[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.