Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (25 page)

Soon Rand had her own salon to match Mises’s. As she grew closer to Nathan and Barbara, Rand became ensconced within a new surrogate family, a tight kinship network consisting primarily of the couple’s relatives and friends. The group included Barbara and Nathan’s cousins, Leonard Peikoff and Allan Blumenthal, Nathan’s sister and her husband, Elayne and Harry Kalberman, Barbara’s childhood friend Joan Mitchell, and Joan’s college roommate, Mary Ann Rukovina. Joan’s boyfriend and briefly her husband, Alan Greenspan, was also a regular. Many were
students at New York University, where Barbara and Nathan were now enrolled. These young people were fascinated by Rand, drawn by her strong personality, her bold presentation of ideas, and her literary fame. Rand’s new group of fans dubbed themselves the “Class of ‘43” after
The Fountainhead
, or tongue-in-cheek, “The Collective.” Rand granted her inner circle a rare privilege: the chance to read chapters of
Atlas Shrugged
as they poured off her typewriter. Objectivism as a philosophy had been long germinating in Rand’s mind. Now Objectivism as a social world began to take shape around her.

Rand also remained a magnet for libertarians. She became friendly with Herbert and Richard Cornuelle, two brothers who worked for FEE and the Volker Fund. The Cornuelles were the same type of business-oriented libertarians she had met in California. After studying with Mises, Herbert pursued a corporate career with Dole Pineapple, and Richard served as the head of the National Association of Manufacturers and later as an advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Richard found Rand “electrifying.” When he visited her apartment she seemed a dynamo of energy, perched high atop an ottoman “smoking cigarettes with a long holder with a very characteristic, rather severe hairdo and a kind of intensity in the way she looked at you when she was talking to you, which I found kind of fascinating and frightening almost.” One evening the Cornuelles brought Murray Rothbard to Rand’s home. A Brooklyn native, Rothbard had stumbled across organized libertarianism by way of the infamous
Roofs or Ceilings?
pamphlet that had caused so much grief for Leonard Read. Given a copy in 1946 while a graduate student, he contacted FEE and was then introduced to the work of Mises. By the time Rand returned to New York Rothbard was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia University and was a regular at the Mises seminar.
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Meeting Rand, Rothbard quickly discovered that she was not his “cup of tea.” It was a curious reaction, for the two had much in common. Both loved to argue, staked out extremist positions, and criticized anyone who strayed from pure ideology. Although he was an economist, Rothbard, like Rand, approached libertarianism from a moral point of view. But Rothbard found Rand exhausting. Her intensity, her “enormous hopped-up energy,” overwhelmed him.
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(He had no idea that Rand was a regular user of amphetamines, but he seems to have detected
a strange edge to her personality.) A night owl who loved to stay up late arguing the fine points of economic theory, even Rothbard could not keep up with Rand. For days afterward he felt depressed.

Still, Rothbard’s meeting with Rand had been eye-opening. Despite his allegiance to Mises, Rothbard was bothered by the Austrian’s antipathy to natural rights. Like Rand, he was a natural moralist and wanted to ground his economics in something deeper than utilitarianism. Through Rand Rothbard learned about Aristotelian epistemology and “the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy, which [he] did not know existed.”
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He went on to explore these fields through his own reading. Eventually he combined Austrian economics and natural rights philosophy to create his own brand of anarchist libertarianism. Rothbard acknowledged that Rand had taught him something of value. Yet he disliked her intensely and kept his distance. Rand’s growing charismatic powers could both attract and repel.

As Rand began training her own cadre of thinkers, she became less interested in the laborious task of converting others to her worldview. It was simply easier to start from scratch. Unlike Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek, the young people she met through Barbara and Nathan were not grounded in alternative approaches to politics or the free market. They were receptive to her comprehensive view of the world, her unified field theory of existence. Other libertarians wanted to argue with Rand, but the Collective merely listened.

