The Woman Who Discovered Private Property; W. Holtz

One of the first Americans to travel exten sively in pre-Communist Albania and to take an intelligent interest in its problems was Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), whose The Peaks of Shala (1923) documents her visit to some of that country's remotest mountain regions. Lane was also the author of a classic handbook of libertar ian thought, The Discovery of Freedom (1943). The two are not directly connected, although The Discoveryof Freedomwas in a way the cul mination of a process of discovery that began when she went to Europe in the 1920s as a free lance writer. Professor Holtz, who teaches in the Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia, is writing a biography of Rose Wilder Lane. Lane carried with her an essentially unexam ined baggage of parlor-socialist ideas, common among writers and intellectuals of the time and attached to the historical spectacle of the develop ing Soviet Union. Her experience in Europe and in the Caucasus would lead her to question these ideas; her experience in her own country in the 1930s would lead her to rebel against them; and The Discoveryof Freedomwould be a distillation of her thought and experience.

In the mountains of Albania, Lane had one of her earliest practical encounters with the implica tions of personal freedom. There she met a woman who, in contravention of all tradition and teaching in her society,had discovered private property. By chapter six of The Peaksof Shala,Lane had brought herself and her readers deep into the mountains ofnorthern Albania, where in scattered and isolated villages she found a primitive yet noble tribal society, generous and courteous to guests but locked in blood feuds with neighboring tribes under the Law of Lec, which dated from Alexander the Great. She estimated that, except for their rifles, they were essentially living in the eighth century. The tribal leaders were much interested in her reports from the outside world, which she tried to interpret for them as best she could. But in one village Lane found a problem beyond her powers of explanation, as the village elders asked how they might settle a woman's revolutionary claim to the fruits of her own labor.

All she wanted, this woman said, was justice. She told us with a calm precision; none of her people's rhetorical flourishes. Even through the 256 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1992 barrier of language I could see that she was stat ing her case as a lawyer might who was not addressing a jury. She had been married five years; she was twenty-one years old. She had two children boys. While she was married her husband had built a house. It was a large house; two rooms. She had help~d her husband build that house. With her own hands she had laid the slate on the roof. She liked that house. She had lived in it four years. Now her husband had been killed by the Serbs and she wanted to keep that house. She wanted to live in it alone, with her two children.... Her husband's brother, head of the family now, had taken it. He was living in it with his wife and children and brothers and cousins and-I forget exactly; seventeen of them in all.

The family, which comprised all the village at the foot of the slope on which we stood, had decided that the house should be used for them. But she would not do it. She wanted that house all for herself; she said again that it was her house. Until she got that house nothing would content her or keep her silent. "I WantMy House!" "But where do you suppose she got the idea?" Lane asked her interpreter. "Heaven knows," he replied. "Who can tell what women willthink of?" Later that evening, the woman brought her appeal to a gathering of the tribal elders. "Undoubtedly we were among the most courteous people in the world," Lane wrote, "but the next moment that idea was completely upset, for out of the darkness walked that rebel woman who believes in private property." She came quite calmly into the circle of the firelight, her beautiful hands low on her thighs, below the wide, silver-shiningmarriage belt, the blue beads twinkling at the ends of the long black braids of her hair, her chin up, and a light of battle in her eyes....

"When am 1going to get my house?" said the woman. She stood there superb, holding that question like a bone above a mob of starving dogs, and they rose at it. 1have never seen such pandemonium. Three chiefsspoke at once, snarling; they were on their feet; it was like a picture by Jan Steen changed into the wildest of futurist canvases. I expected them to fly at one another's throats, after the words that they hurled at each other like spears. I expected them to strike the woman, so violent 1y did they thrust their faces close to hers, clenching quivering fists on the hilts of the knives in their sashes. She stamped her foot, her lips curled back like a dog's from her fine, gleaming teeth, and she stood her ground, flash ing back at them words that seemed poisoned by the venom in her eyes. "My house!" she repeated, and, "I want my house!" As the argument died down for a moment, Lane asked for an explanation from one of the elders.

