IT WAS A cold afternoon in October 1933, and Isabel Paterson was locked inside a New York City bank vault.

She was furious.

Then a 47-year-old columnist for the Herald Tribune, Isabel was at the bank to remove something from her deposit box. But the bank’s staff was concerned the withdrawal might violate one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s new banking rules. Roosevelt, sworn into office seven months earlier, had seized unprecedented executive authority over the banking system in an effort to end the country’s financial crisis. Less than a week after taking office, he’d rushed the Emergency Banking Bill through Congress so quickly that few congressmen had time to read it. Then he issued a series of executive orders that, among other things, forbade banks from allowing customers to withdraw currency for the purpose of “hoarding” and forced anyone with gold coin, bullion, or certificates to surrender them to the Federal Reserve.

If the Wright brothers represented what Isabel loved best about America, Franklin Roosevelt came to represent what she most despised.

Isabel’s bank was confused about Roosevelt’s new rules, which carried heavy fines and criminal penalties. So when Isabel appeared to be withdrawing possessions from her deposit box, the staff panicked. They decided to lock her inside the vault, unsure what else to do.

They’d probably picked the worst woman in America to hold prisoner.

Isabel stood only five-foot-three, but she was a terrifying force. Her brash manner had gotten her into the newspaper business decades earlier, almost by accident: In her twenties, she’d landed a job as secretary to a small newspaper publisher in Spokane, Washington, and promptly began terrorizing her new boss over his grammar. The publisher fired Isabel as his secretary—he needed someone “more tolerant,” he told her—and put her to work writing editorials instead.

It was an inspired decision: Isabel was a deft writer with an acerbic wit and strong opinions. She loved books, hated movies (called film a “monstrous” medium), vigorously opposed Prohibition (even though she rarely drank herself), worshiped “self-starters” like the Wright brothers, and, above all, believed that a nation’s strength was “directly proportional to the freedom of the individual.”

Now Isabel Paterson was locked in a bank vault—and it was Franklin Roosevelt’s fault.

Isabel began scolding the bank staff, loudly accusing them of kidnapping her. Stuck between Roosevelt’s regulations and Isabel’s ire, the bank apparently decided it feared Isabel more: They opened the vault and let her go.

Afterward, of course, she wrote about the episode.

“There is practically nothing you can’t be put in jail for now,” she fumed.

Roosevelt, Isabel believed, was destroying America: Between the banking reforms, the agricultural price controls, and the creation of the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt was setting up state machinery that had “the makings of Fascism” and was devaluing what little savings Americans still had.

“This bastard oligarchic half-state socialism we’re getting into looks to me like nothing but an everlasting mess,” Isabel wrote in a letter to a friend shortly after the bank incident. “[I]t won’t help or ‘save’ anybody in the end. It will just bring us all to the breadline.”

From the Stone Age to the Air Age

ISABEL KNEW WHAT it was like to be poor. She’d been born into poverty on the frontier.

She was Isabel Bowler back then, one of nine children of a not-very-successful Canadian farmer named Francis Bowler. The family moved around in a covered wagon in search of opportunities that never quite panned out, from a grist mill on Lake Huron to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the Utah Territory to, finally, a ranch in Northwest Canada.

Isabel grew up teaching herself to read, sewing her own clothes, cooking bear meat, and churning butter. She was 16 years old before she saw an electric light bulb for the first time.

Years later in her column—where she always referred to herself as “we” rather than “I”—Isabel explained: “We weren’t brought up in a world in which water ran from taps and food came in tin cans, and we know that whatever is done, someone has got to do it.” In other words, she believed that a comfortable life “has to be earned and invented and made.”

When she was 18, she left home to make her way in the world, first as a “dining room girl” at a hotel, then as a stenographer for bankers, then as a secretary. She became Mrs. Isabel Paterson at 24 when she married salesman Kenneth Paterson, nicknamed “Pat,” in Calgary, Alberta. A couple weeks after marrying, Isabel took off for Spokane and left Kenneth behind.

