Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (39 page)

Rand’s intellectual stature was enhanced during these years by the widespread sense that
Atlas Shrugged
was a prophetic work. She made few public comments about President Johnson and the Great Society, but many of her readers thought
Atlas Shrugged
had predicted the rapidly expanding welfare state. A Texas newspaper quoted Rand’s statist villain, Wesley Mouch, and observed, “Readers of Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ have seen increasing signs recently of the conditions predicted in the novel”; the
Orange County Register
chimed in with an editorial querying, “Atlas Shrugged Coming True?” This sense of the novel’s predictive power stretched from the grassroots to national financial magazines. A circular letter distributed by the Michigan-based Muskegon Manufacturers Association told its readers, “The book, published seven years ago, took 12 years to write. Yet in it, the steel incident
occurs, the international mess we have come to accept as the norm is developed, the very words that bureaucrats and politicians are today uttering as excuses and reasons, appear in its pages.”
Barron’s
, a leading New York financial newspaper, began a lead story on oil import quotas with mention of
Atlas Shrugged
, commenting, “To judge by what has happened since early 1959, when the decree took effect, Miss Rand deserves high honor as a prophet.”
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In 1966 Rand added to her nonfiction quiver with
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
, a collection of speeches and previously published articles. In addition to work by Rand and Nathan, the book also featured essays by Alan Greenspan and Robert Hessen. The book reflected the symmetry and hierarchy of Objectivism, for it was intended to explain the ethical theory Rand had depicted in her novels and outlined in
The Virtue of Selfishness
. She called her new book a “nonfiction footnote to
Atlas Shrugged
” that rested upon the “necessary foundation” of her earlier work. Accordingly it was tuned to applications and extensions rather than basic philosophy. The first section, “Theory and History,” addressed specific economic issues such as monopoly, regulation of the airwaves, and copyright law. “Current State” collected Rand’s thoughts on contemporary political issues. Rand now had an equal number of fiction and nonfiction books in print but still garnered little respect as a philosopher from the outside world.
The New Republic
jabbed at her in a sarcastic review: “With engaging self-confidence, [Nathaniel Branden] hits out at Dr. Erich From. Mr. Alan Greenspan has a go at the anti-trust laws. . . . But, unquestionably, Miss Rand remains Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.”
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Reviews like these ignored the growing strength of Objectivism but also indicated the limitations of Rand’s appeal. She had failed to storm the temples of high culture, yet the mandarins did not notice that outside the gates she was inspiring a rising generation of politicized youth.

The paperback edition of
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
, released a year later, included one of Rand’s most important political statements, her major argument against the Vietnam War and the draft. In “The Wreckage of the Consensus,” first delivered as a speech to Boston’s Ford Hall Forum, Rand denounced the Vietnam War, calling it a “hideous mess” that “does not serve any national interests of the United States.”
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Her critique had little to do with colonialism, fascism, imperialism, or the other evils leftists laid at the feet of the United States. Rather, she argued that the only justification for war was national self-defense, and Vietnam did not meet this criterion. Although she was opposed to Communism, Rand did not buy the domino theory that guided policymakers, whereby any nation that became Communist was seen to potentially topple its neighbors in the same direction. In the fashion of the prewar right, Rand saw hostilities in Vietnam as unrelated to life in the United States. To her, the more potent threat lay at home, where statists and socialists disguised as liberals might destroy the freedoms of America.

Rand saw the draft as a sure sign that freedom was already in grave danger. She was deeply opposed to the draft and its implications for society. “Of all the statist violations of individual rights . . .the military draft is the worst,” she told her audience. “It negates man’s fundamental right, the right to life, and establishes the fundamental principle of statism—that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.”
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Rand coupled her attack on the statist draft with an impassioned defense of young lives wasted by the war. If potential inductees turned to drugs or “the beatnik cult” in response to state enslavement, who could blame them? She was incensed that none on the right had joined her offensive; instead, she observed incredulously, it was only “the extreme
left
” who had demanded repeal of the draft. Rand argued that opposition to the draft should be the province of conservatives, “the alleged defenders of freedom and capitalism.”
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Framed as a statist violation of rights, conscription fit seamlessly into her larger opposition to coercion and the initiation of force.

