Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (35 page)

Goldwater and Rand drew from the same wells of libertarian enthusiasm. During Goldwater’s campaign, subscriptions to
The Objectivist Newsletter
boomed, rising from five thousand in 1963 to fifteen thousand by the end of the following year.
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The Arizona senator hailed from the libertarian sunbelt region where Rand’s books were favorites, and both were popular among small business owners. In Washington State, the Draft Goldwater Committee ordered two hundred copies of
Atlas Shrugged
for potential supporters. Goldwater, like Rand, talked about profits, production, and the burden of taxation and regulation. “Profits are the surest sign of responsible behavior,” he said on the Senate floor, almost echoing Rand’s ideas about money as the root of all good.
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His belief in the power and efficacy of free markets endeared him to the independent business owners who formed the backbone of his organization.

Young Goldwater enthusiasts quickly noticed that he seemed to perfectly embody Rand’s iconography of the independent, manly hero. Jerome Tuccille, an avid libertarian, remembered, “More important than his message was the fact that Goldwater managed to
look the part
as though he had been made for it. . . . One look at him and you knew he belonged in Galt’s Gulch, surrounded by striking heroes with blazing eyes and lean, dynamic heroines with swirling capes.” The campaign’s student arm was saturated with Rand fans, as one MIT student remembered. He joined YAF and Students for Goldwater, only to find that “Most of the key people in both groups (which mostly overlapped) were Objectivists, and I kept getting into discussions of Rand’s ideas without having read the books.” The connection between Rand and Goldwater’s campaign was cemented by Karl Hess, a dedicated NBI student and one of Goldwater’s chief speechwriters. Hess sprinkled Randian parlance liberally throughout his boss’s speeches. “There were strong echoes from the novelist of romantic capitalism, Ayn Rand,” the
Washington Star
noted of one Goldwater speech.
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As the campaign wore on, Rand was outraged to see Goldwater caricatured as a racist by the mass media. It was true that both she and Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a litmus test of liberal acceptability, but neither she nor Goldwater was truly prejudiced. Rand inveighed against racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism,” and Goldwater had integrated his family’s business years before and was even a member of the NAACP. But Goldwater’s libertarianism trumped his racial liberalism. He was among a handful of senators who voted against the bill, a sweeping piece of legislation intended to address the intractable legacy of racial discrimination in the South. Goldwater’s vote was based on principles he had held for years. A firm supporter of state’s rights, he was alarmed at the expansive powers granted the federal government under the act. Following the analysis of his friends William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, he also believed the act was unconstitutional because it infringed on private property rights. In the scrum of electoral politics such distinctions were academic. Goldwater’s vote went down as a vote for segregation.

Rand understood his action differently because she shared his individualistic perspective on rights and his belief that private property was sacrosanct. Unlike Goldwater, Rand was unimpressed with the doctrine of state’s rights, which “pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities. . . . It does not grant to state governments an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens.” But she was equally appalled by the act’s clauses II and VII, which forbade discrimination in public accommodations and employment. If the act passed it would be the “worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history,” she wrote. Early civil rights activists who struggled against government-enforced segregation drew Rand’s approval. Now she criticized “Negro leaders” for forfeiting their moral case against discrimination by “demanding special race privileges.” Rand considered race a collectivist fiction, a peripheral category to be subsumed into her larger philosophy. Her rendering of American history did not ignore race, but neatly slotted it into her larger vision of capitalism. Slavery simply proved her point about the country’s “mixed economy,” and the Civil War demonstrated the superiority of the capitalistic North against “the agrarian-feudal South.”
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In the pages of
The Objectivist Newsletter
Rand vigorously defended Goldwater against the widespread perception that he represented “the Radical Right,” a dangerous fringe element said to be imperiling American democracy. The charges stemmed from Goldwater’s popularity among members of the John Birch Society (JBS), a secretive anti-Communist group. Members and the group’s founder, the candy manufacturer Robert Welch, tended to anti-Semitism and bizarre conspiracy theories. In a much ballyhooed comment Welch once told supporters he believed Dwight Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. Members of the society, which kept its roster confidential, were found in every segment of the political right. But its oddities, once uncovered by the mass media, were fast making the JBS a political hot potato. Richard Nixon denounced the group in 1962 while running for governor of California. It was a move intended to advance his appeal among moderates, but instead it cost Nixon a sizable chunk of his base and he lost the election. Goldwater was unwilling to take such a step, for he understood how vital the JBS was to his campaign. Society members were as common among adult volunteers as Objectivists were among his campus following. Goldwater
walked a careful line, making use of JBS volunteers who did not publicize their membership.
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Rand was not bothered by the charges against the JBS, which she characterized as “an artificial and somewhat unworthy strawman.” She had lunch with Welch in Boston before her first Ford Hall Forum appearance; apparently it was a successful encounter despite their differences. Welch followed up with a copy of Grace Lumpkin’s anti-Communist religious autobiography, noting that Rand might disagree with the theme but still find it of interest. The JBS even had a form letter of sorts for Objectivists who inquired about membership. “Since Miss Rand is an avowed atheist, she would certainly not follow the Society in its insistence that its members believe in God,” the letter read, continuing, “Any support, however, which you might be able to give to the principles of less government, more individual responsibility, and a better world, outside membership in the Society, would certainly be appreciated.” To Rand the JBS was simply another group of misguided religious conservatives. She didn’t understand the extent to which the society had become synonymous in the popular mind with incipient fascism and totalitarian mob rule. The JBS had even been widely—and falsely—linked with the Kennedy assassination. It struck fear into the hearts of liberal commentators, ever alert for demagogues after an era of totalitarianism. By contrast Rand wondered, “What, exactly, is the evil of the so-called ‘radical right?’ “ It couldn’t be racism, she argued, for “the main, active body of racists in this country” were southern Democrats.
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Rand viewed the charge of racism as a smokescreen for liberal opposition to capitalism. In her mind Goldwater’s defense of capitalism explained his popularity, for the main issue of the age was capitalism versus socialism. In a postmortem on the Republican convention she wrote, “Now consider the term extremism. Its alleged meaning is: ‘intolerance, hatred, racism, bigotry, crackpot theories, incitement to violence.’ Its real meaning is: ‘the advocacy of capitalism.’”
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To some degree Rand had a point. Liberal commentators appeared especially incredulous at the mention of libertarian ideas, and support for the Liberty Amendment, a proposal to ban the income tax, ran high among Birchers. But free markets were only a piece of the larger JBS worldview, which included staunch opposition to civil rights and anti-Communism à la McCarthy. With her single-minded focus on capitalism, Rand missed
the political realities unfolding on the ground. The violence and unrest of 1964, including the Watts riot, stoked racial anxieties. Goldwater had staked out his territory as an opponent of the Democratic approach to civil rights; whether he liked it or not, he was becoming a central figure in the political clash over integration and desegregation, and these issues, far more than capitalism, underlay his political fortunes.

