Timothy Sandefur is the vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute and the author of six books, including Frederick Douglass: Self Made Man and Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness.

These three women all lived during the Great Depression, so he talks to us about the literary, historical, and political scenes of the time, painting a picture of their works and relationships in context. We discuss the parallels between their time and ours, and his optimism for the future.

And don't miss Alice Temnick's Great Antidote EXTRA on this episode, where you'll find even more to explore!



Want to explore more:
Timothy Sandefur on Frederick Douglass, a Great Antidote podcast.
Caroline Breashears, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and the Power of Stories, at Econlib.
Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand and the Goddess of the Market, an EconTalk podcast.

Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote, named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.adamsmithworks.org.

Welcome back. Today on February 3rd, 2023, I'm excited to welcome Timothy Sandefer back on the podcast for the third time. We're going to be discussing more significant figures in history. So if you haven't listened to our first episode, which is, well, not the first episode, but the first episode along that vein, which is about Frederick Douglass, you should go check it out. Today we're going to be talking about his recent and fantastic book, Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Patterson Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand found Liberty in the Age of Darkness. The title test says it all, except obviously not. You should read the book <laugh>. Um, he's the Vice President of Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, as well as the author of six books. Welcome back.

Thank you so much.

So I guess first I've asked you this multiple times, but what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?

I actually kind of have two answers to that one, one broad and one narrow. So the broad answer is, uh, as a, as a general philosophical principle, and this relates to the book actually, and that is your life belongs to you, that if I had to, uh, pass along one idea to young people, it would be the most important thing is you do not live to make other people happy. Your life belongs to yourself. And do not ever allow yourself to be persuaded that the purpose of your life is to improve other people's happiness or other people's station in life or other people's contentment, or whatever it might be. Your life belongs to you. That's my broad lesson. The narrow lesson is a lot of times I've heard people say things like, oh, well, I'm not really sure what I want to do with my life.

I haven't, you know, nothing's come to me yet. Uh, Tim, you're lucky cuz you always knew what you wanted to do with your life and so forth. The, that's a really, that's a wrong way of approaching this question the right way, is that you never really just have it handed to you what you should do with your life. What you need to do is you got gotta get out there and try different things and find what appeals to you. And what happens in is that one day you realize that you really enjoy doing this thing and you continue to pursue it. That's how it happens. It's not that one day you decide to be an architect, or one day you decide to be a, a musician or whatever. It's that one day you realize that you really enjoy the idea of, of architecture or you really enjoy drawing or you really enjoy building things or, and, and you decide to pursue that. So, in other words, try a bunch of different things and be prepared for when it strikes you that you enjoy doing that thing. Don't go out there and think, well, someday I'll figure out what I want to do and then do that thing.

It's very timely advice for me. So thank you. Um, I'm gonna venture to say that what I think people should know is the length of FDR's presidency. Maybe I'm just really ignorant, but I didn't know the full extent of his presidency and like the story of that until I read this book. And obviously this book is not just about FDR’s presidency, but I never was taught in school and no one seemed to think it was important to mention that he's the reason why like presidents only served two terms cuz he just didn't do that. And I didn't know that there was ever a president who didn't do that. And that seems really ridiculous and kind of like an important piece of information that I should have known, you know?

Well, there's a lot that people should know about Franklin Roosevelt that is not taught in our schools, particularly the fact that he was the closest thing to a dictator that this country has so far had, that his control over the economy and the public media was so incredibly pervasive that he literally became president for life. And that the life and, and livelihoods of countless Americans depended upon his will. And that's why they muted their criticism of him so severely even though he was basically controlling who could do what and when. And in one notorious instance, actually creating concentration camps in this country for Japanese Americans, we, it's crazy that we look at the Roosevelt years through these rose colored glasses and that the myth of Roosevelt having somehow cured the Great Depression continues to persist in schools today.

So with that, let's get into the contents of the book because that impacts these three women's stories almost entirely like that. It's super important, but their stories start before that. But even before we get into that, why did you decide to write this book now?

Well, I'd always been interested in the curious fact that in 1943, these three women, Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand published books that basically started the modern free market, conservative or libertarian movement in the United States. It's just an interesting coincidental fact, but then it turns out it's not really a coincidence. It turns out that they all knew each other and I've always kind of wanted to write about that. Plus I also have always wanted to write about Rose Wilder Lane. I've just always found her to be such a fascinating personality and a fascinating character. You know, she, she was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of the Little House on the Prairie Books. And so I've always just found that a curious thing. And so I, I started out actually originally to write that, to write a, a biography of Lane, but that's been done before. And so I decided to instead try to focus on their, the, the friendships between these three women and what it was that led them to write their books at the same time. And so the book turned into more of like a, essentially a biography of their novels or, or rather a biography of their books that they published in 1943.