Against this background Dwight Eisenhower’s 1951 presidential nomination became a real turning point for Rand. In a tight convention Eisenhower, a decorated war hero, had narrowly ousted Senator Robert Taft, the presumptive Republican nominee. Taft, known in the Senate as “Mr. Republican,” was the last major politician to vocalize views shared by Rand and her libertarian friends. He vigorously opposed the New Deal, fought against labor unions, and questioned the wisdom of American involvement overseas. By contrast, Eisenhower was a genial, noncontroversial figure who offered Americans a reassuring, steady hand at the tiller after the upheaval of the Depression and war. He was so popular, and his political views so moderate, that both parties courted him as a presidential prospect.

Rand was alert to the dangers of such a nominee. Eisenhower was akin to Hayek, a destroyer from within, a false friend who would dilute
the principles she held dear. He did more damage than any Democrat possibly could, for his nomination “destroyed the possibility of an opposition” and meant “the end of any even semi-plausible or semi- consistent opposition to the welfare state.” Rand was not alone in her reaction. Even the new religious conservatives she hated were tepid about the nonideological Eisenhower. In 1956 Buckley’s
National Review
would offer a famously lukewarm endorsement: “We prefer Ike.”
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But now, to her dismay, most of Rand’s New York friends swallowed their reservations and climbed aboard the Eisenhower bandwagon. Twenty years of Democratic rule had made them desperate for any Republican president. This struck Rand as foolish compromise and unforgiveable inconsistency. She realized, “[T]hey were not for free enterprise, that was not an absolute in their minds in the sense of real laissez faire capitalism. I knew then that there is nothing that I can do with it and no help that I can expect from any of them.”
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After a string of disappointments, she was ready to turn her back on conservatives altogether.

It was Nathan, stepping forward into a new role of advisor, who gently nudged Rand to this conclusion. The conservatives were not really “our side,” he told Rand. “We have really nothing philosophically in common with them.” Boldly he informed Rand that she was making “a great mistake” to ally herself with Republicans, conservatives, or libertarians. Rand was intrigued and relieved at Nathan’s formulation, the last premise that she needed to clarify her thinking. Looking back a decade later, she remembered, “[F]rom that time on . . . I decided that the conservatives as such are not my side, that I might be interested in individuals or have something in common on particular occasions, but that I have no side at all, that I’m standing totally alone and have to create my own side.”
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Implicit in Nathan’s words was the promise that he and the Collective could take the place of the allies Rand had forsaken.

The 1953 marriage of Nathan and Barbara accelerated Rand’s move away from the broader libertarian community. She and Frank presided as matron of honor and best man at the wedding, a union Rand had done much to encourage. In California Barbara Wiedman had confessed to Rand her uncertainty about the relationship, but found the older woman unable to understand her hesitancy. Nathan was clearly an
exceptional young man with a profound intelligence. Barbara admired Nathan and shared his values. According to Rand, they had all the necessary ingredients for a successful relationship. Against her instincts Barbara followed Rand’s advice. Nathan and Barbara’s subsequent decision to change their last name to Branden symbolized the new strength of Rand’s growing circle. “Branden” had the crisp, Aryan ring of characters in Rand’s fiction; it also incorporated Rand’s chosen surname.
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As in the case of young Alisa, the symbolism was clear enough. Barbara and Nathan were reborn not only as a married couple, but as a couple with an explicit allegiance to Rand.

After their marriage the Brandens and the Collective formed the nucleus of Rand’s social life to the exclusion of all others. Rand sequestered herself during the day, laboring on
Atlas Shrugged
. At night she emerged for conversation, mostly about the book. Saturday nights were the highlight; no matter how intense her writing, Rand never canceled their salon. The Collective gathered at Rand’s Thirty-sixth Street apartment, a small, dimly lit space “reeking with smoke” and filled with hair from the O’Connors’ Persian cats.
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The apartment could not compare with the magnificent estate at Chatsworth, but Rand loved that she could see the Empire State Building from a window in her office. Modernist furniture in her favorite color, blue-green, filled the apartment, and ashtrays were available at every turn. When Rand finished a chapter, it was a reading night, with the Collective silently devouring the pages she drafted. Other nights were dedicated to philosophical discussion.

