Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Many enrolled for second and third terms. When they requested additional topics, Branden enlisted Alan Greenspan to give a talk entitled “The Economics of a Free Society,” Barbara to speak on “The Principles of Efficient Thinking,” and Mary Ann Sures and Leonard Peikoff to explore, respectively, art and the history of philosophy up to and including Rand. By popular demand, the maestro herself launched her own private lecture series, on the art of writing romantic-realist fiction, which also began in early 1958. For six months, she gave informal workshops in her apartment, with about a dozen NBI students ranged in chairs around the living room and a table and microphone set up to record her remarks. By all accounts, the talks were fascinating, if self-referential; she depended mainly on examples from her novels to illustrate the correct principles of character creation, narrative description, and unity of plot and theme.

  There were a few disagreeable incidents, two of them involving the wife of her lover. She spent half a session analyzing what she regarded as the overwritten prose and bad plotting of Thomas Wolfe, choosing to critique the very passages that Barbara had praised eight years before. She liked to test her listeners for depth of understanding and, during the final session, called on Nathaniel to read aloud from an anonymous short story, then asked the class for comments. The story was a farcical tale of a small-town reporter who kidnaps the town’s richest girl in order to produce exciting news and make his name; the plot thickens when a local gangster named Pug-Nosed Thompson scoops him and collects the ransom. The story ends when the kidnapped girl refuses to go free until the reporter agrees to marry her. The story was full of 1920s tabloid dialect (“My stars in heaven!” the newspaper’s editor cries, whereupon a reporter shouts, “Hot diggity dog!”). Barbara was first to raise her hand. She said that the story was competently plotted—almost like an Ayn Rand story!—but awkwardly written and without much point. That made for a surprise ending, because Rand had written the story, “Good Copy,” in 1927. Offended by the criticism or by a suggestion of condescension on Barbara’s part, “she began to shout in outrage,” Barbara recalled. “I knew nothing about literature [she said], I knew nothing about writing, and most of all, I knew nothing about her!” The class quickly broke up, but Rand continued shouting at the woman who was by now her closest friend until four o’clock in the morning, when both women were exhausted. “Stop it!” the younger woman cried after one last harangue, and the argument finally ended. Barbara was one of the few people in Rand’s life, including Paterson, Frank, and Branden, who could seriously offend her without risking a permanent break.

  Even as Rand’s moods grew more changeable and dangerous in the months following the publication of Atlas Shrugged, her public emphasis on philosophy—”a philosophy for living on earth,” she called it—attracted new intellectual seekers. One was a journalist, a former staff writer for The New York Times Magazine named Edith Efron, who became intellectually infatuated with the author while researching a New York newspaper interview column that ran beneath the byline of her current boss, Mike Wallace. Soon after, Efron began attending NBI lectures and Rand’s Saturday night salons and set out to enlist one of her colleagues, Al Ramrus, a producer and writer for Wallace’s late-night TV show, The Mike Wallace Interview. Suddenly, recalled Ramrus, Efron started “spouting these strange ideas about the insidious influence of the welfare state” in the office. This surprised him, he said, because she and he had shared a die-hard “nonobservant New York Jewish left-wing” outlook. They clashed with each other until, one evening, she invited him to meet the novelist. The meeting didn’t go well, Ramrus remembered, especially after he remarked that maybe Atlas Shrugged had received “lousy reviews” because she was “a lousy writer.” Two days later, along came a special delivery letter from Efron, notifying him that she, Rand, and other Objectivists wanted nothing more to do with him. Relations with his colleague remained chilly until he actually read Atlas Shrugged and “was hugely impressed” by its magisterial and life-altering message of individualism and achievement. In his second meeting with the author, he was acutely aware of her mental gifts. Fifty years later he remembered the impression she made on him that evening. “Her big, black, glowing, lustrous eyes radiated a tremendous energy, and penetration, and focus, and intensity,” he said. “And they never left you.” With infinite patience and no display of haste or condescension, she teased out buried assumptions in his liberal creed and carefully corrected them. She emanated “universal genius” to a degree he had never before witnessed and never would again. (“The only [other person] who came close,” he said, “was Frank Lloyd Wright.”) Watching such a great and disciplined mind at work “was inspiring and, by example, empowering” to Ramrus. As with so many others, his next two or three meetings with her revolutionized his political outlook. He, too, enrolled in NBI, and both he and Efron joined the circle surrounding Rand.