What I really like, and this is just me, my personal preferences of the stuff I like to learn and how I like to learn it is everything within the context of its time. What is the cultural atmosphere? What is the historical context, political context? Mm-hmm. <affirmative> what's happening in the, in the thought, in the like, I don't wanna say collective thought, but like a nation's thought. Yeah. You know, how, how all these artists and writers are reacting to each other and it all overlaps and ties together. Um, I don't know. So this book was like a nice, it put a nice little bow on this time period for me because it presented these ideas and this era in a way that was super accessible and interesting for me. 

I'm glad to hear that cuz I, it, it, intellectual history has always been a, a fascination of my own. And I had a loose model actually that I was trying to copy in a, in a way in this book, um, I was imitating the style of a book called The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, which was published in 2000. And it's just a masterpiece, just a marvelous book. It's about the history of the philosophy of pragmatism as told through the lives of these, this group of intellectuals who all knew each other and kind of were working together. Incidentally, just recently there was, uh, two books that just came out about the friendship between three philosophers in, uh, England, Anscombe, Foot and Murdoch, who the three of them also women, um, were really spearheading the revival of interest in Aristotle's philosophy in the 1950s. [Editor’s note: The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foote, Mary Midgely, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics]  And so I just love that kind of book and that's what I kind of wanted to do, is to imitate that style.

You did it. Um, so Freedom Furies, Freedom's Furies, that has a really nice ring to it. I guess we know who they are, but why, why is that the title you used to describe them? Why is that the title of the book?

So the journalist William F. Buckley once referred to Patterson, Lane and Rand as the three Furies of modern libertarianism. And I think Buckley, who of course was definitely not a libertarian, uh, meant it in a pejorative sense, I think. But the, the Furies are actually, uh, that's pretty a pretty good word actually, because the Furies are characters from Greek mythology and they're, they're the, the spirits who pursue people who have broken the law, and particularly people who have committed patricide or who have broken the oaths. And in the Orestia by Aeschylus, the furies pursue Orestes for having murdered his mother Clytemnestra as a result of her having murdered his father Agamemnon. And this sort of cycle of vengeance keeps going until Athena intervenes and creates the first constitutional government creates, the system of trial by jury. And she says, from now on, we're going to resolve our problems through, through persuasion and argument instead of through blood lust. And she transforms the furies into the blessed ones, changes their names to the blessed ones. And so I thought in a sense these writers, they kind of fit that mold because they were, they were pursuing people like Franklin Roosevelt who they thought had, had broken the Constitution and broken their constitutional oaths, and they made their argument in the terms of persuasion and arguments rather than some kind of, you know, actual political activities. So I just thought the term fury is kind of, kind of appropriate in an unexpected way.

I feel like my, the connotation I associate is that the way you would say that, I don't know, with furies is positive. So it's kind of interesting that Buckley meant it pejoratively, but that's a cool backstory. So, okay, let's put these women into perspective. What is the historical and political scene that shaped their world when they started writing? What is, what does America look like at this stage?

Well, so, America, there's this two broad trends that I talk about in the book. One is literary and one is political. And, and the political one is first the rise of progressivism and then it's climax, the climax of progressivism with the New Deal, with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. And of course, world War II that follows after that. And what you have during that period from the book covers from about 1925 to about 1945. During that period, you have the rise of bureaucratic government and the welfare state and the, uh, quite pervasive control far more than, than in some ways far more than you have today, because we live in an era after the sixties, after the sexual revolution, and also after the rise of Reagan and Goldwater conservatism, which did not exist back then. So you had basically an open field for collectivism and around the world, a real fad for dictatorship.

Dictatorship was really fashionable at the time, and particularly because of Benito Mussolini in Italy, who everybody seemed to have thought that he had, you know, spearheaded this transformation, this resurgence of the Italian economy. It turned out it was all lies and it was all just brutality and totalitarianism, which incidentally is a word that Mussolini coined. Uh, and so it became very popular for intellectuals to advocate dictatorship. And when Roosevelt was elected in 1932, a lot of, uh, writers and journalists celebrated it because they thought it would be dictatorship. Walter Lippman, for example, wrote in his newspaper column, he, he directing, uh, directing his words to Roosevelt. He said, you have no choices but to assume the role of a dictator. And, William Randolph Hearst, the famous newspaper publisher, actually paid to have a movie produced called Gabriel Over the White House, in which God himself directs the president to arrest his political enemies and have them executed and control the entire nation's economy from the White House and save the world and end war and so forth. So it was very faddish to be pro dictatorship in the early thirties, uh, disgracefully enough.

