Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (48 page)

Unlike Rand’s earlier victims, Kelley was largely unperturbed by his ejection from the Objectivist inner circle. After being denied tenure at Vassar he reconstituted himself as the leader of an independent Objectivist movement, founding the Institute for Objectivist Studies in 1990. His break with ARI energized emerging groups such as the magazine
Full Context
, whose subscribers appreciated Rand but quailed at the demand that they accept her philosophy uncritically. Kelley’s activities also helped reunite Objectivists with libertarians, many of whom remained attentive to Rand despite their dissatisfaction with the developments of her last years.

Thenceforth ARI and the Institute for Objectivist Studies (later renamed the Objectivist Center and then the Atlas Society) developed along parallel tracks. Both transformed themselves into advocacy think tanks, seeking funding from wealthy capitalists who admired Rand’s works. They launched newsletters, websites, and online discussion forums and held annual summer seminars on Objectivism, drawing strength from a newly vibrant Randian subculture that rekindled itself on the Internet. Although dogged by the same poor reputation that had shadowed Rand and NBI, the Ayn Rand Institute benefitted greatly from
its legal connection to Rand’s estate. It used Rand’s personal papers as a source of revenue, releasing several new fiction and nonfiction books under her name. As it became more established, ARI relocated to Irvine, California, a region historically receptive to free market ideas. The institute’s most successful initiative, an annual essay contest on Rand’s novels for students, awards prizes of up to ten thousand dollars and has done much to stimulate reading of her works. In the 1990s it established an archive to house Rand’s papers and began supporting the work of scholars interested in Rand, thereby raising her profile within the academy.

As internecine warfare erupted between her followers, Rand’s standing in the outside world plummeted. Ignored by most literary critics and professional philosophers, Rand passed into the lexicon of American popular culture, a signifier of ruthless selfishness, intellectual precocity, or both. “Some people matter, and some people don’t,” one character tells another, brandishing a copy of
The Fountainhead
, in the hit 1987 flim
Dirty Dancing
. On TV’s
The Simpsons
Marge Simpson deposits her infant Maggie in the Ayn Rand School for Tots, where her pacifier is confiscated and she learns “A Means A.” In a second Rand-themed episode, “Maggie Roark” ends up under Ellswoorth Toohey’s fist in the Mediocri-Tots day care center. These cultural references persisted decades beyond her death and became ever more substantive. In 1999 Rand found her way onto a thirty-three-cent postage stamp. In 2008 the designer of Bioshock, a popular video game, modeled his future dystopia on Objectivism, complete with the art deco styling that Rand loved and propaganda banners attacking altruism. The game’s ideological backdrop was intended as “a cautionary tale about wholesale, unquestioning belief in something,” explained its creator, who nonetheless professed a sympathy for Rand’s individualism.
⁶

Rand also remained part of the underground curriculum of American adolescence, beloved particularly by the accomplished yet alienated overachiever. Arriving at a summer school for gifted high school students in the early 1990s one participant remembered, “We were all either Rand or post-Rand.”
⁷
Tobias Wolff spoofed this affinity in his 2004 novel
Old School
, in which his adolescent narrator becomes briefly obsessed with Rand: “I was discovering the force of my will. To read
The Fountainhead
was to feel this caged power, straining like a damned-up
river to break loose and crush every impediment to its free running. I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires—nothing between me and greatness itself—but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to councils of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long, slow death of respectability. That was where the contempt came in.”
⁸
Wolff was not the only writer to find Rand an irresistible target for parody. The cape, the ivory cigarette holder, the dollar-sign pin—she is a satirist’s dream come true. In Mary Gaitskill’s
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
, she is the stern Anna Granite, founder of “Definitism,” while Murray Rothbard mocked her as Carson Sand in
Mozart Was a Red
.
⁹

That Rand had spawned a veritable genre of parodists spoke to her continued appeal. Twenty years after her death she was selling more books than ever in her life, with
Atlas Shrugged
alone averaging sales of more than one hundred thousand copies per year. These figures kept her from fading out of public memory, as did her connection to Alan Greenspan, her most famous protégé. As Greenspan’s star rose, so did Rand’s. Profiles and biographies of Greenspan inevitably lingered over his time spent by her side, and enterprising reporters even exhumed Greenspan’s
Objectivist Newsletter
articles for clues about his intellectual development.

The financial crisis of 2008 ushered in a new Rand, one stripped of historical context and at times mythic in stature. She suddenly became a favored citation of the left, who saw in her ideas about free markets and selfishness the roots of economic devastation. Greenspan’s startling admission that he “found a flaw” in his ideology offered the ultimate proof for this line of reasoning. To these criticisms Rand’s followers had a ready answer, the same one she herself would have proffered. True capitalism has never been known, the Objectivists cried, and it is the statist economy that collapsed, not the free one. Rather than cause libertarians and Objectivists to recant their beliefs overnight, for many the financial meltdown simply confirmed the predictive powers of Rand’s work. Yaron Brook, ARI’s director, summarized the reaction: “We’re heading towards socialism, we’re heading toward more regulation.
Atlas Shrugged
is coming true.” This understanding was not confined to Objectivist circles. Sales of
Atlas Shrugged
spiked in 2008 after the U.S. Treasury bought stakes in nine large banks and again in 2009 when the
Democratic administration announced its stimulus plan. A new vogue emerged for “going Galt,” or restricting production so as to avoid higher taxes. Her novels touted anew by Rush Limbaugh, Rand was once more a foundation of the right-wing worldview.
¹⁰

Even as she was reclaimed by her most avid fans, Rand’s work transcended contemporary politics. One of the many ironies of Rand’s career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans is Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seem to both embody and defy Rand’s beliefs. The website’s emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand’s sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand’s adage “All creation is individual.”

