Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (34 page)

Another student outlined myriad complaints in a letter to Rand. He was particularly bothered by a pervasive cynicism in the two universities he had attended: “Anyone who seeks, or makes a statement on, truth and/or beauty is (a) ignored, (b) the recipient of a vague, benevolent smile, (c) scorned, (d) politely laughed at and called ‘unsophisticated,’ or (e) treated as a refugee from some quaint spot, which, fortunately,
is now ‘lost.’”
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Rand, though, was interested in both truth and beauty. She defined herself as a leader of the nearly lost Romantic school and attacked Naturalistic writers and artists as “the gutter school.” Alluding to Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita,
Rand criticized modern intellectuals and writers: “They feel hatred for any projection of man as a clean, self condent, efficacious being. They extol depravity; they relish the sight of man spitting in his own face.”
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She preferred the popular mystery novels of Mickey Spillane, featuring a hard-boiled detective who doggedly tracked down evildoers.

Objectivism was also appealing because it promised sure footing on the slippery terrain of right and wrong. Rand insisted that ethics could be scientifically derived from the nature of man, properly understood. Man was a rational being and therefore, that which served his life,
qua
man, was the good. More important than her elevation of selfishness was Rand’s insistence that her ethics could be proven and defended objectively. Remembering his turn to Objectivism, a radio host explained, “I think the biggest change that occurs is that you recognize that there are absolutes, that there are guidelines as criteria, that you can know and understand.” The absolutist and rationalistic form of Rand’s ethics appealed as much as their content. “Above all, Dagny is sure of herself, and lots of young people want to be sure of themselves,” one college fan told an interviewer.
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It was not certainty alone that Rand offered, but the idea that things
made sense,
that the world was rational, logical, and could be understood. Order was the particular reward of
Atlas Shrugged,
which portrayed a world in which politics, philosophy, ethics, sex, and every other aspect of human existence were drawn together into a cohesive narrative. Just as Rand had provided businessmen with a set of ideas that met their need to feel righteous and honorable in their professional lives, she gave young people a philosophical system that met their deep need for order and certainty. This aspect of her appeal rings through again and again in accounts of her influence. One young fan told Rand that before finding her work, he was “a very confused person” but “You gave me the answers, and more important, a moral sanction for existing.” Often the lure of Rand’s intelligible world was enough for readers to trade in long-standing beliefs overnight. A self-described former “altruist and socialist” started her books skeptically but soon found in Rand
the “consistent philosophy that ignored no aspect of life” he had always sought. Sharon Presley, one of the few women to become active in the libertarian movement, remembered
Atlas Shrugged
as a revelation: “It wasn’t until Rand that I had some kind of explicitly articulated theory or set of principles that made sense to me . . . so that was a major, major influence on my life.”
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Objectivism seemed immediately superior to her previous habits of thought because Rand’s ideas interlocked and supported one another.

In many ways the overwhelming impact of Rand’s ideas mimicked Marxism’s influence. Arthur Koestler’s memory of his conversion to Communism echoes the sentiments expressed by Rand’s readers: “The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question; doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.” Only a small portion of Rand’s readers became as feverishly devoted to her ideas as Koestler did to Marxism, but the basic dynamic was similar. A twenty-four-year-old woman told Rand, “you have combined all my stray thoughts into an orderly, workable pattern—this alone is worth many years of my life.”
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Rand’s perspective could bring refreshing clarity to the unfocused, replacing doubt and uncertainty with passion and conviction.

No matter how they came to Rand, some basic similarities seemed to underlie those who were attracted to her. In his 1963 study of young conservatives,
They’d Rather Be Right,
Edward Cain designated Rand the primary “theorist” of conservative youth and described the type who was drawn to her. According to Cain, the follower of Rand was limited in number “but qualitatively very important. He is very likely to picture himself as someone whom John Galt might call to his mountain retreat. Bright, alert, and conscious of his capacity, he would admire the boldness of heroic action. Having something to offer, he feels there should be appropriate reward for a job well done, and has probably long despised the ‘second handers,’ or drones, who have had to crib from his chemistry reports or term papers.”
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Although Cain’s emblematic Objectivist was male, the presence of Rand herself, along with her independent, intelligent female heroines, made Objectivism attractive to female students in search of role models. Whatever their gender, Rand drew students who were self-consciously intellectual and willing to read outside their
assigned coursework. No one who quailed at a novel in the thousand-page range would get very far into the Objectivist world.

