing, smiling contentedly. Then the engine started, the plane picked up speed, and the ground fell away beneath her feet. It rolled out like a tapestry, she thought, like a complex work of art; and she felt “triumphant, as if coming into a deferred heritage,” the heritage of the magnificent land and the power to see it for herself. Higher and higher they The View from the Wing 3 rose, in circle after circle, heading past South Beach and out to sea, far, far out, where there was nothing but the sky and the ocean, and the sky and the ocean merged, as she felt, in “Nirvana.” Still they climbed across the sunset, until they reached 5,000 feet.

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