Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Notwithstanding Time’s irreverent report, intermittently, at least, Rand said she enjoyed speaking in front of mixed and liberal audiences. (At other times, she said that she hated speaking and “did it only for the cause.”) She told one large gathering in Boston that in the 1930s she had envied the socialists’ and New Dealers’ ability to argue from principle; the conservatives of the day did nothing but mouth worn-out bromides from an earlier era. “As an advocate of reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism,” she announced, “I seek to address myself to men of the intellect—wherever such may still be found—and I believe that more of them may be found among the former ‘liberals’ than the present ‘conservatives.’” At Princeton, in a lecture called “Conservatism: An Obituary,” she took on the Right directly. Identifying herself not as a conservative but as a “radical for capitalism,” she spoke scornfully of the Buckleyites who, she said, were moral traitors for refusing to admit that free-market capitalism, not God or religion, had caused a century of American progress and prosperity. In November 1960, she was invited back to Yale for a second lecture. She called her speech “For the New Intellectual,” a name that would become the title of her first nonfiction book. This time, Yale thought it was prepared for a large crowd, but nearly twice as many students, professors, and visitors tried to crowd into her lecture as the hall could hold. She addressed an overflow audience in Ferris Booth Hall at Columbia University, which the copy editor Bertha Krantz attended. Krantz later told an interviewer, “That’s when I was struck by the number of students who were—just worshipped her. You could see it.”

  Largely as a result of her speeches, the 1960s solidified her fame as a quixotic, tenacious, theatrically inflammatory social thinker. She traveled the country, lecturing to large, often unruly audiences. She gave major addresses at the University of Michigan, Boston University, Brown, Purdue, Johns Hopkins, West Point, Hunter, Adelphi, Syracuse, Sarah Lawrence, and MIT. In 1961 at the University of Wisconsin, she gave a lecture entitled “The Objectivist Ethics.” “What is morality, or ethics?” she asked the crowd. “It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions,” she answered. Quoting Galt’s speech, she listed Objectivism’s three cardinal values, which together provide the means for human beings to live and thrive independently. These are reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Reason—or more broadly, consciousness—is man’s “only source of knowledge,” she told the audience, but is a matter of free will; people can choose to engage it or turn it off. Purpose is the choice of the kind of happiness a person decides to pursue. And self-esteem is the “inviolate confidence that [a man’s] mind is competent to think and that his person is worthy of happiness.” She listed corresponding virtues, which she explained were behavioral traits needed to achieve a life of independence: rationality (knowing that nothing can alter the facts), productiveness (the means by which thought and work sustain life), and pride (seeking to earn the right to hold oneself as one’s most important value, which she also called “moral ambitiousness”). She defined happiness as the consciousness of having achieved one’s values. As for the pursuit of heedless pleasure, which her critics frequently accused her of promoting, she scoffed at it as a negative value—an unthinking person’s way of finding momentary relief from a chronic state of terror, à la Lillian Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. Other individualistic, entrepreneurial virtues included integrity, justice, and honesty, the last of which she described as the consciousness that “one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner.”

  A few weeks after the Wisconsin speech, she presented the first of eighteen annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, a famous stronghold of free speech on the Northeastern University campus in Boston. The speeches typically began at seven thirty in the evening, but fans who had traveled from around the world to hear her—from as far away as Africa—would line up starting in midmorning (or, as the decade progressed, even the night before) and exchange ideas, news, and gossip all day long. Followers met future spouses, employers, and business associates in line and at postlecture parties. Because, beginning in the mid-1960s, the event took place in April, it became known as “the Objectivist Easter.” Meanwhile, Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on campuses from Harvard and MIT to Stanford. She hosted regular syndicated talk-radio programs on WKCR-FM at Columbia University and on WBAI-FM, New York’s quirky “free speech” station. Some of her university lectures were carried live on the National Educational Radio Network, the forerunner of NPR. In all cases, her cool intelligence and passionate commitment to ideas as a life-and-death matter turned young adversaries into grudging admirers. Throughout the 1960s, students came to jeer but stayed to listen, then bought her books and joined her movement.

