Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (37 page)

The first lecture situated Objectivism within the history of philosophy and covered the “bankruptcy of today’s culture.” The next two lectures were more technical, covering philosophical topics such as reason, abstraction, concept formation, identity, and causality. A third lecture was devoted to “the destructiveness of the concept of God.” The course then began to focus on proper cognitive processes, mixing philosophical and psychological concepts. It branched next into a focus on Rand’s ethics, including a discussion of economics and capitalism. The last lectures tackled free-standing topics such as the nature of evil, art, and sex, including a lecture on “the nature and purpose of art” given by Rand. The final lecture promised to answer the question of why “human beings repress and drive underground, not the worst within them, but
the best.” In New York lectures were followed by a question-and-answer period in which Rand often participated.
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Rand was unquestionably the dominant influence and comprehensive frame of reference at NBI. Whatever subject they taught, NBI lecturers were, by definition, members of her inner circle who had passed muster and acknowledged her as their primary teacher. The Objectivist intellectual world was developed in deliberate opposition to what Rand saw as the dominant method (or lack thereof) in American universities. She harshly criticized universities for their opposition to system building and the “arbitrary, senseless, haphazard conglomeration of most curricula, the absence of any hierarchical structure of knowledge, any order, continuity, or rationale.”
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By contrast, Objectivism was to be a carefully ordered system. Initiates began with the basics and moved up to more advanced classes as they mastered different concepts. Particularly ambitious students in the New York area could aspire to meet with Rand personally and participate in philosophical discussions with the Collective.

As Objectivism grew, Rand became increasingly sensitive about her public profile. Immediately after
Atlas Shrugged
was published she had sparred with liberals in televised forums, in print, and at academic symposiums. Now she refused to appear with others, telling an inquirer she did not do debates: because the “epistemological disintegration of our age has made debate impossible.”
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Stung by years of bad publicity, by the mid-1960s she had composed a release form to be used for media appearances. The form required that her appearance be “a serious discussion of ideas” and that disagreements, “if any, will be expressed politely and impersonally.” Rand insisted that no references be made to her critics and reserved the right to approve the exact wording of her introduction. She was also touchy about the unexpected side effects of her literary fame, telling an eager fan, “I am sorry that I cannot let you take snapshots of me. I have discontinued this practice because I photograph very badly.” When an NBI student violated this policy at a lecture Nathan confronted the student and exposed her film.
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Far from welcoming the swelling in Objectivist ranks, Rand was increasingly suspicious of those who claimed to speak in her name. Even the Ayn Rand campus clubs, which germinated spontaneously at many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, including Boston University, Dartmouth, MIT, Stanford, and Columbia, began to bother her, for they
used her name without her supervision. In May 1965 Nathan issued a rebuke and a warning to the campus clubs in
The Objectivist Newsletter
. He and Rand were particularly concerned about the names these organizations might choose. Nathan explained that names such as the Ayn Rand Study Club were appropriate, whereas names such as the John Galt Society were not. “As a fiction character, John Galt is Miss Rand’s property; he is
not
in the public domain,” Nathan argued.
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He also spelled out the proper nomenclature for those who admired Rand’s ideas. The term Objectivist was “ intimately and exclusively associated with Miss Rand and me,” he wrote. “A person who is in agreement with our philosophy should describe himself, not as an Objectivist, but as a student or a supporter of Objectivism.” At a later date, when the philosophy had spread farther, it might be possible for there to be more than two Objectivists. Further, any campus club that wished to issue a newsletter should indicate their agreement with Objectivism but make clear that they were not official representatives of the philosophy. Nathan closed with a strong attack against another group of Rand readers, the “craven parasites” who sought to use Objectivism for non-Objectivist ends. Into this category fell anyone who advocated political anarchism and anyone who tried to recruit NBI students into schemes for a new free market nation or territory.
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Nathan’s unease gives some indications of how the student right was developing in the wake of Goldwater’s failed campaign. Goldwater had been a unifying factor, a figurehead who drew together diverse groups on the right and channeled their political energy into preexisting institutions. With the collapse of Goldwater’s prospects, his young followers scattered into different groups. Objectivists were no longer found in Students for Goldwater, but began to form their own clubs. Anarchism too was beginning to circulate among the more radical students, primarily through the efforts of Murray Rothbard. In 1962 Rothbard published his two-volume
Man, Economy, and the State
, an exegesis of his mentor Ludwig Von Mises’s thought. The book was written with a concluding set of chapters advocating anarchism, which Rothbard’s sponsors at the Volker Fund quietly excised. Rothbard took his ideas to a more receptive audience, founding a magazine called
Left and Right
that hoped to attract student rebels from both ends of the political spectrum.
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Although anarchism was a minority position, to say the least,
the very idea of it infuriated Rand. But some students saw anarchism as the logical next step after Objectivism. Others, infatuated with Rand’s idea of a capitalist utopia, hatched elaborate plans for a new libertarian Atlantis. A truly free market society could be founded in uninhabited lands or even established on offshore floating platforms, they believed. Rand found these schemes ludicrous.

She was more troubled by the New Left. Leftist campus activism had started small, with a few dedicated students protesting against mandatory anti-Communist loyalty oaths for faculty. It gathered steam in tandem with the Civil Rights movement. Soon the locus of concern shifted to students themselves, their rights on campus, their place within the university structure. Later the Vietnam War and the draft would become central issues. Rand made her clearest statement against the New Left in a 1965 essay directed at UC Berkeley’s Free Speech movement, “Cashing In: The Student Rebellion.” Characteristically, she blamed Berkeley’s troubles on modern philosophy. According to her, “the man most responsible for the present state of the world” was Immanuel Kant, whom she identified as the spiritual “father” of Berkeley’s student rebel leader, Mario Savio. Rand’s invocation of the villainous Kant was one aspect of Objectivism’s kooky side. Yet it was also a source of its appeal, for the demonization of Kant spoke to Objectivism’s earnest intellectualism and deep reverence for the power of ideas.

