Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  It is debatable what influence the New Deal’s economic policies had on any trend toward socialism in America; they may have helped to save capitalism from its hungry dependents, its doubters, and its organized adversaries by compromising with a mild form of collectivism. (Rand apparently never considered that one of Roosevelt’s accomplishments may have been to stave off a Russian-style insurrection.) Still, the intrepid president was so deeply, if narrowly, hated that country-club Republicans swore he possessed every vice from Stalinism to syphilis (rumored to have been transmitted to him by the first lady, who got it “from a Negro”).

  When he ran for a third term, those who believed in minimal government and laissez-faire capitalism saw totalitarianism in the making. If he were to win, Rand and others believed, there might never be another federal election. America might turn to dictatorship, a notion that was not as fanciful then as it seems now, given that Hitler and Mussolini had risen to power through popular movements and were overrunning the free nations of Europe. By the summer of 1940, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, allies for the moment, had already invaded France, Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. As Rand knew, the next target was England, which was already being bombed by the Luftwaffe; Londoners were donning gas masks “against the worst madman the world has known,” Lady Boileau wrote to her. Rand’s childhood heroine, the little English girl who gunned down the German navy, was needed once again; although, since much of Europe had by now embraced a diluted form of socialism and because war always enhances governmental powers, Rand and other right-wingers also opposed the entry of the United States into the European conflict. They preferred to let Hitler march unimpeded into Russia and then enter the war against whichever dictator was left standing.

  Wendell Willkie was not against American participation in the war, but he was an outspoken, clean-cut, and popular defender of business interests against the New Deal. An electric-utility holding-company president raised in Elwood, Indiana, he was a self-made businessman who inspired hope in the anti-Roosevelt forces. They especially admired his stirring speeches on the rights of property owners and the importance of industrial freedom to the continued prosperity of the country. Against Roosevelt’s chilling declaration that “the old reliance on the free action of individual wills” was a relic of the past, he insisted that “only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.” Rand couldn’t have agreed more. She seems not to have taken in his oft-repeated calls “to strike a balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of society.”

  While Ann Watkins and Blanche Knopf were working out an agreement to nullify her book contract, Rand and O’Connor reported each day to the National Willkie Clubs headquarters on West Fortieth Street, overlooking Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. She told a friend that working as a volunteer there wasn’t a sacrifice but was an act of “pure selfishness,” because she was fighting for her own ideas and the right to express them. At first, she typed while the dutiful O’Connor rang doorbells, but soon she was leading a political-research action team and making speeches. During much of the month of October she campaigned on street corners and in coffee shops; often, she manned the stage of an old, boarded-up East Fourteenth Street movie theater that Gloria Swanson, a fellow conservative, had rented to run Willkie campaign films. Following each of seven shows a day, she and sometimes Swanson spoke out against the New Deal and answered the audience’s questions. “I was a marvelous propagandist,” she later said. By all accounts, she mesmerized her audiences. She was especially good when challenged by hecklers. Once an onlooker shouted, “Who are you to talk about America? You’re a foreigner!” to which she replied, in her raspy Russian accent, “I chose to be an American. What did you do, besides having been born?” She loved the give-and-take, and, as always, excelled at making abstractions understandable and complicated notions simple.

  She met a larger number of interesting men and women during the campaign than she had ever met before, she told a friend, among them important members of the Old Right establishment. Gloria Swanson became a friend and political ally. Through Channing Pollock, an anti-Communist playwright and theater critic whom she met and liked, she got to know Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken’s eccentric friend, whose highly cultivated and unapologetically elitist books and essays had already given her several of the key ideas she was incorporating into The Fountainhead; Frank Chodorov, a staunch proto-libertarian magazine editor; George Sokolsky, a well-known conservative opinion maker and the son of Russian immigrants; John C. Gall, the chief attorney for the National Association of Manufacturers and, later, Big Steel; and the distinguished economist and public lecturer Ruth Alexander, who became Rand’s lifelong friend and once called her (undoubtedly to her delight) “America’s Joan of Arc.” Through their influence, she read Carl Snyder’s Capitalism the Creator: The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society (1940), which set out to prove that free markets were the chief way societies moved from “barbarism and poverty to affluence and culture,” and began to think more deeply about economics.

  When Willkie lost the election in November, Rand experienced “violent” indignation. At first she blamed Willkie. She and her new associates perceived him as having knuckled under to Roosevelt’s liberalism and backpedaled his way to defeat. No doubt they had overestimated his commitment to a program of free-market conservatism. In her disillusionment, she berated him. “Willkie was the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt, who was only a creature of his time,” she said, with a contrariness that would mark her developing public style.

  Coming as it did on top of other serious setbacks, the Willkie loss proved a subtle turning point in her life. In the previous four years, after many early signs of success, her disappointments had mounted. She and Watkins had not succeeded in finding a producer for Ideal or an American publisher for Anthem. We the Living was out of print. The Unconquered, her first novel’s unsightly stepsister, had gone from hoped-for moneymaker to critical fiasco and professional embarrassment. Her advanceless book contract had been canceled. All the while her subliminal awareness of her own, if not her husband’s, slight restlessness in marriage was increasing. The years 1940 and 1941 ushered in a permanently more severe, less open Rand. The adherent of reason acquired a habit of turning weak or irresolute allies into enemies and doing so unflinchingly, with Russian flair.

