Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty

The ideals of liberty, individualism, and self-reliance have rarely had more enthusiastic champions than Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston. All three were out of step with the dominant worldview of their times. Stephen Cox, Paterson's biographer, notes that "women were more important to the creation of the libertarian movement than they were to the creation of any political movement not strictly focused on women's rights." Paterson, Lane, and Hurston often tempered their individualism with pragmatism and an appreciation of messy cultural and religious realities. To justify their individualism, Paterson and Lane laid out grand philosophical systems. So-called race problems, in Paterson's view, were "strictly political problems". For Hurston, race pride was just another facet of racism. All three women considered communism to be destructive not only in politics, but also in the literary arts. Today, their insights about the New Deal welfare-warfare state and the internal contradictions of communism appear to have been remarkably prescient.