Ayn Rand and the World She Made Read online

  Her speeches and essays were eventually collected in half a dozen slim volumes that have never been out of print. In the spring of 1961, Cerf published the first of these, For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. The material wasn’t new: it was a collection of monologues from her four novels, including Kira’s speech to Andrei on the value of individual life in We the Living and John Galt’s radio address, along with a title essay based on the lecture she had given at Yale. The essay is a mixture of historical parable and madcap fairy tale. In it, she attributed the suffering of mankind to two eternally recurring archetypes she called Attila and the Witch Doctor. At different points in history, she wrote, a Witch Doctor might present himself as a shaman, a priest, a popular demagogue, a medicine man, a professor, or a self-serving literary critic who weakened a nation’s spirit by dispensing self-sacrificial bromides and promises of a better life to come. After the Witch Doctor had prepared the way with sermons, Attila, or the tyrant, swept in to pillage and enslave the faithful. And this had been the pattern in every age and culture until the establishment of the American Constitution. The essay announced her almost fanatical crusade against the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom for the rest of her life she blamed for the end of the Enlightenment and the triumph of moral relativism over reason. (Henceforth, she would refer to Kant as a monster and “the chief destroyer of the modern world.”)

  To stop the nightmare, she offered a new morality, that of the “Producer,” and a “New Intellectual,” modeled on the philosophical businessmen she had tried and failed to mold in the post-Willkie 1940s. If only everyone would embrace reason, self-reliance, and unregulated markets, she implied, the West could usher in an age of freedom, individualism, productivity, wealth, and peace—and do so without relying on religious faith or the use of force except in self-defense, Rand’s basic formula for defeating tyranny.

  By now, a new book by Ayn Rand, even a small book, created a stir. Newsweek sent a reporter to inform readers about a typical night at NBI. One hundred or so “new intellectuals stalked solemnly into [an assembly room at] the Hotel Roosevelt,” NBI’s new and larger New York meeting place, wrote the Newsweek reporter. These well-groomed men and women listened “raptly,” for three hours, to Branden “droning” on, before Rand arrived onstage to answer questions, when the energy level rose with a rush. She didn’t coddle the audience. When a brash young man asked a question the reporter couldn’t hear, she labeled him “a cheap fraud” and moved on. Her admirers remained calm, the reporter wrote, taking it for granted that anyone who misconstrued or disagreed with her ideas “must be motivated by villainy alone.” He likened her to the early twentieth-century preacher Aimee Semple McPherson in her power to “hypnotize a live audience” and quoted one of her adherents sounding particularly loopy: “Her books are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them.” Finally, “although she had a glare [that] would wilt a cactus,” the reporter hailed her as “a welcome streak of color in the world of authorship.” There exists “no label for Ayn Rand,” he concluded, “unless it is the valuable and honorable one of born eccentric.” He saw little that was colorful in her “foremost apostle” or her band of “militantly non-beatnik” admirers.

  Not to be outdone, later that year The Saturday Evening Post published an unusually lengthy profile of her and her movement called “The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand.” The opening photograph showed the literary lion standing in front of the twin lions at the Forty-second Street entrance to the New York Public Library, her eyes huge, bright, and probing, a cigarette holder in her hand. In a photograph on the next page, an unidentified NBI student stood cradling a massive open copy of Atlas Shrugged as reverently as if it were a hymnal. Like Newsweek, the Post took Rand and her large following with a helping of irony, but without the usual venom. The writer, John Kobler, merely wondered how she had charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as “clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” She was “the free enterprise system’s Joan of Arc, with a Yankee dollar [for] her Cross of Lorraine.” It was a description she might have relished a few years earlier, but by now she made it a point never to read what was written about her in the press.

  In Esquire’s review of For the New Intellectual, the wryly subversive Gore Vidal called her philosophy “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But what really galled him was the same issue that had captured the attention of Newsweek and the Post: the size of her audience. “In my campaign for the House [of Representatives in 1960],” he grumbled, “she was the one writer people knew and talked about.” The Wall Street Journal echoed the alarm, warning upper-crust parents and corporate executives that their sons and daughters were sitting around “in booths in college-town snack shops” arguing about her work with the same seriousness that earlier generations had brought to discussions of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx.

  Unfortunately, Rand did read Sidney Hook’s review of For the New Intellectual in The New York Times Book Review on April 9, 1961, and for a number of reasons it provoked a weeks-long fit of rage. One was Professor Hook’s allegation that she had misread Aristotle. The distinguished philosopher and historian at NYU was making a point that Isabel Paterson had tried to make years earlier: “A is A” implies nothing, he wrote, other than a logical method to test the consistency of philosophical observations and ideas and cannot be used as the basis for a code of ethics. He disagreed that free minds cannot exist without free markets and surmised that her rhetoric drove her into corners she did not really wish to occupy. For example, if “all the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism” had actually been caused by government interference, as she asserted in the book, then what accounted for the horrors of nineteenth-century child labor, which the government had remedied? (Rand answered that if it weren’t for the jobs that capitalism had created in the first place, the children would have starved to death.) As to her blanket rejection of altruism, he wrote, “I am confident that even at some danger to herself Miss Rand would not rush out of a burning building and leave a helpless child behind. She refuses to call such an action unselfish because she falls back on the truism that every voluntary choice is a choice of the self, which she mistakes as an act for [the] self.” He ended with a gibe: Although a writer need not be a professional philosopher to write an interesting book about philosophy, substituting indignation for analysis was not the way to do it.

