Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  The Bobbs-Merrill Company commissioned “To the Readers of The Fountainhead” in the fall of 1945, when the novel was again climbing the best-seller lists. It was mailed to thousands of fans who continued to write to the author, care of the publisher, with questions concerning her background and the character of her hero. It communicated as much about her self-concept as about her life. “When I am asked about myself,” she wrote, “I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark, ‘Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends, or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.’” Except by searching in old newspapers, readers could not know that she was born outside the United States, let alone in Russia; most never learned that she was Jewish, a background she did not bestow on any of her scores of characters. “I have no hobbies,” she continued. “I have few friends. I do not like to go out.” When she declared that twelve publishers had rejected The Fountainhead before Bobbs-Merrill had agreed to publish it, her tone contained a note of pride at being a triumphant outsider. She included Knopf in her count, although it hadn’t rejected the book so much as refused to extend her deadline for a second time. She also included two or three publishing houses that had seen only an early, incomplete outline, not the text, and she didn’t mention that her first publisher, Macmillan, had offered her an advance that she turned down. Her disciples would accept and repeat the story of The Fountainhead’s twelve rejections hundreds of times over the years, both as a symbol of the hardships she had endured at the hands of timid or imperceptive editors and as an implicit compliment to her independent-minded readers. Likewise, they would cite the struggles she listed here: working as a waitress, an office clerk, and a reader for film companies before she could earn her living as a writer. In a rational world, she seemed to say, she would have been spared such experiences. Perhaps she felt this more deeply because some of the menial jobs she held would have been unthinkable in the world of her childhood. In any case, she was not of the view that these experiences had helped her with her writing or the development of her ideas. She was not writing about the folks next door, in offices and diners. “I am interested in men only as they reflect philosophical principles,” she declared, and “in philosophical principles only as they affect the actual existence of men.” Later, in discussions of The Fountainhead and her other novels, she memorably amplified this point. “An abstract theory that has no relation to reality is worse than nonsense; and men who act without relation to principles are worse than animals. Those who say that theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.”

  “Do not underestimate the admirers of The Fountainhead,” she warned Warner Bros. producer Henry Blanke in December 1945. “[They are] becoming a kind of cult.” This was true, although she would later angrily reject the use of “cult” when it was used to describe the political and cultural movement that grew up around her in the 1960s. Although the movie was still on hold, the book’s success was attracting other keen-eyed marketers. In early 1944, a digest-sized magazine called Omnibook had condensed the novel and offered it for sale to members of the armed forces. A year later, the popular book club the Literary Guild issued its own edition as a dividend book, or bonus, to its members. Most surprisingly, beginning on Christmas Eve in 1945, the comic-strip giant King Features began syndicating a handsomely illustrated, condensed, serialized version of the novel in Hearst-owned newspapers across the country. Rand had been upset about the Omnibook publication, because Bobbs-Merrill had sold the rights without a guarantee that she could read the shortened text beforehand. This time, she read and approved every sentence of the King Features condensation and endorsed, and adored, the hand-drawn, Art Deco—style illustrations. “The artist has done a wonderful job of making Roark look like Frank,” she wrote to niece Mimi. In fact, the artist had done a wonderful job of making Roark look like Cyrus in The Mysterious Valley, right down to the rolled-up sleeves and the lock of hair that fell over his forehead. Amusingly, in one drawing Dominique is a passable replica of Rand, except that she is taller and wears shoulder-length, 1940s-style blond hair. The serial ran weekly through midsummer 1946.

  Just as the serial was starting, Rand left the relative isolation of the San Fernando Valley ranch and returned to work at Hal Wallis Productions, on the Paramount lot. She found the atmosphere dramatically changed. The war was over. The larger-than-life Franklin D. Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The previous August, Harry Truman, the new president, had ordered American planes to use the world’s first two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing a Japanese surrender but also killing tens (and eventually hundreds) of thousands of civilians and setting off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. The Cold War had begun. In Hollywood, most wartime rationing had ended and a postwar boom was under way, but exhilaration was mixed with a new anxiety. Most Americans had never imagined the existence of such a destructive weapon as the atomic bomb until it was exploded. As Time magazine put it, Americans were proud that their resourceful scientists had been able to coax tiny atoms to reveal their mighty secrets. But they were also frightened—by the power of the new weaponry, by the magnitude of the damage to Japan, and by the prospect that the Soviet Union might develop its own bomb and deploy it against the United States. Still, theoretical physicists such as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Enrico Fermi, whose work had helped create the bomb, became new American heroes.

  In this respect, popular opinion caught up with Rand, who from adolescence had loved the luminous rationality of science, engineering, and technological invention. For a few days, Wallis assigned her to a silly gangster movie called I Walk Alone. In early January 1946, however, he asked her to plan and write an original screenplay documenting the development of the atomic bomb. The assignment, coming barely five months after the war had ended, was a vote of confidence from Wallis, a challenge, and, as she saw it, a unique opportunity to communicate the virtues of the American way of life. To her, the fabrication of the bomb stood for man’s greatness and his salvation, as she put it in a memo to Wallis, primarily because it had been created, and could only be created, by rational, free men living in a free society. Nazi Germany had tried and failed to build a bomb, she reminded Wallis. Even the toughest tyrant can’t coerce a mind to work. That’s why, in a fair fight between dictatorship and freedom, freedom will always win. This was the message she wanted the movie to deliver.

