An American conservative movement developed rapidly after World War II. It brought together intellectuals and politicians opposed to the New Deal in domestic policy and Soviet communism in foreign policy. The movement's first presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost the election of 1964 but its second, Ronald Reagan, won the election of 1980. It has remained an influential force in American life up to the present, despite strong internal contradictions, which include disagreements about centralized power, about religion, about tradition, about elites, and about the free market. To some of the movement's early luminaries, such as Russell Kirk, free-market capitalism was the antithesis of conservatism since it required perpetual innovation and the sweeping away of traditional forms. To others, such as Ayn Rand, capitalism was the heart and soul of conservatism because it alone preserved the dignity and freedom of the individual.
Rand (1905–82) published two massive novels of ideas, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), perpetual best sellers that have introduced hundreds of thousands of Americans to free-market conservatism. They illustrate her belief that great entrepreneurial individualists are the motors of human progress, whose destiny is to struggle against mediocrities and collectivists: to benefit a mankind that resists, despises, and persecutes them. Rand had no patience with cultural traditionalists like Kirk and was a defiant atheist. Her besetting faults of egotism and intolerance prevented her from playing a constructive role in the conservative movement, a role that her popularity certainly warranted. Two new biographies attempt to explain her quirky brilliance. Jennifer Burns places Rand in the context of American intellectual history while Anne Heller, in a less scholarly idiom, explores the Russian and Jewish elements of her character and work.
Rand (née Alissa Rosenbaum) was born in Russia in 1905, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish shopkeeper in St Petersburg. She was twelve when the Russian Revolution began and her family—unmistakably bourgeois—suffered ruin at the hands of the Bolsheviks. She hated the Revolution and everything it stood for. As an adolescent she loved, by contrast, the image of the West that she found in books and movies. She fled to America in 1926, inventing her new name en route. A chance meeting with Cecil B. De Mille in Hollywood led to a job in the movie studios, as an extra and script assistant. Assimilating and learning English as rapidly as possible, she met and soon married another film extra, Frank O'Connor. His presence by her side for the next half-century, unambitious, domestic, conciliatory, and a cuckold, stood in striking contrast to Rand the writer's Nietzschean ideal of Man as fearless swashbuckling entrepreneur.
We the Living (1936), her first novel, fictionalized her family's shattering experiences in Revolutionary Russia and condemned Marxism. She published it in the midst of the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, however, when New York's literary establishment was sympathetic as never before or since to communism. Rand realized that she was at odds with most of the city's prominent writers, who either ignored the book or reviewed it harshly. Anthem, a dystopian fantasy that she wrote in 1937, could not even find an American publisher for ten years, though it would later sell millions of copies during the Cold War and become a minor anticommunist classic.
Undeterred, Rand began work on The Fountainhead (1943), her big novel about an architectural genius. She wrote the bulk of it in 1942 in a blaze of creative energy, fueled by Benzedrine and other amphetamines. Howard Roark, the book's modern-architect hero (loosely modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright), refuses to compromise with the tradition-bound “second-raters” who surround him, in a world contaminated by collectivism. He would rather hew rocks in a quarry than sacrifice his artistic integrity. When beautiful Dominique Francon sees him doing just that the two of them exchange smoldering looks, and before long he's breaking into her bedroom to ravish her. Dominique, a fiery thoroughbred, loves finding the man who can master her. When Roark designs a public-housing project, he exacts a promise that his exquisitely unified design will not be modified in any way. When he finds that it has been changed by faithless collaborators he dynamites it, goes on trial, and justifies his act to a sympathetic jury that acquits him. When The Fountainhead came out, word-of-mouth publicity more than compensated for bad reviews and it sold strongly, with as many readers being titillated by the sex scene—daring for its time—as by Rand's advocacy of individualistic capitalism.
In the ensuing years Rand hammered out the principles of her philosophical system, Objectivism, and eventually anthologized them in an array of shorter works, For the New Intellectual (1961), The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966). Her system's central insights were: that the world progresses through the brilliant work of creative individualists, that capitalism alone can unlock their potential, and that selfishness is a virtue. She regarded altruism as a destructive force, since it encouraged individuals to live for the benefit of others rather than for themselves: it corrupted givers and receivers alike. As in her novels, she emphasized the corrosive power of envy, arguing that collectivism of all kinds was really the institutionalization of envy. It led to the expropriation of the deserving by the undeserving and, over the long term, to economic stagnation and political tyranny.
