In the midst of unrelenting action, Atlas Shrugged is also an eleven-hundred-page deconstruction of the Marxian proposition “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” The failure of the transportation system, the collectivization of industries, and the resulting economic atavism all broadly reproduce the Russian transition period under Lenin from a primitive capitalism to a brutal Communism in which human energy, far from being a creative force, was no more than “a raw commodity which the state could use to ‘build socialism,’” wrote Orlando Figes. The novel is full of detailed parallels with the Russia of Rand’s youth, including the Communists’ failed attempts to force deposed capitalists to run their old businesses for the benefit of the state. It is surely also the only page-turning critique ever written of the Rooseveltian welfare state, the bureaucratization of the altruistic impulse, and the transformation of America from a culture of self-reliance to one of entitlement.
Midway through the novel, Dagny meets an old hobo who tells her a parable that deftly encapsulates this theme. Dagny is on a Taggart train, rushing west to find a talented young scientist before he, too, disappears—only to be stranded in the Kansas prairie when the train’s crew bolts in the night, in defiance of a new law forbidding any worker to leave his job. The hobo is dressed in rags not because he doesn’t want to work, he assures Dagny. For twenty years, he held a job as a skilled lathe operator at the very same Twentieth Century Motor Company where Dagny found the prototype motor. Dagny is startled but says, “Go on.” About twelve years earlier, he says, Jed Starnes, the founder of the company, died, leaving the business to his three rich, idle children. The Starnes heirs had noble ideals, or so they announced to an assembly of the company’s six thousand employees when they took over. “We’re all one big family,” they said. On a mass vote, the employees adopted the Starneses’ progressive plan, in which work would be assigned according to ability and rewards would be doled out based not on merit but on need. Within a year, previously productive employees suddenly developed incapacitating needs—they had crippling accidents, became alcoholics, gave birth to broods of hungry children. As the needy segment grew, the active workforce shrank, quality dropped off, and customers went elsewhere. The industrious ones who did their jobs were expected to work long hours for less money. Usually, they either hid their ability or quit. Workers spied on one another to make sure that no one was working more slowly or less effectively than they and destroyed equipment out of laziness or malice. Within four years, the company was bankrupt. One man had foreseen the evil of this system from the start—a tall, copper-haired engineer who kept to himself and was known only by name. After the vote, he had stood and said, “I will put an end to this once and for all. I will stop the motor of the world,” and strode out of the factory and disappeared. The Starnes heirs and the employees never saw or heard from him again. But after the company failed and thousands of other businesses also began to close their doors, the hobo often wondered if the engineer had exercised some awesome kind of retributory power. He took to asking people about the man, whose name was John Galt, and now he wonders if he might be responsible for initiating that apparently meaningless question, “Who is John Galt?” Dagny, electrified by this new information, begins to understand the concept that the author calls “the sanction of the victim.” If capable people would only reject the second-handers’ calls to altruism and refuse to cooperate, the looters and moochers, the expropriators, and the “needy” would all perish.
Dagny hires a private plane to resume her journey west. Near Colorado, she spots another plane carrying the gifted young scientist she seeks. She follows and crash-lands in a camouflaged mountain refuge reminiscent of The Mysterious Valley. This is Galt’s Gulch, where the great titans of the era have been hiding. Here reside the preeminent industrialists, financiers, builders, jurists, scientists, composers, and artists who have vanished over the previous twelve years. They are hard at work at their trades, constructing a capitalist utopia and using a reconstructed version of the Twentieth Century Motor Company’s revolutionary engine to power their endeavors.
Dagny wakes from the crash in John Galt’s arms. He is the inventor of the engine and the organizer of the titans’ strike. The strikers—including Francisco d’Anconia, whom Dagny now spots—intend to prove that minds, not muscles, are the source of all prosperity. Their plan is to bring down the collectivist system by means of its own inherent weakness: its members’ inability to think clearly enough to produce what they need to survive. Dagny gazes at Galt’s features and, like Kira meeting Leo, sees the image of her ideal man. “This [Galt’s face] was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen,” Rand wrote. But Dagny cannot stay in paradise. She will not stand by while the nation self-destructs in an orgy of altruism and decay, as Rand put it in her journals, or let go of her beloved railroad.