It was in Spokane that she became a newspaperwoman, and several years later she made her way to the Herald Tribune in New York City. There she wrote a column on books, published several novels, and became a part of the city’s literary scene—a scene that, in the late 1920s and 1930s, was steeped in far-left politics. As she put it herself years later, “During the nineteen thirties… Communism broke out like hives among the ‘intellectuals’ and the scions and toadies of the rich.”

“I was not a Communist. I am against organized corruption and planned murder.”

Isabel Paterson

Isabel, of course, cut against the grain. From the moment she began writing her column, she published cutting reviews of popular intellectuals like Upton Sinclair and George Bernard Shaw. She noted that Shaw, who openly admired both Stalin and Mussolini, described his own workspace as a mess. “Now we can’t take any stock in the economics or social program of a man whose unconscious hope is to get the state to come in and sweep his room and trim his whiskers for him,” Isabel wrote.

When a novelist friend visited Rome in 1932 and wrote to Isabel that she was somewhat impressed by Mussolini, Isabel shot back that Mussolini was a “disgusting dictator.” Looking back at the politically charged period—in which even people she respected were embracing statism—Isabel later quipped: “I was not a Communist. I am against organized corruption and planned murder.”

Her attitude about freedom and progress is perhaps best captured in her writings about the Wright brothers, who completed their first flight in 1903 when Isabel was 17. To her, the brothers represented everything good about America. Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the airplane on their own, funded by about a thousand dollars of their own money, working on a private field that a farmer let them use. A separate, government-backed effort to develop the airplane was being run simultaneously by the head of the Smithsonian Institution; it blew through $50,000 of public money but produced nothing.

The Wright brothers, on the other hand, “were two Americans who asked nothing of anybody; they could earn what they needed, and mind their own business; and out of their native genius they solved a scientific problem which gave mankind the mastery of the air,” Isabel wrote.

She liked to say she’d lived “from the stone age to the air age.” She believed the airplane was invented in America “precisely because this was the only country on earth, the only country that has ever existed, in which people had a right to be let alone.”

Isabel Paterson with aviator Harry Bingham Brown.

Roosevelt Steps In

IF THE WRIGHT brothers represented what Isabel loved best about America, Franklin Roosevelt came to represent what she most despised.

The crash of 1929 hit everyone, including Isabel: She lost money in the stock market and suffered a pay cut at the Herald Tribune. But she remained optimistic at first, having already lived through a depression in the 1890s. “Americans,” she wrote, “certainly are resilient.”

But Isabel quickly grew frustrated with President Hoover, who announced several dubious policies and programs after the crash (including the Farm Board, which paid farmers to grow unprofitable produce). So in the 1932 election, Isabel voted for Franklin Roosevelt instead.

Roosevelt, at least, said the right things on the campaign trail: He pledged to reduce “the annual operating expenses of your national government” and accused Hoover of piling “bureau on bureau, commission on commission.” He even compared federal commissions to “a fungus growth on American government.”

After Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, of course, he dropped all talking points about cutting the size of government.

In his first 100 days, Roosevelt pushed the First New Deal through Congress in 15 separate bills, including the banking reform bill. (“Congress doesn’t pass legislation anymore,” comedian Will Rogers joked at the time. “They just wave at the bills as they go by.”) The creation of the National Recovery Administration made a farce of Roosevelt’s campaign promises; suddenly federal codes dictated how many cents a laundry business in Cleveland could charge for pressing suits. Roosevelt’s appetite for expanding regulation clearly surpassed Hoover’s.

Isabel, of course, was disgusted.

“Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright. But we like the view better up there.”

Isabel Paterson

At this point, she was under pressure to lay off writing about politics in her column. “[S]ome of Paterson’s readers were begging her to come down off her soapbox,” Stephen Cox, Isabel’s biographer, recounts. Her column, after all, was supposed to be a literary column; it was called “Turns with a Bookworm.” She’d already delved far more into politics than she probably should have. And the literary set was not particularly receptive to Isabel’s brand of free market individualism: Cox describes “the anti-capitalist mentality” of writers and public intellectuals during Isabel’s time as “even more entrenched than it is today.”

