Ayn Rand and the World She Made Read online

  For David Harter de Weese

  Alas, that you would understand my word: “Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.”

  —Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1885

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  ONE Before the Revolution 1905–1917

  TWO Looters 1917–1925

  THREE Freedom to Think 1926–1934

  FOUR We Are Not Like Our Brothers 1934–1938

  FIVE The Fountainhead 1936–1941

  SIX The Soul of an Individualist 1939–1942

  SEVEN Money 1943

  EIGHT Fame 1943–1946

  NINE The Top and the Bottom 1946–1949

  TEN The Means and the End 1950–1953

  ELEVEN The Immovable Mover 1953–1957

  TWELVE Atlas Shrugged 1957

  THIRTEEN The Public Philosopher 1958–1963

  FOURTEEN Account Overdrawn 1962–1967

  FIFTEEN Either/Or (The Break) 1967–1968

  SIXTEEN In the Name of the Best Within Us 1969–1982

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviation Key

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  Ayn Rand died in her Murray Hill apartment in New York City in 1982, at the age of seventy-seven. Although she had spent her last thirty years as a familiar presence in the city where I lived, offering lectures and readings, I never met her. With no particular evidence, I assumed that her best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (the only ones I knew about), were potboilers or propaganda. They certainly had an eerie effect on some of my acquaintances who read them and who began to talk about “the earned and the unearned,” “free markets and free minds,” and an individualist hero named John Galt. Besides, in the 1970s, when I moved to New York, I was busy reading E. L. Doctorow, J. M. Keynes, and Little Magazines.

  Hence, unlike most of Rand’s readers, I came across her books not as a young person but in my forties, while working as an editor on a financial magazine. A contributor, Suze Orman, showed me the two-thousand-word text of Francisco d’Anconia’s famous “money speech” from Atlas Shrugged. “So you think that money is the root of all evil?” the capitalist hero Francisco asks a group of New Deal—style lobbyists and bureaucrats. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money?” Rand’s answer, in part, is that money is the “tool and symbol” of a society built on mutual, voluntary trade rather than forced labor, duty to the state, or war. It is an engine of economic progress. “But money is only a tool,” she writes. “It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.” Orman appended a note: This was exactly what she was trying to say in the essay I was editing.

  The passage surprised me by defending limitless wealth in a way that was logical, original, complex, and, though somewhat overbearing, beautifully written. I learned that Rand had often presented this long passage as a test of intelligence and literary acumen to potential new disciples, including her most famous follower, Alan Greenspan. I went on to devour her novels and, later, to read her speeches, essays, letters, journals, screenplays, and theatrical plays. (A complete list of her published works appears in the Selected Bibliography.) I became a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations.

  Although Rand is rarely taught in universities, new readers, most in their teens and twenties, have always found their way to her books. Together The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) have typically sold more than 300,000 copies a year, easily making them the equivalent of best-sellers. Recently, in the midst of a financial crisis greater than any since the Great Depression—the proximate setting of Atlas Shrugged—sales of her last and most ambitious book have nearly tripled. More than thirteen million copies of the two books are in print in the United States.

  Because most readers encounter her in their formative years, she has had a potent influence on three generations of Americans. Her controversial themes and racy romantic scenes made her famous in the 1940s and 1950s. She attracted a youthful right-wing following in the 1950s and 1960s and became the guiding spirit of libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1970s and 1980s. In a 1991 survey jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Americans named Atlas Shrugged the book that had most influenced their lives (second only to the Bible). When the Modern Library asked readers in 1998 to name the twentieth century’s one hundred greatest books, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were numbers one and two on the list; Anthem and We the Living were numbers seven and eight, trumping The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Ulysses. Her defense of radical individualism and of selfishness as a capitalist virtue has won her scores of contemporary public champions, including former SEC chairman Christopher Cox, congressman and 2008 presidential contender Ron Paul, Libertarian Party founder John Hospers, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Moore, Alan Greenspan, and even Chris Matthews, MSNBC news commentator and former chief aide to liberal congressman Tip O’Neill. Forbes and Fortune regularly mention her as a heroine of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, game theorists, and chess masters. Yet she has stood outside the pale of respected American literary practitioners and social critics, and a quarter century after her death most readers of her novels know little about her.