  The lengthy memo, written on the very day she accepted the assignment, is remarkable for revealing layers of meaning within a categorically new event. Always quick to discover large, original themes among steel girders and diaphanous evening gowns, she pitted liberty against tyranny as the core principle at stake in any discussion of the weapon. The memo also suggests an apparent, and potentially disturbing, disregard of the suffering brought on by the deployment of the bomb. No doubt, use of the weapon saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and possibly as many Japanese lives, by making unnecessary an American land invasion. But this was not Rand’s point, and the theme she chose to illustrate took no account of ordinary civilians, even in this real-life calamity. To Wallis, she joked that “if there is a God, He” might have planned the successful development of the bomb as proof of the superiority of American capitalism. Urging Wallis to adopt her approach, she wrote, “The responsibility of making [this] picture [with the proper moral lesson] is greater than that of knowing the secret of the atomic bomb.”

  One wonders: Did she really mean that framing an idea is more important than possessing the power of life and death over an entire population? There is nothing in her work to suggest she didn’t. Three months earlier, she had answered a confused fan by noting, “If there is such a thing as an average man, who cares about him or why should anyone care? What I am interested in is the great and the exceptional.” At times, the unexceptional simply wasn’t real to her. Perhaps the first half of her famous formulation—her interest in men as they reflect philosophical principles—meant mo
re to her than the second half, her interest in principles as they affect the lives of men.

  She set to work immediately. She scheduled interviews with General Leslie Groves, the army’s senior commander at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bomb was built, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former scientific director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, who had returned to his teaching post at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She visited Dr. Oppenheimer twice, winning his cooperation and goodwill through her respect for his scientific achievement. He endorsed her interpretation of Germany’s failure to produce a bomb and told her, thrillingly, that the ethos at Los Alamos precluded giving or taking official orders. In other words, the device was created by free men and free minds. She found Oppenheimer enormously intelligent and fascinating but also slightly bitter and apparently tormented by moral doubts. He certainly became bitter: Within a few years federal agencies, angered by his public opposition to the American-Soviet nuclear arms race, would accuse him of having been a Communist and strip him of his security clearance. Perhaps because of his political liberalism, otherworldly air, and battered pride, she made him her primary model for the character of Dr. Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged, a vain, weak, and progressively evil-minded physicist. She even borrowed the details of his office to use for that of Stadler.

  The story she was outlining for Top Secret, as the film was called, became a rehearsal for Atlas Shrugged in other ways as well. She introduced into the film script a purely fictional character named John X., a young soldier she invented as a guard for Dr. Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. John X., influenced by his fictional father’s Depression-era defeatism and his teachers’ unseemly moral relativism—a growing complaint of Rand’s about postwar culture—is resigned to a world without heroism or meaning. While witnessing the accomplishments of Oppenheimer, however, he gains perspective and courage—just as a tragicomic character called “the Wet Nurse” will gain courage in Atlas Shrugged. At the end of the script, John X. enunciates the movie’s message: “Man can harness the universe, but nobody can harness man.” The unhappy fate in store for a society that dares to try to harness man was to be magnificently elucidated in Atlas Shrugged.

  Like the Tchaikovsky movie, Top Secret was never produced. In March 1946, after she had completed her outline and written about a third of the shooting script, Wallis sold the rights to MGM, which was on the verge of filming its own movie about the bomb and wanted to quash a competing project. She was furious, not only because Wallis sent a secretary to give her the bad news but also because she figured out that he must have begun the project with a sale in mind. She wrote a second memo to the Boss, suggesting a moral (as opposed to a legal) agreement between them. From now on, she wanted greater up-front control in choosing her assignments and greater say-so in executing them. And she wanted Wallis to phone her directly, not through a functionary, if he thought she was behaving badly, unreasonably, or arrogantly. Whatever the reply was, she left the studio a week later. Although her contract called for her to work until the end of June, she signed off on March 25 and didn’t return until late September.

  During her six-month leave at the ranch, she made her first extensive notes for the characters and plot of her fourth novel, her magnum opus, and drafted its first chapter.

  Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s tour de force in support of American capitalism, has been described as a literary masterpiece, a philosophical detective story, and a prolonged tantrum against Neoplatonism, Christian brotherhood, and government regulation. It tells the story of a group of industrial titans who go on strike against an anticapitalist and increasingly totalitarian society. The time is a hazy version of the 1930s, and the mood is apocalyptic. The government, and the nation, are sliding toward collectivism. Industrialists are publicly derided as selfish fiends who grow rich off the labor of the poor. Washington bureaucrats manipulate industries by fiat and have begun to appropriate the capitalists’ products and profits—always “for the good of the people.” As the novel opens, the nation’s industrial titans have been vanishing slowly for twelve years. Now the pace of their disappearances is picking up. No one knows where they are going, or why. They are abandoning their mines, banks, and factories, which cannot go on functioning without their leadership and brains. As a result, industrial America is shutting down, and the nation is running short of coal, oil, steel, manufactured goods, electricity, and transportation. People seem eerily resigned to the economic collapse all this forebodes. As an expression of hopelessness, people ask one another, with a shrug, “Who is John Galt?” Where the question came from and what it means are a matter of indifference to those who ask it.