Once engaged with Rand, students often attempted to bring her into the classroom, with uniformly disastrous results. A Brown University student described how his grades plummeted after he began relying heavily on Rand for his schoolwork. First came the term paper on Franklin Roosevelt, analyzing him as a “social metaphysician” under the authority of Nathaniel Branden. Then followed his turn toward Romanticism after reading Rand’s essay “The Goal of My Writing.” The student recounted: “It just hadn’t occurred to me, until then, that I had been writing rather realistic, naturalistic stuff. Ayn Rand made that sound like part of the international Communist conspiracy. Treason to Tarzan. I was just bowled over.” Formerly the star of his creative writing class, the student now began to churn out derivative, Rand-style Romantic stories on the level of “C grade movies.” His instructor despaired at seeing his prize pupil’s creativity and talent disappear overnight, but the student remembered: “It never occurred to me that what was happening to me was anything but Howard Roark banished by the Dean.”
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Feeling marginalized or discriminated against was no burden to Objectivists; indeed it indicated that they were acting as honorable, independent individualists.

Students pressed onward in their quest to share Rand’s ideas, often becoming the bane of their college instructors in the process. One student at Montclair State in New Jersey described his battle with a political science professor: “One day after class I recommended your books and repeated the Oath of Self Allegiance. He winced.”
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Rand bedeviled college professors of all stripes. Some took preemptive action:
The Objectivist Newsletter
reported on a philosophy professor who automatically failed any student who wrote a paper on Objectivism. Arriving at Wellesley College, Nora Ephron was whisked to an orientation seminar where the evils of Rand’s philosophy were stressed. “How pleased I was to read your excellent book review!” a professor of French at Columbia University told Sidney Hook, recounting a recent run-in with a student who had “exuberant enthusiasm about Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy.’ “ Exhausted and exasperated by the effort “to make this student realize that logical analysis ought to be applied when judging Ayn Rand’s statements properly,” the professor was grateful to Hook for offering a definitive rebuttal of her ideas in the nation’s most respected newspaper.
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A writer for
New University Thought
captured the mood among university professors. Robert L. White grudgingly admitted Rand’s influence, calling her “a genuinely popular ideologue of the right” and identifying a “genuine grass-roots fervor for her ideas.” According to White, Rand was the only contemporary novelist his students consistently admired, and he found it “dismaying to contemplate the possibility that Ayn Rand is the single writer who engages the loyalties of the students I am perhaps ineffectually attempting to teach.” White thought Rand was “a horrendously bad writer,” and, condescendingly, he thought his student’s identification with her heroic characters “pathetic.” But White was also scared. Even though he couldn’t take Rand seriously as a thinker or a writer, he worried that when his students outgrew her, “some of Ayn Rand’s poison is apt to linger in their systems—linger and fester there to malform them as citizens and, possibly, deliver them over willing victims to the new American totalitarians.”
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Like many of Rand’s critics it was difficult for White to imagine Rand as simply another purveyor in the marketplace of ideas.

Professorial opposition to Rand was undoubtedly fed by her reputation as a right-wing extremist. On college campuses those interested in Rand typically gravitated toward conservative student groups, soon making Objectivists into a visible segment of the conservative youth population.
Atlas Shrugged
had been roundly denounced by Rand’s conservative and libertarian contemporaries, but a new generation greeted the book with enthusiasm. A 1963
National Review
survey of student conservatives noted that “a small but appreciable headway is being made by the Objectivists” and estimated that they composed less than 10 percent of the student right.
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The survey included Sarah Lawrence, Williams, Yale, Marquette, Boston University, Indiana, South Carolina, Howard, Reed, Davidson, Brandeis, and Stanford. The highest percentage of self-identified Objectivists were at Stanford and Boston University (7 percent and 5 percent, respectively). In California she had a significant following at both public and private schools.

