Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Read online

  GODDESS OF THE MARKET

  GODDESS OF THE MARKET

  Ayn Rand and the American Right

  Jennifer Burns

  OXFORD

  UNIVERSITY PRESS

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  Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burns, Jennifer, 1975–

  Goddess of the market : Ayn Rand and the American Right / Jennifer Burns.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-532487-7

  1. Rand, Ayn. 2. Rand, Ayn—Political and social views.

  3. Rand, Ayn—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Novelists, American—20th

  century—Biography. 5. Women novelists, American—Biography.

  6. Philosophers—United States—Biography.

  7. Political culture—United States—History—20th century.

  8. Right and left (Political science)—History—20th century.

  9. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. I. Title.

  PS 3535.A547Z587 2009

  813’.52—dc22 2009010763

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  TO MY FATHER

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I: THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905 – 1943

  1. From Russia to Roosevelt

  2. Individualists of the World, Unite!

  3. A New Credo of Freedom

  PART II: FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944 – 1957

  4. The Real Root of Evil

  5. A Round Universe

  PART III: WHO IS JOHN GALT? 1957 – 1968

  6. Big Sister Is Watching You

  7. Radicals for Capitalism

  8. Love Is Exception Making

  PART IV: LEGACIES

  9. It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand

  Epilogue: Ayn Rand in American Memory

  Acknowledgments

  Essay on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  GODDESS OF THE MARKET

  Introduction

  HER EYES WERE what everyone noticed first. Dark and widely set, they dominated her plain, square face. Her “glare would wilt a cactus,” declared Newsweek magazine, but to Ayn Rand’s admirers, her eyes projected clairvoyance, insight, profundity. “When she looked into my eyes, she looked into my soul, and I felt she saw me,” remembered one acquaintance. Readers of her books had the same feeling. Rand’s words could penetrate to the core, stirring secret selves and masked dreams. A graduate student in psychology told her, “Your novels have had a profound influence on my life. It was like being reborn. . . . What was really amazing is that I don’t remember ever having read a book from cover to cover. Now, I’m just the opposite. I’m always reading. I can’t seem to get enough knowledge.” Sometimes Rand provoked an adverse reaction. The libertarian theorist Roy Childs was so disturbed by The Fountainhead’s atheism that he burned the book after finishing it. Childs soon reconsidered and became a serious student and vigorous critic of Rand. Her works launched him, as they did so many others, on an intellectual journey that lasted a lifetime.1

  Although Rand celebrated the life of the mind, her harshest critics were intellectuals, members of the social class into which she placed herself. Rand was a favorite target of prominent writers and critics on both the left and the right, drawing fire from Sidney Hook, Whittaker Chambers, Susan Brownmiller, and William F. Buckley Jr. She gave as good as she got, calling her fellow intellectuals “frightened zombies” and “witch doctors.”2 Ideas were the only thing that truly mattered, she believed, both in a person’s life and in the course of history. “What are your premises?” was her favorite opening question when she met someone new.

  Today, more than twenty years after her death, Rand remains shrouded in both controversy and myth. The sales of her books are extraordinary. In 2008 alone combined sales of her novels Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem topped eight hundred thousand, an astonishing figure for books published more than fifty years ago.3 A host of advocacy organizations promote her work, and rumors swirl about a major motion picture based on Atlas Shrugged. The blogosphere hums with acrimonious debate about her novels and philosophy. In many ways, Rand is a more active presence in American culture now than she was during her lifetime.

  Because of this very longevity, Rand has become detached from her historical context. Along with her most avid fans, she saw herself as a genius who transcended time. Like her creation Howard Roark, Rand believed, “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.” She made grandiose claims for Objectivism, her fully integrated philosophical system, telling the journalist Mike Wallace, “If anyone can pick a rational flaw in my philosophy, I will be delighted to acknowledge him and I will learn something from him.” Until then, Rand asserted, she was “the most creative thinker alive.”4 The only philosopher she acknowledged as an influence was Aristotle. Beyond his works, Rand insisted that she was unaffected by external influences or ideas. According to Rand and her latter-day followers, Objectivism sprang, Athena-like, fully formed from the brow of its creator.

  Commentary on Rand has done little to dispel this impression. Because of her extreme political views and the nearly universal consensus among literary critics that she is a bad writer, few who are not committed Objectivists have taken Rand seriously. Unlike other novelists of her stature, until now Rand has not been the subject of a full-length biography. Her life and work have been described instead by her former friends, enemies, and students. Despite her emphasis on integration, most of the books published about Rand have been essay collections rather than large-scale works that develop a sustained interpretation of her importance.