At this point, Atlas Shrugged veers ever more sharply toward the utterly implausible, and with the appearance of the protonuclear device designed by Galt’s evil former physics professor, Dr. Robert Stadler, and delivered into the hands of the government, it borders on science fiction. As an apocalypse approaches, John Galt commandeers the radio airwaves from his hidden mountain valley and delivers a sixty-page speech to the battered nation, anatomizing the evils of the welfare state and prophesying the victory of Rand’s now-mature philosophy of individualism, freedom, rationality, and capitalism. The speech is popular among the frightened masses. The looters and moochers decide to find John Galt and make him economic czar. But the ideal man has no desire for power; and he has a surprise in store for the enemies of freedom.
With a railroad map above her desk and a furnace foreman’s manual for steelmaking by her side, Rand wrote hundreds of pages of preliminary notes for Atlas Shrugged in the spring and summer of 1946. She started with a statement of the novel’s theme as she and O’Connor had discussed it two years earlier: the mind on strike. She was setting out, she wrote, to show the world how badly it needed its creators and producers and how it mocked and martyred them at its peril. At this stage, she didn’t foresee Galt’s long speech or the painstaking work of giving a formal structure to her free-market philosophy. She thought the message of the novel would echo that of The Fountainhead, except that, instead of demonstrating individualism within a man’s soul, it would dramatize the importance of individualism within the sweeping social, political, and moral realms of what was basically a panoramic nineteenth-century novel.
In this initial stage of note making, before the plot and characters were fully formed, she was imagining her heroes and villains as new variations on earlier characters or as aspects of her acquaintances and friends. John Galt, like Howard Roark, had always been in her mind, she said. She was basing Dagny Taggart largely on her own temperament but endowing the railroad heiress with more physical skill and courage. Dagny’s “hunger for her own kind of world,” like Rand’s, she noted, is why “she works so fiercely. … She knows she can have her world only by creating it.” As for the strikers, she developed their traits by analyzing the people closest to her. Her husband was the sort of finely tuned man who simply stops functioning, or functions only minimally in an occupation not his own, when forced to live in a morally corrupt society, she noted; the nondescript blue-collar jobs that many of the heroes regularly work at while on strike from their real professions are based on this view of O’Connor and his working life. Of Walter Abbott, her young playwright protégé, whom she would later remember as a ne’er-do-well, she now wrote, “[He is] the sensitive, poetic kind of writer who spends his time writing bloody thrillers” for the movies. “He thinks this is all he has a chance at. That is his form of being on strike.” (No particular character in Atlas Shrugged seems to have been modeled after him.) She cast a cooler eye on the attributes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Isabel Paterson. Although she continued to view Wright as “a Roark” in his work, she thought his “desire to be a ‘god’” among the lesser mortals who surrounded him undercut his
integrity and placed him squarely in the camp of the new novel’s parasites. Paterson’s mistake was of a different kind. Loving justice and finding it nowhere, Rand observed, the older woman had given up all hope of living in a rational world or of gaining any valid recognition for herself. As a result, Rand wrote in a passage that would have been breathtaking had she written it about herself, “She knows that she cannot reach her enemies, the irrational ones, by her proper weapon, the mind; so she turns upon her friends, wreaking upon them the very thing she should hate, the thing which has hurt her—the irrational.” (Interestingly, Galt, too, will battle his friends and allies, such as Dagny, by targeting the producers who continue to work and benefit the looters.) While contemplating the attributes she had in common with John Galt, she wrote, “I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being.”