  At about the same time, Rand received an effusive letter from her former late-night debating partner, Mises student and Circle Bastiat ringleader Murray Rothbard. Rothbard and his friends had obtained early copies of Atlas Shrugged from an airport bookstore where one of them worked and had read the novel straight through, pausing only to call one another and rave about its insurrectionary power. Rothbard had avoided Rand since young George Reisman’s losing argument with her in the summer of 1954; even at that time, he had recognized the inherent pressure toward rigidity in her thinking. Writing to his friend Richard Cornuelle in August 1954, he observed, “Since [Ayn’s followers] all have the same premises, they are all … individual parts in a machine.” As a consequence, he added, in a flight of whimsy that six months afterward became half fact, “there is no reason whatever why Ayn, for example, shouldn’t sleep with Nathan, or Barbara with Frank.” Because her followers all seemed intent on evolving into the same kind of person—replicas of Howard Roark or Dominique—”the case [is] really very good for a complete Stalinist tyranny that plans everybody’s lives,” he concluded, even though he still considered Ayn herself a “wacky” advocate of freedom.

  But he and his friends were so bowled over by Atlas Shrugged that he forgot or set aside his reservations.

  A week before Atlas went on sale, Rothbard sent Rand a four-page, single-spaced letter of stunned praise. “I will start by saying that all of us in the ‘Circle Bastiat’ are convinced … that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written,” he began. “For the first time [in history], you have [depicted] persons and their actions in perfect accordance with principles and their consequences.” Admitting that he had kept his distance from her for the last three years (“the fault is mine … a defect in my own psyche”), he explained that he suffered from depression and had experienced a bout after every long discussion with her. He was convinced that this was due either to the exhausting effort of keeping up with “a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century” or to a subconscious fear that his independence and personality would be swallowed up “by the tremendous power of your own.” Rand accepted his apology and asked to see him, and for a few weeks in early 1958, she, Nathaniel Branden, and the “anarcho-libertarian” Rothbard got along together well.

  By the early 1960s, Branden would have created a well-oiled assembly line that delivered thousands of young men and women to Objectivism every year. But in the late 1950s he was on the lookout for high-value converts such as Efron and Ramrus. Rothbard, age thirty-one, had a Ph.D. in economics and came with his own circle of five or six Bastiat associates, including George Reisman and a bright Queens College undergraduate named Robert Hessen, who later became a business and economic historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Rand and Branden welcomed Rothbard and his friends. But intimations of trouble followed.

  Rothbard’s brief connection with Rand and her circle is a cautionary tale of cult initiation gone awry. Like most New York Rand enthusiasts, he signed up for the NBI lectures. He also entered into a course of psychotherapy with Branden, hoping that Rand�
�s theory of the mind, as interpreted and practiced by her closest advisor, would guide him in overcoming his recurring depression as well as a severe travel phobia that prevented him from taking trains and planes. When he mentioned this, he later noted in a letter, Branden gave him a “ninety-five percent guarantee” that he would be cured of his phobia along with his depression. On the basis of such assurances, he accepted an invitation to speak at an Emory University—sponsored academic symposium scheduled to take place nine months later, in Sea Island, Georgia.

  The novelist’s protégé was still only twenty-seven years old in late 1957, but, as Rand’s followers knew, she considered him to be an established genius in a field she often said she hated to deal with; most psychology was “a sewer” of the irrational, she said, while applauding Branden’s skill in bringing her principles to bear on it. By this she meant that, since emotions stem from ideas, a neurotic person is necessarily a repository of wrong, evasive, or contradictory ideas, which didn’t interest her. If the person wasn’t immoral, however (meaning consciously evading the facts of reality as she saw them), she was confident that Branden could fix what ailed him. When young friends came to her to discuss their problems, she habitually referred them to Branden for either long- or short-term treatment, depending on the nature of their troubles and complaints. Because her suggestions had the force of law, at one time or another “Nathan was everybody’s therapist,” at least within the Collective, his wife later said. Some worked it off, others paid five dollars an hour, Branden’s modest fee.