Before long, opposition to the draft became a key part of the Objectivist worldview, despite Rand’s active discouragement of draft resistance. She had little sympathy for those who publicly protested the draft, favorably quoting
Persuasion
, a magazine published by NBI students, “One does not stop the juggernaut by throwing oneself against it.”
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Her position was nuanced, or some might say contradictory: against the draft, and against the war, and against the protestors too. Some of this was merely cultural. Raised in the high European tradition, Rand viscerally objected to the messiness of the bohemian student protestors. Their
strident demands, socialist rhetoric, and street action reminded her all too much of the Bolsheviks. Objectivists instead sought to protest the draft through legal means. Rand’s personal lawyer, Henry Mark Holzer, began representing clients who had been drafted. He and several other Objectivists organized an antidraft road show that visited several cities, presenting the Objectivist argument against the draft as a violation of individual rights.
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Rand’s opposition to the draft cemented her popularity on campus and separated her further from conservatives. Increasingly the Vietnam War was making the differences between libertarians and conservatives clear. Conservatives saw the war as an important conflict in the worldwide struggle against Communism; if anything, they urged that the war be pursued more vigorously. By contrast, libertarians doubted the war’s relevancy to U.S. interests, and like Rand they saw the draft as an unacceptable violation of individual rights. In 1966 several professors at the University of Chicago called a conference to discuss the Selective Service System. A number of libertarians, including the economist Milton Friedman, made principled arguments against the draft. Rand publicized similar ideas to her student following. One young follower recalled, “It was not necessary to accept the antiquated bourgeois baggage of respect for one’s elders, support for an unwinnable war, or abstention from sex. Instead, liberty could be justified, youthfully and gloriously, by the triumphant words of John Galt to a mediocre world, resonating through the campus rebellion: ‘Get the hell out of my way!’ “
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Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for president had given Rand her first surge of popularity among conservative youth. Now her opposition to the draft created a second rush of enthusiasm for her ideas.

A good index of her popularity came in October 1967, when
National Review
featured Rand on its cover, rendered as a stained glass window complete with dollar sign insignia, under the wry headline “The Movement to Canonize Ayn Rand.” The article was essentially a hit piece commissioned by William F. Buckley, who had grown concerned with Rand’s perennial appeal among young conservatives. Buckley told his chosen author, M. Stanton Evans, that he wanted a “definitive” piece on Ayn Rand that would “demonstrate to people of commonsense that her ideological and philosophical presumptions make her an inadequate mentor.” Whittaker Chambers’s message bore repeating to a new
generation of conservatives. Evans, an activist since his student days and then an editor at the
Indianapolis News
, was to draw the line.
⁴⁰