  Amid the impending crisis, the novel’s high-spirited heroine, Dagny Taggart, strives to save her family’s great ancestral railroad, the New York—based Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. She is the vice-president of operations; her peevish, whining older brother James Taggart is nominally the president. While Dagny tries to keep thousands of miles of railroad track repaired with pieces of scrap metal and stretches the capacity of years-old diesel engines, James ingratiates himself with a clique of high-powered Washington officials, who bestow favors in return. He is a kind of inverse rendering of Peter Keating: having been born to money and position, he attempts to acquire self-esteem by giving them away. He hates and envies his competent younger sister but secretly depends on her to safeguard enough of their inheritance so that he has something left to trade among the “aristocracy of pull.”

  “The social welfare” is the motto behind which the bureaucrats and lobbyists grab for privilege and power. Under this banner, and as a diplomatic favor, James arranges for the railroad to build a spur into a barren stretch of the socialist state of Mexico. This proves financially disastrous. As a countermeasure, Dagny announces plans for her own new spur line, which she sardonically names the “John Galt Line,” to run through the nation’s last stronghold of free enterprise, the booming state of Colorado. Raw materials being impossible to come by, she calls on her colleague, a tough, self-made steel magnate named Hank Rearden, to sell her large quantities of his new invention, Rearden Metal, so that she can build the track. Rearden Metal is a superhard alloy that the “looters and moochers” in Washington (Rand’s unforgettable phrase) have been trying to impound on behalf of a government-backed steel cartel that hasn’t produced anything in years.

  Dagny and Rearden miraculously complete the John Galt Line in record time. Hurtling through the Rocky Mountains on the line’s first run, with Dagny at the throttle and her friend Rearden beside her, and with crowds of Coloradoans cheering at each stop, the two trailblazers realize that their admiration for each other has turned to molten desire. This sets the stage for another of Rand’s power-driven sex scenes. Having completed their run, the two are gazing at a field of oil derricks from a balcony in the Colorado moonlight when Rearden first embraces her. The embrace is “like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body,” Rand writes. Yet Dagny is conscious of surrendering something of far greater import than her body. Leading her into his guest room, Rearden throws her on the bed while she thinks, “Whatever pride of person I hold … that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body.” Rearden, married to a monstrously cold and delightfully spiteful villainess named Lillian, at first despises both Dagny and himself for their animal lust. Gradually, he comes to understand the philosophical necessity of their sexual appetite for each other. This is especially true after Francisco d’Anconia, a courtly South American copper-mining heir who was once Dagny’s friend but now presents himself in the guise of a debauched international playboy, incongruously explains that sexual desire in a rational man is an expression of his highest values. Soon Rearden learns that years before, Francisco was also Dagny’s lover. But Rand makes it clear that neither man is Dagny’s ideal man.

  Among its many strengths, Atlas Shrugged is a uniquely intricate thriller, with a dozen hair-raising, idea-driven subplots radiating from the main story lin
e, reinforcing its characters and themes. Dagny and Rearden, two of the last titans remaining at the helm of their businesses, play the part of the novel’s philosophical detectives. Why does the stately, omnitalented Francisco, the chosen son of a proud aristocratic family, boast of being a dissolute playboy and yet speak like a sage? Why are “the men of the mind,” as Francisco calls his fellow industrialists, disappearing? Who is the copper-haired stranger seen talking solemnly to each of the titans before he disappears? And what is going wrong with the world? In order to find out, the pair of heroes—like the brainy French anthropologist in The Mysterious Valley—must reconcile contradictory information at every step. About his own seemingly divided identity, Francisco says to Dagny, “I’ll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of [your premises] is wrong.”

  The John Galt Line proves a commercial success, and Dagny and Rearden celebrate with a cross-country driving vacation. But the national landscape is not a pleasant sight. It has lapsed into a series of barren farms and desiccated towns, some of which have reverted to barter, recalling Russia in 1920 and 1921. The two stop to investigate a ruined factory called the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Amid the rubble they find discarded pieces of the prototype of a revolutionary motor designed to convert static electricity into usable power. Dagny is enthralled and also horrified: This pioneering motor could theoretically produce an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy to fuel the next generation of innovation. Who invented it? Why did he leave it here, in pieces?

  When Dagny and Rearden return to New York, collectivist Washington is busy wresting the John Galt Line from Dagny by means of an “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog” directive that prohibits “vicious competition” among railroads; the profitable line gives Dagny too much independent power. Once the line is closed, all that’s left in the region is an old, broken-down railroad, and it stops running. Without transport, the new industries founder. Their leaders, too, begin to disappear. That’s when Dagny decides to pursue the mystery of the vanishing titans, find the inventor of the motor, and discover why “the motor of the world” is poised to stop.