  This book firmly locates Rand within the tumultuous American century that her life spanned. Rand’s defense of individualism, celebration of capitalism, and controversial morality of selfishness can be understood only against the backdrop of her historical moment. All sprang from her early life experiences in Communist Russia and became the most powerful and deeply enduring of her messages. What Rand confronted in her work was a basic human dilemma: the failure of good intentions. Her indictment of altruism, social welfare, and service to others sprang from her belief that these ideals underlay Communism, Nazism, and the wars that wracked the century. Rand’s solution, characteristically, was extreme: to eliminate all v
irtues that could possibly be used in the service of totalitarianism. It was also simplistic. If Rand’s great strength as a thinker was to grasp interrelated underlying principles and weave them into an impenetrable logical edifice, it was also her great weakness. In her effort to find a unifying cause for all the trauma and bloodshed of the twentieth century, Rand was attempting the impossible. But it was this deadly serious quest that animated all of her writing. Rand was among the first to identify the problem of the modern state’s often terrifying power and make it an issue of popular concern.

  She was also one of the first American writers to celebrate the creative possibilities of modern capitalism and to emphasize the economic value of independent thought. In a time when leading intellectuals assumed that large corporations would continue to dominate economic life, shaping their employees into soulless organization men, Rand clung to the vision of the independent entrepreneur. Though it seemed anachronistic at first, her vision has resonated with the knowledge workers of the new economy, who see themselves as strategic operators in a constantly changing economic landscape. Rand has earned the unending devotion of capitalists large and small by treating business as an honorable calling that can engage the deepest capacities of the human spirit.

  At the same time, Rand advanced a deeply negative portrait of government action. In her work, the state is always a destroyer, acting to frustrate and inhibit the natural ingenuity and drive of individuals. It is this chiaroscuro of light and dark—virtuous individuals battling a villainous state—that makes her compelling to some readers and odious to others. Though Americans turned to their government for aid, succor, and redress of grievances ever more frequently during the twentieth century, they did so with doubts, fears, and misgivings, all of which Rand cast into stark relief in her fiction. Her work sounded anew the traditional American suspicion of centralized authority, and helped inspire a broad intellectual movement that challenged the liberal welfare state and proclaimed the desirability of free markets.

  Goddess of the Market focuses on Rand’s contributions as a political philosopher, for it is here that she has exerted her greatest influence. Rand’s Romantic Realism has not changed American literature, nor has Objectivism penetrated far into the philosophy profession. She does, however, remain a veritable institution within the American right. Atlas Shrugged is still devoured by eager young conservatives, cited by political candidates, and promoted by corporate tycoons. Critics who dismiss Rand as a shallow thinker appealing only to adolescents miss her significance altogether. For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.

  The story of Ayn Rand is also the story of libertarianism, conservatism, and Objectivism, the three schools of thought that intersected most prominently with her life. These terms are neither firmly defined nor mutually exclusive, and their meaning shifted considerably during the period of time covered in this book. Whether I identify Rand or her admirers as libertarian, conservative, or Objectivist varies by the context, and my interchangeable use of these words is not intended to collapse the distinctions between each. Rand jealously guarded the word Objectivist when she was alive, but I use the term loosely to encompass a range of persons who identified Rand as an important influence on their thought.

  I was fortunate to begin this project with two happy coincidences: the opening of Rand’s personal papers held at the Ayn Rand Archives and the beginning of a wave of scholarship on the American right. Work in Rand’s personal papers has enabled me to sift through the many biased and contradictory accounts of her life and create a more balanced picture of Rand as a thinker and a human being. Using newly available documentary material I revisit key episodes in Rand’s dramatic life, including her early years in Russia and the secret affair with a young acolyte that shaped her mature career. I am less concerned with judgment than with analysis, a choice Rand would certainly condemn. Though I was granted full access to her papers by the Ayn Rand Institute, I am not an Objectivist and have never been affiliated with any group dedicated to Rand’s work. I approach her instead as a student and a critic of American thought.

  New historical scholarship has helped me situate Rand within the broader intellectual and political movements that have transformed America since the days of the New Deal. At once a novelist and a philosopher, a moralist and a political theorist, a critic and an ideologue, Rand is difficult to categorize. She produced novels, plays, screenplays, cultural criticism, philosophic essays, political tracts, and commentary on current events. Almost everything she wrote was unfashionable. When artists embraced realism and modernism, she championed Romanticism. Implacably opposed to pragmatism, existentialism, and Freudian psychology, she offered instead Objectivism, an absolutist philosophical system that insisted on the primacy of reason and the existence of a knowable, objective reality. Though she was out of fashion, Rand was not without a tradition or a community. Rather than a lonely genius, she was a deeply engaged thinker, embedded in multiple networks of friends and foes, always driven relentlessly to comment upon and condemn the tide of events that flowed around her.

