The Economist recently reported that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, is back on the bestseller lists. A week before the president’s inauguration, more people were buying it than Obama’s Audacity of Hope.
For the uninitiated, Atlas explores a future world in which the nation’s economy is collapsing because of government interference. The theme developed out of Rand’s own era: she started planning her novel in 1943, in the midst of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But it’s no wonder that it seems relevant today. New Deal activism, which was principally responsible for prolonging the Great Depression, guides our current economic stimulators.
Rand’s disciples are a devoted lot. A recent issue of the New Yorker profiled one local group – the dentist with “John Galt,” the hero of Atlas Shrugged, on his license plate; the wealth manager who piously intones, “I’ve been a follower of Ayn Rand for five years”; the helpful fellow who suggests, “When civilization collapses, we’ll just have to organize an Objectivist gang.”
Mention the name Isabel Paterson in such a gathering, and you’re likely to draw blank looks. For all the fervor that Rand inspires, little notice is paid to the woman who most inspired her.
Paterson (1886–1961) was a novelist and literary critic. She was slight, just over five feet tall, with a delicate taste in food and drink, a deep love of nature, and a nationally famous sense of humor. Stubborn and sharp-witted, she was also one of the New Deal’s fiercest foes.
Paterson grew up in poverty on the Western frontier. She had only two years of formal schooling. But she learned from her own experience, as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of history, that economic success results from individual initiative, not federal management. As an author, she also knew what makes a plausible story and could see that there could not possibly be a happy ending to the government’s efforts to fix everything that was broken in the 1930s.
May 5, 2009
Stephen Cox is professor of literature at UC San Diego. His two latest books are The New Testament and Literature and The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America.
