Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (24 page)

Ultimately it was Rand who was unwilling to let their connection go. In early summer 1951 Nathan and Barbara moved to New York. Barbara intended to pursue a master’s degree in philosophy at NYU, and Nathan transferred to be with her. After the couple left, Rand’s restlessness grew intense. She had always wanted to move back to New York, and with
The Fountainhead
movie completed she saw no reason to remain. By the fall of 1951 she had convinced Frank they must leave. She knew he was “chronically and permanently happy” in California, but his preferences meant little compared to hers.
¹⁴
It had been more than twenty years since Frank supported himself. Increasingly Rand called the shots, and he was along for the ride. She phoned Nathan in high excitement to share the news. A few weeks later she and Frank were driving east. The Hills, who rented the Chatsworth property in their absence, found the house in disarray, as if the decision to leave had been made in great haste. Left behind was a box of old pictures, numerous pieces of furniture, and several stacks of railroad magazines. Frank asked the Hills to keep his gladiolas alive until he returned.

Back in New York Rand made no effort to rejuvenate her relationship with Isabel Paterson. Secure in her new triangle with Nathan and Barbara, she rejected overtures to conciliation by mutual friends and soon parted ways with Rose Wilder Lane, too. As Lane described it years later, Ayn and Frank visited her Connecticut home, where she and Ayn “had a hard struggle” over religion. Although Lane was not a churchgoer or an adherent to any traditional Christian doctrine, she firmly believed that the universe reflected a divine creator and thought Rand’s atheism was “untenable.” Writing to Jasper Crane, Lane described the scene
after hours of conversation: “I was giving up, and murmured something about creativeness being obvious everywhere; and she struck me down by responding triumphantly, obviously feeling that she destroyed my whole position in one stroke, with the childish: ‘then who created God?’ I saw then that I had wholly misjudged her mental capacity. We parted amiably and I haven’t seen her since.” In Lane’s recollection she was alienated both by Rand’s statement and her manner; Rand spoke “with the utmost arrogant triumph,” giving Lane a “ ‘that squelches you’ look” as she delivered her final question.
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The incident confirmed Lane’s doubts about Rand’s ultra-individualistic position and laid bare the differences between them. Rand clearly felt that she had outgunned Lane. The following day Lane sent a lengthy letter further clarifying her position, which Rand covered with critical scribbles. She never responded to the letter and they had no further contact.

Rand’s break with Lane foreshadowed the growing importance of religion on the political right. In the years since
The Fountainhead
, religion had moved to the forefront of American political discourse. Rand remembered the transition clearly. Until the mid- to late 1940s she “did not take the issue of religion in politics very seriously, because there was no such threat. The conservatives did not tie their side to God. . . . There was no serious attempt to proclaim that if you wanted to be conservative or to support capitalism, you had to base your case on faith.” By 1950 all this was changing. As the Cold War closed in, Communism became always and everywhere Godless, and capitalism became linked to Christianity. William F. Buckley’s best-selling debut,
God and Man at Yale
, famously recast Rand and Hayek’s secular “individualism vs. collectivism” as an essentially religious struggle, arguing that it replicated on another level “the duel between Christianity and atheism.” Two years later, in his iconic autobiography
Witness
, Whittaker Chambers defined Communism as “man without God,” a substitute faith that flourished in the absence of traditional religion. Russell Kirk kicked off a vogue for “New Conservatism” with his 1953 book,
The Conservative Mind
, which asserted the importance of religious traditionalism. Even on the left, intellectuals gravitated toward the neo-Orthodox theology of the former socialist Reinhold Niebuhr.
¹⁶

In turn Rand became an ever more devoted atheist. At a cocktail party she met the young Buckley, already a celebrated figure on the right. She
was characteristically direct, telling him in her thick Russian accent, “You arrh too eentelligent to bihleef in Gott!!”
¹⁷
Buckley was both amused and offended. He sought the advice of other libertarians, including Isabel Paterson, as he pulled together
National Review
, the flagship magazine of American conservatism, but Rand became one of his favorite targets. Rand was not the only libertarian to reject the new supremacy of religion. The combination of conservatism, capitalism, and Christianity was a virtual hornet’s nest on the right, sparking battles in the pages of FEE’s
The Freeman
and among members of the Mont Pelerin Society.
¹⁸
By decade’s end secular libertarianism would be overshadowed by the religious New Conservatism, but it never disappeared altogether. Rand and those she once sought as allies testified to its continued vitality.

Rand’s opposition to religion grew stronger as she wrote
Atlas Shrugged
. The book originally included a priest, Father Amadeus, among the strikers. He would be her “most glamorized projection of a Thomist philosopher,” a character who would “show theoretically the best that could be shown about a man who is attracted to religion by morality.” Over the course of the story she intended Amadeus to realize the evil of forgiveness, and in an important scene he would go on strike by refusing to pardon one of her villains. Eventually Rand decided that the priest undermined her larger points about rationality. All of the other figures were taken from honorable professions that she wished to celebrate. Including a priest in this company would be tantamount to endorsing religion. She cut Father Amadeus from the novel.
¹⁹

Despite the disappointments of Read, Lane, and Paterson, when she first returned to New York Rand was still interested in finding “reactionary” friends. Her California activism and years of letter writing kept her firmly embedded in multiple libertarian networks. Now she was again an active presence on the New York scene. Newly cautious in her approach, Rand eschewed formal organizations or partnerships. Never again would she find herself “committed to any idea that [she] didn’t believe in.” Instead she would be part of “a common intellectual front in an informal way.”
²⁰
Through her work for HUAC Rand had met J. B. Matthews, a dedicated anti-Communist who assisted Congressman Martin Dies and Senator Joseph McCarthy in their hunt for subversive Americans. Matthews included Rand in numerous conservative dinners and parties. At these events she met a group analogous to her Willkie associates. In
the postwar era, however, conservatism was rapidly growing in size and strength, and Rand was no longer the sole intellectual of the crowd.

