Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (51 page)

As historians have begun to locate the origins of conservatism in reaction against the New Deal and thereby accord more weight to business libertarianism, Rand has emerged as a figure of greater consequence. In
Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
(2009), Kimberly Phillips-Fein asserts the centrality of libertarian businessmen to the conservative renaissance, an important new line of interpretation that is being followed by a host of emerging scholars. Phillips-Fein notes Rand’s popularity among businessmen and describes her early political activism. Although not academic in nature, Brian Doherty’s celebratory
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
(2007) also recognizes Rand as a foundational thinker of libertarianism, alongside F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard. Taken together, these books indicate a new interest in the history of libertarianism and a dawning understanding that political conservatism draws from both secular and religious roots. As historians continue to explore the importance of economic individualism, Rand will take her deserved place within the right-wing firmament.

NOTES

Introduction

1
. Jan Schulman, Ayn Rand Institute (hereafter ARI) Oral History, Ayn Rand Papers (hereafter ARP); Craig Singer to AR, December 9, 1969, ARP 161–37–05; Roy Childs,
Liberty against Power
, ed. Joan Kennedy Taylor (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1994), xiii.

2
. Ayn Rand,
For the New Intellectual
(New York: New American Library, 1961), 12, 14.

3
. Ayn Rand Institute, “Interest in Ayn Rand Soaring,”
ARI Impact
, 15, no. 4 (2009). A significant number of these purchases were made by the Ayn Rand Institute itself, but even excluding the approximately 300,000 copies the Institute distributed for free, the figures are impressive.

4
. Ayn Rand,
The Fountainhead
, 50th anniversary ed. (1943; New York: Signet, 1993), 24–25; “Mike Wallace Asks Ayn Rand,”
New York Post
, December 12, 1957.

Chapter 1

1
. Ayn Rand, Biographical Interview 11, February 15, 1961, by Barbara and Nathaniel Branden, tape recording, New York, December 1960–May 1961, Ayn Rand Papers, a Special Collection of the Ayn Rand Archives, Irvine, California. Henceforth cited as Biographical Interview with corresponding number and date.

2
. Yuri Slezkine,
The Jewish Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 116–17. St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1925.

3
. Lissette Hassani, Ayn Rand Oral History Project, Ayn Rand Papers. Subsequently cited as Oral History, ARP.

4
. Biographical Interview 11.

5
. Rand attended the Stoiunin Gymnasium, a progressive and academically rigorous school for girls. Chris Matthew Sciabarra,
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995),
69
. Although few Jewish girls were formally educated, they were more likely than boys to attend Russian primary schools. The proportion of Jewish students in St. Petersburg schools was strictly limited to 3 percent. See Benjamin Nathans,
Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 222; Zvi Gitelman,
A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 10. According to Anne Heller, the Stoiunin Gymnasium was able to circumvent these restrictions, meaning about a third of Alisa’s classmates were Jewish. Anne C. Heller,
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
(New York: Doubleday, 2009), 18.

6
. Biographical Interview 11.

7
. Ibid.

8
. Interview with Nora Drobysheva, Oral History, ARP.

9
. Biographical Interview 11.

10
. Ibid.

11
. Ibid. Alisa’s coolly rational rejection of religion also marked other intellectuals of Jewish origin who later became prominent conservatives or right-wing activists. See George H. Nash, “Forgotten Godfathers: Premature Jewish Conservatives and the rise of
National Review
,”
American Jewish History
87, nos. 2–3 (1999): 123–57. Nash notes that his subjects prided themselves on their individuality and independence, which may account for their distance from Judaism.

12
. Ayn Rand,
We the Living
(1936; New York: Signet, 1959), 44, 26.

13
. Sciabarra,
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
,
chapter 3
.

14
. AR to Isabel Paterson, May 8, 1948, in
Letters of Ayn Rand
, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Penguin, 1995), 214. Henceforth cited as
Letters
.

15
. In
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
, Chris Sciabarra argues that Rand should be considered a thinker in the Russian dialectical tradition, an argument that falls outside the purview of this work. Sciabarra argues that Rand was influenced by the work of N. O. Lossky, a prominent dialectical philosopher affiliated with Petrograd (Leningrad) State University, whom she claimed to have studied under. However, evidence connecting her to Lossky remains fragmentary, inconclusive, and contradictory. Sciabarra’s research has provided valuable and hitherto unknown details of Rand’s education. His findings are described in
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
; Sciabarra, “The Rand Transcript,”
Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
1, no. 1 (1999): 1–26; Sciabarra, “The Rand Transcript, Revisited,”
Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
7, no. 1 (2005): 1–17. Sciabarra’s findings suggest inaccuracies in Rand’s recollection of her time at the university, which accordingly must be treated with care. My discussion of Rand’s education draws on Sciabarra and Rand, Biographical Interview 6, January 2, 1961.

16
. Barbara Branden,
The Passion of Ayn Rand
(New York: Random House, 1986), 45.

17
. Rand’s movie diary and the two pamphlets have been published in Rand,
Russian Writings on Hollywood
, ed. Michael S. Berliner (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999).

18
. Ibid., 76.

19
. Rand, We
the Living
, 52.

20
. Preparations for Alisa’s departure are described in Jeff Britting,
Ayn Rand
(New York: Overlook Press, 2004), 29–33, and multiple letters in the Russian Family Correspondence, ARP.

21
. Britting,
Ayn Rand
, 30, 32; Russian Family Correspondence, ARP.