"Who can say what the avalanche wants?" replied the chief contemptuously. "She would break our village into pieces. She has no respect for wisdom or custom. She says that a house is her house; she is a widow with two sons, and she demands the house in which she lived with her husband. She wishes to take a house from the tribe and keep it for herself. Have the mountains seen such a thing since a hundred hundred years before the Turks came? She is gogoli [insane]." "I helped to build that house," said the wom an. "With my own hands I laid the roof upon it. It is my house. 1will not give up my house." "My pen spilled ink on my excited hands as 1 tried to capture their words in shorthand," Lane wrote. "I was seeing, actually seeing with my own eyes, the invention of private property!" Then the oldest man ... obviously the chief of chiefs-appealed to me. "In your country, what would you do with such a woman?" And I perceived that 1 was obliged to explain to this circle of eager listeners a system of social and economic life of which they had never dreamed, of which they knew as little as we know of the year 2900.

Rose Wilder Lane tried to explain not merely the ownership of houses, but of land, and of prop erty held for rents and investment, as well as the notion of hired labor and taxes paid to govern ment. And failed, as she could see when another chief rose to make a passionate speech that con vinced everyone but the complaining woman: THE WOMAN WHO DISCOVERED PRIVATE PROPERTY 257 "Such things can never be. Even a child knows that it would be foolish to own a house in which he did not live. Of what use is a house, except to live in? As it is, each man has the house in which he lives,and there are houses for all, and they belong to the tribe that built them. It is impossible that a man can own a house. It is not the nature of men to own houses, and we will never do it, for the nature of man is always the same. It is the same today as it was before the Romans came, and it will always be the same. And no man will ever own a house."

"Glory to your lips!" they said to him. "It is so." The woman, who had been sitting quietly lis tening to this, now rose and very quietly,without saying farewell, slipped out of the firelight, and ina moment, by the sound of the closing door, I knew she had left the house. But there was something about my last glimpse of her back that makes me believe she is still clamoring for her house, and will be until long after her baby sons are grown and married. Unless she gets it sooner. What Lane had encountered in this Albanian village was, of course, a primitive communism, the kind with a small c. The big C variety she would encounter soon enough, as her travels took her to Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan during the time that these ancient nations were being absorbed into the growing Soviet Union. There she encountered the well-intentioned, blundering Soviet bureaucrats disrupting centuries-old agri cultural practices with confiscations, allocations, and taxes on production that reduced some peas ants to a despairing certainty of starvation. What was claimed as progress was really regress, she concluded; and she returned to the United States with her socialist opinions badly tarnished.

When in the 1930sshe made a similar tour of the farms of her own Midwest and observed the New Deal farm programs in place, she found a familiar insertion of the hand of government between the worker and the produce of his labor. The result was a train of thought that finally produced The Discovery of Freedom, the subtitle of which told the real story: Man's Struggle Against Authority. In the long course of history, she argued, the insight into the absolute validity of personal freeRose Wilder Lane, taken at about the time she first visited Albania. dom and personal responsibility was only an occa sional glimmer in a dark chr.onicleof submission to authority. Its most promising flowering had been in the founding of the American republic, but its essence lay in the assertion of the individual human will. Which might happen anywhere, even in the medieval setting of an Albanian village in 1921,in the heart of a woman who had discovered private property.

Lane retained her love for Albania, livingthere for a year in 1926-27 even as she saw it sinking under Italian influence. She informally adopted the 12-year-old boy who was her guide and inter preter on the first mountain trip. She supported him through his studies at Cambridge and stood as godmother to his family after he married, even though she was never able to return to visit them. When this young man was interned, first by the Italians during World War II and then by the Com munists after, she was able to provide clandestine support to his family, some of whom have now made their way to the United States. Among those Albanians who remain behind, working to build a free society in place of the most recent tyranny, are doubtless the descendants of that rebellious wom an who had insisted on the right to keep what she had worked to build. D 258 Mud Farmingand Political Extortion by Richard B. Coffman W illiam Faulkner's comic novel, The Reivers, contains an amusing episode that raises interesting questions about entrepreneurs and exploitation. The story is set in the rural South in the early days of the century, when roads were primitive dirt tracks and automo biles still a novelty. During an epic cross-country car trip, Faulkner's heroes run afoul of a "mud farmer." By night he plows up a muddy stretch of road. By day he waits at the roadside with his mules to tow cars through the mud for an exorbi tant fee. Faulkner's heroes make a valiant effort to push and shove their car through the mud hole, but in the end it defeats them, and they escape only by hiring the mud farmer to tow them out.