An eager booster of Goldwater up to his triumphant nomination at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, Rand became disillusioned as he moved into the general election. It was the same mistake Willkie had made. Goldwater began to retreat from his pro-capitalist stance, repackaging himself as a moderate who could appeal to a broad swath of voters. Afterward Rand dissected his campaign angrily: “There was no discussion of capitalism. There was no discussion of statism. There was no discussion of the blatantly vulnerable record of the government’s policies in the last thirty years. There was no discussion. There were no issues.” A month before the election Rand warned her readers that Goldwater was moving toward defeat, and she urged them to prepare for the “bitter disappointment.” Perhaps hoping to reverse the tide, as the campaign drew to a close Rand sent him a speech to be used without attribution.
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Her speech, like her letter to Goldwater, recast conservatism along purely economic lines, celebrating the power of the free market. The campaign, by now past the point of rescue, ignored her contribution.

In truth Goldwater faced a nearly impossible task. He was running against the master politician Lyndon Baines Johnson, who pulled the mantle of the deceased John F. Kennedy close around his shoulders. And Goldwater’s irreverent, shoot-from-the hip, folksy style, so attractive to straight-talking libertarians, was a huge liability. Caricatured as a racist fanatic who would drag the United States into nuclear war, Goldwater lost by a landslide in the general election. Besides Arizona the only states he won were in the Deep South, filled with the very southern Democrats Rand cited to disprove his racism. Yet Goldwater’s decisive defeat held within it the seeds of political transformation, for his positions had made the Republican Party nationally competitive in the South for the first time since the Civil War. It was an augury of the first national political realignment since FDR’s New Deal.
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“It’s earlier than we think,” Rand told the
New York Times
the day after Goldwater’s loss. Advocates of capitalism had to “start from
scratch” and concentrate on culture rather than practical politics.
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This was the same conclusion she had reached after the Willkie campaign—that a popular consensus on the virtues of capitalism had to be established before electoral success could be achieved. Laissez-faire capitalism belonged to the uncharted future rather than the past. The senator himself seemed to accept Rand’s explanation for his defeat, quoting her in his syndicated column.
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In
The Objectivist Newsletter,
her private forum, Rand openly blamed Goldwater for his loss. She was appalled that the only voters he had drawn to his banner were southern whites: “As it stands, the most grotesque, irrational and disgraceful consequence of the campaign is the fact that the only section of the country left in the position of an alleged champion of freedom, capitalism and individual rights is the agrarian, feudal, racist South.”
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The only glimmer of hope had been Ronald Reagan’s principled and philosophical speech on behalf of Goldwater, but it had been too little, too late.

Despite her enthusiasm for Goldwater, Rand was blazing a trail distinct from the broader conservative movement, as indicated by the title of her second nonfiction book,
The Virtue of Selfishness
. Whereas traditional conservatism emphasized duties, responsibilities, and social interconnectedness, at the core of the right-wing ideology that Rand spearheaded was a rejection of moral obligation to others. As one reader told her after finishing
Atlas Shrugged,
“I accepted the principle that I was my brother’s keeper, asking only why those who told me this did not keep their brothers. I felt a moral obligation to renounce wealth, success, love until the downtrodden masses were cared for. I wondered why I felt resentment if I gave a bum a quarter and guilt if I didn’t. I was bewildered at these contradictory emotions and thought, ‘there is something wrong with me.’ There was something wrong all right, but not with me, but with my code.”
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Rand shared with the fusionist conservatives of
National Review
a fear of socialism and a suspicion of the state, but her thought rested on a fundamentally different social basis. Her vision of society was atomistic, not organic. Rand’s ideal society was made up of traders, offering value for value, whose relationships spanned only the length of any given transaction.

The Virtue of Selfishness
was the brainchild of Bennett Cerf at Random House, who was eager to add to the Rand franchise. She was a veritable golden goose for the house, which had published
For the New Intellectual
and the Brandens’ biography,
Who Is Ayn Rand?
Combined sales were well into the hundreds of thousands and showed no signs of leveling off. Cerf suggested that some of Rand’s speeches and articles from her newsletter could be repackaged as a stand-alone volume. In response Rand proposed a new book, titled
The Fascist New Frontier,
after her essay of the same name. Originally enthusiastic about the project, Cerf grew increasingly uncomfortable with the book’s title as he tried unsuccessfully to rouse the interest of his sales staff.