  While her underlying message assailed the communitarian spirit that took hold in the 1960s, her specific positions on issues of the day were often classically liberal, as well as farsighted and brave. As an extension of her commitment to individual rights, she consistently championed minority civil rights and equality of opportunity between the sexes (stopping short of the idea of a woman as president, since she believed that every woman should properly worhip a man, or men). Condemning the first use of force in any context, she opposed the Vietnam War long before her contemporaries did. And she spoke plainly and forcefully against state governments’ bans on abortion. “Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved,” she told an audience of fifteen hundred people at the Ford Hall Forum, five years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 and in a state, Massachusetts, in which abortion was then illegal. “An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being,” she declared. When she opposed popular movements, her reasoning was original and often, in its peculiar way, progressive. She condemned the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 as much for its threat and use of force in taking over administration buildings and its attempted subversion of countervailing opinion (that is, free speech) as for its original goal of overturning a prohibition against political organizing on campus. She was always worth hearing.

  Nathaniel Branden at age eighteen, a few months before Rand met him.

  Rand and O’Connor, Chatsworth, 1951.

  O’Connor, Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, and Rand at the Brandens’ wedding in New York, February 1953.

  The Collective at the wedding of Nathaniel Branden’s sister Elayne and Harry Kalberman, April 1955. From left: Joan Mitchell, Alan Greenspan, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Leonard Peikoff, Elayne Kalberman, Harry Kalberman, Rand, O’Connor, and Allan Blumenthal.

  Rand and Branden in the mid-1950s, during the early years of their affair.

  Barbara Branden, late 1960s.

  Publicity photograph for Atlas Shrugged, taken in Bennett Cerf’s Random House office on Madison Avenue, 1957.

  Rand greeting admirers at the National Book Awards ceremony, 1958. That year, Atlas Shrugged was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction.

  Barbara, Nathaniel, Ayn, and Frank at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, 1963.

  Rand, Nathaniel, and Barbara at the 1962 wedding of Larry Scott and Patrecia Gullison. A year or so later, Nathaniel and Patrecia began an affair.

  Standing in front of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, wearing her gold dollar-sign brooch, in 1967.

  Mrs. Rose Greenspan, Gerald Ford, Alan Greenspan, Rand, and Frank after Greenspan was sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1974.

  One of several cartoons of Rand by Edward Sorel, this one from The New Yorker, February 14–21, 2005.

  In New York, 1970s.

  On the balcony overlooking the central hall in Grand Central Terminal, photographed by Theo Westenberger for Look, 1979.

  A recently discovered 1961 portrait by Frank. “Her eyes might say, ‘Come to bed and dominate me,’” wrote Nathaniel Branden when he saw the portrait in 2007. “But of course if you obey her, who is the master of whom?” Speaking of Frank, another acquaintance said, �
��So he knew her after all.”

  In January 1962 Branden persuaded her to launch a four-page monthly bulletin called The Objectivist Newsletter (later, in a digest-sized format, The Objectivist) to spread her message to all those students and others whose curiosity had been aroused by her books and speeches. It was remarkably professional looking, and it published most of her original nonfiction throughout the 1960s. She and Branden incorporated it as a jointly owned business venture outside the NBI umbrella, which was held and controlled by Branden alone. By contractual agreement, they co-wrote and co-edited the publication in equal shares and split the profit; at a minimum, each was required to write one serious article or essay for every issue.

  Rand had never enjoyed expository writing. In the 1940s, she wrote in her journals that such work bored her, primarily because its purpose was not to create a world of her own but to help others to learn. But after thirteen years of shoehorning ideas into the thoughts and speech of characters in dramatic situations, she was finding it difficult to work on a new novel. She wasn’t convinced “that there’s a human race out there and that the struggle is worth it,” she told Branden. Writing for her ideal fiction reader was hard; writing for the newsletter turned out to be surprisingly pleasurable. Compared to constructing a novel, composing essays was child’s play. All she had to focus on were clarity and logic. Thus she entered into a new career as a cultural polemicist, almost against her will; without the pages of the newsletter to fill, she might have written less. Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the social tumult of the late 1960s, she published scores of both cranky and brilliant essays, many suffused with the anti-war, old libertarian spirit of the Isabel Paterson— era American Right: she wrote on the absolute nature of individual rights, on the proper limits of government, on the virtues of capitalism and the evils of economic control by a coercive state. Her often bitter rhetoric notwithstanding, many of these are worth reading decades later, if only for their clarity of language and purity of point of view. In “The Ethics of Emergencies,” for example, she warns against defining national emergencies too broadly or, worse, making them permanent, so that everyone is expected to sacrifice his liberties all the time. In “Man’s Rights,” “The Nature of Government,” “The Anatomy of Compromise,” and “The Roots of War,” she combined her old, defiant dedication to radical individualism with shrewd demonstrations of how to deconstruct political speech and uproot hidden agendas—in other words, how to think one’s way through government propaganda.

