Selling Laissez-faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the "Pittsburgh Courier"

The ideals of liberty, individualism, and self-reliance have rarely had a more enthusiastic champion than Rose Wilder Lane. A columnist and popular author, she held firm to these beliefs during the New Deal and World War II era, when faith in big government was at high tide. Through her book The Discovery of Freedom ([1943] 1984a), she became a key transitional figure from the Old Right of the 1930s to the modern libertarian movement. If the Courier was an exhilarating opportunity for Lane to advance the message of individualism and free enterprise, it also gave rise to some painful self-reflection. Many of Lane's columns highlighted how the web of wartime controls threatened individual liberty. In the last two decades of her life, Lane rarely wrote again about racial issues or referred to her years at the Pittsburgh Courier. Instead, she concentrated on playing a hands-on mentoring role in launching the libertarian movement, a term she apparently coined.