So then, I guess in terms of, and, and maybe this will just kind of come into play in the, in the later conversation, and we, as we talk about the timeline, but there are a lot of literary themes that, that kind of persist from the beginning to the end of this tale. Um, things like the Village virus, right? So what are the important ones that they're kind of born into and that influence all of their writing?

Yeah, I, so as they begin, I'm glad you asked that because I said earlier that there were two broad themes that dominated their lives, and one of them was political with the rise of Roosevelt. The other one is the literary movement, known as the Revolt from the Village. And the Revolt from the Village was a cultural trend that began, really began around 1915 or so, but it really, really took off in 1920 with the publication of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, enormously influential novel, so influential that we sort of forget how influential it is because its influence is everywhere around us. To this day today, Americans are still writing novels and making movies that are essentially just remaking Main Street. And what, what the reason it's called the Revolt from the Village is because the theme of these works is that the small town is stifling and suffocating and ruins your aspirations for a life of meaning and grace.

So people like, you know, Mark Twain and others, they had, they had published books where they kind of celebrated the American small town in nostalgic terms. And what Sinclair Lewis and other village writers did was they turned that around and they said, no, the, the American small town is a miserable place where every bit of originality is, is ground out of you in conformity and small mindedness dominate everything. And, uh, and Lewis was particularly cynical about this, that, that you try to escape it to have a life of meaning and significance, and it still just drags you down. And so his novels are deeply pessimistic, and yet they're still written with this sort of dream about a life that means something. Well, flash forward about 20 years, and now you're in the middle of the, of World War II, and by that time people had really kind of reassessed things and they started to instead kind of wished to go back to the village and to say that small town American life was a good thing and that we shouldn't be so down on, on ordinary bourgeois existence.

So that trend, first, the rejection of small town America, and then the re-embrace of small town America, that was really dominating much of the literature at the time. Now a second, there was a second wave, and that was the rise of communism and particularly what was known as the Popular Front, which was an effort by the Communist Party of the United States to sort of affect the culture by sponsoring novelists who would write communist dominated literature. They called it the proletarian novel. The idea behind the proletarian novel was to have a novel that would, uh, set the groundwork for Communist revolution by downplaying individualism, downplaying heroism, and focusing on the misery of poverty and the the evils of capitalism. For the most part, it was a failure, really, there are only two novels that were, um, that were of any good in, in this respect. And that was Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940 and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in 1939 were really the only two successful proletarian novels that stuck with us. But those are two of the literary trends that affected all three of these women, and particularly Sinclair Lewis, who was every bit as influential to them as Franklin Roosevelt was.

So the first fury that you introduced us to is Isabel Patterson. Who was she, how did the world influence her writing? What are her most notable works and contributions? What's her story?

Isabel Patterson was born in 1886 in a, on a tiny island on the north side of Lake Huron. She grew up on the American frontier. We don't know a great deal about her early life, but she could remember seeing her first light bulb at the age of 16. She remembered when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. She, in sometime in the 1920s, she worked as a secretary to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who is best known for carving Mount Rushmore; at the time he was carving Stone Mountain in Georgia. Uh, incidentally, he never finished that project. He got so frustrated by all the interference from the, the government and from the people involved in the project that he finally, uh, broke into pieces, the plaster miniature of his models and through the pieces from the top of the mountain and quit the project.

So Patterson moved to New York, became a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, and for 25 years, wrote a weekly column in the newspaper. It was really a gossip column about the publishing industry. So she got to know all of the important writers and became one of the nation's most important literary intellectuals. Uh, so she was on a first name basis with people like Sinclair Lewis, HL Mencken and others. And, uh, and she was also a novelist. She wrote a novel called, Never Ask the End, which was her most successful novel, which is sort of a stream of consciousness, kind of novel, very autobiographic. All three of these women wrote autobiographical novels, very, very, nostalgic novel. It's all about a woman who's feeling the, the world she once knew when she was young, slipping away into the, this new age that's dominated by things like The New Deal or the construction of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, which was a, an enormous project.

