The Libertarian Pioneer Who Wrote for America's Biggest Black Newspaper

Rose Wilder Lane—novelist, journalist, founding mother of the modern libertarian movement, and very likely uncredited co-author of her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books—was also, less famously, a columnist in the early 1940s for the largest black newspaper in the United States.

Lane first learned about The Pittsburgh Courier in spring 1941 from a black woman who worked for her. After taking out a subscription, she sent a fan letter and an article submission to Joel A. Rogers, one of the paper's columnists. Rogers, a self-taught popularizer of black history, was instrumental in getting her hired as a regular contributor. She wrote for the paper from 1942 to 1945, and the authors of this article have compiled most of her Courier columns in a forthcoming book, titled Rose Lane Says.

Lane's fascination with the Courier was not surprising. She was bound to appreciate the cosmopolitan and welcoming atmosphere, as well as the ethnic and ideological diversity of the columnists and the lively dialogue between them. The regular contributors included a white drama critic, Ted Le Berthon; an Indian expatriate, journalist, and independence activist, Kumar Goshal; and a Japanese-American semanticist, S.I. Hayakawa, who later became a U.S. senator from California.

The most accomplished person on the paper's staff may have been the lead editorial writer, George S. Schuyler. Dubbed "the black H.L. Mencken" for his scathing prose, he was in the process of a gradual transition from independent socialist to libertarian-leaning conservative. Schuyler, like Lane, was an unrelenting anti-Communist, always ready to denounce the party's infiltration and attempted manipulation of black organizations and causes. He fought many Roosevelt- and Truman-era policies, including the New Deal's intersections with Jim Crow and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Lane had known Schuyler in the 1930s when, according to her, he was still an "ardent" New Dealer. Even then she admired his consistent, "almost singlehanded" fight against "communists and racists white or black."

Lane's columns appeared weekly from October 31, 1942, to September 8, 1945. Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, she promoted them to this new audience by addressing topics of direct concern to Courier readers. Her maiden column glowingly characterized the "Double V Campaign" (victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home) as part of the more general struggle for individual liberty throughout U.S. history. The Courier "is a place where I belong," she wrote. "Here are Americans who know the meaning of equality and freedom." But she also showed awareness that she was an outsider with something to learn. "For the first time in my long life as a writer," she confessed, "I suffer from stage-fright. How does a recruit speak, indeed how does she dare to speak, in the presence of veterans of a movement that she should have joined long ago?"

Lane regularly weaved her laissez faire and anti-racist ideas together. Her columns promoted the individual over artificial collective constructs such as race and class. Instead of indulging in the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of 'race,' [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century," she wrote, Americans both black and white should "renounce their race." She compared people who judged others by their skin color to communists, who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the "delusions" of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal 'class' distinction." The collectivists, including the New Dealers, filled "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government."

To Lane, African Americans' achievements were all the more amazing given their unusually disadvantaged starting point. Under slavery, they had toiled under conditions "more destitute than the starving hordes in Europe now." They "had been born and had lived in concentration camps, under guard; they had been worked hard, meagerly fed, denied schooling, churches, privacy or decency; forbidden to marry, to own property, to read and write, without permission."

With emancipation, they were "homeless, penniless, ragged, illiterate, lost among strangers, they had freedom." But, Lane asked provocatively, "'Freedom—for what? Freedom to starve?' Yes, precisely." In the years since slavery, she asked, "How did they survive at all? God knows. And I wish some of their brilliant writers would tell us, in great works of fiction. For they not only survived; they prospered. They became great writers, scientists, educators, musicians and doctors, lawyers, capitalists. Behind the wall of prejudice that kept them unknown to other Americans, they built up a culture, a society, churches, colleges, business enterprises. They own today property worth tens of billions of dollars. They did this, in eighty years. Starting from nothing at all. Nothing but freedom."

While the Courier was an exhilarating opportunity for Lane to bring the message of individualism and free enterprise to a new audience, it also prompted some painful self-reflection. She had wrongly "accepted the myth of 'the Negro race.' Dark-skinned persons served me, and I was kind and courteous to them, with the damnable kindness and courtesy for which there is no forgiveness." She had heard about lynchings and other racial injustice but had assumed that these were isolated incidents. Reading the Courier had shown her that she had been an "utter fool" and "a traitor to my country's cause, the cause of human rights."

In some ways, Lane anticipated what later came to be known as "whiteness studies," although she gave it an individualist twist. She asked her black readers to appreciate how hard it was for whites to overcome these old patterns of bigotry.

From infancy, Lane explained, the schools had taught whites the collectivist delusion "that whiteness is the ineradicable mark of superior race." Half in jest, she said that "the progress of my people is slow….The American White is generally a friendly fellow, good-hearted, generous, and meaning no harm to anyone. His errors, even his cruelties, come from the false beliefs instilled in him by his environment and training. He needs help to overcome them." One way for African Americans to "solve the White problem" was to mail copies of the Courier to "more ignorant whites."

Lane's libertarian approach toward race led her to reinterpret familiar tropes for her readers, such as her interpretation of the familiar phrase, "white friends of the Negro." The modern liberal claim to be friends to an entire race was just as implausible to her as the claims of the leftist who pronounced himself a friend of humanity. Friendship, she argued, was individual, not collective or impersonal. It was "an emotion felt by one person for another person; it is as unique and exclusive as love. Nobody can be a friend to anyone whom he never saw, nor whose very name he doesn't know….Try being a friend to musicians. It can't be done."