  Rand was Russian by both birth and temperament. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, she was twelve years old when the Bolshevik Revolution overturned her native city, St. Petersburg, and caused her family to flee south, newly impoverished and hungry. Although her characters and themes have always impressed readers as being distinctly American, it was her hatred of Russian tyranny that underlies her best and most famous work. Her followers have often proclaimed that she was born an American in spirit and was merely trapped during her formative years in a dark and alien Slavic land. I have tried to document how Russian and Jewish culture and history color some of the most interesting features of her character and work.

  Rand immigrated to America from Soviet Russia in 1926, without much English, to pursue a career in writing. Her early years in America were hard, but not as hard as she later claimed they were. “No one helped me, nor did I think it was anyone’s duty to help me,” she wrote in an afterword to Atlas Shrugged. In fact, many people helped her. I have tracked her relationships with a variety of helpmates and with the influential thinkers and writers of her time.

  Rand wanted to be the architect of an American utopia that looked backward to the gilded age of American industrial titans. But like many of her Russian predecessors, she was a far shrewder social critic than she was a visionary. As a deconstructionist of liberal American economic and political assumptions, considered against a background of twentieth-century Russian history, she displayed breathtaking insight and remarkable courage. Whatever one thinks about her positive program of rational selfishness, egoism, and unregulated capitalism, her ability to spot and skewer cowardice, injustice, and hypocrisy is at least as keen and passionate as that of her ideological opposite Charles Dickens.

  Like Dickens, Rand’s art is the art of melodrama. At heart, she was a nineteenth-century novelist illuminating twentieth-century social conflicts. Her novels and the best of her essays are well worth reading now, when issues of wealth and poverty, state power and autonomy, and security and freedom still disturb us.

  ———

  Because I am not an advocate for Rand’s ideas, I was denied access to the Ayn Rand Papers at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California, where copies of
her unpublished letters and diaries, calendars, photographs, and other documents reside. Nevertheless, I have been able to add much that is new to the record of her life. An exhaustive search of Russian government archives by a Russian research team yielded fascinating new information about her parents’ and forebears’ limited freedom as Jews in the anti-Semitic Russian empire, about her formal education in St. Petersburg and the Crimea, and about her experiences during the Russian Revolution. I listened to half a dozen unpublished tape recordings of speeches, interviews, and lectures presented over the years by archivists at the Ayn Rand Institute and enjoyed unprecedented access to forty hours of taped biographical interviews with Rand conducted by Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, all of which filled in many details of the writer’s childhood and troubled young adulthood. Freedom of Information Act documents cast light on her first years in America and, among other things, helped to explain the timing of her 1929 marriage to her husband, Frank O’Connor. Journalist Jeff Walker and collector Marc Schwalb let me listen to privately recorded interviews with Rand’s friends from the 1920s through the 1970s, many of them now dead, whose comments suggested aspects of Rand’s character that were new to me. I conducted more than fifty interviews with Rand’s still-living, often elderly American relatives, intimates, employees, and adversaries, including three long interviews with her former protégé and lover, Nathaniel Branden. Further insights came from viewing original letters to and about Rand and her followers housed in libraries and archival collections in Hollywood; San Francisco; New York; Washington, D.C.; Auburn, Alabama; Scottsdale, Arizona; Provo, Utah; Bloomington, Indiana; and West Branch, Iowa, and from drafts and galley proofs of Rand’s four novels on file at the Library of Congress.

  Gallant, driven, brilliant, brash, cruel, as accomplished as her heroes, and ultimately self-destructive, she has to be understood to be believed.