She saw free-market exchanges as the model for all other forms of human interaction. Individuals participate voluntarily and rationally. The law should do no more than ensure that contracts are honored, and the functions of government should be kept to an absolute minimum. The initiation of violence and the preemptive use of force are never justifiable. To Rand, however, taxation is itself a form of coercion, because it is imposed by governments that possess a monopoly of force and threaten to use it against those who will not pay. The greater the taxation, the greater the violence implicitly visited on citizens. When in 1960 the Democratic Party offered housing, jobs, and education as rights she retorted, “At whose expense?” In her view, such promises threatened citizens’ rights rather than enhancing them. Real rights must not impose burdensome duties on others. Burns and Heller both note that Rand, having no children, spent little time in the company of people who cannot possibly make rational market decisions. They suggest that the internal rigor of her system breaks down when it encounters the complex social structure of the outside world, which is made up not just of autonomous individuals but of families.
A gripping storyteller who backed up her fictions with a comprehensive philosophy was nevertheless attractive. In the 1940s and 1950s a movement began to form around Rand. Its founders were a young Canadian couple, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who created an institute to popularize Objectivism. New York devotees gathered to hear Branden lecturing on Rand's philosophy. He distributed tape-recorded versions to enthusiasts in other cities. Rand and Branden selected the most talented and devoted of her disciples to attend meetings of an inner circle. Among these insiders was the young Alan Greenspan, subsequently chairman of the Federal Reserve, who remained throughout his career one of her most loyal supporters.
Everyone who met her agrees that Rand was a magnetic personality with a laser stare, a pulverizingly logical approach to conversation, and a charismatic sense of her own superiority. She thought of herself as the embodiment of rationality but had plenty of eccentricities, such as a love for jewelry in the shape of dollar signs, a long cigarette holder, and a dramatic black cape. In 1955 she announced that she and Branden, who was more than twenty years her junior, were not mere intellectual partners but must become lovers too. Poor mild Frank O'Connor, Rand's husband, was now obliged to leave his apartment two afternoons each week so that Ayn and Branden could have uninterrupted sessions of sex and philosophy in the nuptial bed. Both husbands and both wives then met to hold rational discussions of the situation—as superior beings they were expected to rise above the objections of conventional morality. Most members of the Objectivist group, even those in the inner circle, knew nothing about this affair until decades later.
It is difficult not to look upon Branden himself as a scoundrel. On the basis of Rand's theories about emotion and personality he ran his own variant of psychotherapy. Objectivist aspirants were expected to submit to, and pay for, intensive sessions on his couch, but with this difference: he would then tell Rand and the inner circle what they had confessed, with the result that emotional blackmail thickened the already turbid atmosphere of the Objectivists’ cult-like world (by now many of them were living in the same building at 120 East Thirty-fourth Street). When he finally broke with Rand and his long-suffering wife to marry a third woman, Rand slapped him, delivered a furious harangue, and told him that he deserved to be impotent for the next twenty years (Burns, 241). Then the two of them subjected the Objectivist faithful to an undignified slanging match in print, each condemning the other and forcing everyone to take sides.
That dramatic break did not come until 1968. The heart of Objectivist life in the 1950s, meanwhile, was excited discussion of draft chapters from Rand's new and even more massive novel. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, certainly is a page-turner. The setting is an industrial America in decline. A handful of great entrepreneurs, including the dazzlingly beautiful Dagny Taggart, whose very name sounds like a sharp-edged weapon, are struggling to run their businesses in the face of collectivist inefficiency and a widespread mood of fatalism. One of the era's great men, Ragnar Danneskjold, has become a pirate who seizes foreign-aid ships on the high seas and gives the proceeds to entrepreneurs who have been unjustly taxed—he is in effect the anti-Robin Hood. An uneasy awareness grips the nation: that most of its dynamic figures are disappearing one by one. Meanwhile a cryptic riddle is making the rounds: “Who is John Galt?” At last the reader learns the astonishing truth. The great creative individuals have gone on strike as a way of demonstrating that the world will be helpless without them. Led by the greatest of them all, John Galt, they have secluded themselves in a Colorado hideaway, “Galt's Gulch,” which he runs as a do-it-yourself capitalist utopia. They are biding their time until the world learns its lesson, welcomes them back, and abolishes collectivism.
As disaster approaches Galt emerges from hiding to make an electrifying radio broadcast. In a speech of nearly a hundred pages Galt outlines the entire economic history of the world, his critique of socialism, and his explanation of the need for unimpeded capitalism. The world agrees to his terms and he returns in triumph. Among the many readers exhilarated by this tale of capitalism triumphant was a young entrepreneur, Ted Turner, who paid for a series of billboards in Atlanta bearing the now-famous question “Who is John Galt?”
