Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (11 page)

Yet Rand was still spooked by just how popular Communism and socialism had been. She was right to understand that the Communist threat had not vanished entirely, even though intellectual fashions had changed. Soviet spies remained in Washington, D.C., and some would successfully filch valuable military secrets during World War II. But the Communists were not on the verge of taking over the American political system. At the height of their influence they had mustered fewer than one million members and barely 100,000 votes.
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Still, Rand’s broadside made for exciting reading.

One of the first people Rand shared “Fifth Columnists” with was Channing Pollock, whom she had met during the Willkie campaign. Pollock was a newspaper columnist and moderately successful playwright who had been on the advisory board of the Liberty League and was well connected to wealthy conservatives. Like Rand he was a committed individualist and an implacable foe of Roosevelt. But unlike many of the president’s opponents, Pollock favored aid to Britain and shared Roosevelt’s sense that America’s involvement in the war might be necessary. He traveled the country regularly delivering folksy speeches that denounced Communism, the New Deal, and isolationism in equal measure. He had even floated the idea of a “vigorous organization of the Great Middle Class” that would “rout the rotten forces of Communism, Fascism, collectivism and general nuttiness, and put America back on its feet—a hardworking, united United States.”
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His idea anticipated the group Rand herself hoped to start.

Rand contacted Pollock in early 1941. Pollock was a “name,” someone who could attract both donors and attention to her proposed organization. Without help from him or somebody similarly prominent, Rand’s idea would go nowhere. Pollock was interested, but not ready to commit immediately. He decided to test the concept during an upcoming lecture tour, asking anyone interested in a political group to contact him. He netted four thousand names, enough to convince him that Rand’s idea had wings. Returning to New York in April he gave Rand the go-ahead. He sent out a brief letter to prospective backers and asked Rand to draw up a statement of principles to attract interested parties.

The result was Rand’s thirty-two-page “Manifesto of Individualism,” the first full statement of her political and philosophical beliefs. Pollock wanted something much shorter, but once she got going Rand couldn’t stop. She spent an entire weekend pounding out an essay that would “present the whole groundwork of our ‘Party Line’ and be a basic document, such as the
Communist Manifesto
was on the other side.”
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In contrast to her novel, the “Manifesto” had practically written itself.

Rand’s version of the Communist Manifesto bore the hallmarks of her later work. It was an all-encompassing vision that included a statement of rights, a theory of history and of social classes, and keen attention to human psychology. It was a first pass through many of the ideas she would later flesh out in both her fiction and her nonfiction. There were some critical differences, both in content and in tone. Rand was more expository and more nuanced in this first statement than she would be in her published work. Most significantly, she did not include reason as an important part of individualism, and she used the word “altruism” only twice. But many other features of her mature thought were there.
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The base of Rand’s individualism was a natural rights theory derived from the Declaration of Independence. Each man had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and these rights were “the unconditional, personal, private, individual possession of each man, granted to him by the fact of his birth and requiring no other sanction.” The role of society, and its only purpose, is to ensure these individual rights Rand explained. Next Rand set up a dyad of opposing concepts, contrasting Totalitarianism to Individualism. Totalitarianism was defined by one basic idea, “that the state is superior to the individual.” Its only opposite and greatest enemy was Individualism, which was the basic principle of natural rights. Individualism was the only ground on which men could live together in decency. As such, the doctrine of an absolute “common good” was “utterly evil” and “must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the Individual.”
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From there she moved quickly to divide society into two realms, the Political Sphere and the Creative Sphere. The creative sphere is the realm of all productive activity, and it belongs to “single individuals.” Rand stressed repeatedly that creation was an individual, not a collective process. Making an analogy to childbirth, she argued, “[A]ll birth
is individual. So is all parenthood. So is every creative process.”
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The Political Sphere was the opposite of the Creative Sphere and must be extremely limited in scope lest it destroy individual creativity.

Closely related to the two spheres was Rand’s next dyad, of Active Man and Passive Man. Even as she set them up as polar opposites, Rand recognized that “in every one of us there are two opposite principles fighting each other: the instinct of freedom and the instinct of security.” But both man and societies could be defined as either active or passive, and there was “a strange law in their relationship.”
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If society was geared toward the needs of the Passive Man, the Active Man would be destroyed; yet if society responded to the needs of the Active Man, he would carry along both Passive Man and all of society as he rose. Therefore modern humanitarians were caught in a paradox: in restricting the Active to benefit the Passive, they undercut their basic goal.

This clash between Active and Passive even structured world history, according to Rand. When the Active Man was ascendant, civilization moved forward, only to succumb to the lure of the security needed by the Passive Man. It was a cycle of light and dark that had continued for centuries, and now Rand saw another round dawning in America: “[W]hen a society allows prominence to voices claiming that Individual Freedom is an evil—the Dark Ages are standing on its threshold. How many civilizations will have to perish before men realize this?”
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Active and Passive Man were, at base, variations on the concepts of creator and the second-hander that underlay Rand’s developing novel. Now appearing in nonfiction form, the same ideas gave Rand a class theory of sorts. She was quick to emphasize that the passive type of man was not necessarily a member of the working classes or the “so-called downtrodden.” In fact, working men understood quite well the nature of individual effort and initiative. The highest concentration of collectivists would be found in two other classes, Rand ventured: the second-generation millionaires and the Intellectuals. Most intellectuals were second-raters with a lust for power, she alleged. It was they who had helped Stalin, while the millionaires helped Hitler, aided by “the lowest elements” in both cases. She concluded, “Tyrannies come from above and below. The great middle is the class of Freedom.”
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Here was the clearest influence of the Willkie campaign on her thinking. Before, Rand had spoken only of the superior man and his
contributions to society, showing little interest in distinguishing members of the faceless mob below. Now, without losing contempt for “the lowest elements” (which remained undefined), she allotted a new role to the vast American middle classes. These were the people she had met in the theater and on the street, ordinary voters who seemed naturally suspicious of Roosevelt and his promises of prosperity.