But the message had shifted, and Evans’s prominent cover story revealed how many of Rand’s beliefs had become conventional conservative wisdom even as she remained, officially, persona non grata. Unlike Chambers, Evans was untroubled by her defense of capitalism and her attack on government regulation. She had, Evans wrote, “an excellent grasp of the way capitalism is supposed to work, the efficiencies of free enterprise, the central role of private property and the profit motive, the social and political costs of welfare schemes which seek to compel a false benevolence.”
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He also admired her polemical fire and consistency, and defended her against Chambers’s accusation that she was an unconscious Nazi. Evans went on to argue that despite these features, Rand remained a dangerous figure for conservatives because she mixed her good qualities with the bad, namely, atheism. Her work raised several “central dilemmas of the era”: “Can faith in God be reconciled with liberty for man? Is Christian belief compatible with libertarian attachment? Is Capitalism anti-Christian?” Evans seemed confident that a general consensus on each had already been reached. The only problem was that Rand answered all of these questions incorrectly. Christianity was an essential part of the conservative and capitalist agenda. Rand, an atheist, would never quite fit in. Evans urged that conservatives make judicious use of Rand, all the while being careful not to swallow her arguments whole.
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While Rand’s inner circle continued to fray, Objectivism in New York was reaching fever pitch. With much fanfare, in May 1967 NBI signed a fifteen-year lease on offices in the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building. Even though their offices were in the basement, it was still an ideal address. The lease also contained an auditorium, perfect for large lectures and the movie showings, performances, and dances that were becoming a regular part of the Institute’s offerings. New York NBI now coordinated Objectivist baseball games, art shows, concerts, a movie series titled “The Romantic Screen,” an annual NBI Ball, even an Objectivist European tour. For California Objectivists there was an NBI Ball West.
The Objectivist
announced that the new auditorium would
also host seven informal, casual dress social evenings targeted toward singles.
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Though much of this social activity stemmed from student demand, it was also linked to Rand’s belief that she lived in a “dead culture.” It was axiomatic to Objectivists that they lived in a state of crisis, a world uniformly opposed to their values and interests. This came through most clearly in Rand’s devotion to Romantic art and her attack on contemporary art, literature, and movies. Since the mainstream contained nothing of value for Objectivists, it was necessary to create an alternative world, where NBI students could find the cultural nourishment they needed. The institute’s new quarters were a testament to the durability and power of the universe Rand had forged. Few noticed that Nathan escaped to California for two months to personally teach the Basic Principles course in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

For all the successes of the New York NBI, the organization was developing an unsavory reputation. The idea that Objectivism was a weird pseudo-religion had wide currency in the mass media. Some of this sprang from the obvious passion Rand inspired in her readers. Religious metaphors were often used to describe her: she was a “prophetess” or “she-messiah,” and her audience was “a congregation” or “disciples.”
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Much of the religious imagery, however, stemmed from eyewitness reports of NBI classes.
Life
quoted a student who described an NBI class as “almost liturgical: an immaculate white cloth altar with a tape-recorded tabernacle.” “As a newcomer,” the student said, “I was asked three times if I were a ‘believer.’ “ Similarly, Jerome Tuccille wrote of his time as an NBI student, “My first reaction to all of this was awe, the stunned awe of the true believing convert as devout now in my atheistic capitalism as I had ever been in the Baroque Catholicism of the 1950s.” At NBI Rand’s writings were like holy writ. In his lectures and articles Branden used Rand’s characters to make his arguments, citing John Galt’s reaction during a particular scene in
Atlas Shrugged
as an example of “psychological maturity.” Rand’s creative world was cited as an alternative to reality, and passages from her novels were taken as proof of various trends and problems affecting the contemporary world.
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At critical stages of argumentation Rand and others tended to insert passages from
Atlas Shrugged
to carry the point.

Visitors to NBI lectures were alarmed by the exalted place Rand held at NBI and the conformity of the students Nathan taught. “When
Miss Rand entered the room and sat down, an awed hush fell over most of the people who were gathered,” remembered the psychologist Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). Ellis’s therapeutic technique was based on rational examination and understanding of emotions. He proposed a debate with Branden after hearing about Objectivism from many of his clients. The debate was a raucous affair, with Rand shouting from the sidelines and the Objectivist audience clapping for Branden and booing Ellis. Afterward Ellis was deeply disturbed. A year later he published a slashing attack on Rand and Branden,
Is Objectivism a Religion?
Even those friendly to Objectivism were disconcerted by the NBI lectures. Before their break, John Hospers sent Rand an unusually frank letter describing his experience: “I felt as if I were in a strange church where I didn’t belong, where all the other people were singing the chants they were expected to and only I did not conform, and where to deny a single thing was considered heresy. . . . And the attitude of the audience in the lecture hall shocked me even more. Rational? Good heavens—an Army of the Faithful, repeating the same incantations and asking questions only about details or applications, never questioning the tenets of the True Faith.”
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