[Rose Lane Says: Thoughts on Race, Liberty, and Equality 1942-1945 by Rose Wilder Lane, Edited by David T. Beito and Marcus Witcher. South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2024; 308pp.]
We owe a great debt to the historians David T. Beito and Marcus Witcher for making available the texts of eighty-four weekly columns that Rose Wilder Lane wrote during World War II for The Pittsburgh Courier, the newspaper with, by far, the greatest circulation among American blacks. Lane, as most readers will know, was a great pioneer of modern libertarianism, much esteemed by Murray Rothbard. She is probably best-known among libertarians for her book The Discovery of Freedom (1943), but Rose Lane Says develops her unique perspective further and also applies it to the fraught topic of race relations.
What is that perspective? A perhaps surprising way to answer that question is to recall the opening line of Chapter I of The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, all societies down to the present have been oppressive, marked by conflict between the class of workers and the class of their exploiters. Capitalism has increased humanity’s productive power to such a great extent that the conditions are now ripe for a proletarian revolution, resulting in a temporary dictatorship that will eventually wither away, leaving everyone to live in abundance.
Lane agreed with a substantial part of the Marxist interpretation of history, as she herself noted, but, of course, there are great differences as well. For Lane, the revolution that will bring about lasting peace and prosperity has already happened, and that revolution was the American War of Independence and the establishment of the United States under a constitutional government. To understand why she thinks the American Revolution is so significant, we must in turn understand her philosophy of man, and that in brief is this: in order to survive, each person must use his creative energy. If he wants more than what can be snatched from the earth directly, like fruit from a tree, he must build tools that will enable him to rise above the level of subsistence. If people keep building more and better tools and live peacefully, they will continually add to their well-being.
To use his creative energy, a person must be free, and this is the source of our rights. Everyone has the right to live, to use his creative energy to improve his condition, and to apply this energy to resources such as land. Human creative energy works only if it is free: it cannot be coerced. Unfortunately, we cannot do away with coercion, as some people, or groups of people, will attempt to seize for themselves what others have used their creative energy to produce. That being so, we have the right to defend ourselves and what we have acquired. But to devote resources to our defense is costly, and it is much more efficient to delegate our right to self-defense to an agency—the state—which will take over the job of protection for us. (Lane, it is evident, is a limited government libertarian rather than an anarchist.) It is also important to note that, although each person has the same rights, that is the only respect in which people are equal. Each of us has a different character and different abilities; indeed, that is the source of the power of creative energy in cooperation with others to achieve prosperity. If we were all identical in these respects, we would be unable to do this.
We at last are in a position to grasp why Lane sees the Declaration of Independence as the turning point of world history. The Declaration says that “all men are created equal” and that we hold it to be self-evident that among our “unalienable rights” are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” She maintains that no previous society had come anywhere near to recognizing these truths. She does give some credit, though, to Christianity, and particularly to the Roman Catholic Church, for teaching that the offer of salvation is open to everyone. She argues that such recognition ill comports with the Church’s support for a hierarchical society of lords and serfs during the Middle Ages.
Although my aim in this review is primarily exposition rather than criticism, I cannot refrain from noting that her claim for the complete originality of the Declaration of Independence cannot be sustained, nor, for that matter, did the authors of the document make such a claim. They drew from—among others—Aristotle, Cicero, the tradition of common law, and John Locke, whose parallels with her own view of government Lane surprisingly does not mention. Her postulation of a complete rupture in world history is an example of what the philosopher of history Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics and other works famously called an “immanentization of the eschaton.”
Regardless of its validity, though, her view of the Declaration leads her to a very negative portrayal of the American South. Southern society was—both in its own estimation and that of others—hierarchical; and, as Lane sees matters, all hierarchical societies are based on ruthless oppression. She compared Southern slave plantations to Nazi concentration camps, even though the famous black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois said in his Black Reconstruction in America that most Southern slaves lived on good terms with their masters.
Lane is very favorable to Abraham Lincoln, even though he invaded the South, unleashing a bloody war of destruction and assuming dictatorial powers to conduct that war. She praises the Emancipation Proclamation, holding that Lincoln in it recognized the rights to equality that the Declaration of Independence had accorded to “all men,” even though Lincoln denied that the purpose of the war was to end slavery and in fact the Proclamation left slavery intact in the states that had not seceded from the Union.
For all her failings, Lane remains a great libertarian, and I should like to conclude with two instances of her libertarian wisdom. She firmly opposed the efforts of Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans to rule the South through military occupation. Southern whites, no more than anyone else, cannot be successfully coerced to do what they do not want to do, and the amelioration of relations between whites and blacks can only take place voluntarily. Blacks do not need reparations or programs devised by outsiders to “help” them—Lane is suspicious of “do-gooders”—but instead need to be left alone so that they can use their creative energy to advance themselves.
The second instance of her wisdom is her position on the Second Amendment. She takes “the right to keep and bear arms” as a check on the federal government. The amendment as she reads it says to the government, “If you become tyrannical, the people may use force to overthrow you”; and, contrary to the arguments of those who invoke the preamble’s talk of a “well-regulated militia” to claim the amendment is obsolete, she instead takes the mention of the militia to mean that the people in arms posses military power that is independent of the federal government.
Rose Lane Speaks contains an abundance of original thinking, and I urge all those interested in liberty and the free market to read it.