Rand’s focus on the philosophical roots of the campus disturbances also highlighted a basic theoretical difference between left and right. Unlike their counterparts on the left, Objectivists saw the problems of society in entirely abstract terms. The left certainly had theorists analogous to Rand, namely Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre. But students on the left tended to see injustice as firmly embedded in the material world, be it racism, sexism, militarism, or class oppression. Conversely, contrast Rand and her followers identified the ills of the world in purely philosophical terms. This was a tendency that permeated the right more broadly. Conservatives had long believed that “ideas have consequences,” as the title of Richard Weaver’s 1948 book put it. Similarly, in
The Conscience of a Conservative
Barry Goldwater identified a critical distinction between left and right: “Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. . . . In the name of a concern for ‘human beings’ [liberals] regard
the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society.”
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This idea was anathema to conservatives because it could provide a justification for altering the outcomes of market capitalism. Conservatives instead wanted to shift emphasis to the more abstract, “spiritual” side of human nature. Although she was an atheist, Rand’s ideas followed the same dynamic, for she too was untroubled by the idea of “economic wants” going unsatisfied. Indeed, Rand understood society as simply a function of its dominant ideas.

Rand’s essay on the New Left did, however, come back to earth long enough to urge clear-headed action against the philosophically misguided. She told readers, “The first step is to make oneself heard, on the campus and outside. There are many civilized ways to do it: protest meetings, speeches, pamphlets, letters-to-editors.” The key was that students must “fight intellectually, on moral-intellectual grounds,” since “ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas.”
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She encouraged “civilized” protest to highlight the violent and coercive nature of the protestors. Her followers threw themselves eagerly into the campus fray. Columbia University, a hotbed of left protest, was also home to one of the most dedicated Objectivist organizations, the Committee for the Defense of Property Rights. A photo in the
Columbia Owl
captured well the Objectivists’ mission: two serious young men with neat hair, shaven faces, ties, and overcoats stand proudly over a chair with a large banner declaring “Abolish SDS.”
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The antiwar protests were the perfect chance for Objectivists to practice what they preached, and they eagerly presented themselves as a lone outpost of order and rationality in a sea of mysticism and irrationality. For all Rand’s criticism of American universities, student Objectivists were still eager to defend the university’s academic mission. A student at Washington University wrote, “The students and faculty are here on a voluntary contractual basis to learn and teach (or engage in research), respectively. We are not here to run the university.”
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The Committee for Defense of Property Rights claimed it was formed “to work for the nonviolent atmosphere which scholarly progress requires” and warned that Columbia, “a center of learning,” was endangered by “a handful of drugged, bearded Brown Shirts.”
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Objectivist protestors revealed their essential orientation toward studying, learning, and personal advancement. Objectivists were excited by ideas, not political programs
(although eventually the ideas were to cause political change). Their version of rebellion was fundamentally scholastic: reading philosophy rather than taking over buildings.

Still, student Objectivists had to be careful how they used Rand’s ideas or they would incur her wrath. The University of Virginia Ayn Rand Society planned an ambitious three-day conference, with speakers, discussion groups, a banquet, and several cocktail parties. Eager to draw Rand’s blessing and interested in her advice, the organizers shared their plans for an event intended to “provide what neither our colleges nor our culture provides—an exciting intellectual experience and a social event.” What Rand noticed instead was that the club used a phrase from John Galt’s oath on its stationery. Her lawyer dispatched a blistering letter ordering removal of the offensive quote. The club’s president was apologetic and ashamed: “I have cut the bottoms from all of our stationery I have, and have issued instructions and anyone else who has any of our stationery shall do likewise.”
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A similar fate befell Jarrett Wollstein, a dedicated student of Objectivism. Wollstein offered a course on Rand’s thought at the University of Maryland’s “free university,” hoping to balance the overtly leftist content of the other courses. He was careful to identify himself as an independent operator who had not been sanctioned by Rand. But his disclaimer was to no avail. The local NBI representative soon visited his class to read aloud a legalistic statement announcing that he was not an approved teacher, in the process scaring off several students. Next Wollstein’s application for an NBI class was rejected and his registration fee refunded. Rand then publicly disowned his project in
The Objectivist
, writing, “I wish to put it on record that I repudiate and unequivocally disapprove of Mr. Wollstein’s entire undertaking.”
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Lengthy letters to Rand and Branden brought no reply.

When Wollstein attended an Objectivist-sponsored conference on the draft his presence caused a storm of controversy. Although the conference was not an official NBI event, Leonard Peikoff was the keynote speaker. Peikoff refused to speak if Wollstein was permitted to attend even a single session of the conference, throwing the day’s proceedings into jeopardy. After a tense confrontation with two NBI-affiliated lawyers, Wollstein accepted a refund and left the conference. He later received a brief letter from Nathan banning him from all NBI lectures. Even such treatment could not wean Wollstein off Rand or dampen his
enthusiasm for her message. He wrote an article for YAF’s
New Guard
criticizing Rand and her associates as “the founders of a new orthodoxy” but also asserted, “The value of Objectivism will stand for all time.”
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