But Isabel ignored readers who complained, and used her column to make the case for liberty.

A long line of people gather for a food handout in Newark during the Great Depression in 1934.
Source: Newark Public Library

Defending ‘Our System, Our Freedom’

IN A DECEMBER 1933 column, Isabel wrote:

A business may be so admirably organized that it looks as if it would run itself, but if you take out one or two men who keep it running and put in some bureaucrat who knows all the graphs and charts, the business will go to pieces. They don’t do it by rule, but by nature. And in an effort to regulate everything those people may be easily eliminated. They have been very nearly exterminated in Russia. Bureaucracy smothers them.

In a letter to a friend around the same time, she reflected on her own impoverished upbringing on the frontier. “[T]he poverty of my childhood was disagreeable,” she wrote, “but I don’t know what state action could have made my home happier; and all the chances and benefits I have enjoyed came from our system, our freedom[.]” Today’s men “all want to have their noses wiped for them by Mussolini, or Roosevelt, or somebody,” she complained.

By 1935, Isabel was comparing the New Deal to “the procedure in Germany,” with its “usurpation of authority and disregard of the Constitution,” the “steady centralization of power,” and “a stupefying tangle of contradictory regulations of every activity of the private citizen.”

Franklin Roosevelt was president for 12 years—and for 12 years Isabel used her column as a pulpit to take an aggressive, principled stance against the New Deal and what it represented. When Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, Isabel defended judicial review; when Roosevelt introduced Social Security, Isabel slammed it as a “wage tax.”

She also took shots at First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who at one point lamented that houses out West were too far apart and that children who lived there must spend a good deal of time alone. “Should this be allowed to continue?” Isabel asked sarcastically.

[T]hose children… might find something to do without being told, think their own thoughts, read or observe nature, or get the notion of becoming independent, instead of planning to grow up and attach themselves forthwith to a government pay roll, where they can be assured of steady supervision and inquisition at intervals into their private lives.

A Legacy of Freedom

ISABEL WAS EVENTUALLY fired from the Herald Tribune over her unfashionable politics. The tide of opinion was trending the other way: Isabel’s own boss, for example, was the editor and assistant for Wendell Wilkie’s wildly popular 1943 book that called for a single world government. The Roosevelt administration also cultivated “inappropriately cozy relationships with journalists,” according to Goldwater Institute scholar Timothy Sandefur, and “those who resisted the New Deal learned that dissent was costly.”

But Isabel’s firing didn’t come until 1949, four years after Roosevelt died in office. She managed to hold onto her column far longer than anyone might have guessed, through her undeniable skill and strength of will.

Her legacy, of course, outlasted her column.

Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and Rose Wilder Lane, author of The Discovery of Freedom, both became friends of Isabel’s during the 1940s. Isabel became a sounding board for both women and encouraged their individualist philosophies. Eventually her friendships with both women imploded—Isabel was, admittedly, a difficult person—but her influence is felt in Rand and Lane’s work.

“You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated,” Rand wrote in Isabel’s copy of The Fountainhead.

Isabel published her own magnum opus in 1943, The God of the Machine, in which she offered an impassioned case for individual freedom as the engine of progress. Rand said the book “does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible does for Christianity.” It became a foundational text for a new, upcoming generation of conservative and libertarian leaders in America, including William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, who both credited Isabel as an inspiration.

Isabel did not choose the easiest path for herself, even at the end: In retirement, she remained a staunch opponent of Social Security and refused to accept her own benefits. She kept her card in an envelope labeled “Social Security Swindle.”

As she wrote in a 1936 column: “Freedom is dangerous. Possibly crawling on all fours might be safer than standing upright. But we like the view better up there.”

This article was inspired by the recent book Freedom’s Furies, published by the Cato Institute and written by Tim Sandefur, vice president of Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute. Tim is a longtime friend of PLF, where he worked as an attorney from 2002 to 2016, and we attribute him with our thanks.