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 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 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 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 and warmly encouraged me to write a full account of her life. From their example I learned that indi- vidualism, 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 ac- cess 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 ; 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 in- vention 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 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 indi- vidual.”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 spec- tators 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. That was a record. Isabel Paterson had flown higher than any woman had ever flown before. At that point, Brown touched the levers in a businesslike way, and the plane started down. The flight had lasted most of an hour; shadows already extended across the island, and spectators were growing fearful about Brown’s ability to find his way home. They kindled bonfires on the landing field, and by the light of those fires he found his course. The plane touched ground, “coming to rest like a duck on the surface of the water,” and the crowd sent up a long cheer. Isabel Paterson was amused. She was being applauded “for get- ting down rather than going up,” but going up was the point, after all. What counted was the adventure of the air, not the security of the ground. While she was flying “it did not matter in the least” to her if she “never walked the earth safe again.” “It was the greatest experience of my life,” she told a reporter.6 Back in the city, the election returns were coming in. A reporter from the New York World, which supported Wilson, turned up at the headquarters of the Roosevelt or “Bull Moose” party, where he was happy to find an “air of cheerlessness”: “Moose Quarters” were a “Cavern of Gloom.”7 Democrats rushed into the streets to celebrate their first presidential triumph in twenty years. Masses of party faithful collected on Broadway, at City Hall Park, and at Demo- cratic headquarters, Tammany Hall on Fourteenth Street. Fireworks exploded, streetcars were stopped, the police were helpless. Free- spending customers thronged the best hotels and restaurants, and unprecedented numbers of automobiles appeared in the streets, a sign that “class privilege” and “political progress” were not utterly distinct.8 Paterson’s reaction to the festivities is unrecorded. She made her way homeward, a little woman in an enormous town. During her flight, she considered whether the pilot might “have been wonder- ing who was elected President”; but she herself didn’t wonder. She was a partisan of nobody; she had no connection with political life. She thought only of the sky and the sea and the steady climb of the machine. 4 The Woman and the Dynamo

But the real adventure of her life lay ahead of her. It was the intellectual adventure of discovering, in her own way, what America was about. Taking her own survey of the landscape of ideas, she would try to find the relationship between the achievements of pri- vate life and the sustaining principles of public life, of the political machinery that allowed the literal machinery to fly. “The airplane,” she would write, “was invented in the United States precisely be- cause this was the only country on earth, the only country that has ever existed, in which people had a right to be let alone.” The machine itself wasn’t revolutionary; it was merely “an end-prod- uct” of a revolutionary “energy system,” a system of invention, production and communication that could operate only in condi- tions of freedom.9 While other intellectuals of her time identified progress with an increasingly regulated and regimented world, Paterson identified it with and with individual responsibility for the taking of life’s risks and rewards. It was not the loss of “free land” that concerned her; it was the loss of freedom itself. But, she be- lieved, the ideals of could be recovered; they could even be enhanced, if people were adventurous enough to accept the chal- lenge. Limited government could become minimal government; could be made freer than ever before to conduct the experiment of life; “the technology of freedom” could be fully used; and the incalculable energy of the individual self, which is ulti- mately the energy of God, could create progress far beyond the ability of anyone to imagine.10 In the years that followed her flight, Paterson became a well- known columnist and literary critic; a best-selling novelist; and, in her great book, The God of the Machine (1943), the author of a unique contribution to American political thought. She developed radical individualism into a philosophy of remarkable richness and explanatory power. She went further. She gave it wit and charm, and a fighting common sense. She was one of a handful of intellectuals whose rebellion against the modern state created the individualist “right” as we know it today—a complex web of classical liberals, libertarians, and free- market conservatives united by certain ideas about and politics and by a certain demotically American style. The question of who first wove that web, and when, remains controversial. Pater- The View from the Wing 5 son, as I will show, was there at the beginning. She designed the classic pattern of modern political individualism, and she discov- ered its most colorful materials. Very little of this story, and none of its fun, appears in conven- tional historical studies. As a modern liberal historian has said, the American Right has never “received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should.” He mentions a lack of “imagina- tion.”11 Certainly you need some imagination if you want to under- stand the history of the radical individualists and their contribution to American ideas. You need enough imagination to see that the landscape of American history is indeed complex, and that its forms may not always have been determined by professional politicians, corporate leaders, pressure groups, and graduates of the better East- ern colleges. You may even need a taste for paradox. Radical individualism is an influence without an institution, a power that never grasped at power, a social democracy at war with the concept of social democracy. In Paterson’s generation, its lead- ing figures produced more than their share of enigmas and ironies. Their political “,” as it seemed to others, could more accurately be termed an insistence on the fundamental ideals of , a liberalism that made generous allowance for personal difference and diversity. They were men and (more often) women, natives and immigrants, modernists and antimodernists, Christians and deists and atheists; and they felt free to defend the capitalist system while mercilessly attacking the capitalists who, they thought, were criminally mismanaging it. They were masters of the collo- quial American language and enjoyers of vernacular American culture, but they lived at an immense and frequently mysterious remove from normal American life. So private was Mrs. Paterson that a would-be investigator predicted that her biographers would “end in Bellevue.”12 Bellevue was an insane asylum. I’ll take that as a warning. I have discovered many facts about Paterson (beginning with her date of birth) that she preferred no one to know, but some facts are still buried too deep for even a decade of research to reveal. I have tried not to lose my sanity over this, and Paterson’s own example has helped me. She suggested that the story of her life was something more than the story of the facts about herself. In her old age, when she made plans to write an 6 The Woman and the Dynamo autobiography, she said that it would be an account “of the world I have seen.”13 It would be a book about her experience of America, her idea of what had happened to America in its progress “from the stone age to the air age.” It would, of course, be a picture of America as seen from a distance, a distance established both by time and by her own highly individual temperament. But there is no sight with- out distance; it is distance that allows us to see the many patterns of a landscape. And outsiders can make use of their distance, too. Preparing to write her book, Paterson sorted through boxes of photographs and letters and other souvenirs of the world she had seen, discarding some and preserving others. One of the things she kept was an article from a Staten Island newspaper, reporting on an aeronautical event of 1912; another was the picture of a young woman sitting on the wing of a tiny airplane, smiling into the dis- tance. Paterson died before she could write what she thought about that. But it’s easy to see, looking at the picture, that who she was and what she did has something important to say about the risks and possibilities of life in America. That is the story I’ve tried to write.