The “Manifesto” as a whole throbbed with a newfound love and respect for America. In Russia Rand had idealized America, but the 1930s had disillusioned her. Watching the spread of collectivism in literature and art, in 1937 she complained about “our degeneration in cultural matters—which have always been collective in America.”
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The “Manifesto” bore no such traces of cynicism. Instead it defined individualism and Americanism as essentially the same thing. America’s establishment of individual liberty, according to Rand, “was the secret of its success.” She praised the American Revolution as a rare historic moment when men worked collectively to establish “the freedom of the Individual and the establishment of a society to ensure this freedom,” and called “give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry’s dramatic words in support of the American Revolution, “the statement of a profound truth.”
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Rand’s final section, an extended defense of capitalism, likewise bore the marks of her campaign experience. Before Willkie she had been procapitalist yet pessimistic, writing, “The capitalist world is low, unprincipled, and corrupt.” Now she celebrated capitalism as “the noblest, cleanest and most idealistic system of all.” Despite her opposition to Willkie’s managers, Rand seemed to have picked up on some of their tactics, marketing capitalism as the solution to all ills.
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Rand’s newfound embrace of capitalism also reflected reading she had done since the campaign ended, particularly Carl Synder’s
Capitalism the Creator: The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society
.
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Snyder, a well-known economist and statistician at the Federal Reserve Bank, argued that capitalism was the “only one way, that any people, in all history, have ever risen from barbarism and poverty to affluence and culture.” From this premise Snyder developed a historically grounded, statistically supported case in favor of capital accumulation and against economic regulation and planning. Snyder supported centralized credit control, and indeed touted wise control of the money supply as the key to preventing future depressions and panics. He also
gave grudging support to some government activities, such as the building of dams and conservation projects. But any further intervention, such as redistributive taxation, centralized planning boards, or wage and price controls, would be tantamount to “putting industry under the dead hand of government regulation.”
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Published with a glossy picture of Adam Smith for a frontispiece, Snyder’s book was a rebuttal of the Keynesian theories that dominated academic economics and influenced Roosevelt’s administration.

Snyder helped Rand codify and historicize the ideas she had already expressed in
Anthem
. In allegorical form Rand had emphasized the power of the individual and the importance of breakthrough innovations. Now Snyder set these ideas in an economic and historical context, arguing that economic prosperity was due to “some few [who] are very successful, highly talented, endowed with capacities and abilities far beyond the mass of their fellows.”
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As she read Snyder, Rand transformed the psychological categories of second-hander and creator into the economic concepts of Active and Passive Man.

In the “Manifesto” Rand followed Snyder’s celebration of classical economics rather than introduce her own explosive concepts of morality. Altruism, which would play a significant role in
The Fountainhead,
is noticeably subordinate in the “Manifesto.” It may have been that Rand’s attention was far from the philosophy of her novel when she wrote the “Manifesto,” or it may have been that she was unwilling to debut her ideas without the illustrative support of fiction. Whatever the reason, Rand celebrated selfishness in entirely economic terms. “One of the greatest achievements of the capitalist system is the manner in which a man’s natural, healthy egoism is made to profit both him and society,” she wrote, and went no further.
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Similarly all of her attacks were leveled at the “absolute” common good, implying that a limited conception of the common good was acceptable.

Unlike her later work, the “Manifesto” did not spell out Rand’s differences with Adam Smith’s bounded “self-interest.” Though he lauded self-interest in the economic realm, Smith also celebrated the natural concern people felt for the welfare of others, which he called “sympathy.” Smith drew a distinction between self-interest and what he called the “the soft, the gentle, the amiable virtues.” These two sets of values existed in a delicate balance, he argued, and “to restrain our selfish, and
indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.” In her mature work Rand would attack any distinction between economic and social virtues, insisting that the same code of morality must apply to both. But in her first extended discussion of philosophy she was content to talk about capitalism’s efficiencies and the benefits of freedom without integrating both into a new moral system.
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Rand closed her discussion of capitalism with a twist of her own devising. She asserted that for all the glories of capitalism she had sung, “we have never had a pure capitalist system.” Collectivist elements, such as Monopoly Capitalists and the State, had conspired against capitalism from the beginning. These problems were not the fault of capitalism, but rather the result of encouraging collectivism. We must stop blaming capitalism, she wrote: “[I]t is time to say that ours is the noblest, cleanest and most idealistic system of all. We, its defenders, are the true Liberals and Humanitarians.” Her readers faced a choice, and they must draw together in common action. They would find and recognize each other by “a single, simple badge of distinction,” their devotion to freedom and liberty. She blared, “INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”
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Rand dispatched the final product to Pollock with an enthusiastic note. She was open to changes and amendments but hoped the “Manifesto” would be eventually published or made public, along with the signatures of the committee they would gather. “Let us be the signers of the new Declaration of Independence,” she wrote hopefully.
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