It was it the largest project ever undertaken by private capital in the United States or the world. And huge sections of the Manhattan that she had grown up with were being dynamited right outside her office for several years. So she's writing this, these novels about the loss of, of her childhood and all these sorts of things, but she also became a real intellectual in terms of economics and politics, entirely self-taught, had had two years of schooling in her life. But she became a really fascinating figure in terms of free market economics. And in 1943, published The God of the Machine, which is a hugely influential free market work.

So then what about Rose Wilder Lane? Daughter of what, what's her name? I always forget- of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's like, I get confused between the two of them cuz they have stuff in common.

<laugh>, a way to remember it is somebody a while back actually published a novel based on Rose's life called A Wilder Rose. And that's pretty appropriate because Rose was pretty wild in some ways. So she was also born in 1886, same age as Isabel Patterson, and she was also born on the American frontier. She really was born in a little house on the prairie. And, uh, unlike her mother, she hated it. She hated, hated the, the American frontier. And so she moved as quickly as she could. She moved away from it first to San Francisco and then to Albania, which about, is about as far away from the prairie as you can get before you start coming back. But she was forced to come back. She, she wanted to be a journalist and she went there as a, she went as a world traveling globe-trotting reporter, but she ended up coming back to the United States just in time for the Great Depression.

And she ended up staying in, in, in the US and writing novels and non-fiction both about the Frontier and then about the New Deal era. And she wrote some really fine novels. My favorite of hers is a really more of a collection short stories called Old Hometown, which is a collection of these sort of Twilight Zone style stories that are set in, in small town America. Um, she published a book in the late thirties called Free Land, which was her response to the New Dealers because the New Dealers kept saying, well, previous generations, you know, there was the Homestead Act. So they, they, they got free land and she hated it when people would say that. So she wrote a novel to show that, that this land was not free, people had to work their butts off for it.

And, that was her most successful novel. She became friends with Isabel Patterson sometime in the twenties. I think they first met in the early thirties, but they were pen pals before that. And Rose idolized Isabel Patterson just worshiped the ground she walked on and Patterson became kind of a guru both to her and to Ayn Rand. And it was sometime in the forties that Rose and her mother decided to start writing these children's novels that were based on, on Laura's life. And so Laura took credit for them, but Rose kind of co-authored them in secret. And those are the Little House on the Prairie novels.

And then Ayn Rand

And then Rand was born, she was born in Russia in 1905, she escaped the Soviet Union in the 1920s, came to Hollywood with the dreams of becoming a screenwriter and a novelist. She ended up going to New York when her play Night of January 16th became a Broadway hit. She published an autobiographical novel called We The Living in 1936 about life in the Soviet Union. Now, one of the interesting things that led me to write this book was that when that came out, she was asked to fill out a, a questionnaire, and one of the questions on there was, uh, who's your favorite writer? Now if you know anything about I Rand you would expect her answer to be somebody like Victor Hugo or Edmund Rostand, cuz she loved these, these great romanticist, but instead she wrote Sinclair Lewis. And I thought that was fascinating because Lewis's style as a novelist is basically the opposite of Ayn Rand’s.

But the reason why was that she, she's really sympathized with, for example, the main character in Main Street. I mentioned Main Street is about life in a dingy little small town and longing to get out of it. The main character is a woman named Carol Kennecott [Editor’s note: should be Carol Milford]. And Lewis presents Carol as in a sympathetic light as, as being right to want a life of significance and meaning, but never being able to find it. And I think Rand really sympathized, especially with her background in Russia, of being surrounded by smallness and the lowest common denominator and wanting so much for a world where greatness was possible. And then she, here she arrives in New York City in the middle of the skyscraper revolution, right? The Chrysler Building is being built, the Woolworth Building. When she, when she arrived in Manhattan, the Woolworth building was the tallest building in the world.

And the story is that she burst into tears when she saw it. So she decides to write a novel about an architect, but it's heavily influenced by Lewis's observational style. And I think if you read Main Street and then The Fountainhead, you can see the parallels quite strikingly. Anyway, she, in 1940 Rand became friends with Patterson. She was trying to re, she had become frustrated with the, the failure to oppose Roosevelt, and she was trying to put together a group of intellectuals who would offer a, a scholarly case for individual freedom. And she contacted Patterson because she had been reading her newspaper columns and Patterson refused to join, but she said, why don't you come up to the office and we'll talk? And that was the beginning of their friendship, which lasted about 10 years. And Patterson taught Rand a great deal about economics and about, uh, history and about the Constitution. And so, like I said, Patterson became kind of a guru. And as I say, first of first among equals of the three Furies,

This is just kind of a funny thought that just occurred to me in The Fountainhead, there's a good chunk of it where Ayn Rand is basically talking about how groups and organizations are a vacuum for individuals and individual liberty. And so it's kind of funny that she was trying to get a group together. 