  ANNE C. HELLER

  FEBRUARY 2009

  ONE

  BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

  1905–1917

  If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism. I was born with that obsession and have never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and more tragically needed. Call it fate or irony, but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia.

  —Autobiographical Sketch, 1936

  When the fierce and extraordinary Ayn Rand was fifty-two years old, about to become world famous, and more than thirty years removed from her birthplace in Russia, she summed up the meaning of her elaborate, invented, cerebral world this way: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” It was a world in which no dictator, no deity, and no well-meaning sense of duty would ever take away the moral right of the gifted individual—Ayn Rand—to live according to her own high-wattage lights.

  This was not the world she was born into. Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Russian Jew, on February, 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, then the capital city of the most anti-Semitic and politically divided nation on the European continent. Later, she would say that she loathed everything Russian, and while this was not entirely true—she retained her appetite for Russian classical music and Russian sweets until the end of her life—she hated the passivity, brutality, and primitive religiosity of the Russia of her youth.

  She had good reason for this. Her birth came barely three weeks after the brief but bloody uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, where, on a bright January Sunday morning, twelve thousand of Czar Nicholas II’s cavalrymen opened fire on thirty thousand factory workers, their wives and children, labor organizers, and students who had walked to the Winter Palace to petition for better working conditions and a role in the czar’s all-powerful government. The protest was led by a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, and many marchers were said to be praying as they died. The slaughter gave rise to days of rioting throughout the city and set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which would end not in the quick and brutal suppression of the rebellion’s leaders, as this one did, but in a revolutionary coup that would shake the world and mold Ayn Rand’s worldview.

  Rand’s parents, who in January 1905 were thirty-four and twenty-five and had been married for just nine months, could hear the gunfire from the windows of their new apartment above a pharmacy on Zabalkanskii Prospekt—the street on which, later that evening, the popular writer Maxim Gorky would hold a meeting of the city’s liberal intellectuals and announce, “The Russian Revolution has begun.” Rand’s father, born Zelman Wolf Zakharovich Rosenbaum but known outside the family by the non-Jewish variant of his name, Zinovy, was a pharmaceutical chemist and the manager of the shop downstairs. Her mother, a homely but self-consciously stylish woman named Khana Berkovna Kaplan, known as Anna, had been trained as a dentist but had stopped practicing after her marriage and pregnancy.

  By the time Ayn Rand was born, Zabalkanskii Prospekt and the streets around it were calm again. It was an illusory calm: all over Russia and the vast Russian territories to the south and east, massive labor strikes, anti-czarist peasant insurrections, and anti-Jewish violence were erupting. This would continue, in waves, until 1914, when World War I briefly united the nation against the Germans, and would grow yet more explosive from 1915 to 1919, when the country was war torn and starving. Meanwhile, Marxist political organizations, their leaders in and out of exile in Siberia and Europe, gained a following.

  In these years, it was dangerous to be a Jew. As the economy deteriorated and the czar grew more repressive, the brunt of popular anger often fell upon Russia’s five million Jews. At Czar Nicholas II’s court, as elsewhere in Europe, Jews had long been identified with the supposedly pagan notions of a money economy, urbanization, industrialization, and capitalism. Given traditional Russian fear of modernity and fierce anti-Semitism, Jews were ready-made scapegoats onto whom the czar, the landowners, and the police could easily shift workers’ and peasants’ resentment for their poverty and powerlessness.

  For Jews outside the capital city, this period brought the worst anti-Semitic violence since the Middle Ages. In the fall of 1905 alone, when Rand was not quite a year old, there were 690 anti-Jewish pogroms and three thousand Jewish murders. In one pogrom in Odessa, in the Crimea, where Rand and her family would relocate in 1918, eight hundred Jews were killed and one hundred thousand were made homeless. The czar’s police were said to have supplied the largely illiterate Russian Orthodox rioters with arms and vodka.