Similar contradictions undergird the response to Rand of Craig Newmark, the founder of the online advertising site Craigslist. Like Wales, Newmark was once an active member of the libertarian subculture, reading “a few things by Ayn Rand, even making a pilgrimage to her offices,” and later becoming a member of the Society for Individual Liberty. Like so many others, Newmark drifted away from Rand after a period of intense engagement but still identified himself as someone who prefers market solutions, a “hybrid libertarian.”
¹¹
Something of Rand remained in his insistence that people are rational and markets work. Even as Craigslist feeds on a Randian iconoclasm against established ways of doing business and her faith in human rationality, it also undercuts Rand’s individualism through its emphasis on collaboration and mutuality. In both cases Newmark and Wales built on Rand’s ideas but married them to a very different theory of human nature, one in which community and connection are paramount.

It is precisely these contradictions and complexities that make Rand a source of perennial fascination. Rand insisted that she had held the essentials of her philosophy since she was a child, and she presented her ideas as fixed and unchanging by their very nature. But her work
proved remarkably malleable, as underscored by the radically divergent reactions to her novels. One fan wrote to her in 1957, “It appears that there must be two books entitled
Atlas Shrugged
. I know that I never read the book which some claim to review. Very happy that I was able to get the one you had written.”
¹²
The many ways Rand has been reinvented, remade, and reimagined are both an index of her popularity and a reason for it. Though later in her life Rand insisted that her ideas were not subject to interpretation, this imperative clashed with her earliest beliefs. As she wrote in 1935, “The worst of all crimes is the acceptance of the opinions of others.”
¹³
Many of her readers learned this firsthand from Rand herself. In falling sway to her system and then casting it aside, they learned how to think for themselves.

What remains of Rand, once the context and politics are stripped away, is a basic ethical truth that continues to attract admirers of every ideological persuasion. Be true to yourself, Rand’s books teach, sounding a resonant note with the power to reshape lives. One of her readers made the point in a brief fan letter. Lee Clettenberg was forty three and living in Detroit when he wrote to Rand. He had only a seventh-grade education, a twist of fate that left him consumed with anger, confusion, and self-hatred. He struggled to improve his life, discovering, “Every time I tried to claim a piece of me, I felt like a thief, a robber of the dead.” But then came Rand. He stumbled across
The Virtue of Selfishness
, and there he found “the” question: “ ‘Why does man need a code of values?’ BANG! Everything I have read and learned fell into place, just like that. BANG! AND. . . . just like that . . . YOU . . . gave ME . . . back to . . . MYSELF!”
¹⁴
Though his letter was unusually evocative in its folksy directness, the intensity of his reaction to Rand was typical. It is this enthusiastic response that has made Rand’s prodigious novels, dismissed uniformly by literary critics, into modern classics.

In a 1968 introduction to
The Fountainhead
, Rand was forthright about the religious energies that pulsed through her work. She described the book’s Nietzschean roots and registered both her disagreement with the German philosopher and her desire to convey his exalted sense of life in her novel. Rand argued, “Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life.” According to Rand, the primary emotions that religion had usurped were exaltation, worship, reverence,
and a sense of the sacred. She maintained that these emotions were not supernatural in origin, but were “the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal.” It was these emotions she wanted to stir with
The Fountainhead
, “without the self-abasement required by religious definitions.”
¹⁵
Rand intended her books to be a sort of scripture, and for all her emphasis on reason it is the emotional and psychological sides of her novels that make them timeless. Reports of Ayn Rand’s death are greatly exaggerated. For many years to come she is likely to remain what she has always been, a fertile touchstone of the American imagination.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would never have been possible without the assistance of Jeff Britting, archivist at the Ayn Rand Institute. From my first exploratory trip down to Irvine eight years ago, Jeff was unfailingly professional, endlessly informative, and always willing to go the extra mile. Through his efforts the archive has become a hospitable place indeed for scholars interested in Ayn Rand. Numerous other librarians and archivists gave me valuable assistance. Deserving of particular mention are archivists at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, the Stanford University Library Special Collections, Yale University, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

I am grateful to all the individuals and organizations that granted me use of copyrighted material in this work. Permission to include excerpts from the writings of Rose Wilder Lane has been granted by the copyright owner, Little House Heritage Trust. The Rothbard Papers are cited courtesy of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama. Material from Leonard Read is used with permission of the Foundation for Economic Education (
www.fee.org
). The Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, granted me permission to use material from the Stewart Brand Collection (M1237). Barry Goldwater is quoted with the permission of the Arizona Historical Foundation. Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, Ph. D, kindly granted use of photographs and documents. Permission to quote from Ayn Rand’s unpublished material was granted by the Estate of Ayn Rand, and other material is used courtesy of the Ayn Rand Archives. The Ayn Rand Archives at the Ayn Rand Institute is a reference source. Use of its materials by this author does not constitute endorsement or recommendation of this work by the Ayn Rand Institute.