Hmm. Yeah, she was trying to recruit people not to into like an organized union or something, but just to, to contact thinkers and artists and, and scholars who could mount an intellectual case for liberty. And it is possible that Patterson may have been one reason why Rand says that in The Fountainhead, because Patterson was very much against the idea of joining groups because every group seemed to eventually devolve into collective thinking. And she just really, really hated that. There certainly is a lot of The Fountainhead that reflects Rand's friendship with Patterson. I think the friendship between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand in the novel is, uh, in many ways parallel's Rand's friendship with Patterson. Patterson was significantly older than Rand about 20 years older than Rand, and you know, she's sort of, by that time she's, uh, kind of a cynical newspaper woman.

And Gail Wynand and in the novel was a cynical newspaper man. And there are, we, we don't know exactly what their late night conversations were like. They sat up late talking about philosophy, but there's an old story that one night they sat up trying to figure out what the consciousness of a beaver was. Like. They're trying to figure out what animals, how animals think. And sure enough, there's a passage in The Fountainhead when Gail Wynand and, uh, says just this, he's, he's thinking about when he was young, he had a pet kitten and he enjoyed thinking about what it was like, what it might be like to be a kitten. And I, I strongly suspect that that was an influence. Patterson also, of course, shows up in a cameo in Atlas Shrugged. So readers probably already know that Rand herself put herself in the novel in a very brief passage toward the end.

But Patterson shows up in the novel also in her novel, Never Ask the End, Patterson describes the America she knew when she was young as Atlantis, and she really was fond of the myth of Atlantis. And she, in her newspaper column, would frequently refer to Free Market, turn of the Century America as a lost Atlantis. And I strongly suspect that Rand, when writing Atlas Shrugged, she uses the term Atlantis to describe the place where, where the capitalists of the world go to hide during their strike. Spoiler alert. And, uh, I think she got that from Patterson. Sure enough, the term Atlantis is first used in the novel in a party scene when a woman comes up to the main character, Dagney Taggart and says that, she says, I knew Atlantis and I, I knew somebody who knew Atlantis, and she's got the same sort of stubborn gruff personality that the real Isabel Patterson had. So I, I believe that that character is a cameo of Patterson that Rand put into her novel.

Hmm. So I guess, how else did they all relate to each other? Was there a relationship between Rose Wilder Lane and Rand and Rose Wilder Lane and Patterson, and were they always friends, enemies, frenemies, <laugh>? How far does this

You know, good, every good libertarian has to have a relationship with every other good libertarian, right? But, uh, <laugh>, no. So, so yes, the, uh, all three of them did meet each other one way or the other. Rand and Lane only met in person one time; they corresponded, but they only met in person one time. And apparently they had a nice long conversation that at some point turned to religion. Lane was somehow or another religious, she certainly did, she did not consider herself a Christian. In fact, she had a real fondness for Islam, but she never really fit into any religious category, but she still believed in some kind of a God. And she claimed afterwards that she and Rand argued about that. It may not have really happened because it turns out that the next day after their meeting, Lane wrote this really nice letter Rand saying, Hey, I really enjoyed our conversation.

I hope you come back sometime. So they probably actually didn't argue, but in any event, that was a difference between them. And they corresponded for a couple years afterwards, but eventually that sort of petered out mostly cuz they were just both of them very busy. Patterson and Rand were very close friends until Rand moved to California to work on the movie version of The Fountainhead. And they corresponded and visited after that. But, at one point, finally Patterson, she had a, a difficult personality. She was very short tempered and I suspect a depressive. She had a close friend who committed suicide that I think affected her a great deal. And she tended to, to be very rude to people sometimes. And apparently during one visit to California when she was, when Rand was trying to help Patterson get money to start a magazine, Patterson treated all of Rand's friends so rudely that it basically ended their friendship. They, they continued to correspond afterwards, but they, they, their friendship was destroyed. So it was, it, again, it was not really ideological falling out, it was more of a personality thing that led to them to the end of their friendship.

