The Journals of Ayn Rand (71 page)

He ought to know.

[The Best Years of Our Lives
won seven Academy Awards in 1946
.]

This is a curious and revealing phenomenon—a
philosophical
picture. It presents, not superficial politics, but the fundamental essence of the philosophy of collectivism. If anyone thinks that collectivists are merely out to destroy some sort of “bloated bankers” or “economic exploiters”—let him see this picture and learn what they are really after.

In order to present a vicious theory, the picture distorted historical events and characters—but this is not astonishing, since a vicious theory cannot be true to facts. The story presents Chopin’s struggle between good and evil, as personified by a young Polish girl on the one side and by George Sand on the other. George Sand, according to the picture, is evil because she provides a beautiful, private retreat where Chopin can live in peace and luxury, because she takes care of his every need, attends to his health, and urges him to forget the world and devote himself exclusively to the work of writing music, which he is desperately eager to do. The young Polish girl, according to the picture, is good because she urges Chopin to drop the work that he loves and go out on a concert tour in order to make money. (Yes,
money
—strange as this may sound in a story representing an ideology that damns the capitalist system for inducing artists to be commercial.) The girl, in this case, is collecting money “for the people,” for a cause that is identified as national or revolutionary or both, and this is supposed to justify anything and everything; so she demands that Chopin renounce his genius, sacrifice his composing and go out to entertain paying audiences—even though he hates concert playing, is ill with tuberculosis and has been warned by the doctors that the strain of a tour would kill him.

When Chopin locks himself in his room to avoid his nagging friends and to work, the picture treats it as an act of selfishness. When George Sand tells his friends to leave him alone, the picture treats her as a vicious, anti social creature. The Polish girl and a sniveling old music teacher are held up as samples of self-righteous virtue, the virtue being granted to them by the fact that they demand the sacrifice of another man’s life and do not balk at sacrificing the life of a genius to a fund-raising campaign.

After much inner suffering, Chopin escapes from Sand’s “selfishness,” goes on tour, breaks under the strain—and dies. This monstrous self-immolation is presented as an apotheosis of virtue. There is even a final scene where George Sand asks one of the collectivists what they gained by destroying a great life. The answer is that they gained the inspiration given to thousands of humble people. To translate this into specific and modern terms, one would have to suppose that they meant they gained propaganda value—and the audience is supposed to feel: What’s the life of a genius, or of any man for that matter, as compared to “inspiring” the masses?

There
you can see collectivism in the raw. There you have it stripped of all the humanitarian trimmings and dialectic contradictions. This is the concrete illustration of the collectivist doctrine which holds that man exists to serve others, that he has no right to any personal aim, motive, desire or life, and that his only proper purpose is to sacrifice himself to the needs of the collective; therefore, a creative artist is a selfish monster, not because he hurts or exploits anybody, but because he wants to be left alone to do his own work; and the creative artist’s proper place is in a gang of fund-moochers or ditch-diggers, if the collective so demands.

Now, this much is true: creative work
is
a personal, individual, totally independent endeavor; his art means more to the creative artist than any social problem, more than anything or anybody. But who—outside the ideologies of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany—will dare to hold the creative artist as evil?

[The following is AR’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 20, 1947, as reported in the Government Printing Office record (“Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry”). The Committee’s chairman was J. Parnell Thomas; Robert Stripling was Chief Investigator.
]

 

The Chairman:
Raise your right hand, please, Miss Rand. Do you solemnly swear the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Miss Rand:
I do.

The Chairman:
Sit down. [...]

Mr. Stripling:
Where were you born, Miss Rand?

Miss Rand:
In St. Petersburg, Russia.

Mr. Stripling:
When did you leave Russia?

Miss Rand:
In 1926.

Mr. Stripling:
How long have you been employed in Hollywood?

Miss Rand:
I have been in pictures on and off since late in 1926, but specifically as a writer this time I have been in Hollywood since late 1943 and am now under contract as a writer.

Mr. Stripling:
Have you written various novels?

Miss Rand:
I have written two novels. My first one was called
We the Living,
which was a story about Soviet Russia and was published in 1936. The second one was
The Fountainhead,
published in 1943.

Mr. Stripling:
Was that a best-seller—
The Fountainhead?

Miss Rand:
Yes; thanks to the American public.

Mr. Stripling:
Do you know how many copies were sold?

Miss Rand:
The last I heard was 360,000 copies. I think there have been some more since.

Mr. Stripling:
You have been employed as a writer in Hollywood?

Miss Rand:
Yes; I am under contract at present.

Mr. Stripling:
Could you name some of the stories or scripts you have written for Hollywood?

Miss Rand:
I have done the script for
The Fountainhead,
which has not been produced yet, for Warner Brothers, and two adaptations for Hal Wallis Productions, at Paramount, which were not my stories but on which I did the screen plays, which were
Love Letters
and
You Came Along.

Mr. Stripling:
Now, Miss Rand, you have heard the testimony of Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer?

Miss Rand:
Yes.

Mr. Stripling:
You have read the letter I read from Lowell Mellett?

Miss Rand:
Yes.

Mr. Stripling:
Which says that the picture
Song of Russia
has no political implications?

Miss Rand:
Yes.

Mr. Stripling:
Did you at the request of Mr. Smith, the investigator for this committee, view the picture
Song of Russia?

Miss Rand:
Yes.

Mr. Stripling:
Within the past two weeks?

