In Profile: Isabel Paterson

"If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever."

Isabel Paterson was born on January 22nd, 1886, at Tehkummah, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, and spent much of her childhood in Alberta and Utah.  One of nine children Paterson would receive only two years of formal education and lived much of her youth in brutal poverty.  She was sixteen when she first saw an electric light bulb.  By eighteen she was working odd jobs at everything from waitressing to bookeeping.  It was not unusual for her to work ten and twelve hour days, seven days a week, only to make $20 a month.  When she finally landed a well paid office job, in Calgary, her employer was the top flight corporate lawyer Richard Bedford Bennett, who would later serve as Prime Minister of Canada.  Moving to Vancouver she started writing for newspapers and published a few novels with modest success.  After the First World War she lived in New York where she worked for Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore.  By 1921 she started writing for the Herald Tribune where she would work until 1949.  During the twenties and thirties she and Gertrude Stein fought a nasty war of words whose climax was probably this review Paterson wrote in 1934:

Gertrude Stein, author of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," is coming over soon for a lecure tour.  One of her lecture topics will be "The History of English Literature as I Understand it."  That should be a very brief lecture.

When writing about "The Lost Generation" of novelists who dominated the literary scene of the twenties Paterson was even more unkind, yet brutally correct:

Their essential docility, underneath the surface revolt, was complete and touching.... They feel themselves persecuted by 'The Saturday Evening Post.'"

Paterson's acerbic wit found its way into her personal life and she inevitably quarreled, sometimes over trivia other times over profound differences in world view, with most of her friends.  Among them the libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane, and more famously the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand.  She was especially close to Rand and they parted, according to Rand's version, over one insulting remark too many Paterson made about a mutual acquittance.  Despite this both continued a considerable intellectual respect for one another and Paterson wrote a strong and favourable review of Atlas Shrugged when it was published in 1957.  In her turn Rand wrote a highly positive, though not uncritical review of Paterson's masterwork, The God of the Machine.

Published in 1943 The God of the Machine was nothing less than an attempt to explain the development of human history from the perspective of politics.  Paterson's view was that political and economic freedom was the mainspring of human progress and used often obtuse references to mechanical engineering to explain her points.  Despite its radical message, and the often awkward incorporation of the theories of the physical sciences to explain human events, the book has remained something of a cult classic.

In chapters like Rome Discovers Political Structure and Rome as an Exhibit of the Nature of Government, Paterson explains the rise and fall of antiquity's greatest empire as the result of the expansion and contraction of individual freedoms.  Later on in the book she explains the collapse of the medieval feudal system as a product of a rising capitalist economy and how the attempts of an English monarch, King John, to co-opt this new source of wealth lead to the Magna Carta and the British Empire.  In two fascinating chapters, really self-contained essays, she explores the political and psychological essence of modern charity, voluntary and coercive, and the decline of the American educational systems as it follows, under government control, the Japanese model.

Isabel Paterson died on January 10th, 1961, and was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in New Jersey.

This mini-biography was composed with reference to Stephen Cox's introduction to The God of the Machine, 1993, and the Cato Institute's online biography of Paterson.  Stephen Cox's full length biography is avaliable here and one he wrote for Lew Rockwell is here.  Cato's indepth take on The God of the Machine is here.  Isabel Paterson's personal papers can be found, oddly enough given her contempt for the man, at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.