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,
Article from Latest
The Reason Magazine website is a go-to destination for libertarians seeking cogent analysis, investigative reporting, and thought-provoking commentary. Championing the principles of individual freedom, limited government, and free markets, the site offers a diverse range of articles, videos, and podcasts that challenge conventional wisdom and advocate for libertarian solutions. Whether you’re interested in politics, culture, or technology, Reason provides a unique lens that prioritizes liberty and rational discourse. It’s an essential resource for those who value critical thinking and nuanced debate in the pursuit of a freer society.