  Another reason Rand was incensed by this review was that Hook had once been a protégé of John Dewey, who had provided a model for the slippery Dr. Simon Pritchett in Atlas Shrugged. Hook also was a Marxist, though an unequivocal opponent of Russian Communism. He had been Barbara Branden’s master’s-thesis advisor in the early 1950s and at the time of the review was supervising Leonard Peikoff’s progress toward his Ph.D., which examined Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction in classical philosophy. Both Barbara and Peikoff were extremely fond of Hook, and he of them. Recognizing this, Rand exempted them from challenging him in the tumult that followed. But the rest of the inner circle and the NBI network were expected to denounce him as dishonest and corrupt.

  Nathaniel Branden led the way. After the Newsweek profile, he had used his large NBI mailing list to call on all students of Objectivism to write rebuttal letters to the editor and cancel their subscriptions. In response to Hook’s review, he constructed a point-by-point refutation in the contemptuous tone and percussive rhythms of his mentor. Because the finished piece was far too long to appear in print as a letter to the editor, he raised money to run it as a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review of May 28. In three dense columns, he upbraided Hook for even trying “to state what Miss Rand’s ideas are,” let alone argue against them, and suggested that the highly respected scholar go back to school to study the history of ethics. Rand loved this kind of intellectual combat, especially when she was being aggressively defended by Branden. “It was almost worth Hook’s review,” she told Nathaniel, to watch him go to war on her beh
alf. And he was proud of his ability to drive enemies from the castle gates.

  Branden later said bitterly that since she, too, had come to expect him “to protect her from the world,” his “failure was that I was not in my fifties.” By this he meant that he was not experienced or strong enough for her to lean on without damage to himself. But even as he helped her, he also benefited. In 1962, Bennett Cerf agreed to publish a small book adapted from a series of radio talks Branden had given on the art of Atlas Shrugged, which he called Who Is Ayn Rand? in homage to “Who is John Galt?” in the epic novel. Barbara contributed a biographical essay that revealed, for the first time since the 1930s, that Rand had been born and grew up in prerevolutionary Russia. Not surprisingly, both parts of the book presented the author exactly as she saw herself: as a unique creative force compelled to struggle against a crass, corrupt, unthinking, and indifferent world in order to write and guide her masterpieces into print.

  Astonishingly, even this modest volume, so adulatory that the Brandens later disavowed it, sold well, going through several printings and proving that popular interest in Rand was practically unlimited. On a personal note, preparing the book allowed the maestro to spend months working with Branden to fine-tune the texts of his radio scripts for publication, and she grew closer to him, happier, less critical, and more satisfied than she had been in years. It was the first of a number of honeymoon periods that occurred between them. “She could hardly complain that I was neglecting her when her rival was this book,” he later wrote.

  If like-mindedness and personal loyalty had always been important to the strong-willed émigré, they positively preoccupied her in the years following her depression. During Saturday-night socials with members of the Collective and their spouses, friends, and younger guests, “enormous enthusiasm was expected for every deed and utterance,” Branden told an audience in 1996. She discouraged the kind of probing or “invalid” questions she had been happy to answer in the early 1950s. “Right and wrong, rational and irrational, moral and immoral—those were the words being used all the time,” recalled Joan Blumenthal. Rand increasingly judged her votaries’ merit on the basis of their “sense of life,” or subconscious attitude toward the grandeur and perfectibility of man, and encouraged them to do the same with one another. The correct moral stance, she wrote at about this time, wasn’t “Judge not, lest ye be judged” but “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.” Said a longtime NBI staff member, “Moral judgments were required if you were a moral person. It was terrible.” The new emphasis on “sense of life” placed devotees’ longings, fears, tastes, sexual impulses—anything—on the table for approval or condemnation. “Most people were walking on eggshells,” recalled Henry Holzer, who joined the inner circle as Rand’s “intellectual bodyguard,” or copyright attorney, in 1962 or 1963. “If you said something that was unknowingly immoral you’d be devastated. She’d look at you with those laser eyes and tell you that you had a lousy ‘sense of life.’” Recalled Branden, “Her idea of encouraging a person to be independent is to tell him, in effect, ‘Go and think it over—until you see things my way.’” Everything was a matter of philosophical importance, and everyone was morbidly afraid of her disapproval.

