Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (10 page)

Characteristically, Rand’s take on Willkie’s campaign was idiosyncratic. Willkie is remembered for his optimistic internationalism, typified by his postwar best-seller
One World,
and his willingness to present a united front with Roosevelt on aid to Europe during the presidential campaign. Rand, however, focused almost entirely on Willkie’s defense of capitalism. To be sure, this was a part of Willkie’s persona. In 1940 he told a campaign audience, “I’m in business and proud of it. Nobody can make me soft-pedal any fact in my business career. After all, business is our way of life, our achievement, our glory.” Rand appreciated how he framed his opposition to the New Deal as a “very forthright ideological, intellectual, moral issue.”
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She saw him as a fellow crusader for individualism. She also mistakenly believed he was a populist candidate who was beloved by the masses.

Genial, upbeat, and hopelessly green, Willkie was no match for the Roosevelt juggernaut. He lacked the killer instinct necessary to unseat an incumbent running for his third term. Genuinely concerned about the gathering hostilities in Europe, he acceded to Roosevelt’s entreaty that he not take a public stance against Lend-Lease, a policy controversial with isolationists. Deprived of the one substantive issue that might have contrasted him sharply with Roosevelt, Willkie struggled to define himself. Instead, with a few broad strokes, Roosevelt painted him as a tool of big business and the rich.

Such stereotyping did little to discourage Rand; in fact it had the opposite result. Convinced for the first time that domestic politics truly mattered, she and Frank signed on with the New York City branch of the Willkie Club, a network of volunteer organizations that was vital to
the campaign. It was a risky move. Neither she nor Frank had worked regularly for years, and their savings were nearly depleted. But it was characteristic of Rand that she never did anything halfway. Politics had been a growing fixation of hers for years. Here was the chance to live her principles, to act on behalf of a politician she supported. She would never have been able to do the same in Russia. Setting aside her unfinished novel, she eagerly joined the cause.

The New York Willkie Club was tailor-made for a young, Republican-leaning author. Willkie’s mistress, Irita von Doren, the book editor of the
New York Herald Tribune
, had a strong influence on the New York campaign, which brimmed with writers, editors, and other literati. Here were people like Rand: passionate about ideas, articulate, willing to argue endlessly about politics. These were no bohemian radicals talking about revolution, but establishment figures who mingled easily with the city’s business elite. She told a friend, “I have met a greater number of interesting men and women, within a few months, than I did in my whole life, during the Willkie campaign of 1940.”
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Rand began her volunteer work as a humble typist and filing clerk. Her ascent through the ranks was swift, and within weeks she spear-headed the creation of a new “intellectual ammunition department.” Rand taught other volunteers how to skim newspapers for damning statements by Roosevelt or his running mate, Henry Wallace. These quotations would then be compiled for use by campaign speakers or other Willkie clubs. Wallace, in particular, proved a fertile source of objectionable rhetoric, and Rand sent several volunteers to the local library to comb through material from his earlier career.

At times Rand butted heads with her superiors in the Willkie campaign. Her instinct was to highlight Roosevelt’s negative qualities, his collectivist ideology, and his antagonism to business. The campaign managers, however, chose to advertise Willkie like a new kind of soap, stressing his positive qualities. Such mild tactics disgusted Rand. When she wasn’t researching Roosevelt’s misdeeds, she visited theaters where Willkie newsreels were shown, staying afterward to field questions from the audience. These sessions were among the most exciting parts of the campaign for Rand, who reveled in the chance to share her strong opinions and argue with strangers. “I was a marvelous propagandist,” she remembered.
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Her coat emblazoned with Willkie campaign buttons, she joined the ranks of the city’s soapbox preachers. On promising street corners she would begin an anti-Roosevelt, pro-Willkie diatribe, quickly drawing crowds attracted by the novelty of a woman campaigner with a Russian accent. When a listener jeered at her for being a foreigner, Rand jeered right back. “I chose to be an American,” she reminded him. “What did you do?”
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These spontaneous sessions began to shake Rand loose from her preconceived notions about American voters. Before campaigning, Rand had been suspicious of American democracy. Instead of government of, for, and by the people, she thought the state should be “a means for the convenience of the higher type of man.”
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Her earliest fiction, heavy with contempt for the masses, reflected this sensibility. Now she found herself impressed by the questions her working-class audience asked and their responsiveness to her capitalist message. She said of her time in the theaters, “[It] supported my impression of the common man, that they really were much better to deal with than the office and the Madison Avenue Republicans.”
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It seemed that the faceless crowds she condemned, rather than their social and intellectual betters, understood the dangers of the Roosevelt administration.

Most questions she fielded were about the war in Europe, however. Every voter wanted to know whether the candidate would involve the United States in the conflict. Most dreaded the idea of sending their boys overseas, even though the situation in Europe was deteriorating rapidly. Germany, Italy, and Spain had gone fascist, and Britain remained the lone outpost of liberal democracy. Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, beseeched Roosevelt for money and material. Roosevelt’s hands were tied by restrictive neutrality acts, but he was increasingly convinced that the United States must play a role in the European war. Still, there were powerful pressures against any involvement. Neither candidate wanted to risk alienating the isolationists or the equally powerful internationalists. Both charted a careful course between the two.
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On the front lines of the campaign Rand sought to gloss over Willkie’s equivocation. She herself doubted Willkie was sincere when he spoke out against the war, but she did her best to convince voters otherwise, walking the thinnest line between truth and falsehood. “[I]t would have been much better if he had come out against any help to the allies,”
she reflected later.
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Toward the end of the campaign Willkie did turn in a markedly isolationist direction, telling his audiences he would not become involved in a war and eliciting a similar pledge from Roosevelt.