And so, I mean, something has to, I guess, I don't know how to put this, some sort of idea has to translate and some sort of, um, I don't know, goal has to be met for someone to become a fury, to, to have this change. So what were the impacts of their works and ideas and how did that change the landscape of the world around them, if it did?

Well, their influence has been quite large, especially Rand, who became such a, a major figure in the history of, of free market thinking. Rose, she sort of disappeared after her death. She's, if she's remembered at all nowadays, she's primarily remembered for the Little House on the Prairie novels. But in 1943, she published a book called The Discovery of Freedom, which was her effort at, at the history of the discovery of the principles of Freedom. And she would've insisted on the term discovery. She insisted that freedom was not invented. It was not a creation, it was a fact of reality. And it was a fact that human beings discovered gradually over time. And that's her argument in the Discovery of Freedom, which although it has some historical inaccuracies, is still quite a lovely book. I love it. I think it's, if I had to give, give a single book to a beginner on the principles of Freedom, it would be Rose Wilder Lane's Discovery of Freedom.

Uh, incidentally, I I I'll mention the, the titles of their books are synonyms for each other, which I think is very revealing. So The God of the Machine is Isabel Patterson's book, that's a synonym for the Fountainhead, which is a synonym for the main spring of Human Progress, which was the title that Rose's book, Discovery Freedom was published later. It was reissued under a different title as The Mainspring of Human Progress. Those three things are synonyms for each other, because what they were trying to do was to dis to locate and describe the source of economic growth, innovation, prosperity, creativity. And that, of course is the individual creative mind. Anyway, Lane's influence is, uh, is deeper than one might first think. She helped set up a college or to fund a college that no longer exists called Rampart College that was devoted to propagating the ideas of, of individual liberty.

And then she, her adopted son, Roger Lee McBride, became the first Libertarian Party candidate to run for president. And he became the executive producer of The Little House on the Prairie TV series. So that influences is subtle, but very present. And Patterson's influence. Patterson also has been largely forgotten, but her book, the Discovery of, I mean her book, the God of the Machine, Rand and Lane, just loved this book that Rand said that it was like Das Kapital for capitalists and hoped that, that it would get wide attention, which unfortunately it did not. It's, it's a little hard to read. It's, it's got tough parts. It's really good and it has some great passages in it, but it also has some passages that are kind of difficult to get through. And I think that kind of handicapped it in terms of influencing the general public.

So I mean, the time period overlaps, kind of necessarily because of the political ideas at the time and the systems that were in order, communism and all of that. A lot of the ideas that they talk about resemble what economists like F. A. Hayek would talk about with the price system in free markets and all of that. Was there any overlap in terms of their actual, like communication or ideas going from one to the other? Was it kind of coincidental? 

It was coincidental, and I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the story. They independently without knowing of the work of people like [Ludwig von] Mises and Hayek, or in fact, it was before the work of Mises and Hayek independently discovered a lot of the insights that would later be elaborated by, by the Austrian and public choice economists. For example, my favorite example of this is, Rose wrote a very small book, less than a hundred pages called Credo in 1936. And she argues, she's talking about why you don't need, uh, planners, you don't need economic planners to, to plan the economy. And she gives this marvelous example. She says, compare a classroom with a teacher on one side, and on the other hand, compare how, compare that with how people leave a theater when a movie is over. She says, in a classroom order is maintained by the teacher who tells the children what to do, disciplines them if they don't do those things, and she's in charge, she, she monitors the children and controls their behavior.

On the other hand, when people leave a movie theater, when the movie is over, there's nobody on stage telling them, okay, you know, row one can leave, row two can leave, or anything like that. People just are on their own to get outta the theater. And yet people still manage to get out of the theater promptly and without, you know, beating each other up. And she says the difference between these two kinds of order is that the, in the teacher system, you know, there's an authority figure who dictates to people how they behave in the, in the theater situation, it's a spontaneous order. She doesn't use that term. That's the term that Hayek would use in 1944 and afterwards. But that's sort of independently discovering the phenomenon of spontaneous order. And again, lane, just like, I mean, Lane and Patterson both had very meager schooling.

Lane graduated high school, but she didn't go to college and she was largely self-taught in terms of economics, as was Patterson. So here you have these people who are independently discovering some of the phenomena that Hayek and Mises and others would later write about. Now, they did meet them later- for instance, Lane met Mises. They did not get along. Um, she had objected to some passages in Human Action when Mises published that. And she said she was particularly bothered by Mises’ moral relativism. And so she said in her review that it was basically all wrong. And then later on she wrote to Mises and he wrote back and said, I'm, I have no interest in talking with somebody who thinks I'm all wrong. So then later on Rose met him in person, and he said to her something along the lines of, that he, he was not interested in speaking to ex-communist <laugh>, which in fact, Lane was. She had, when she was in her youth, she had been a, a, a socialist and, and she claims a member of the Communist Party and later gave that up. So, yeah, they did not get along.