  True to Rothbard’s 1954 prediction, a pallid kind of Stalinization set in. Whenever the leader took a position—against naturalism in novels, abstract art, or, a little later, the student rebellions at Berkeley and elsewhere—her young friends followed suit. A slip of the tongue by an Objectivist who liked Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or secretly didn’t like the paintings of one of her favorite (and also, she told people, one of her husband’s favorite) contemporary artists, Spanish superrealist José Manuel Capuletti, could bring accusations of mysticism, whim worship, malevolence, or an attitude of “anti-life.” If a transgression suggested disloyalty or simply that someone was “not my kind of person,” often no amount of prior goodwill made any difference. “She was the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions,” said Hessen, who himself went through a number of painful episodes. Although she typically forgave isolated lapses, tantrums and purges became more common in the late 1960s.

  It was typically Branden who took charge of the denunciation of followers who had strayed, and sometimes he revealed information from his therapy sessions with them. “There was very little psychological privacy in those days,” he offered as an explanation to an interviewer in 1999. “Everything that was wrong with anybody or was thought to be wrong was publicly discussed. It was like public knowledge in our whole group.” By the early 1960s, he “was constantly denouncing,” Barbara recalled, and because he was “everybody’s therapist, his denunciation was much more damaging than Ayn’s.” Those who survived learned to juggle the explicit messages of the Objectivist subculture with the unstated rules: They were expected to practice obedience in the name of reason and embrace loyalty as a road to independence.

  The story of Rand’s brief friendship with a forty-year-old Brooklyn College professor of philosophy named John Hospers is a poignant case in point. She and he, a rising academic thinker, met during the spring of 1960, when she gave the lecture titled “Faith and Force” at Brooklyn College. Unfamiliar with her work, he was thunderstruck by her speech and invited her to lunch on campus. She enjoyed the lunch and reciprocated by inviting him to a lecture at NBI. In the meantime, he read Atlas Shrugged and was “bowled over” and “wiped out” by the book. She asked him to visit her at her apartment, and he began to do so every two or three weeks, usually arriving at eight in the evening and staying until four or five in the morning. The two talked endlessly about Atlas Shrugged, which Hospers praised in depth and in detail, and about politics, literature, and art, her opposition to the draft, her withering disapproval of government intervention in a market economy, and her strong views on determinism and free will. They analyzed traditional ethical conundrums, such as, “If you had a choice between driving over a stranger or your own dog, what would you do?” (He didn’t remember her answer, except that it wasn’t to hit the stranger.) On the night before he was to turn in the manuscript of his first book, Human Conduct, he carried it to her apartment and they talked until morning. As the clock struck eight, she made him breakfast and waved him off to his publisher’s office, calling, “Good premises!” instead of “Good-bye,” which deeply touched him, he recalled. Hospers, who became the first Libertarian Party candidate for president of the United States in 1972 and was the author of the classic primer Libertarianism, liked to recall that he learned free-market principles at the great woman’s knee. He fell in love with the “uncompromising rigor” of her arguments, her piercing eyes, and her deep Russian voice, “which could warm you and freeze you by turns,” he wrote.

  He wasn’t always able to make clear to her how her ideas fit in a historical context or introduce her to new concepts. At that period, “She read almost no philosophy at all,” he said, and she gave the impression that her ideas “had come full-blown from her head, or from the head of Jove.” They had political differences. He, a methodical thinker with a social conscience, expressed doubt that the freedom to think gave a majority of people the freedom to shape their lives; a cripple can’t will himself to walk, he argued, or a poor person transcend a lifetime of risk-averse or self-defeating habits in a day. (She ceded the point about walking but reminded him that with determination people do overcome seemingly impossible odds and even rise to leadership positions—not adding, “as I did.”) He also argued that truth and falsehood, or good and evil, cannot always be established with certainty by reason: Additional facts are sometimes needed to draw conclusions. For example, “All swans are white” remains true only as long as no one discovers a black swan; afterward, a new truth must be constructed. Rand agreed that new facts may sometimes create new truths but insisted that fundamental concepts, such as, “A thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature,” remain permanently and self-evidently true. Their spirited exchanges resembled those she’d had with Paterson in the 1940s, except that,
by this time, Rand’s conceptual framework was set and nothing would alter her thinking.

  Hospers had the unusual privilege of meeting with her alone. But he also sat in on a number of NBI lectures and even gave one or two himself. At one lecture he attended, on aesthetics, which was his academic specialty, he was almost shouted down when, speaking from the floor, he tried to defend the artistry of William Faulkner and Pablo Picasso, which the speaker had casually “relegated to the fcrap-heap.” After a few such experiences, he concluded that Rand’s movement was overrun with sheep, “shivering, scared children who dared not say the wrong thing lest they incur her wrath,” he wrote in a memoir. He said as much to her in a 1961 letter. What do you gain from your followers’ “undigested agreement” with you? he asked. Her reply was revealing. “‘Undigested agreement’ does not interest or concern me,” she answered coldly. “Through all the years I spent formulating my philosophical system, I was looking desperately for ‘intelligent agreement’ or at least for ‘intelligent disagreement.’ I found neither. … What I am looking for [now] is ‘intelligent agreement.’ “If she didn’t find it, she could go into a rage.