Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (7 page)

There were a few exceptions, mostly among journalists suspicious of the new vogue for all things Soviet. Elsie Robinson, a spirited Hearst columnist, praised Rand effusively: “If I could, I would put this book into the hands of every young person in America. . . . While such conditions threaten any country, as they most certainly threaten America, no
one has a right to be carefree.”
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John Temple Graves, a popular southern writer, was also taken with the book and began touting Rand in his genteel Birmingham dispatch “This Morning.” Another subset of readers was deeply touched by the novel’s emotional power. Rand was unsurpassed at singing the proud, forlorn song of the individual soul. One reader told Rand, “I write in difficulties. The book made such an impression on me that I am still confused. I think it’s the truth of all you say that is blinding me. It has such depth of feeling.”
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It was the first of the adoring fan letters Rand would receive throughout her career.

In some important ways
We the Living
was an unquestioned success. The novel was widely reviewed, and almost all reviewers marveled at her command of English and made note of her unusual biography. Rand’s picture appeared in the newspapers, along with several short profiles. When she spoke at the Town Hall Club about the evils of collectivism the column “New York Day by Day” pronounced her an “intellectual sensation.” Yet sales of the book were disappointing. Macmillan printed only three thousand copies and destroyed the type afterward. When their stock sold out the book effectively died. Rand’s chance at literary success had been nipped in the bud.
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Disillusioned by the slow demise of
We the Living
, Rand began to ruminate on the state of the nation. She came to political consciousness during one of the most powerful and rare phenomena in American democracy: a party realignment. The old Republican coalition of midwestern moralists and eastern urbanites lay crushed under the weight of the Great Depression. Bank failures, crop failures, and soaring unemployment had scorched across the familiar political landscape, destroying old assumptions, methods, and alliances. Out of the ashes President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was assembling a new coalition among reformers, urban workers, and African Americans that would last for most of the century.

At the base of this coalition was the “New Deal” Roosevelt had offered to American voters in the campaign of 1932. The current depression was no ordinary event, he told his audiences. Rather, the crisis signaled that the era of economic individualism was over. In the past liberalism had meant republican government and laissez-faire economics. Now, Roosevelt redefined liberalism as “plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life.” His federal
government would assume an active role in moderating and managing the nation’s economy. Of course he wasn’t sure exactly just how. “Bold, persistent experimentation” was all that Roosevelt could promise.
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Rand voted for Roosevelt in 1932, drawn primarily by his promise to end Prohibition, but as she struggled to sell
We the Living
her opinion changed. “My feeling for the New Deal is growing colder and colder. In fact, it’s growing so cold that it’s coming to the boiling point of hatred,” she wrote Gouverneur Morris’s wife, Ruth, in July 1936. Her distaste for Roosevelt was cemented by her sense that he was somehow “pink.” She told Ruth, “You have no idea how radical and pro-Soviet New York is— particularly, as everyone admits, in the last three years. Perhaps Mr. Roosevelt had nothing to do with it, but it’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it?”
⁶⁹
In a letter to John Temple Graves she moved closer to a conservative position. She agreed with Graves that “big business is crushing individualism and that some form of protection against it is necessary.” But she added, “The term ‘umpired individualism’ frightens me a little.”
⁷⁰
Rand wondered just who the umpire would be.

The 1936 election did little to reassure. Threatened by populist demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin, Roosevelt tacked hard to the left. During the campaign he pounded away at “economic royalists,” framing himself as the only responsible champion of the common man. Roosevelt’s presidency set the terms of modern politics, establishing such institutions as Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission. He was creating the basic outlines of the administrative state, securing both the livelihood of impoverished Americans and his own political fortunes.
⁷¹

Rand watched all this with growing suspicion. The idea that government had a “duty” to manage economic life reminded her of those soldiers who had taken over her father’s business. She was further unnerved by the radicals that seemed to swarm around Roosevelt and had wormed their way into the highest citadels of American intellectual and political life. Rand could see little difference between armed Communist revolution and Roosevelt’s rapid expansion of the federal government. She railed against both. It was an opposition that quickened her pulse and fired her pen. A lifelong obsession with American politics had begun.

CHAPTER TWO
Individualists of the World, Unite!

ONCE SHE SPOTTED
the first pink, Rand began to see them everywhere. They had even infiltrated the movie studios, she soon discovered. Despite her success as a novelist and playwright, Rand could find no work in the lucrative film industry, a failure she blamed on her out-spoken opposition to Soviet Russia. She turned instead to the novel that would become
The Fountainhead
. Politics soon emerged as a welcome distraction. As Roosevelt launched his historic program of government reforms Rand watched closely. She read the New York newspapers regularly and began dipping into the work of authors critical of the president. By 1940 her interest in politics had become all-consuming. Fired to action by the presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie she stopped work on her novel and began volunteering full time for the New York City Willkie Club.

The Willkie campaign helped Rand crystallize the political nature of her work and resolve unarticulated tensions about American democracy and capitalism that surfaced during her early work on
The Fountainhead
. At first Rand was hesitant to ascribe political meaning to the novel. She wanted her new book to be philosophical and abstract, not rooted in historic circumstance, as was
We the Living
. Nor was she certain of what her political ideas were, beyond principled anti-Communism. Rand was suspicious of both democracy and capitalism, unsure if either system could be trusted to safeguard individual rights against the dangers of the mob.