Atlas Shrugged, even longer than The Fountainhead, made Rand even more famous. Once again the reviews were bad. Many authors, but not she, would have regarded public acclaim and massive sales as adequate compensation. She was enraged, and reacted by becoming even more intolerant and even less willing to discuss ideas except with disciples who were prepared to knuckle under to her view on every issue. This inflexibility meant that, with a very few exceptions (including Greenspan), her followers were docile and unoriginal or else stayed in her company only for a few weeks, until a sharp disagreement led to excommunication. Such was the fate of Murray Rothbard and his wife, when she had the temerity not to give up her Christian faith despite Branden's demonstration to her that Rand had disproved the existence of God.
By the time Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, the new conservative movement was drawing media attention. Led by William F. Buckley Jr, editor of National Review (founded 1955), it brought together libertarians like Rothbard and Henry Hazlitt, traditionalist conservatives like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk, and anticommunists like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Buckley, a prolific writer and an artful diplomat, found ways to reconcile these various factions, pointing out that, despite their differences, they all shared an aversion to New Deal statist liberalism and to Soviet communism. With her massive readership, Rand was converting thousands of young Americans to libertarianism every year and could have played a galvanizing role in the movement, but she would have nothing to do with National Review. This was partly because Buckley was a Roman Catholic, who saw Christianity as central to the heritage of Western civilization and central to its confrontation with “godless Communism.” (At one of their few meetings Rand told Buckley that he was too intelligent to believe in God.) It was also partly because National Review ran a crushingly negative review of Atlas Shrugged, written by Chambers, who described the book as totally unrealistic and emotionally sophomoric, and its heroes as capitalist totalitarians. His review ended in the sentence, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”Footnote 1
Buckley was aware that in taking on Ayn Rand he might be jeopardizing his journal, since many subscribers had come to conservatism after reading her books. He was, however, determined to make conservatism politically respectable and was already involved in the campaign to win a Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. He knew that advocacy of Rand's brand of capitalism without taxation and with only the most minimal government (utterly remote from current realities) would harm his quest for the mainstream and so he took the calculated risk of breaking with her. His Cold War anxieties, moreover, presupposed that at least one branch of government, the military, would be immense. Much more to his taste was Milton Friedman, whose accessible and persuasive book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) made the case for free-market capitalism while leaving room for strong defense and active government.
Rand's stubborn reclusiveness made her politically irrelevant despite her fame. One of the earliest and most perceptive commentaries on her situation was Jerome Tuccille's book It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971). Tuccille describes how he, and hundreds of young men like him, broke from orthodox Catholic and Jewish upbringings in the postwar American suburbs and found a religion-substitute in Objectivism. For a while they lived and breathed the holy writ of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and modeled themselves on the books’ heroic characters. Before long, however, they found the reality of Rand's Objectivist circle claustrophobic and broke out into other areas of the conservative and libertarian world, taking selective elements of the message with them rather than the whole thing.Footnote 2
We get another entertaining glimpse of Rand in Tobias Wolff's 2003 autobiographical novel Old School. Set in the early 1960s, it describes Rand's visit to his New England prep school's literary club, surrounded by a crowd of Objectivist groupies. At first the narrator swallows the Rand gospel whole, tries to model himself on John Galt, and regards the fallible beings around him as contemptible and weak. “I was discovering the force of my will . . . I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires . . . but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to counsels of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long slow death of respectability.” But on vacation he gets a bad case of the flu and can't help feeling gratitude toward the relatives who uncomplainingly nurse him back to health. So much for the idea of living for oneself alone and of despising selflessness!Footnote 3
Early books about Rand were written by her disciples, or by ex-disciples like Barbara Branden, who had axes to grind and were contentiously polemical. Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market and Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by contrast, are balanced, sensible, informative, and judicious. Neither author is a current or former Objectivist and each has the necessary critical distance to recognize Rand's mixture of ability and folly. Both express their ambivalence about Rand as a female role model. She was strong woman with a powerful sense of direction but she was also a narrow-minded dogmatist. Their explanations of exactly why she turned out that way differ.