  Impartial observers, however, might not have been so sure that the NBI chief was qualified to treat emotional disturbances at that time. Although he now had an M.A. in psychology from the education department at NYU, he hadn’t received any professional training, and he didn’t yet have a Ph.D. (He would get one in 1973.) He had applied for but been refused a New York State license to practice therapy on the basis of too few hours of supervised practice; eventually he would obtain certification in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., with privileges to work in New York. In spite of his minimal credentials in the late 1950s, however, his clients took up all of the hours he was willing to devote to therapeutic practice, and those he could not see he passed on to his cousin Allan Blumenthal, a physician, whom he was training in his techniques and who set up a practice largely on that basis.

  At first, Rothbard was pleased to be in therapy with Branden. After a few weeks, however, the sessions began to sour. Branden started to pester him about converting his wife, Joey, a practicing Christian, to atheism and Objectivism, Rothbard recalled, in a much-disputed 1989 magazine memoir called “My Break with Branden and the Rand Cult.” According to him, one evening when he and Joey were visiting Rand, someone suggested that Joey listen to a recording of Branden’s NBI lecture arguing for the nonexistence of God, in Objectivist parlance (since one cannot prove a negative). When she listened but refused to reevaluate her convictions, the pressure on Rothbard intensified. He later reported, perhaps falsely, that Branden urged him to divorce her.

  By the spring of 1958, Objectivist events and activities were multiplying. After Branden’s weekly NBI lecture, a group gathered at a nearby coffee shop and talked about ideas until closing. The discussion that followed Rand’s fiction-writing workshop sometimes lasted into the early morning. Educational events were augmented by gatherings at the Blumenthals’ or Brandens’ apartment, in addition to invitation-only Saturday nights at Rand’s. Everyone lucky enough to be included was expected to attend all or most of these events. (“Why is it you don’t see us more often?” Branden once asked Rothbard—ominously, Rothbard thought.) Yet even during socials, there was very little small talk, which Rand, of course, deplored; typically, she, Nathaniel, or Barbara would lead a discussion of politics, books, music, or current events, while others stretched their necks to listen. (“Those parties were very hierarchical,” recalled one disenchanted NBI student. “They were round-tables of oratory.” “They were absolutely a nightmare,” Barbara later admitted. “They were as far from parties as anything you can imagine.”) As though spontaneously, guests adopted Rand’s opinions, preferences, even gestures. Since she smoked, they smoked. Once, Rand bought a new dining room table, and according to Shelly Reuben, her typist at the time, two admirers who had been in her apartment went out and bought the same table. The musicians in the group pretended to prefer Rachmaninoff—Rand’s favorite Romantic composer, a popular figure in the Russia of her youth—to the tragic, “malevolent” Beethoven and the “pre-musical” (meaning, pre-Romantic) Bach and Mozart. Once she described Brahms as “worthless,” and Leonard Peikoff, a talented pianist who was perhaps Rand’s most reverential follower, rushed to give away his collection of Brahms recordings. When not in his studio painting, Frank sat silently in a corner.

  The naturally unruly Rothbard and his prankish friends found some of this funny, and one night they improvised a skit that made fun of the Collective. With George Reisman playing a chain-smoking, thickly accented Rand, Ralph Raico as a pompous Branden, and young historian Ron Hamowy imitating a beleaguered rank-and-file follower named Tina, they blended reasoned demands for lecture fees by Raico with satirical quotes from Francisco’s money speech in Atlas Shrugged. They taped their hijinks on a reel-to-reel recorder, and when Branden found out about it he demanded the tape. “After all,” Rothbard claimed he said, “you wouldn’t mock God.” The libertarian refused, citing private-property rights and thinking, Who’s God here, buster? You, Rand, or both?

  The beginning of the end of Rothbard’s relationship with Rand came when Branden accused him of plagiarizing John Galt’s speech, as well as key parts of Barbara Branden’s NYU master’s thesis on free will, in a paper he had prepared for the summer 1958 Sea Island symposium. Rothbard gave Branden a copy out of “misplaced good will,” he later wrote, and was, or pretended to be, stunned when Rand’s deputy responded with a six-page list of purloined words, phrases, and concepts. Branden threatened to send a letter to Helmut Schoeck, a well-known scholar and head of the symposium, as well as to initiate legal action, if Rothbard didn’t either retract the paper or credit Rand and Barbara. After an agitated exchange of letters, including one from Rand’s attorney Pincus Berner to Helmut Schoeck, Rothbard was summoned to a full court trial in Rand’s apartment. He refused to appear and was banished in absentia.