  For the time being, however, she thought of her fellow former Willkie supporters as men and women of strong convictions. She and others formed the Associated Ex—Willkie Workers Against Willkie and wrote broadsides and letters to the editor ridiculing the luckless utilities executive and accusing him of aiding the U.S. Communist Party agenda. What the country needed now, before it was too late, she told Channing Pollock, was an organization of conservative intellectuals to frame and promote a full-fledged ideology, or moral justification, of laissez-faire capitalism—to do what Willkie had refused to do. She asked Pollock to be its leader. He agreed. The first few meetings were held in offices around town or in the O’Connors’ most recent apartment, tucked into a slightly scruffy building on East Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue, near where the United Nations headquarters later rose. She and her husband had moved there from the Upper East Side during the campaign, to save money, and the following fall they would move again, this time to a sunless ground-floor apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street near Lexington Avenue. They were down to less than nine hundred dollars of her savings.

  It was within this framework that Ayn Rand met Isabel Paterson, the brainy, quirkily Christian fifty-four-year-old novelist and libertarian chief book-review columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Or, rather, how she remet Paterson, for as soon as the columnist’s name was mentioned as a potential member of the group, Rand remembered having been introduced to her at a literary cocktail party in the spring of 1936, shortly after the publication of We the Living. According to Paterson’s biographer,
Stephen Cox, the older woman didn’t remember the encounter, although soon after it took place she mentioned Rand in her column. Through a publicity handout, she had learned that the émigré author had survived the Russian Revolution and had come away believing that suffering was anything but noble and had no redeeming value. Paterson casually but firmly disagreed. She thought that hardships could be instructive, especially for writers.

  Cox describes Paterson as the literary world’s most outspoken critic of Roosevelt’s policies. Her column of literary and political commentary was widely read, and she was politically well connected. (For example, her boss, the Herald Tribunes stylish books editor Irita Van Doren, was Wendell Willkie’s longtime lover.) When she didn’t respond to a printed invitation, Rand telephoned and made an appointment to see her at the Herald Tribune’s offices on West Forty-first Street. Paterson never joined organizations, she explained. But Rand impressed her. A couple of weeks later, Ann Watkins called to report that the older woman had been asking for Rand’s phone number, and they met again. Rand liked her “enormously.” Before long she was attending Paterson’s regular Monday-night get-togethers in a dingy eleventh-floor cubbyhole at the Tribune, where half a dozen literary and political essayists and pundits, including Time magazine’s Sam Welles and Fortune’s John Chamberlain, typically gathered to proofread the paper’s weekly books section before it went to press. Between sets of proofs, Paterson led discussions on subjects ranging from books and gardening to capitalist economics and the American Articles of Confederation. Participants thought of these sessions as a conservative Round Table, comparing themselves to an earlier group of literary wits led by Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, and Alexander Woollcott that met at the Algonquin Hotel, a few blocks north of the Herald Tribune.

  Rand tended to behave with old-world formality among political and professional acquaintances, but when Paterson invited her to spend a weekend in her rural Ridgefield, Connecticut, country house, without O’Connor, Rand uncharacteristically accepted—remarking later, after the two women had fallen out, that it was rude of Paterson not to have included Frank. Both night owls, they talked nonstop until dawn about philosophy and politics. Paterson had grown up among pioneers in the Canadian West and was widely and deeply acquainted with American history and theories of free-market economics. Her guest was less broadly read, and was fascinated by Paterson’s views. Setting aside a hazy presentiment that Paterson might have a buried mystical streak (after all, who but a religious mystic would argue that suffering had an upside?), she was captivated and exhilarated by the older woman’s explanations of judicial process and the measures the Founding Fathers took to protect minority rights against the will of a potentially tyrannical majority. Paterson had a theory about capitalism, that it operates like an expanding circuit of energy whose generating plant, or dynamo, is the individual who produces what he is best at and trades with other individuals who do the same; money acts as a signaling system that allows people to transmit their desires around the world and expand the circuit. Much of what Rand learned from Paterson would find its way into the essays she was beginning to write, into the last two-thirds of The Fountainhead, and, in the use of energy circuits, motors, and power as metaphors for human action and achievement, into the structural motifs of Atlas Shrugged.