During these evenings Rand taught the Collective the essentials of her philosophy. No longer content to celebrate individualism through her fiction, she now understood, “my most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.”
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Objectivism, as she would soon be calling her ideas, was an ingenious synthesis of her ethical selfishness and the Aristotelian rationality that had captured her interest after she completed
The Fountainhead
. Stitching the two together, Rand argued that she had rationally proved the validity of her moral system. Unlike other systems, she claimed, Objectivist morality was not based on theological assumptions, but on a logically demonstrable understanding of what man’s needs on earth were. In essence, Objectivism was Rand’s rebuttal of the skeptical and relativistic orientation that had characterized American intellectual life
since the rise of scientific naturalism.
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What differentiated Objectivism was its ambition. Rather than simply reassert the idea of objective and transcendent truth, a project supported by a host of other neo- Aristotelian thinkers, Rand attempted at the same time to vindicate a controversial and inflammatory transvaluation of values that contradicted the basic teachings of Western religion and ethics.

The scope of her project awed her young followers, who considered her a thinker of world-historical significance. In her ideas they found a “round universe,” a completely comprehensible, logical world. Rand’s focus on reason led her to declare that paradoxes and contradictions were impossible. Thought, she explained, was a cycle of moving from abstract premises to concrete objects and events: “The cycle
is unbreakable;
no part of it can be of any use, until and unless the cycle is completed.”
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Therefore a premise and a conclusion could never clash, unless an irrational thought process had been employed. Nor could emotions and thoughts be at odds, Rand asserted. Emotions came from thought, and if they contradicted reality, then the thought underlying them was irrational and should be changed. Indeed even a person’s artistic and sexual preferences sprang from his or her basic philosophical premises, Rand taught the Collective.

It was all adding up to one integrated system. Man was a rational creature who used his mind to survive. The rational faculty required independence and individuality to operate properly; therefore an ethics of selfishness was appropriate for rational men. Any moral or ethical problem could be approached from this perspective. Was a person acting independently? Were his or her actions based on reason and consistent with his or her premises? That was the true determinant of right, Rand taught. Even more than her fiction or the chance to befriend a famous author, Rand’s philosophy bound the Collective to her. She struck them all as a genius without compare. On Saturday nights they argued and debated the fine points and applications, but never questioned the basics Rand outlined. During these marathon sessions, Rand was indefatigable, often talking until the morning light. The Collective marveled at how the opportunity to talk philosophy rejuvenated her, even after a long day of writing. The obvious was also the unthinkable. To keep up with her younger followers, Rand fed herself a steady stream of amphetamines.
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Always by her side at these occasions, Frank was a silent paramour, an ornamental and decorative figure. As the conversation wore into the evening, he served up coffee and pastries but contributed little to the discussion, sometimes dozing silently in his chair. The move to New York had been profoundly disruptive for Frank. He made a fainthearted attempt to sell flowers to decorate building lobbies, printing up cards that identified him as “Francisco, the lobbyist.” But without his own land and greenhouse, the business offered little reward and soon collapsed. Rand turned again to fiction to sort out Frank’s behavior, telling the Collective, “He’s on strike.” She continued to value their connection, always introducing herself to strangers as “Mrs. O’Connor.” When their schedules diverged as she stayed up late to write, she left him friendly notes about the apartment, always addressed to “Cubbyhole” and signed “Fluff.” Rand was elated when he suggested that one of her chapter titles, “Atlas Shrugged,” serve as the book’s title, and she proudly informed new visitors that Frank had thought up the book’s name. Such claims did little to disguise Frank’s failure to emulate the active, dominant heroes Rand celebrated. The Collective knew, however, that his place by Rand’s side was never to be questioned. Frank was outside the rankings, of the Collective but not in it.
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