Burns, a history professor at the University of Virginia, began the project as her dissertation at Berkeley. She aims to place Rand in the context of twentieth-century American intellectual history but soon bumps up against the fact that Rand had surprisingly little contact with the intellectual luminaries of her generation. The only philosophical debt she acknowledged in her early years was to Nietzsche, and the only one she admitted later was to Aristotle. In a letter to a friend she scoffed at the conventional approach to philosophy, writing, “I see no point in discussing what some fools said in the past and why they said it and what error they made and where they went off the rails” (Burns, 127–8). Although Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and many others were writing in defense of capitalism and against collectivism in the same years as Rand, and in ways she might easily have admired, she barely engaged with them and wrote no book reviews or scholarly articles. Neither did she invoke the names of pro-capitalist writers in her novels. In the margins of her copy of Hayek's Road to Serfdom she scribbled, “The man is an ass with no conception of a free society at all” (Burns, 104). Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Graham Sumner, and the newer defenders of capitalism may all be lurking between the pages of her books but she never acknowledged them or tried to line herself up in their company. In a revealing paragraph Burns concedes that Rand's “Romantic Realism has not changed American literature, nor has Objectivism penetrated far into the philosophy profession.” Still, she is the decisive figure in bringing new generations of Americans to free-market conservatism and in that sense should be recognized as “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” Burns is confronted with an unusual problem for an intellectual historian, in that her subject's influence was greater than her intellectual achievement (Burns, 4).
As Burns shows, the capitalism Rand defended was quite different from the capitalism actually practiced in mid-century America. In Rand's imaginative universe, the actual owners of great industries run them. Dagny Taggart personally manages and loves the railroad that her family has built over the generations. Hank Reardon, her lover, is equally hands-on with the steel company he has founded and brought to greatness. There is no corporate structure, no mass of managerial bureaucracy, and the implication is clear: that the rich entrepreneurs are the hardest-working of all Americans, and deserve what they possess. The reality was quite different. As Alfred Chandler shows in his history of managerial capitalism, The Visible Hand (1977), nearly all the great twentieth-century corporations developed not as the fiefdoms of larger-than-life individuals but through the separation of ownership and management. They also went hand in glove with big government, often using it to safeguard their market position, and they lobbied hard for protective tariffs and other un-Randian advantages. No wonder generations of small businessmen have loved Rand; they operate in a world that more nearly coincides with the one she evokes, where individual owners’ particular decisions and particular virtues are still decisive.Footnote 4
Burns also shows that Rand was ambivalent about the confrontation of elitism with populism that has dogged conservatism for the last half-century. An explicit Nietzschean in her early works, she never lost faith in the idea that a magnificent handful of great beings make history. Humanity consists of a few supermen and a big flock of sheep. On the other hand, The Fountainhead ends with a jury of twelve ordinary citizens agreeing with Howard Roark that his act of destruction was justified—Rand seems at that point to have accepted the idea that the common man understands reality even when the spoiled elites do not. She then veered away from this pseudo-populism after dabbling in practical politics for a few years. Picking up where the failed Wendell Willkie campaign of 1940 had left off, she was appalled to discover the irrationality (as she saw it) even of the corporate executives she tried to cultivate. They would not fall in with her ideas and she was loath to involve herself with the painstaking compromises that are the lifeblood of American democracy. She joined the Hollywood hunt for ex-communists in the late 1940s, along with John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, but played no further role in practical politics.
Rand's great weakness, Burns argues, was her refusal to compromise and her refusal to participate in the give and take of intellectual life. Even the most influential and persuasive scholars are aware (or should be) that their work is fallible. The academic disciplines thrive on perpetual challenge, reconceptualization, and the displacement of widely shared theories by new paradigms. Each new generation undertakes acts of intellectual parricide. Anyone who refuses to participate in this process becomes marginalized and Rand was asking the impossible when she required readers to accept her system lock, stock and barrel. It was, in effect, a self-invalidating demand.
Still, Burns reminds us that that even after her disillusioned withdrawal from politics Rand remained a major figure. Bennett Cerf, one of the most important American publishers in the mid-twentieth century, published Atlas Shrugged at Random House and wanted also to publish her collection The Virtue of Selfishness. His respect for her achievement, despite profound differences, reminds us not to read back her later marginality into the middle years of her career. Similarly, Burns notes that Robert Nozick paid tribute to her influence in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1975), the most philosophically rigorous statement of the libertarians’ case. He believed that she had done more than any other mid-twentieth-century figure to make a philosophically rigorous defense of capitalist individualism. Nozick was no fawning disciple, however. He later followed up with “On the Randian Argument,” a respectful challenge to her denial that self-sacrifice can be rational. As Nozick showed, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, resolves to kill himself if Dagny Taggart, whom he loves, is tortured to pressure him into talking. Rand herself, in other words, recognized circumstances in which self-sacrifice might be defensible.Footnote 5
Burns was granted full access to the Rand archive, which had hitherto been closed to all non-Objectivists. As a result she was able to read through Rand's mountainous 1940s correspondence with Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane, both formidable mid-century figures in the development of libertarianism. This access turns out to have been a mixed blessing. Her early letters to Paterson, to whom she was junior in years, experience, and publishing, show at first a refreshing openness to new avenues of inquiry. It wasn't long, however, before the friendships foundered, souring Rand on the possibility that she had anything to learn from anyone. Burns's excessively thorough chapters based on these unpublished works slow down her book's narrative drive—it's the only place where you feel that you're reading a modified dissertation.
