Defenders of liberty--past, present, and future
Announcing Freedom’s Furies
My new book, Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness is available today!
I’m delighted to share this story with you, which is much more complex and interesting than I imagined when I started working on it a few years ago. If you want a little preview, check out my recent article in The Objective Standard, in which I look at the friendship between Paterson and Rand.
(Oh, and yes, it will soon be available on Audible.com, too—as read by yours truly.)
My book is not a biography of these three fascinating women, or a work of libertarian argumentation. Instead, I tried to write, so to speak, a biography of the books they published in 1943: Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Rand’s The Fountainhead. It’s a look at the literary and political influences that affected these three friends and their work as artists, journalists, and philosophers—as well as a glimpse of their friendship and, at times, their estrangement.
The single most interesting thing I learned while writing this book was the influence that Sinclair Lewis had on all three of them. Lewis, who became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, published Main Street in 1920—a book that blew the socks off the American literary world. Although Lewis is strangely neglected today, he was certainly the most important American writer after Mark Twain, and his influence on Paterson, Lane, and Rand was enormous. Lane was friends—probably lovers—with Dorothy Thompson in the 1920s, before Thompson and Lewis were married, and before Thompson became in her own right one of the nation’s most influential journalists. Lane even babysat for Lewis and Thompson when they went to collect Lewis’s Nobel Prize. As for Rand, she delved into Lewis’s writing in her first years in America, and declared his 1936 book It Can’t Happen Here the greatest novel of the 20th Century. His influence on The Fountainhead is incalculable. Paterson, meanwhile, had known Lewis since the 1910s, when he was working as an editor and rejected one of her fiction manuscripts. She became one perhaps the leading literary journalist of her day, and met him on many occasions.
Most importantly, Lewis spearheaded a literary movement called “The Revolt from the Village”—a bitter and satirical condemnation of bourgeois values—which inspired many writers until the Great Depression brought on a backlash. His contempt for boring, commercial society was matched only by his loathing of fascism. Paterson, however, thought bourgeois values were worth preserving, and feared the Romanticism that Lewis seemed to be implying—and that Rand grasped eagerly.
I’ll have more to say about these things in future newsletters. In the meantime, I hope you’ll check out Freedom’s Furies to learn more about the fascinating history of these three American revolutionaries.
First review
The first review is also available: Stephen Cox writes about the book at American Greatness.
Debunking the 1619 Project…well, not quite
In the latest issue of Independent Review, I examine a book that purports to debunk the 1619 Project…only to find myself having to defend Nikole Hannah-Jones. (I feel so dirty!) Excerpt:
It would not have undermined Grabar’s rebuttal of the Project to acknowledge that Lincoln’s colonization scheme—like those Jefferson and others proposed decades earlier—was inhumane and logistically absurd. Black Americans had little interest in emigrating, and many who did go failed because they had no experience. They were not foreigners; most were born in America, as were most of their parents and grandparents. Colonization manifested a belief that blacks and whites could never peacefully coexist on this continent, and the impracticability and immorality of mass exportation was already so clear by August 1862 that some Lincoln scholars think the whole meeting was some kind of political theater.
One can admit that colonization schemes were cruel and stupid without conceding the 1619 Project’s central thesis. On the contrary: that thesis is, in its essence, the same as that advanced by colonizationists. Hannah-Jones and her colleagues think America was founded as, and remains, a white-supremacist nation in which blacks have no place. That was false when colonizationists asserted it before the Civil War, and it remains false despite being endorsed by Hannah-Jones and her allies. Yet Grabar misses this nuance. In fact, in her rush to defend Jefferson and other revolutionaries against Hannah-Jones’s claim that they weren’t actually against slavery, she even cites colonization schemes as proof that they were. But while it’s true that America’s founders hated slavery, they still deserve blame for failing to focus their efforts on working toward a nation where the races would enjoy equal citizenship.
Vasily Grossman
I started out recently to review Vasily Grossman’s novel The People Immortal, a new translation of which has just been published by Grossman scholars Robert and Elizabeth Chandler—as well as Stalingrad, another Grossman novel they published in 2019. But the review turned instead into a feature article about Grossman and the Chandlers’ efforts to keep his work alive. Here’s an excerpt:
Life and Fate’s most haunting episode, however, comes when the Communist Party begins denouncing Viktor for refusing to compromise his scientific principles. He is spared at the very last minute when Stalin himself telephones Viktor at his laboratory and praises his work. The call lasts only a few minutes, but it is enough: Viktor’s fortunes immediately reverse, and his colleagues regard him as a virtual celebrity. Then, a few weeks later, a Party official appears at the lab and asks him to sign a letter that the Party is sending to Western newspapers, denying that there is any oppression in the USSR. Viktor knows that if he refuses, his newfound acclaim will vanish at once. “It’s quite unthinkable to show this letter to Comrade Stalin without your signature,” says the Party man. “He might ask, ‘But why hasn’t Shtrum signed?’”
The People Immortal and Stalingrad suffered terribly from the censorship and propaganda demands of the Soviet government, but they are still important parts of his career. Of course, Grossman’s greatest works were Life and Fate—the sequel to Stalingrad—and Everything Flows, which he worked on even on his deathbed. I admire Grossman’s work a lot. Of course, thousand-page epics like Life and Fate aren’t for everyone, but you might check out the BBC’s fine radio adaptation of the novel (starring Kenneth Branagh!) or the surprisingly good Russian television version, if you can find it on DVD.
Talking about Frederick Douglass on The Great Antidote
I joined Juliette Selgren of The Great Antidote to talk about Frederick Douglass, and particularly the question of whether Douglass qualifies as a patriot or not. You can listen here.
Previewing the arguments in the ICWA case
I’m heading to DC soon for the oral arguments in Brackeen v. Haaland, the case about the Indian Child Welfare Act. The Federalist Society asked me to write up a brief preview of what the arguments will be about. It’s in two parts; in this part I explain the racial issues at stake, and in this part I discuss the federalism questions.
Balloons, bureaucrats, and bullies
It’s been a busy month at the Goldwater Institute. A few days ago, we won our challenge to the constitutionality of Pima County’s subsidies to the World View balloon company; in that case, County officials devoted $15 million in taxpayer money to (in the county’s own words) “front-end capitalization” for World View. The Arizona Constitution forbids government from giving or lending public money to private companies, however, and in a unanimous decision, the court or appeals agreed with us that the county’s actions were unconstitutional. You can read about that decision here.
We also filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court—in a case where a public employee union is prohibiting its members from resigning from the union—and in the Arizona Supreme Court—in a case about whether you can challenge the validity of a decision issued by an agency that had no jurisdiction in the first place. Also, in an Illinois case where we sued the state for not giving people their gun licenses, the government agreed to improve its processes for approving applications—a win for the right of self-defense.
A reminder: this Substack is my personal newsletter, and doesn’t speak for the Institute; I just like to point you to what’s going on at the office, sometimes.
Looking forward to ending 2022 on a high note—stay tuned!