One of the first libertarians Rand reached out to was Ludwig von Mises, whom she had met briefly during one of her trips east. While other academics interested in the free market had found a welcoming home at the University of Chicago, Mises was so far outside the economics mainstream that no respected academic department would hire him. Ultimately the Volker Fund was able to secure him a visiting professorship at NYU, where they paid his salary (as they did for Hayek at Chicago). Mises’s strongest connections were not to academia but to Leonard Read’s Foundation for Economic Education, where he gave regular lectures and was considered an employee.
²¹
As his affiliation with FEE reminded her, Rand and Mises differed on important points, primarily concerning morality. Whereas outsiders saw Mises as a pro-capitalist hack, Mises firmly believed his economic theories were strict science, utterly divorced from his political preferences and beliefs. Misean economics pointedly did not concern itself with morality, to Rand a dangerous failing. Still, she remained hopeful that Mises and others could be converted to her point of view. She predicted, “it would only be a case of showing to them that I had the most consistent arguments.”
²²

Rand’s personal relationship with Mises was predictably rocky. Both were hot-tempered and principled, and tales about their conflicts were legendary in conservative circles. Russell Kirk liked to regale his audiences with a story about Mises taunting Rand as “a silly little Jew girl.”
²³
The truth as both Rand and Mises remembered it was more prosaic. At a dinner party with the Hazlitts, Rand began, as usual, trying to convert Mises to her moral position. Henry Hazlitt and Mises both assumed a utilitarian stance, arguing for capitalism on the basis of its benefit to society. Rand was testing out some of her ideas from
Atlas Shrugged
, talking about how man survived only due to his mind and defining the free use of rationality as a moral issue. According to Rand, Mises lost his patience and “literally screamed, because he was trying to prove that what I was saying was the same thing as Rousseau or natural rights, and I was proving to him that it wasn’t.” The dinner ended on a tense note, but Mises’s wife later arranged a reconciliation. Rand was not unduly troubled by the incident, for Mises simply struck her as closed
to persuasion: “I had the impression that von Mises had worked out his system, knew how he related his economics to the altruist morality, and that was that.”
²⁴
Mises’s morality, however, did not ruin his entire approach. Unlike Hayek, Mises held capitalism as an “absolute,” and thus she considered him worthy of study and respect.

Nathan and Barbara were puzzled by Rand’s attitude toward Mises. They had seen the critical comments she left in the margins of his books,
Human Action
and
Bureaucracy
. “Good God!” she wrote angrily. “Why, the damned fool!” Why then did she continue to court Mises and recommend his books? Rare indeed was the person with whom Rand disagreed yet continued to see on a social basis. Her willingness to carve out an exception for Mises indicated the profound impact he had on her thought. As she told one of Mises’s students, “I don’t agree with him epistemologically but as far as my economics and political economy are concerned, Ludwig von Mises is the most important thing that’s ever happened me.” It was easy for Rand to appreciate Mises’s intellectual orientation. He identified reason as “man’s particular and characteristic feature” and based his work on methodological individualism, the idea that individuals should be the primary units of analysis. These premises underlay his approach to economics, a field about which Rand knew little but considered critically important.
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Mises had first made his name with an attack on socialism.
²⁶
In his tome
Socialism
(first published in English in 1935) he argued that prices, which should be set by the free flow of market information, could never be accurately calculated under socialism; therefore fatal distortions were built into the very structure of a controlled economy, and collapse was inevitable. This analysis matched Rand’s understanding of life under the Soviets. She also found the idea insightful for what it suggested about morality. In notes to herself she glossed Mises, writing, “Under altruism, no moral calculations are possible.”
²⁷
Mises’s vision of an economy centered primarily on entrepreneurs rather than workers reinforced Rand’s individualistic understanding of production and creativity.

Mises also provided economic support for Rand’s contention that true capitalism had never been known, an idea she first advanced in the “Manifesto of Individualism” years earlier. Along with his exposition of the calculation problem under socialism, Mises was known for his argument against monopoly prices. According to Mises, in a truly
free market a wily competitor would always undercut any attempt to establish artificially high prices. True monopoly prices could arise only if another party, such as the government, raised barriers to entry into the market, thereby preventing competition. Accordingly, antitrust laws were misguided and dangerous attempts to solve a problem that had been created in the first place by the state.
²⁸
Rand now had two arguments to deploy against antitrust. The first was her moralistic argument that antitrust laws unfairly punished the successful. The second was Mises’s contention that monopolies were not the fault of business, but of government regulation. Rand could therefore cite monopolies as evidence that the United States had never experienced true free-market capitalism. As Paterson had before, Mises helped Rand strengthen, define, and defend her ideas.

Cultural connections also bound the two. Mises was about twenty-five years older than Rand, but they both hailed from the same cosmopolitan European Jewish milieu. His Viennese family was similar to the Rosenbaums in many respects, secular yet conservative, cultured yet commercial. Mises had fled Austria in advance of the Nazis, an experience that profoundly shaped his views of the state. His style also suggested a model for Rand. He was famous for his Thursday evening
Privatseminar
, where curious NYU students mingled with libertarians of all ages, including the occasional famous visitor, such as the actor Adolph Menjou. Mises was formal and reserved toward his students, who in turn treated him reverently. Discussions were often so intense that the group typically reconvened at a nearby restaurant, with a number of students carrying on discussion without the professor until late in the night. Snubbed by the American intellectual establishment, Mises had nonetheless managed to establish himself as the leader of a small movement.