So when Schuyler called for abolition of the term Negro, she heartily approved—but also conceded that it was not her place to decide. To millions, the word Negro represented "pride in achievement and the fellowship in the struggle for human rights."

Lane even anticipated in a small way the strategy of the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s. She suggested emulation of the crusade of "shy, sensitive, Victorian" women like her, who had once asserted their right to smoke in restaurants: "We never questioned that individuals are responsible for any injustice that they submit to. So we did not submit. We smoked in public places….A waiter rushed to your table and contemptuously told you to leave….You put out the cigarette and doggedly choked down some food from your plate. The next time you ate, you did it again." Through this method, these women had worn down prejudice bit by bit.

When promoting her vision of a free society, Lane emphasized black success stories to illustrate broader themes of the value of entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. One column compared the accomplishments of Courier publisher Robert L. Vann and Henry Ford. Vann's rags-to-riches story illustrated the benefits of a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority, can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion." Ford showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of thousands of jobs…putting even beggars into cars."

But Lane's primary goal in her columns was not merely to glorify the individual entrepreneur. It was to illustrate the benefits of "uncontrolled" free markets for ordinary people. Proponents of central state direction, she argued, did not realize the ability of decentralized markets to bring order out of chaos. A free economy was "NOT planned by a few persons and NOT enforced by the police"; it was "planned by all the individuals and controlled by the free choices of all the individuals working, selling, buying and consuming material things."

Although Lane wanted this planning accomplished through "liberty and individual initiative," she feared that most Americans had passed the point of no return. The habit of seeking security in the New Deal and wartime bureaucracy was becoming harder to break: "It's human to want to be safe and freedom isn't safety; freedom demands self-reliance and courage." In proclaiming the "four freedoms" (freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear), President Franklin Roosevelt had misunderstood the fundamental meaning of the term. Freedom was not a "freedom to" or a "freedom from" anything. For Lane, "Freedom is self-control; no more, no less."

Lane ultimately left the Courier because of internal politics. The Courier's executive editor, P.L. Prattis—who Lane had personally liked—abruptly and without explanation terminated her services. She suspected that Prattis had acted for political reasons, with Lane landing in the middle of growing ideological tensions between Schuyler, who was increasingly hostile to the Roosevelt administration, and the rest of the staff: "Two of us were too much to be endured in that nest of leftists, George [Schuyler] says, since they could not get him, they got me." On at least one count, Lane was correct. Prattis had closely aligned himself with the leftist faction in the Roosevelt administration, led by Vice President Henry Wallace, and was contemptuous of the "rugged individualism" of Republican "reactionaries."

Lane certainly gave no hint of trimming her sails. Her final column (which ended with the unfulfilled promise "Continued Next Week") used events in Danbury, Connecticut, as an illustration to attack zoning. Under zoning, "nobody in the town of Danbury could build or alter his house without permission." The town imposed regulations to lower density, such as minimum lot size requirements, and other rules that would raise building costs. To put a human face on the regulations' impact, she quoted a local Italian immigrant: "Do I come to America to be a free man, that now in America I must ask permission to live? I must ask and pay, or I cannot improve my own house with my own money and my own hands? And officials come into my house to see that I obey? How can this be, in the United States of America?…This like Italy. Those born at the top can stay at the top. Born at the bottom, the poor must stay at the bottom."

The loss of her Courier column was personally upsetting but was no great financial blow. For the first time, the sales of the Little House on the Prairie books were beginning to provide her a comfortable steady income. But Lane was not completely through with the Courier.

In 1948, she wrote a letter to the editor that praised some previous letters which called for no longer using the word Negro and other racial references. For Lane, such a campaign was necessary because judging people "by their 'races' which do not exist" conflicted with the "revolutionary American principle of individualism" as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The United States had no hope of achieving its stated ideals, she stressed, unless "each of us destroys segregation in his own mind."

Lane devoted most of the last two decades of her life—she died in 1968—to hands-on mentoring roles in launching the "libertarian movement," a term she may have coined. She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and then for the Volker Fund, an organization from which the Institute for Humane Studies later emerged. She kept her distance from William F. Buckley and his new magazine, National Review: His version of conservatism struck her as an aristocratic and "reactionary" holdover of the philosophy "that a commonwealth is a mystic Being, that Governments are ordained by God."

Much more to her liking was the libertarian Freedom School, launched in 1956 and headed by Robert LeFevre, a charismatic radio commentator and businessman. At one point, Lane almost emptied her modest banking account to keep the struggling Freedom School, later known as Rampart College, afloat. One of her admirers was the economist Hans Sennholz, who was later the president of the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian educational organization.

With her combined appeals to markets, individualism, and anti-racism, Lane joined a long line of classical liberals who were critically important to abolitionism and the later civil rights movement. When asked what should be done with emancipated slaves, Frederick Douglass had replied: "Do nothing with them; mind your business and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune." Later, Booker T. Washington touted thrift, investment, and the work ethic; even Washington's great rival, the socialist W.E.B. Du Bois, had championed free markets as a "black Mugwump" in the 1890s. Moorfield Storey, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's founding president, was a champion of the gold standard, free trade, and minimal regulation. Oswald Garrison Villard, the organization's first treasurer, had similar views.

Lane's columns for the Courier represented the most ambitious effort during this period to promote laissez faire ideas to a black audience. The last two decades have brought a new appreciation of Lane as a political activist and as a collaborator in the Little House books. It is time for her writings on civil rights to receive their due as well.