  St. Petersburg was relatively safe from pogroms, which was one reason the Rosenbaums had migrated there. But it had its own complicated forms of official anti-Semitism. By 1914, the statutes circumscribing Jewish activities ran to nearly one thousand pages, and anything that wasn’t explicitly permitted was a crime. For decades, Jews who didn’t possess a trade or profession useful to the czar were barred from St. Petersburg; in most cases, unqualified Jews couldn’t even visit for a night. By law, Jews made up no more than 2 percent of the city’s population, and residency papers had to be renewed each year. Jews often changed their names to avoid detection. They and their homes were subject to police searches at all times. Rand’s father, who was born in the poor and pogrom-ridden Russian Pale of Settlement—a vast checkerboard of Jewish ghettos encompassing much of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland—went variously by the names Zelman, Zalman, and Zinovy. He seems to have become a pharmacist, at least in part, because this was one of the professions that permitted Jews to enter the city relatively freely. But the laws were fickle and crafted to give the czar maximum flexibility, and arrest and/or exile were a constant danger.

  It was in this volatile and often frightening atmosphere that Rand grew up. She was the eldest of three da
ughters of this upwardly mobile pharmacist and his religiously observant, socially ambitious wife; Anna would later appear in her daughter’s novels as a series of superficial or spiteful characters. When Rand was two and a half, her sister Natasha was born; when she was five, her youngest and favorite sister, Eleanora, called Nora, entered the family.

  By the time Nora was born, in 1910, Zinovy had advanced to become the manager of a larger, more centrally located pharmacy. The Zabalkanskii drugstore, along with one a few streets away, in which the young chemist had worked before his marriage, were owned by Anna Rosenbaum’s sister Dobrulia Kaplan and her husband, Iezekiil Konheim; the new store, called Aleksandrovskaia, belonged to an affluent and professionally distinguished German Lutheran merchant named Aleksandr Klinge. Klinge’s shop faced Znamenskaya Square on the Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s resplendent main thoroughfare, built extra wide by Peter the Great to accommodate his cavalry and cannons against the insurrections of the eighteenth century. Zinovy, now newly established among the Jewish bourgeoisie, moved his wife and daughters into a large, comfortable apartment on the second floor, adjoining the pharmacy. Another one of Anna’s sisters and her husband, a prosperous medical doctor named Isaac Guzarchik, settled with their two daughters on the floor above. There the family lived until they fled the starving city for the Crimea in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution.

  Intelligent, self-directed, and solitary from an early age, Rand must have been a difficult child to raise in the first decade of the twentieth century. In spite of the era’s violence and turmoil, the ambience was Victorian: the fashions were for frills, family loyalty, and the feminine arts, all of which went utterly against her grain. Some of her earliest memories were of being unreasonably treated in such matters by her mother, who was the dominating personality in the household and even at times “a tyrant.” In one memory, during the family’s move to the Nevsky Prospekt apartment, Rand and her younger sisters were sent to stay with a neighboring aunt and uncle, perhaps the Konheims. When they returned to Rand’s new home, she asked her mother for a midi blouse like the ones she’d seen her cousins wearing. Anna Rosenbaum refused. She didn’t approve of midi blouses or other fashionable garments for children, Rand recalled fifty years later. Anna was serving tea at the time, and—perhaps as an experiment—Rand asked for a cup of tea. Again her mother refused; children didn’t drink tea. Rand refrained from arguing, although even then the budding logician might have won the argument on points. Instead, she asked herself, Why won’t they let me have what I want? and made a resolution: Someday I will have it. She was four and a half or five years old, although all her life she thought that she had been three. The elaborate and controversial philosophical system she went on to create in her forties and fifties was, at its heart, an answer to this question and a memorialization of this project. Its most famous expression was a phrase that became the title of her second nonfiction book, The Virtue of Selfishness, in 1962.