Miss Rand:
Yes; on October 13, to be exact.

Mr. Stripling:
In Hollywood?

Miss Rand:
Yes.

Mr. Stripling:
Would you give the committee a breakdown of your summary of the picture relating to either propaganda or an untruthful account or distorted account of conditions in Russia?

Miss Rand:
Yes.

First of all I would like to define what we mean by propaganda. We have all been talking about it, but nobody has stated just what they mean. Now, I use the term to mean that Communist propaganda is anything which gives a good impression of communism as a way of life. Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be Communist propaganda. Am I not correct? I mean, would that be a fair statement to make—that that would be Communist propaganda?

Now, here is what the picture
Song of Russia
contains. It starts with an American conductor, played by Robert Taylor, giving a concert in America for Russian war relief. He starts playing the American national anthem and the national anthem dissolves into a Russian mob, with the sickle and hammer on a red flag very prominent above their heads. I am sorry, but that made me sick. That is something which I do not see how native Americans permit, and I am only a naturalized American. That was a terrible touch of propaganda. As a writer, I can tell you just exactly what it suggests to the people. It suggests literally and technically that it is quite all right for the American national anthem to dissolve into the Soviet. The term here is more than just technical. It really was symbolically intended, and it worked out that way. The anthem continues, played by a Soviet band. That is the beginning of the picture.

Now we go to the pleasant love story. Mr. Taylor is an American who came there apparently voluntarily to conduct concerts for the Soviets. He meets a little Russian girl from a village who comes to him and begs him to go to her village to direct concerts there. There are no G.P.U. agents and nobody stops her. She just comes to Moscow and meets him. He decides he will go [with her], because he is falling in love. He asks her to show him Moscow. She says she has never seen it. He says, “I will show it to you.”

They see it together. The picture then goes into a scene of Moscow, supposedly. I don’t know where the studio got its shots, but I have never seen anything like it in Russia. First you see Moscow buildings—big, prosperous-looking, clean buildings, with something like swans or sailboats in the foreground. Then you see a Moscow restaurant that just never existed there. When I was in Russia, there was only one such restaurant, which was nowhere as luxurious as that and no one could enter it except commissars and profiteers. Certainly a girl from a village, who in the first place would never have been allowed to come to Moscow without permission, could not afford to enter it, even if she worked for ten years. However, there is a Russian restaurant with a menu such as never existed in Russia even before the revolution. From this restaurant they go on to this tour of Moscow. The streets are clean and prosperous-looking. There are no food lines anywhere. You see shots of the marble subway—the famous Russian subway out of which they make such propaganda capital. There is a marble statue of Stalin thrown in. There is a park where you see happy little children in white blouses running around. I don’t know whose children they are, but they are really happy kiddies. They are not homeless children in rags, such as I have seen in Russia. Then you see an excursion boat, on which the Russian people are smiling, sitting around very cheerfully, dressed in some sort of satin blouses such as they only wear in Russian restaurants here.

Then they attend a luxurious dance. I don’t know where they got the idea of the clothes and the settings that they used at the ball and—

Mr. Stripling:
Is that a ballroom scene?

Miss Rand:
Yes; the ballroom—where they dance. It was an exaggeration even for this country. I never saw anybody wearing such clothes and dancing to such exotic music when I was there. Of course, it didn’t say whose ballroom it is or how they got there. But there they are—free and dancing very happily.

Incidentally, I understand from correspondents who have left or escaped from Russia later than I did, that the time I last saw it, which was in 1926, was the best time since the Russian revolution. At that time conditions were a little better than they have become since. In my time we were a bunch of ragged, starved, dirty, miserable people who had only two thoughts in our mind. That was our complete terror—afraid to look at one another, afraid to say anything for fear of who is listening and would report us—and where to get the next meal. You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love—nothing but food and fear.

That is what I saw up to 1926. That is not what the picture shows.

Now, after this tour of Moscow, the hero—the American conductor—goes to the Soviet village. The Russian villages are so miserable and so filthy. They were [that] even before the revolution. What they have become now I am afraid to think. You have all read about the program for the collectivization of the farms in 1933, at which time the Soviet Government admits that three million peasants died of starvation. Other people claim there were seven and a half million, but three million is the figure admitted by the Soviet Government as the figure of people who died of starvation, planned by the government in order to drive people into collective farms. That is a recorded historical fact.

Now, here is life in the Soviet village as presented in
Song of Russia.
You see the happy peasants. You see they are meeting the hero at the station with bands, with beautiful blouses and shoes, such as they never wore anywhere. You see children with operetta costumes on them and with a brass band which they could never afford. You see the manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women who come from work singing. You see a peasant at home with a close-up of food for which anyone there would have been murdered. If anybody had such food in Russia in that time he couldn’t remain alive, because he would have been torn apart by neighbors trying to get food. But here is a close-up of it and a line where Robert Taylor comments on the food and the peasant answers, “This is just a simple country table and the food we eat ourselves.”

Then the peasant proceeds to show Taylor how they live. He shows him his wonderful tractor. It is parked somewhere in his private garage. He shows him the grain in his bin, and Taylor says, “That is wonderful grain.” Now, it is never said that the peasant does not own this tractor or this grain because it is a collective farm. He couldn’t have it. It is not his. But the impression he gives to Americans, who wouldn’t know any different, is that certainly it is this peasant’s private property, and that is how he lives, he has his own tractor and his own grain. Then it shows miles and miles of plowed fields.