  Branden’s essays for the newsletter and its successor publications helped him to refine his core ideas on psychology, especially on the nature of romantic love and self-esteem, which would form the backbone of his future best-selling books. Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, later a member of the Nixon administration and an advisor to Ronald Reagan, occasionally added their views on economic issues, including a defense of the gold standard by Greenspan that, in combination with his lifelong admiration for Rand, came back to haunt him when he was named chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Gerald Ford and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Ronald Reagan. (Nixon had divorced the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, completing a separation begun by FDR.) He never lost his respect for gold. “I have always harbored a nostalgia for the gold standard’s inherent price stability,” he wrote in his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence. Other scholarly young Rand devotees, including Peikoff, Hessen, Reisman, and Barbara Branden, contributed essays on problems in philosophy and history, book reviews, and commentary on current events. There were few or no outside contributors.

  She, her supporters, and The Objectivist Newsletter campaigned for Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964, hopeful that the most conservative candidate since Calvin Coolidge might at last acquire the authority to roll back FDR’s social-welfare legislation. After Willkie, she had never publicly supported a political candidate, but she endorsed Goldwater on a number of occasions, both during the Republican primaries (where he was running against Nelson A. Rockefeller) and in the general election against Lyndon B. Johnson. Inspired by her, two dozen of her friends and admirers formed the New York Young Republican Club to support him and launched a magazine, Persuasion, to explain his anti—New Deal views to voters. “We thought he wasn’t doing a good job of explaining himself,” said Joan Kennedy Taylor, who helped to found the club and magazine. On the night before one famous Goldwater rally in Madison Square Garden, Rand even wrote an unsolicited, reportedly masterful speech for him. “It made his points in his voice, but it was tremendously clear, and even used the concept of God as he would have used it,” said an NBI staff member who typed the speech. On the day before the rally, Barbara took the document to Goldwater’s temporary office at the Garden and handed it to a campaign staffer. Either Goldwater didn’t receive the speech in time to use it, or he preferred his own rhetoric, whose generalities frustrated Rand. The imprecision of his language, Rand thought, made his enemies’ attacks easier. In November, he lost to Johnson, in part because of the infamous “Daisy” television ad, which more than hinted that the outspokenly anti-Communist Arizonan might start a nuclear war with Russia. To the readers of The Objectivist Newsletter Rand wrote, “In former campaigns Republicans [have] been guilty of compromise, evasion, cowardice, ‘me-too-ism.’ Barry Goldwater was not; he had courage, frankness, integrity—and nothing to say.” She compared his public speeches to headlines running above blank newspaper columns. What he needed was what every other conservative politician and every citizen and businessman had always needed: a consistent philosophy.

  More surprising, perhaps, is that Rand, through the activism of some of her closest acolytes, helped to end the military draft that she so hated. Her mid-1960s legal watchdog, Hank Holzer, and his wife and law partner Erika Holzer, along with Robert Hessen, Leonard Peikoff, Martin Anderson, writer David Dawson, and other Young Republican Club members filed legal briefs, wrote plays and essays, and held conferences to raise public opposition to the draft as an infringement of the right to life. Anderson, already a young star in the academic world, joined Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and persuaded him to include a promise to end the draft in his platform. Nixon, a Quaker, agreed. Once elected in the race against Hubert Humphrey, Nixon appointed Anderson to serve on a commission to study an all-volunteer army, and a volunteer army became law in 1973, two years before the American withdrawal from Vietnam. It was the first time the nation had been without a draft since FDR reinstated one in 1940, in preparation for America’s entry into World War II. Rand never wrote about her indirect role in this achievement, but she did endorse Nixon in 1968, partly on the basis of his opposition to the draft.

  Perhaps the purest, least rhetorical, and hardest-hitting public statement of her views appeared in a March 1964 Playboy interview. With Alvin Toffler, who in 1970 would publish Future Shock, asking the questions, the text crackled with maverick intelligence. Explaining her choice of the dollar sign as an emblem in Atlas Shrugged and a trademark decoration on her person, she said, “As the symbol of the currency of a free country, [it] is the symbol of a free mind.” Asked whether she thought of the cross as a symbol of torture, as she had been quoted as saying, she replied, “I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. … That is torture.” Tacitly critiquing Nietzsche, she explained that Objectivist ethics required not only that a man not sacrifice himself to others but also, and equally importantly, that he not sacrifice others to himself. The interview, which, in a departure from usual magazine procedure, Rand was permitted to edit and rewrite, reached two and a half million people, mostly men, and brought countless new readers to her novels and nonfiction.