She was also going out and entertaining. During her two and a half years in Hollywood, she had collected a sizable group of politically conservative friends. They were interested in her evolving ideas about capitalism and government and offered help in promoting her ideas and her work. One of these friends was Leonard Read, who headed the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce until 1945, when he left to manage the National Industrial Conference Board in New York City. Shortly after Rand’s arrival, in the winter of 1944, he had given a dinner party in her honor, introducing her to a dozen prominent West Coast businessmen who, by the evening’s end, were favorably impressed with her originality and fervor. One evening in the spring of 1946, while Read was visiting Los Angeles from New York, he and William Mullendore, one of the dozen businessmen, dined at the ranch. A former special assistant for commerce to President Herbert Hoover, Mullendore presided over the Southern California Edison electric company and was highly regarded among free-market champions as a brilliant and accomplished speaker. The two men and their hostess were enjoying a rousing conversation about economic liberty, Read recalled, when Mullendore announced that he wanted to write a book about how a 100 percent collectivist society would, in practice, make most ordinary economic activity impossible. Rand responded, “I have written such a book. It is called Anthem. It was written in 1937. It was published in England” but not in the United States. Surprised to hear of a book by Rand he hadn’t read, Read told her that he had recently founded a tiny publishing company, called Pamphleteers, Inc., whose purpose was to print and distribute libertarian monographs. It had already issued one by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and one by Isabel Paterson’s friend Rose Wilder Lane. He and Rand agreed that Pamphleteers, Inc., would publish Anthem as its first, and only, venture into fiction. The resulting ninety-eight-page booklet appeared in July 1946 and sold for a dollar a copy; ironically, it had as one of its distributors a one-man organization called the Pro-American Information Bureau, described by the liberal newspaper PM as the U.S. purveyor of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols was a famous, forged document purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. It had been written by an anti-Semitic Russian secret policeman at about the time of Ayn Rand’s birth. Of course, Rand and Read didn’t know this.
Rand reworked the original 1938 British edition for American publication, and her revisions became standard in all subsequent editions. Although they weren’t as self-conscious or as radical as those she would make for the 1959 republication of We the Living, they were extensive and revealing. To simplify and streamline the narrative language, she lessened her hero Equality 7–2521’s reliance on biblical turns of phrase and echoes of Nietzsche’s stern poetry of contrasts. The nineteenth-century German philosopher remains a forceful presence in the fable, however. “What can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under,” Nietzsche’s hero Zarathustra says to an assembled crowd in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Man is a rope between beast and [Superman].” “We shall go down,” Equality 7–2521 announces to his friend International 4–8818 when they come upon an underground tunnel, the contents of which eventually lead him to reinvent electric light. Rand’s symbolism is her tribute to Zarathustra.
Although by this time everyone acknowledged that “Ayn Rand is a phenomenon in literature,” as Rose Wilder Lane put it in a review of the reissued Anthem in the Economic Council Review of Books, the lyrical novella padded very quietly into the literary marketplace. Two or three additional reviews appeared in small publications, such as the Columbia Missourian, but the individualist parable did not become a popular success until a commercial publisher released a paperback edition in 1961. Still, Rand was fond of this short work, which she considered the parent of The Fountainhead. She mailed gift copies to Cecil B. DeMille, to The New York Times reviewer Lorine Pruette, to her Boss, Hal Wallis, to Henry Blanke at Warner Bros., to Walt Disney, and to Barbara Stanwyck, who continued to campaign for the part of Dominique. She also sent Stanwyck a copy of her 1932 script Red Pawn, hoping that the star of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers would see a role for herself in Joan, the story’s American wife and mistress, and that Wallis would produce it. Stanwyck wasn’t interested, and Wallis turned it down.
Rand remained an active opponent of Communist sympathizers wherever she went, particularly in postwar Hollywood. Along with her friends Sam Wood, John Ford, Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers, the producer James McGuinness, King Vidor (the future director of The Fountainhead), Walt Disney, and Morrie Ryskind, she helped create an organized opposition to left-leaning craft guilds and unions such as the Conference of Studio Unions and the Screen Writers Guild. With the rumored silent backing of Louis B. Mayer, these “campaigners for freedom” set up the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, or MPA, whose mission it was to push back “the rising tide” of Communism in movies and promote the American way of life. Members met weekly at MGM Studios, and MGM executive Robert Vogel remembered that Rand attended almost every meeting.