By then Rand’s enthusiasm for Willkie had nearly ebbed away. More than his duplicity about the war she was bothered by his stance on capitalism. He had begun as a stalwart defender of free enterprise, but then shied away from using the term in his speeches. Instead “he talked about his childhood in Indiana—to show that he’s a small town American, in effect—instead of talking about the issues.”
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What she wanted, more than anything else, was someone who would stand up and argue for the traditional American way of life as she understood it: individualism. She wanted the Republicans to attack Roosevelt’s expansion of the federal government and to explain why it set such a dangerous precedent. The ideas and principles that Roosevelt invoked, she believed, were the very ones that had destroyed Russia.

Few Americans shared her views. Indeed voters were satisfied enough with Roosevelt that they elected him to an unprecedented third term. But it was not quite the coronation it seemed. For all its activity, the New Deal had not defeated the scourge of depression, and unemployment remained near 15 percent. Roosevelt had alienated powerful figures in both parties and his reform efforts had been thwarted in the past few years. But the increasing instability in Europe made voters skittish. Hitler had plowed over France, and his U-boats sniped at American ships in international waters. As the old adage went, it was unwise to switch horses midstream.

In the wake of Willkie’s defeat new avenues opened before Rand. The campaign had profoundly redirected her intellectual energies. Rather than resume work on her novel full time, in the months following her volunteer work she poured forth a number of nonfiction pieces and began to see herself as an activist, not just a writer. With some of her Willkie contacts she planned a political organization, a group of intellectuals and educators who would pick up where the Republican candidate had left off.

Rand forged her own path into politics, eschewing established groups such as America First, which had picked up the mantle of organized opposition to Roosevelt. Founded in Chicago in the fall of 1940, America First was the institutional embodiment of midwestern isolationism. The
idea that America should avoid entangling foreign alliances stretched all the way back to George Washington’s farewell address in the early days of the republic. It was given modern relevance by the outcry against war profiteering following World War I. Now, watching another gathering storm in Europe, America First leaders and its 850,000 card-carrying members were convinced that the United States should stay out of the fray.
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The organization lobbied vigorously against Roosevelt’s plans to aid Britain, arguing that the United States should concentrate on fortifying its own defenses. Because it so staunchly opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy initiatives, America First drew many of the president’s most bitter critics into its fold. It also attracted a sizable number of anti-Semites to its banner.

Although she shared its basic isolationist sentiments, Rand was not attracted to America First. To her the European war was simply a localized expression of a deeper conflict that structured world history: the clash between Individualism and Collectivism. Her concern lay primarily with American domestic politics, not with America’s role in the world, and her loyalties remained with the Willkie Clubs, which she saw as a powerful grassroots network devoted to capitalism and individualism. But the Willkie Clubs had not long to live. Willkie had little desire to establish himself as a permanent opposition leader, and shortly after the election he gave his blessing to a decision by the Confederated Willkie Clubs to dissolve.
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Rand was deeply disappointed by the disappearance of the Willkie Clubs but intrigued by the idea of the Independent Clubs, a proposed successor organization. These clubs would be nonpartisan local organizations that would encourage “good citizenship” and political participation. Rand began to imagine a new organization along these lines, but national in scope and primarily educational in nature. It would become a headquarters for anyone who wanted to continue fighting the New Deal. Eventually the group would grow large enough to support a national office and a periodical. This new organization would build on and preserve the spirit of the campaign, which, at least in New York, had drawn together a group of serious intellectuals committed to a meaningful defense of capitalism. It was the kind of community Rand had always hoped to find someday, and she was loath to let it disappear.

She was also motivated by a deep sense of crisis, as evidenced by a rousing essay she wrote to attract members to the group she hoped to organize. “To All Fifth Columnists” was an alarmist portrait of America honeycombed with collectivists and Soviet agents, teetering on the brink of dictatorship. Her opening lines asserted, “Totalitarianism has already won a complete victory in many American minds and conquered all of our intellectual life.” Rand assumed that totalitarian dictatorship in America was only a matter of time, and she blamed apathetic and ignorant citizens, the so-called “fifth column.” Hard-working Americans who ignored politics and simply tried to provide for their families were making a grave mistake: “The money, home or education you plan to leave [your children] will be worthless or taken away from them. Instead, your legacy will be a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery, of starvation, of concentration camps and firing squads.”
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The only way to forestall such a tragedy was for the true voice of America to make itself heard. The American way of life, according to Rand, “has always been based on the Rights of Man, upon individual freedom and upon respect for each individual human personality.” These ideals were being overshadowed by Communist propaganda. Her response: to be heard, “we must be organized.” Here Rand grappled briefly with the paradox of organizing individualists. Her group would be “an
organization against organization
. . . to defend us all from the coming compulsory organization which will swallow all of society.”
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There was no other alternative, she declared, for in the world today there could be no personal neutrality.

Rand’s urgency stemmed directly from her experiences in the New York literary world, which convinced her that Communists were also a powerful force within American political life. In truth, the Party had been hemorrhaging members for years, since rumors of the 1936 Stalinist purges reached New York. The Soviet fever broke in 1939, with the revelation of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. American Communists were caught flat-footed by the sudden reversal of policy. They had always loudly boasted of their antifascist credentials, a position that was particularly popular among American leftists. Now Communist leaders could offer no convincing reason for the new alliance. Never large to begin with, Party membership plummeted. Friendly intellectuals and liberal fellow travelers began distancing themselves from the
Communist program. Though the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States would bring a few prominent intellectuals back into the fold, by 1940 Party affiliation was transforming from a badge of honor into a slightly embarrassing relic of youth.
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