  Though overwrought, perhaps, Rand and Branden had a legitimate complaint. The paper, titled “The Mantle of Science,” was infused with concepts and terms peculiar to Rand and Atlas Shrugged and reflected Barbara’s argument, based on Rand’s fallacy of the stolen concept, that a defense of philosophical determinism involves self-contradiction. Either Rothbard was unconscious of the echo (which is unlikely) or was reluctant to own up to the influence of a novelist—a woman novelist, no less, and one who was either ridiculed by or unknown to most university professors. On the other hand, Branden’s allegations were hasty and cold and, when imparted to Schoeck, might easily have ended Rothbard’s academic career. As time went on, real or potential theft of her intellectual property became an increasingly troublesome issue for Rand. In the mid-1960s she retained two attorneys who were also followers, Hank and Erika Holzer, to handle most possible infractions; eventually, Branden himself would become an object of their accusations. In his own defense, Rothbard pointed out that none of the disputed ideas had originated with Rand. Rather than admit guilt, he usefully if spuriously listed external sources from Aristotle to Adam Smith and Nietzsche for each one. In the end, he couldn’t attend the symposium anyway, because Branden’s attempted cure hadn’t helped his travel phobia or his intermittent depression.

  The Rothbard story has many of the earmarks of the emerging Ayn Rand cult. That someone who had seen danger in her habits of thought so early and so clearly should be drawn into her orbit merely proves the strength of her charisma, the countercultural freshness of her ideas, and the power of her literary formula. As she had pointed out to her Republican acquainta
nces in the 1940s, great novels first stir the passions and then engage the mind; Atlas Shrugged did both superlatively. Whether she knew it or not, she was retailing her philosophy of strict rationality through a primal emotional appeal by characters in a fable. For certain kinds of readers who were romantics or especially methodical, bookish logicians or lonely rebels, organized Objectivism provided at least an illusion of freedom, individuality, integrity, and courage and fostered a pleasurable contempt for bureaucratized parental culture—all based on an imagined world that had yielded a resplendent philosophy for living.

  For twenty-five years after the incident, Rothbard ridiculed and satirized Rand and what he called “the Ayn Rand cult” in private and in print. He once compared the group’s hierarchical structure and institutionalized veneration of the founder and leader to the cults of Hitler, Mussolini, Trotsky, and Mao. Naturally, Rand also wholly renounced him. “Prior to our break with him,” Branden wrote in 1989, “both Ayn and I regarded Murray as highly intelligent…. [Afterward] it seemed to me each time she spoke of him she thought him less intelligent than before.” This was her old pattern. She did not, however, disparage or even mention him in public or in print.

  In fact, unlike some later defectors, Rothbard wasn’t seriously injured by his break with Rand. His teacher Ludwig von Mises, Helmut Schoeck, and other conservative thinkers and writers took his side in the plagiarism scandal, perhaps partly because they disliked Rand’s habit of self-promotion and Branden’s heavy-handed tactics on her behalf. But he lost two close friends, George Reisman and Robert Hessen, both also in therapy with Branden. Flushed with the grandeur of Rand’s vision, they sided with their new confederates. In just a few months, Reisman, in particular, had come to worship Branden, describing him to Ralph Raico as “what the best within us [in the Circle Bastiat] started out to be” and explaining that under his care, he had discovered what it felt like to be someone for the first time in his life. He remained loyal to organized Objectivism until well after the author’s death. As for Hessen, who later described his single therapeutic session with Branden as a “hideous” episode of bullying and intimidation, during which he watched Branden pace the room like a panther, he left New York for a year of graduate work in history at Harvard. When he returned, he switched therapists to Branden’s cousin Allan Blumenthal. In the spring of 1959, he also went to work as Rand’s part-time personal secretary. With her permission, while in that position he collected and helped to safeguard archival drafts of her essays. She purged him, too, over a minor disagreement, in 1980.