And I mean, what I'm shocked by is how much the political atmosphere today kind of looks like the one of their time. Yeah. Which is crazy. You wouldn't think, oh, around the time of, you know, the World Wars and all of the Great Depression and all of that, that that looks like today. Yeah. Do you see this resemblance? How does it translate? What are your thoughts? Are you optimistic? What does that tell us? 

I am, I am, believe it or not, optimistic and I'll, I'll explain why, but let, I'll say you're right. There are some creepy parallels between the era of the thirties and forties and our own time. The creepiest of all, I think is the, the, the fashion for strong men in politics, which was, you know, I said in the thirties there was this sort of vogue for dictatorship. In today's world, there seems to be a real fashion for strong man politicians who are gonna come in and implement their will and just do it that way, because somehow or another, the democratic process just isn't working the way it's supposed to, which is that's what people say when their, their bill doesn't get passed, you know, is they say, well then obviously Congress is broken, so we need somebody to come in and do it anyway. And we see that a lot, particularly with the administrative agencies that just implement their will, even though the voters have rejected it time and time again.

So that's a real problem. On the other hand, we have two big advantages now that they didn't have back then. One of them, of course is their own work. We have Rand, Lane and Patterson's, we have their, we have a strong, robust body of free market scholarship and ideas, things like the work of Mises and, and, and Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell and others that did not exist back then. A strong, scholarly intellectual case for freedom, as well as the, the true history of the miseries that communism and, and other forms of collectivism have imposed on the globe that we can point to that they could not point to at that time. Uh, the second thing is a little bit more obscure, and that is, we've been through an age of reaction against progressivism on the left itself. You know, progressivism, original progressivism was this, uh, effort to get morality out of politics entirely and to scientifically plan the economy through these experts who would control everything.

And one of the most horrendous things that the progressives did was create racial segregation, which was supposed to be a, a, a, a scientific solution to the problem of lynching by separating the races. And that's why progressives like Woodrow Wilson reinstituted segregation in the federal workforce, uh, we had a reaction against that in the sixties in the form of both the Civil Rights movement and more broadly the sexual revolution. Those two things built up an attitude in our culture that which really did not exist before. Uh, when you read, particularly the revolt from the Village works in the 1910s and 1920s, the stifling, gossipy, controlling authoritarian atmosphere of the American small town where everybody was up in your business all the time. And if you were a non-conformist, you risked total ostracism at the hands of your neighbors. That has been replaced in the United States with an attitude of leave people alone to let them do their own thing.

And that is a huge blessing. It's a real shame that there are people out there who want to get rid of it and go back to a time when your life was dictated largely by your neighbor's personal aesthetic and social preferences, which again, and that that's a revolution that's only about 50, 60 years old, this idea that people have a right to, to their own private lives. And that's something that Sinclair Lewis and others would, could only have dreamt of. So that's a real positive, and that's, that's a cultural thing, and when we need to cherish and nourish that, because it, it, it could be the saving grace of this country, I think.

So what has writing this book changed about your understanding of today's America liberty and defending liberalism? This connects really, really directly to the previous question…

Huh. Well, so that's an interesting question. I, I think I learned a lot about the work of literature and politics at the time, and it reinforced a lot of my, my thoughts about the importance of an intellectual case for freedom. It's not just, it's not enough to go out there and, and just, you know agitate and, and so forth. You, you have to be able to back your ideas up with something real, something intellectually persuasive and powerful. And all three of them did that in their own way. So, I can't say that, that it changed my mind about how to make the case for freedom, but it really, it really underscored the importance of both, both in terms of scholarship, but also in terms of fiction entire in terms of culture. We really don't have today people who are speaking out in our culture in, and by, by that I mean in, in the terms of art artworks, movies, books, things like, we don't have a lot of people out there saying what we need to say about freedom and, and protecting our liberty against control.