From its founding days, Rand’s ideas haunted Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), one of the first conservative youth organizations. The brainchild of William F. Buckley, the group drew up its founding principles, “The Sharon Statement,” during a meeting at Buckley’s Connecticut estate in 1960. Like Rand, Buckley wanted to form a cadre of young
activists who would influence the country’s political future. Buckley’s new intellectuals, however, would swear allegiance to God and country, rather than reason and capitalism. Although Buckley intended the new organization to reflect the fusionist consensus of
National Review,
not all members of YAF were willing to go along. The organization’s first student head, Robert Schuchman, a Yale Law student, had written Rand a gushing fan letter a year earlier, telling her, “
Atlas Shrugged
was a fulfillment of a literary promise I only began to see in
The Fountainhead:
the promise of a logical view of existence, based on experience, a view which I had always held but had never been able to verbalize.”
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Now he and a few others fought to make Rand’s secular libertarianism a prominent part of YAF. In a dispute over the proposed organization’s name, they prevailed against the suggested “Young Conservatives” and ensured that the Sharon Statement had a libertarian cast. For Schuchman and other secular libertarians, Rand’s pro-capitalist philosophy was exciting and her atheism unremarkable.

Another prominent young conservative, Karl Hess, was attracted to Rand specifically by her atheism. Formerly a practicing Catholic, his faith began to waver after he started reading Rand. He remembered, “My previous armor of ritual and mystery were insufficient to the blows dealt it by an increasing interest in science and by the unshakeable arguments of Ayn Rand.” Similarly Tibor Machan, a young Hungarian refugee who would become a libertarian philosopher, found Rand while he was in the throes of a religious crisis. Machan struggled against the ethical imperatives of Christianity, which filled him with guilt, shame, and confusion. Reading
The Fountainhead
convinced him to abandon religion altogether in favor of Rand’s rational morality. A year later he told Rand, “The change in me has been so drastic that only one who himself has gone through it could fully understand.” He enclosed a letter he had written to his priest, drawing a thoughtful and encouraging response from Rand.

Although Objectivism appeared a way to escape religion, it was more often a substitute, offering a similar regimentation and moralism without the sense of conformity. Rand’s ideas allowed students to reject traditional religion without feeling lost in a nihilistic, meaningless universe. But from the inside Objectivists threw off the shackles of family and propriety by defining themselves anew as atheists. “Last spring I discarded my religion, and this past Fall I took the Principles
course in Washington. Two better choices can hardly be imagined,” one Georgetown student reported proudly to Rand.
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Like most conservatives, Rand was energized and excited by Barry Goldwater’s battle for the 1964 Republican nomination.
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She saw his leading opponent, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, as another Eisenhower, a dangerous moderate who would dilute the differences between the two parties. In a boxed note set off from the rest of the October 1963
Objectivist Newsletter,
Rand suggested that “all those who are interested in political action and specifically all those who advocate capitalism” should register as Republicans in order to vote for Goldwater in the primary. She was initially cautious in her praise of Goldwater, writing, “At present, he is the best candidate in the field.” Six months later she was more enthusiastic. In “How to Judge a Political Candidate” she appeared to be convincing herself that Goldwater’s religion was not significant. She told her readers it was not necessary to endorse a candidate’s total philosophy, only his political philosophy. On this basis Goldwater was still the best candidate, “because freedom is his major premise. . . . Some of his specific steps may be wrong; his direction is right.” Even better, he was “singularly devoid of power lust.” As far as his policies, Rand was most impressed by Goldwater’s aggressive foreign-policy stance, his invocation of national honor, his assertion of “America’s self interest and self-esteem.” Once Goldwater won the nomination she actively sought a role in his presidential campaign through their shared contacts, offering her help in any capacity.
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