Rand sat on the MPA executive board, and in 1946 she contributed a series of short articles to the organization’s newsletter, The Vigil. Each was framed as an answer to a civics question. “What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?” she asked rhetorically (individualism versus collectivism, she answered) and “What Is the Proper Function of Government?” (to protect individual rights against encroachments by other individuals and groups. It must never initiate the use of force but may use force in response to attacks from violent criminals or foreign powers). These little lessons served as a crash course in libertarian political thought for uninitiated members of the MPA and, later, as a rough foundation for some of her post-Atlas nonfiction. She may have attended a few free-for-all evening sessions in which MPA stalwarts debated with leaders of liberal Hollywood groups and which usually ended in shouting matches and “smears” (a favorite word of the time) in the next day’s trade papers. “Reds!” exclaimed the MPA. “Fascist anti-Semites!” returned the Screen Writers Guild, using 1940s code for anti-Communists. Unintended slapstick notwithstanding, the depth of animosity, fear, and bad faith that existed between Left and Right during this period is hard to capture. At one point, Rand suspected her own treasured literary agent, Alan Collins, of acting on behalf of the “Communist spark-plugs planted around [Hollywood and New York],” whose assignment it was to recruit and use “literary agents and publishers … as stooges.” Her suspicions were somehow allayed, because Collins and his associate, Perry Knowlton, remained her New York agents until her death. According to Robert Vogel, “we were all seeing ghosts, no question about it.”
In the fall of 1946, the political friction intensified. The crime novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, got a brainstorm for an “American Authors Authority” that would own, license, and tax all literary copyrights belonging to members of the Screen Writers Guild, the Authors Guild, and other writers’ unions. Because the guilds were immensely powerful and could influence producers and publishers to buy or not buy authors’ works, Rand and her conservative colleagues saw this as a naked ploy
to loot every American writer of his ownership rights and impose a Communist monopoly over the nation’s literary output. Side by side with the unlikely trio of John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and Dorothy Thompson, Rand and her fellow MPA members formed the American Writers Association to fight the Authors Authority and the guilds. At the invitation of the New York newspaper columnist Benjamin Stolberg, she joined the board of the new organization, too. Meanwhile, Albert Mannheimer, who sat on the Screen Writers Guild committee that had proposed the plan, fought it from within, while left-wing committee members tried to “chop his head off.” He and Rand gossiped about Hollywood’s fractious politics on weekends, when they weren’t talking about his plays or her progress on Atlas Shrugged.
At the same time, the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) announced its intention to investigate Communist infiltration of the movie industry. The committee—led by its publicity-seeking chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, who was assisted by Representative Richard M. Nixon of California and the volubly anti-Semitic Representative John Rankin of Mississippi—planned to descend on Hollywood in the spring of 1947, to gather information for public hearings scheduled for the following October in Washington, D.C. The MPA went into action. That winter, Rand and the executive board met as often as three times a week, selecting emissaries and discussing tactics for the spring preliminary hearings. As Rand’s special contribution, she composed the “Screen Guide for Americans,” addressed to movie producers and executives who wanted to avoid the appearance of left-wing influence. She warned them not to “smear” success, the profit motive, or wealth, and not to “glorify” the common man. “Don’t spit into your own face,” she added, “or, worse, pay miserable little [Communist screenwriter] rats to do it.” As for Communists’ right to free speech, she argued, rather persuasively, that the principle of free speech requires “that we do not [pass laws or] use a police force to forbid the Communists the expression of their ideas.” It did not require privately owned and operated movie studios to offer jobs to Communist writers or give them the means to “advocate our own destruction at our own expense.” This sensible distinction lost its sharp edge when, some months later, she publicly testified before HUAC to help police what she believed to be Communist content in some films.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 26