A few months’ immersion in the hurly-burly of American politics washed away this cynicism. The campaign was an unexpected window into her adopted country, spurring new understandings of American history and culture. Afterward Rand began to praise America in terms that would have been utterly alien to her only months before. Like any
small-town booster she touted the glories of American capitalism and individualism, voicing a newfound nationalism that celebrated the United States as a moral exemplar for the world. Her volunteerism completed a transformation that shaped her passage through the second half of the 1930s. Rand entered that politically charged decade an ingénue, focused relentlessly on her own personal ambitions. Ten years later she had located herself firmly on the broad spectrum of domestic public opinion.

The essence of Rand’s new novel had come to her shortly after her marriage to Frank. While working at RKO she became friendly with a neighboring woman who was also a Jewish Russian immigrant. Rand was fascinated by her neighbor’s daughter, the executive secretary to an important Hollywood producer. Like Rand the daughter was fiercely ambitious and dedicated to her career. At her mother’s urging she introduced Rand to an agent who eventually succeeded in selling
Red Pawn
, giving Rand her first important success. Even so, Rand disliked the secretary, feeling that somehow, despite their surface similarities, the two were quite different. One day she probed this difference, asking the other woman what her “goal in life” was. Rand’s abstract query, so typical of her approach to other people, brought a swift and ready response. “Here’s what I want out of life,” her neighbor lectured Rand. “If nobody had an automobile, I would not want one. If automobiles exist and some people don’t have them, I want an automobile. If some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles.”
¹

Rand was aghast. This piece of petty Hollywood braggadocio opened an entire social universe to her. Here, she thought furiously, was someone who appeared selfish but was actually selfless. Under her neighbor’s feverish scheming and desperate career maneuverings was simply a hollow desire to appear important in other people’s eyes. It was a motivation Rand, the eternal outsider, could never understand. But once identified the concept seemed the key to understanding nearly everything around her.

Swiftly Rand expanded her neighbor’s response into a whole theory of human psychology. The neighbor’s daughter was a “second-hander,” someone who followed the ideas and values of others. Her opposite
would be an individualist like Rand, someone who wanted to create certain ideas, books, or movies rather than attain a generic level of success. Within days Rand had identified the differences between her and the neighbor as “the basic distinction between two types of people in the world.” She visualized the dim outlines of two clashing characters, the second-hander and the individualist, who would drive the plot and theme of her next novel.
²

Rand put these ideas on hold for the next few years, her energies absorbed with the move to New York. Once she got started again she was methodical in her approach. For once, money was no object. Much as she hated Woods, the producer’s populist touch gave Rand what she wanted the most: enough money to let her write full time. Some weeks royalties from
Night of January 16th
could reach $1,200 (in today’s dollars, about $16,000), income that freed both Ayn and Frank from paid work.
³
By then she had determined that the background of her book would be architecture, the perfect melding of art, science, and business. With the help of librarians at the New York Public Library she developed an extensive reading list on architecture, filling several notebooks with details that would color her novel. As with her earlier work, she also wrote extensive notes on the theme, the goal, and the intention of the project she called “Second-Hand Lives.”

In its earliest incarnations the novel was Rand’s answer to Nietzsche. The famous herald of God’s death, Nietzsche himself was uninterested in creating a new morality to replace the desiccated husk of Christianity. His genealogy of morals, a devastating inquiry into the origins, usages, and value of traditional morality, was intended to clear a path for the “philosophers of the future.”
⁴
Rand saw herself as one of those philosophers. In her first philosophical journal she had wondered if an individualistic morality was possible. A year later, starting work on her second novel, she knew it was.

“The first purpose of the book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith,” she wrote in her first notes, which were prefaced by an aphorism from Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
. Her novel was intended to dramatize, in didactic form, the advantages of egoism as morality. Howard Roark, the novel’s hero, was “what men should be.” At first he would appear “monstrously selfish.” By the end of the book her readers would understand that a traditional vice—selfishness—was actually a virtue.
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To effect this transvaluation of values Rand had to carefully redefine selfishness itself. Egoism or selfishness typically described one who “puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself,” she wrote. “Fine!” But this understanding was missing something critical. The important element, ethically speaking, was “not what one does or how one does it, but why one does it.”
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Selfishness was a matter of motivation, not outcome. Therefore anyone who sought power for power’s sake was not truly selfish. Like Rand’s neighbor, the stereotypical egoist was seeking a goal defined by others, living as “they want him to live and conquer to the extent of a home, a yacht and a full stomach.” By contrast, a true egoist, in Rand’s sense of the term, would put “his own ‘I,’ his standard of values, above all things, and [conquer] to live as he pleases, as he chooses and as he believes.” Nor would a truly selfish person seek to dominate others, for that would mean living for others, adjusting his values and standards to maintain his superiority. Instead, “an egoist is a man who lives for himself.”
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What sounded simple was in fact a subtle, complicated, and potentially confusing system. Rand’s novel reversed traditional definitions of selfishness and egoism, in itself an ambitious and difficult goal. It also redefined the meaning and purpose of morality by excluding all social concerns. “A man has a code of ethics primarily for his own sake, not for anyone else’s,” Rand asserted.
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Her ideas also reversed traditional understandings of human behavior by exalting a psychological mind-set utterly divorced from anything outside the self.

As Rand described Howard Roark, she reverted to her earlier celebration of the pathological Hickman from “The Little Street,” again mixing in strong scorn for emotions. “He was born without the ability to consider others,” she wrote of Roark. “His emotions are entirely controlled by his logic . . . he does not suffer, because he does not believe in suffering.” She also relied liberally on Nietzsche to characterize Roark. As she jotted down notes on Roark’s personality she told herself, “See Nietzsche about laughter.”
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The book’s famous first line indicates the centrality of this connection: “Howard Roark laughed.”