Isabel Paterson's "Turns With a Bookworm" in the Herald Tribune Book Review

Isabel Paterson had a back-of-the-book column, "Turns with a Bookworm" in the Herald Tribune Book Review. Although she had been a feared and respected literary critic since the 1920s, her memory is kept alive today almost exclusively by libertarians who consider her one of the movement's founding mothers, along with Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane. Not surprisingly, all three were fiction writers. The public was divided on Paterson. To some she was an eccentric genius, to others an interesting crackpot. Paterson was a sub-editor of the Herald Tribune book department.

Paterson had been born in poverty in Canada and had spent her youth on the vanishing frontier. She had little formal education but, as the title of her column indicated, she was a voracious reader. She did not become a US citizen until 1928.

Paterson's seminal work was The God of the Machine, her idiosyncratic and polemical version of American history, published in 1943 and praised by Rand, whose novel The Fountainhead also appeared that year, as the Bible and Das Kapital of Capitalism. Paterson in turn was Rand's primary media cheerleader. Paterson had tried out many of her own ideas in her column. Paterson, Rand and Lane were close friends at one time but Rand and Paterson had a falling out by the end of the decade, not surprising for two outsized, egocentric personalities whose lives had room only for themselves, who openly disdained the opinions of others, who insisted on dominating conversations and used mockery as their primary form of discourse. According to her biographer, libertarian college professor Stephen Cox, Paterson served as a mentor and teacher to Rand, who read very little herself. Rand, however, thought Paterson stole some of her ideas without properly crediting her. They also argued over the role of religion in society, Rand being a militant atheist. Rand thought Paterson had been rude to her friends, an odd complaint coming from one notorious for her own rudeness.

It was the New Deal that had the trio up in arms. The whole idea of a safety net was anathema to them. Paterson. a hardliner, even crusaded against public education, declaring education to be a privilege to be purchased with one's own money and neither a right nor a necessity. If you Google her name, you will find websites where some of the most extreme of her modern day disciples advocate the death penalty for anyone employed by the government or a university. That is not her fault but it is where her extreme rhetoric leads.

While Paterson was a moral traditionalist, she was a firm foe of laws that regulated private behavior. She opposed an aggressive foreign policy or large government expenditures on weapons and weapon research; she had condemned the use of science by the government to create an atom bomb "to fry Japanese babies."

Literary editor and chief critic for the Herald Tribune, Burton Rascoe had hired her as an aesthetically conservative counter-balance to his own Modernist sensibilities. However, Patterson did not dismiss all Modernists out of hand.

Her philosophy was a sentiment not a political action program. It combined classic 18th century liberalism, 19th century Social Darwinism, prairie populism and Horatio Alger mythology, all expressed in language borrowed from applied mathematics and engineering. She saw the economy as a physical force that obeyed physical laws. Freedom was the necessary condition for progress but it ran on money. She did not participate in any political organizations or movements, preferring to carp from the sidelines. Like the Tea Party, mostly she was against things without proposing alternatives. She did have some interesting and valid points to make.

While Paterson advocated frontier values like self-reliance, she did not idealize the frontier life she had led as a child and young woman, knowing from personal experience that the frontier had its share of grifters and the dissolute. While she put money at the center of life, Paterson did not especially like or trust the wealthy, who used the government to line their pockets and maintain their economic hegemony. At one point, Paterson wrote to Rand that she would enjoy seeing the rich swinging from lamp posts.She did not like their occasional humanitarian impulses, which she depicted as a method of social control—it was better in her eyes to die of starvation than to be beholden to charity or the government.

Like most Americans who do not have inherited wealth, Paterson was not economically independent but an employee of a hierarchical bureaucracy subject to the will of her employer. Paterson's philosophy ran counter to the prevailing political philosophies of the day, as well as those of her employer. In 1949, her boss, Irita Van Doren, decided her services were no longer required. She continued to write occasionally for conservative publications like the National Review but became an outlier who faded into relative obscurity once she lost her weekly pulpit. Unlike Rand, she was so true to her rigid principals that she refused to participate in Social Security or medical assistance programs and consequently proudly died in poverty.

In her April 14 column she blathered a bit about applying the principals of natural science to politics and economics. She made a sneering aside about how the British had turned away from the practical advice of Sir Isaac Newton who, as Master of the Mint, had gotten the government to "accept one fundamental rule of applied mathematics which had kept England from bankruptcy and ruin for over two hundred years until it was ignored." She expressed wonder that a condensed version of Arnold Toynbee's six volume A Study of History was being prepared because the original supposedly was too hard to follow. She declared it easy to read and filled with information that was hard to find elsewhere, although she dismissed his dialectic theorizing as essentially meaningless.