  Rand later remarked that, at her best, Paterson exhibited a magnificent ability to make rapid-fire abstract associations, ferret out philosophical meanings, and, in contrast to almost everybody else, instantly understand what Rand was talking about. She had a “marvelous mind,” Rand said, and Paterson returned the compliment by declaring that her new acquaintance was a genius, a word she rarely used, according to her friend and executor, Muriel Welles Hall. Paterson became Rand’s closest friend since Olga Nabokov had abruptly left St. Petersburg and was her first and only living mentor. On scores of Monday nights, in phone calls, over dinner, and on many subsequent weekends in Connecticut (with O’Connor), Rand “sat at the master’s feet,” as Monday-evening habitué Sam Welles (Muriel’s brother) later recalled. Mimi, on her summer sojourns with Rand and O’Connor in New York, was often present during her aunt’s late-night conversations with Paterson. She recalled that the women would stay up talking until four or five o’clock in the morning. Rand asked the questions and Paterson answered them. It was as if the older woman were Rand’s “guru and teacher,” Mimi said, “and Ayn didn’t do that.”

  Paterson also learned from Rand, although partisans of both women debate what and how much. In one early discussion, they were affably arguing about how far it is possible to extend the ethical limits of Rand’s philosophy of anti-altruism, or selfishness. Paterson asked the younger woman her opinion of a riddle she recalled from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Imagine that you are in a castle tower with a newborn baby in your arms, Paterson proposed, and only one of you can escape alive. Would you save your own life or that of the baby? Rand shocked Paterson into momentary silence by declaring that she would most certainly let the baby die. How could you ethically do that? Paterson demanded. Don’t human beings have a moral obligation to care for the young? No, Rand answered. She held no such view, although she did concede that her analysis might be different if the baby were her own. When Paterson suggested that such an attitude could be considered depraved, Rand declared, Very well, then, I am depraved. For the time being, that ended the discussion. Later, Paterson brought it up again. What would you do if the baby were your own? Reflecting, Rand answered that she still would choose to save herself, on the premise that without an adult to feed and care for it, the baby would die anyway. Aha! replied Paterson, who evidently found this point of logic persuasive. Rand later claimed that by means of such instruction, she converted Paterson from an entrenched secular Christian ethic to a morality of anti-altruism. Paterson thanked Rand for the clarification of parental ethics but insisted that she had always believed in enlightened self-interest, and the preponderance of evidence is on her side.

  If the women loved to debate, they also loved to laugh. They were both entertained by Rand’s occasional malapropisms in her adopted language. Once she lamented “an ungulfable bridge.” Another time she asked, “Will you write my autobiography? I can’t do myself justice.” Paterson adorned her columns with witty drawings of herself and friends or authors and once printed a sketch of Rand dashing across a street, hat ribbons flying, dragging behind her a man who looks a lot like O’Connor. “She is afraid of traffic,” Paterson observed in the adjacent text, “because she was hit by a taxi once; and the way she shows it is to stand a minute at the crossing, viewing the stream of vehicles with alarm, seize the hand of her escort with a gesture of feminine terror, and then march ahead across the street, hauling her protector after her.” Paterson was droll, and a shrewd judge of Rand’s character.

  Oddly, post-Willkie, Rand was getting a lot of writing done, though not on The Fountainhead. She produced three interesting items. In late 1940 or early 1941, she composed a bad-tempered open letter to conservatives who she thought were sitting on their hands and whom she hoped to persuade to join the active campaign she and Pollock were waging. She called it “To All Innocent Fifth Columnists.” If conservatives didn’t take immediate steps to oppose Roosevelt’s war of socialist propaganda and halt his expansion of executive powers, she wrote, they, like Willkie, would be to blame for the coming totalitarian dictatorship of America. “Of such as you is the Kingdom of Hitler and Stalin,” she added. The letter was far too rancorous to be used as a recruiting tool and was put away in a drawer. She also wrote a play, Think Twice. And she composed her first extended work of philosophical nonfiction, “The Individualist Manifesto,” which she drafted as the organization’s in-house mission statement. With it, she wanted to do for free-market capitalism what The Communist Manifesto had done for Communism.

  Rand later said that Think Twice was written in three weeks, during the month of January 1941. An earnest, well-plotted whodunnit of ideas, the play is set in the Connecticut country house
of a world-class “altruist” during a Fourth of July weekend party. His guests, all current beneficiaries of his largesse, hate him for the unacknowledged power he wields over their lives. One of them, hiding in the bushes, shoots and kills him. A local detective arrives to solve the crime. But the culprit, a physicist and business associate of the dead man, has planned a perfect murder: he’s arranged all the evidence to point so obviously to himself that the detective in charge can’t believe he’s really guilty. The physicist’s motive for killing: to stop the altruist from bestowing a potentially earth-destroying invention, a forerunner of Dr. Robert Stadler’s protonuclear device in Atlas Shrugged, as a gift to a world filled with power-maddened dictators. Rand wanted to dramatize the bad intentions and dreadful effects of a second-handed humanitarian such as Roosevelt, but the murdered character also recalls her marginally sadistic mother, the woman who once donated her daughter’s favorite toys to charity. The play renewed her old interest in science fiction. “You may be amused to note how prophetic I was,” she wrote to an acquaintance in 1948. At the time of writing the play, “I had not heard or dreamed of the atom bomb.” Again, the play did not find a publisher or a producer, but it helped the author to refine some of the “altruistic” stratagems that Ellsworth Toohey employs to blackmail and entrap characters such as Peter Keating.