  This book seeks to excavate a hidden Rand, one far more complex and contradictory than her public persona suggests. Although she preached unfettered individualism, the story I tell is one of Rand in relationship, both with the significant figures of her life and with the wider world, which appeared to her alternately as implacably hostile and full of limitless possibility. This approach helps reconcile the tensions that plagued Rand’s life and work. The most obvious contradiction lies on the surface: Rand was a rationalist philosopher who wrote romantic fiction. For all her fealty to reason, Rand was a woman subject to powerful, even overwhelming emotions. Her novels indulged Rand’s desire for adventure, beauty, and excitement, while Objectivism helped her frame, master, and explain her experiences in the world. Her dual career as a novelist and a philosopher let Rand express both her deep-seated need for control and her genuine belief in individualism and independence.

  Despite Rand’s lifelong interest in current events, the escapist pleasures of fiction tugged always at the edges of her mind. When she stopped writing novels she continued to live in the imaginary worlds she had created, finding her characters as real and meaningful as the people she spent time with every day. Over time she retreated ever further into a universe of her own creation, joined there by a tight band of intimates who acknowledged her as their chosen leader. At first this closed world offered Rand the refuge she sought when her work was blasted by critics, who were often unfairly harsh and personal in their attacks. But Objectivism as a philosophy left no room for elaboration, extension, or interpretation, and as a social world it excluded growth, change, or development. As a younger Rand might have predicted, a system so oppressive to individual variety had not long to prosper. A woman who tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas, Rand would live and die subject to the dynamics of her own philosophy. The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes this not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.

  PART I

  The Education of Ayn Rand, 1905–1943

  Alisa Rosenbaum, Leningrad, Russia, 1925.

  CHAPTER ONE

  From Russia to Roosevelt

  IT WAS A wintry day in 1918 when the Red Guard pounded on the door of Zinovy Rosenbaum’s chemistry shop. The guards bore a seal of the State of Russia, which they nailed upon the door, signaling that it had been seized in the name of the people. Zinovy could at least be thankful the mad whirl of revolution had taken only his property, not his life. But his oldest daughter, Alisa, twelve at the time, burned with indignation. The shop was her father’s; he had worked for it, studied long hours at university, dispensed valued advice and medicines to his customers. Now in an instant it was gone, taken to benefit nameless, faceless peasants, strangers who could offer her father nothing in return. The soldiers had come in boots, carrying guns, making clear that resistance would mean death. Yet they had spoken the language of fairness and equality, the
ir goal to build a better society for all. Watching, listening, absorbing, Alisa knew one thing for certain: those who invoked such lofty ideals were not to be trusted. Talk about helping others was only a thin cover for force and power. It was a lesson she would never forget.

  Ayn Rand’s father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was a self-made man. His bootstrap was a coveted space at Warsaw University, a privilege granted to only a few Jewish students. After earning a degree in chemistry, he established his own business in St. Petersburg. By the time of the Revolution he had ensconced his family in a large apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, a prominent address at the heart of the city. His educated and cultured wife, Anna, came from a wealthy and well-connected background. Her father was an expert tailor favored by the Russian Army, a position that helped shield their extended family against anti-Semitic violence.

  Anna and Zinovy elevated Enlightenment European culture over their religious background. They observed the major Jewish holidays, holding a seder each year, but otherwise led largely secular lives. They spoke Russian at home and their three daughters took private lessons in French, German, gymnastics, and piano. They taught their eldest daughter, Alisa, born in 1905, that “culture, civilization, anything which is interesting . . . is abroad,” and refused to let her read Russian literature.1

  In their urbane sophistication and secularism, the Rosenbaums were vastly different from the majority of Russian Jews, who inhabited shtetls in the Pale of Settlement. Regulated and restricted by the czar in their choice of occupation and residence, Russia’s Jews had found an unsteady berth in the empire until the 1880s, when a series of pogroms and newly restrictive laws touched off a wave of migration. Between 1897 and 1915 over a million Jews left Russia, most heading for the United States. Others emigrated to urban areas, where they had to officially register for residence. St. Petersburg’s Jewish community grew from 6,700 in 1869 to 35,000 in 1910, the year Alisa turned five.2