In November 1912, aviator Harry Bingham Brown set out to break the American record for altitude in an airplane. Hearing that Brown wanted a woman to fly with him, 26-year-old Isabel Paterson volunteered.
Off the pair went, climbing higher and higher into the skies above New York’s Staten Island and then over the ocean, soaring slowly upward until they passed 5,000 feet. Below them, 10,000 spectators who had gathered to watch this exhibition, some of them perhaps anticipating a crash, waited for the aircraft’s return. With night coming on, they lit bonfires around the field, and using those as his beacons, Brown safely landed his aircraft amid a jubilant crowd. He had broken the record, and his passenger had broken a world record for having flown higher than any woman alive. Paterson felt exhilarated on landing and later told a reporter that it was the greatest experience of her life.
Still later, after she had become a renowned columnist and bestselling novelist, the Canadian-born Paterson would write: “The airplane was invented in the United States precisely because this was the only country on earth, the only country that has ever existed, in which people had the right to be left alone.”
A Life in Brief
Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) was born in Ontario, Canada, and was one of nine children. The family moved frequently, living a hardscrabble existence between the United States and Canada. Her “Wild West” upbringing allowed her only two years of formal education, but she loved books and reading, and became, like so many others of that era, an autodidact of the first order.
While still a teenager, Paterson left home, worked a variety of jobs, and eventually found secretarial work. In 1910, she married Kenneth Paterson, but that union lasted only a few weeks. Though she never remarried, and took little interest in the fate and whereabouts of her husband, she kept his name and was known to many friends as “Pat.”
Shortly before her Staten Island flight, Paterson had made her way to New York, a budding writer with a desire to live in the big city. After working for several publications, she landed a job with the New York Tribune as assistant to editor Arthur Burton Rascoe, who initially disliked the young woman for what he considered her abrasive manner, but who also recognized her talents. After some time spent in that position, for the next 25 years Paterson wrote a column for the paper, “Turns With a Bookworm,” that made her name in the world of letters.
Her Gift to Freedom
In his Introduction to “The God of the Machine,” Paterson’s biographer Stephen Cox wrote: “Paterson’s grave is unmarked. Her life is not. Its most prominent monument is ‘The God of the Machine.’”
“The God of the Machine,” which is a brilliant mix of philosophy, history, politics, and economics, sold poorly when released in 1943, but it influenced thinkers, especially conservatives like William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, and still attracts readers today. Given that the author was largely self-educated, the book reveals a depth of knowledge gained from reading, study, and debate unique in American literature. Its pointed and devastating critique of socialism and Marxism, its extended use of an engineering metaphor to explain why societies thrive and fail in their relationship with individual liberties, and its praise for American political documents and institutions—which the author feared were being eroded by big government—all of these and more make this a remarkable book.
In addition, “The God of the Machine” remains as alive and pertinent a warning of the dangers of totalitarianism to readers as when it was written, perhaps more so. The chapter “The Humanitarian With the Guillotine” begins this way: “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”
A commentator today could employ those exact words to kick off an article on the failed COVID policies, the debacle in Afghanistan, or the inflation in our grocery stories.
Here is another passage from the book that has a contemporary echo, heard from both teachers’ unions and many universities: “A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state. ... The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as ’reactionary,' at the mildest.”
The Mentor
Those who know her story also applaud Paterson’s influence on other writers. In particular, she contributed enormously to the thinking of Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane.
Along with “The God of the Machine,” 1943 also saw the publication of Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” and Lane’s “The Discovery of Freedom.” The young Rand met with Paterson frequently, where, as Stephen Cox tells us, “She has been described as ‘sitting at the master’s feet’ while Paterson instructed her.” In the copy of “The Fountainhead” that she gave to Paterson, Rand wrote, “You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.” Though the two of them later had a falling out, both women continued to praise the work of the other.
Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, also befriended Paterson. The two shared similarities in their lives—an impoverished childhood in the West, husbands who had failed them—and both were fervent believers in the efficacy of hard work and individual effort. Paterson had read Lane’s 1936 piece “Credo” in The Saturday Evening Post, and though the two eventually ended their friendship, her encouragement and ideas strengthened Lane’s belief in individualism.
The Legacy
As readers may have noticed, Isabel Paterson possessed a prickly personality that cost her friends and employers. While writing for Buckley’s National Review in its early days, for example, she demanded high pay and refused to be edited. Despite their quarrels and yet another broken relationship, Buckley said of Paterson after her death that “she was, for all her temperamental shortcomings, a great woman.”
Though Paterson has become one of those obscure spirits haunting our literary history, Buckley was correct to dub her “great.” Her lifelong advocacy of the individual as opposed to the state and her passion for human rights and freedom have left their mark on our culture.
And though the growth and power of government alarmed her, to the end of her life Paterson celebrated and loved her adopted country. In the final paragraph of “The God of the Machine,” she concludes: “Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.”
Paterson’s praise and her warning remain watchwords among patriots today.