It, the, the pendulum has swung so far to the opposite side so far in the, in the direction of trying to dictate how people think and speak and behave. That I, I do worry about that tendency. And we need to nurture our cultural institutions and tell our own story. You know, that, that's probably a better answer to that question is that in recent years we've seen of a spate of, hi, I was gonna say historians, but there's such quacks that it's probably not a good term for 'em. People like Nancy McClean who have been writing these outright lies about the history of free market institutions and free market arguments in this country about, you know, this nonsense about like James Buchanan was a racist and all this sort of nonsense. Um, if anybody's gonna write the truthful history of the free market movement in this country, it's gonna have to be us, us believers in free markets.

And so that really came home in writing this book because so much of what really happened in this country in the Roosevelt years has been purposely neglected by the historians, by the history profession. There's a very strong body of scholarship about, uh, in among economics, uh, the economics literature about why the New Deal was such a failure, how it did not succeed, how it worsened the Depression and lengthened the Depression. But that has not made its way into the history profession. I, one of my end notes in the book, I, I talk about some books on the culture of the 1930s just to show what they omit the complete refusal to even acknowledge that there were opponents of the New Deal and that they had good arguments. It’s really quite remarkable how the history profession has the term nowadays is erased. This is erased history, how the history profession has ignored the opposition to the New Deal and the reasons why the New Deal was not a success.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and to all these listeners that are not a part of this conversation. <laugh>.  I wish we had more time, but I have one last question for you. What is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

I wouldn't say so much that I've changed my mind as that I have been persuaded that things aren't as simple as I had once thought. And that is, I think we believers in, in individual liberty and free markets tend to have this sort of knee jerk response sometimes where we say, well, uh, just get government out of it and the problem will be solved. And in many cases, that turns out to really just be kicking the can down the road. I'll give you a, the most vivid example that comes to mind is sometimes you hear libertarians say that the, that there should be a separation of state and marriage that government shouldn't be in the marriage business. And all these disputes and arguments we have about things like same sex marriage and whatnot, all of that would just stop if the government wasn't responsible for deciding who got married.

And that sounds plausible, right? Then what marriage would just be something that the churches or, or whoever else would handle, and they're, then we wouldn't have these problems. Well, no, that's not a good answer because for one thing, the government has to at some point recognize that people are married, right? So let's say you privatize marriage and, and government isn't doing it, and only the churches in other organizations are handling marriage. Now, let's say there is a, a, a divorce or a custody dispute or something like that, and you go before the judge and the judge has to say, are, were you ever married? And so they say, well, yes, your honor. I have this signed certificate that was signed by the John Smith Company that says we were married. Now the judge has to decide whether that's valid or not. And at that point, you are once again, in the position of answering whether or not people are mar this, the government is acknowledging or not acknowledging a marriage, right?

So all you've done is you've just postponed the point at which the government officially recognizes a marriage or doesn't. And once you get to that point, you're going to still have your argument between, you know, the traditionalists and the, and the innovators and all this, the kinds of arguments we're having now. So trying to say, well, separate government from the system, all that's in that situation anyway, all you're doing is, is, is is it postponing the inevitable moral argument? And I think free marketers sometimes they think that, that they've, they can shortcut the moral argument by just saying, well, let the go get the government out of it, and people can solve their own problems. Well, that is sort of true, but they're still going to have to address <laugh> those problems at some point. So it's not so much that I've disagree with what I used to think, it's that I realize now that things are a lot more complicated sometimes than we, than we sometimes realize, uh, in our free market theory.

Well, cuz also, I mean, that becomes a property dispute, which it's like, who, whose property is it in a divorce, right? So it's like, obviously you're just kicking the can down the road. I don't know. 

And so you cannot avoid the cultural and moral arguments that I think a lot of libertarians want to avoid. And, and so there's a motivation for saying, well, I don't want to to argue religion with people, so I'm just going to say get the government out of it. And that solves the problem, but it doesn't really solve the problem. And you, and even an anarchist is going to have to make the argument on these points because there's going to be a point at which some decision maker has to resolve this thing. And when that happens, there is going to be some sort of official action by somebody. So the bottom line is that in that, and in other things, you know, school or whatever, there, it's not as simple as just saying, get the government out of it. You know, there's an old joke, uh, how many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? None if the light bulb needed changing the market would've taken care of it. And I think unfortunately, we do sometimes fall into that sort of stereotype of thinking it's not, it's not actually a fatal objection to libertarianism, but it is a fatal objection to a certain sloppy type of libertarianism that I at least used to commit when I was younger.

Once again, I'd like to thank my guest for their time and insight, and I'd like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote podcast. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at the great antidote gmail.com. Thank you.