Overall, however, Burns's achievement is first-rate. She has found the right tone of voice for a study of Rand, objective (but not Objectivist!), detached, sober, and worldly. Her judgments are always substantiated by the evidence, and readers are reminded that the success of conservatism as a mass movement after the 1960s is as much attributable to Rand as to any other individual, even though she hated it. I have written two books on post-World War II American conservatism but I admit that until I read Goddess of the Market I had not fully appreciated the extent of Rand's influence.
Heller, a New York writer without academic ties, takes a less scholarly approach to Rand and is the more admiring of the two. She emphasizes the Russian and Jewish elements of Rand's life much more strongly than does Burns, and even makes the intriguing suggestion that the idea for the strike in Atlas Shrugged, and the models for her heroes and heroines, all came from melodramas Rand/Rosenbaum had read by the age of twelve. In her telling, Rand's adult life was largely a playing out of impressions and sensations she had imbibed as a youngster. “A nineteenth-century Russian at heart,” Heller argues, Rand “believed that ideas have the power to change history and that intellectual leaders are the engines and agents of change.” She also points out that when Howard Roark dynamites the public housing project and dedicates the act “to every creator who was destroyed in body or spirit,” Rand is paying tribute to her own “father and grandfather, not only as Russians but also as Jews” (Heller, 84, 121).
It's certainly possible to make the case for Rand as distinctively Russian. Her almost mystical faith in ideas, her scorching intolerance, and her authoritarianism have the authentic flavor of the old autocracy she was born into and the even harsher one she fled. It seems to me more difficult to make a strong case for Rand's Jewishness. She never reacted publicly to the fate of the Jews in World War II and never commented on the creation of Israel or its early struggles. Neither did she show any interest in the ordeal of Soviet Jews during the Cold War, even though the relatives she had left behind were among them. Her world was certainly not divided not into Christians, Jews, and atheists, but into members of her own coterie on the one hand, and everyone else on the other.
Heller is convincing when she suggests that Rand's novels should be thought about side by side with those of the nineteenth-century greats, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, rather than those of any American contemporary. Hugo was the one novelist to whom Rand actually admitted a debt. Her gigantism is modeled on Hugo's, as is the sweep, grandeur, and emotional surge of her plots. Like their great nineteenth-century predecessors, her books were written as vehicles of political and moral indoctrination. As Heller notes, Rand was infuriated when reviewers of The Fountainhead treated the book as though its actual subject was architecture. To her it was painfully obvious that she was discussing the nature of good and evil, the destiny of great individuals, and the temptation to mediocrity that besets collectivist societies. Architecture merely happened to be the medium that carried the message.
Heller, with no need to conform to an academic orthodoxy, is less inhibited than Burns, and sometimes speculates about Rand in ways that go a little beyond the evidence (“she probably spent hundreds of hours poring over the drawings . . .” In early twentieth-century Vienna she “might have glimpsed some of the giants of the age” (14–15) etc.). Heller also takes at least one step into the bedroom to discuss Rand's sexual proclivities, as reconstructed from the rough sex enjoyed by her heroines Dominique Francon and Dagny Taggart. She argues that Rand wanted women to be strong and masterful, but always with the caveat that their men had to be much more overbearing, so that when it came to the point even the strongest woman could delight in being dominated.
In short, Heller's is the more gossipy of the two biographies, Burns's the more scholarly. Both are well written and highly entertaining. Both authors realize the virtue of understatement; that by simply describing what happened, they would set off appropriate trains of thought and judgment in readers’ minds. The fact that neither of them calls Rand a humorless control freak makes it all the more certain that readers will fully appreciate how much she was one.
Each of them recounts a story that gets to the heart of Rand's character. John Hospers, a young philosophy professor at Brooklyn College in the late 1950s, greatly admired her work, met her, and found her conversation dazzling. In response to her urging he arranged for her to speak at a meeting of the American Aesthetics Association at Harvard in 1962, an event that she apparently expected to be the start of her conquest of the philosophical mainstream. After her talk, Hospers, the panel's appointed discussant, offered the usual professorial mix of praise and criticism. Rand, horrified, responded by walking out, cut him dead in public, and never spoke to him again. As she saw it, his job had been to offer adulation only, and his failure to do so won him lifelong ostracism. Stories like that can only make us glad that she left Russia, where, with a slightly different set of beliefs, she might well have become one of the most merciless of all the commissars.