22
. Rand’s change of name was fairly typical of Jewish writers and actors making their living in Hollywood. See Neal Gabler,
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
(New York: Crown, 1988), 301, 372. Contrary to legend, Rand did not name herself after her Remington-Rand typewriter, nor is her name an abbreviation of the diminutive “Ayneleh,” as William F. Buckley Jr. claimed. Nicknames were common in the Rosenbaum household, and letters from Russia confirm that Alisa had experimented with a range of possible pennames, including “Lil Rand,” before settling on “Ayn Rand.” See Nora Rosenbaum to AR, March 23, 1926 and April 11, 1926, letters 21a and 24d, Russian Family Correspondence, Ayn Rand Archives. Rand gave differing accounts of her name throughout the 1930s. She told a reporter, “My first name is Ayna, but I liquidated the ‘A,’ and Rand is an abbreviation of my Russian surname.” In a letter to a fan she wrote, “I must say that ‘Ayn’ is both a real name and an invention,” and she indicated that her first name was inspired by a Finnish writer (whom she declined to identify) and her last an abbreviation of Rosenbaum. Michael Mok, “Waitress to Playwright—Now Best Seller Author,”
New York Post
, May 5, 1936; AR to W. Craig, January 30, 1937, ARP 041–11X.

23
. Biographical Interview 7, January 15, 1961; Harvey Goldberg, Oral History Interview, ARP. Decades later, members of Rand’s extended family still smarted at what they considered her failure to properly acknowledge or appreciate their help. More seriously, they charged that had she fully explained the Rosenbaum’s dire circumstances in Russia, the family would have brought them all to America, thus saving their lives. Heller, 61.

24
. Rand,
Russian Writings on Hollywood
, 77.

25
. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Love of the Last Tycoon
(1941; New York: Scribner, 1993), 11; Nathanael West,
Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust
(New York: New Directions, 1962), 132.

26
. B. Branden,
The Passion of Ayn Rand
, 73.

27
. Marcella Rabin, Oral History outtakes, ARP; Ayn Rand,
Journals of Ayn Rand
, ed. David Harriman (New York: Penguin, 1999), 48, henceforth cited as
Journals
.

28
.
Journals
, 48.

29
. Anna Borisnova to AR, January 22, 1926, and September 22, 1926, letters 9a and 89a, Russian Family Correspondence, ARP.

30
. These stories, which Rand never attempted to publish, were released by her estate in
The Early Ayn Rand
, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: Penguin, 1986).

31
. Lynn Simross, “Studio Club Closes Door on Past,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 9, 1975, L1.

32
.
Journals
, 38. Rand’s willingness to celebrate a criminal anticipates the work of later writers such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Cormac McCarthy, who all to some degree portray the murderer as a person of unusual strength, sensitivity, or both. A more immediate parallel for Rand would have been a book she knew well, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, a serious novel of ideas built around the psychology of a murderer.

33
. Ibid., 27, 37, 36.

34
. Ibid., 32.

35
. Popular American understandings of the Superman are outlined in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, “Neither Rock nor Refuge: American Encounters with Nietzsche and the Search for Foundations,” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2003, 231.

36
. Rand,
Journals
, 23.

37
. Ibid., 29, 42.

38
. Ibid., 48.

39
. Anna Borisnova to AR, October 2, 1930, letter 228a, Russian Family Correspondence, ARP.

40
. Nora Rosenbaum to AR, September 15, 1931, letter 245a, Russian Family Correspondence, ARP; Rosalie Wilson, Oral History, ARP.

41
. The sale of
Red Pawn
, without mention of Morris, is covered in Robert Mayhew,
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
We the Living (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 259. Morris described his role to the columnist Lee Shippey, “The Lee Side o’ L.A.,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 11, 1936, A4.

42
. “Russian Girl Finds End of Rainbow in Hollywood,”
Chicago Daily News
, September 26, 1932.

43
. Edwin Schallert, “Night of January 16th: Unique Courtroom Drama,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 2, 1926, 17. Rand’s first title for the play was
Penthouse Legend
.

44
.
Journals
, 68.

45
. Ibid., 68, 69.

46
. Ibid., 73, 72.

47
. Ibid., 69, 70.

48
. Docky Wolfe, Oral History, ARP.

49
. Rand,
We the Living
, 216.

50
. Ibid., 387.

51
. Ibid., 446, 425.

52
. Rand,
Journals
, 58.

53
. Rand,
We the Living
, 80.

54
. The connections between Rand’s characters and people she knew in Russia are detailed in Scott McConnell, “Parallel Lives: Models and Inspirations for Characters in
We the Living
, ” in Mayhew,
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
We the Living, 47–66.

55
. AR to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934, and June 19, 1934, both in ARP 077–12A. Portions of these letters are reproduced in Mayhew,
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
We the Living, 139, 135. Mencken’s views are described in Terry Teachout,
The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken
(New York: Harper Collins, 2002).

56
. Biographical Interview 14, March 3, 1961.

57
. Jean Wick to AR, June 29, 1934, ARP 077–12A.

58
. David C. Engerman,
Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

59
. Ted Morgan,
Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-century America
(New York: Random House, 2003), 166–67.

60
. Whittaker Chambers,
Witness
(New York: Random House, 1952), 269. For leftist New York in the 1930s, see Michael Denning,
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Verso, 1997).

61
. Quoted in Morgan,
Reds
, 171.

62
. Dina Garmong,
“We the Living
and the Rosenbaum Family Letters,” in Mayhew,
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
We the Living, 72.

63
. B. Branden,
The Passion of Ayn Rand
, 122–23.

64
. “Russian Triangle,”
Cincinnati Times-Star
, July 5, 1936; Ben Belitt, “The Red and the White,”
The Nation
, April 22, 1936; “Days of the Red Terror,”
Toronto Globe
, May 9, 1936. Discussion of the novel’s reviews can be found in Michael S. Berliner, “Reviews of
We the Living
, ” in Mayhew,
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
We the Living.