Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (49 page)

The early stages of this project were supported by grants from the University of California, Berkeley, History Department. I received travel funding from the Institute for Humane Studies and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Mises Institute generously offered me room and board during my stay in Auburn. A W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship, awarded by the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, gave me a full year to write and research. In the last critical stages of writing I received support through the University of Virginia Excellence in Diversity Fellowship, Professors as Writers Program, summer grant, and the Digital Classroom Initiative.

In the eight years I worked on this project I have benefited from the support, advice, and friendship of many people. Apologies in advance to anyone I may have left out. I alone am responsible for all interpretations, arguments, errors, or omissions in this book.

At the University of California, Berkeley, my advisor, David Hollinger, guided me expertly from seminar paper to finished dissertation. I will never forget the gleam in his eye when I proposed the topic of Ayn Rand. His confidence in me has been inspiring and his guidance indispensible. I also benefited immensely from the critical skepticism of Kerwin Klein and the prompt attentions of Mark Bevir. As I finished writing, Eitan Grossman and Kristen Richardson provided valuable editorial support. From the beginning of the project, Eitan urged me to think carefully about the nature, significance, and depth of Rand’s intellectual appeal.

The rich secondary literature on Rand, which I describe more fully in my concluding Essay on Sources, provided an invaluable starting point for my inquiry. I am grateful to the broader community of scholars and writers interested in Rand who paved the way before me.

Many historians have read all or part of the manuscript. I benefited from the insightful comments and questions of Joyce Mao, Jason Sokol, and members of David Hollinger’s intellectual history discussion group, especially Nils Gilman and Justin Suran. Nelson Lichtenstein, Charles Capper, Thomas Bender, Louis Masur, anonymous readers for
Modern Intellectual History
, and the editorial board of
Reviews in American History
helped me perfect parts of the dissertation for publication. Michael Kazin, Daniel Horowitz, and Don Critchlow read the entire dissertation and suggested fruitful ways to reconceptualize it as a book.
Paula Baker gave the manuscript two terrific readings at different stages in the project. James Kloppenberg’s comments and questions fortified my final revisions.

I am also grateful to the many audiences who listened to me present various pieces of my research, starting with attendees at the Capitalism and Its Culture Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gregory Eow arranged a visit to the Rice University History Department, where I learned from Thomas Haskell’s probing questions. Audience members, panelists, and commentators at meetings of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Policy History Conference, and the Davis Center for Russian Studies Sixtieth anniversary symposium shaped and strengthened my interpretations. Thanks to David Farber and Michelle Nickerson for sparking memorable discussion at the AHA. Kathleen Frydl, Abena Osseo-Asare, Jo Guldi, and Daniel Immerwahr helped polish my postdoctoral work.

David Kennedy offered valuable advice on publishing. Though I am not a client of hers, Susan Rabiner generously offered her counsel at several points.

At the Hoover Institution Martin Anderson and Tibor Machan supported my work and offered me their insight into Rand, as did Bob Hessen. I am also grateful to Kenneth Jowett. Andy Rutten and Katherine Mangu-Ward guided me through the world of modern libertarianism. Ron Unz gave me access to his database of libertarian periodicals, and Andrew Kirk helped me track down an elusive Rand citation. During a critical hour John Judis turned up at Stanford and gave me three unforgettable words of writing advice.

My greatest discovery was Jane Barnes, who pushed me to excel with tact and verve. This book is immeasurably better for her hard work and sharp insight. Will Schulman gamely played the role of informed general reader and offered excellent feedback as the manuscript developed. Shoshana Milgram shared her Rand expertise with me on several occasions. Joan Rosenberg offered me lodging in Irvine numerous times, making my research trips infinitely more pleasant, as did Jasmine Kerrissey. In Charlottesville my colleagues in the History Department provided a wonderfully supportive atmosphere for the last days of writing. Guy Ortolano and Carmen Pavel critiqued my drafts and cheered me on. With unfailing good humor and scrupulous accuracy, Stephen
Macekura helped me track down stray citations, books, and facts as my deadline loomed.

At Oxford University Press Susan Ferber immediately grasped the essence of the project. I have benefited greatly from her keen editorial advice, comprehensive vision, and tactical insight. The rest of the team at Oxford, particularly Susan Fensten, Andrew Varhol, Christian Purdy, and Jessica Ryan, has done a spectacular job readying the book for publication.

I am thankful for the many friends who helped me both work hard and play hard, especially Anna, Halton, Chris, Lilly, Natalie, Merry Jean, and the Booty Karma crew. Many a physicist brightened my day in Palo Alto, and new friends welcomed me to Charlottesville. Old friends Alexis and Jerome and Elizabeth were particularly supportive as the end drew near.

My immediate and extended family have been there for me in myriad ways. Christine and Steve listened to several presentations of my research and offered their home as a much valued writing getaway, and Blake, Chase, and Brooke kept me in touch with my inner child. Tim started this whole thing by giving me
The Fountainhead
many years ago. He also read the dissertation from top to bottom, pulling out key details that suggested a path forward for the book. Several Burnses tackled their first Ayn Rand novels on my behalf, a much appreciated labor of love. My parents gave me generous financial support, but more important encouraged my ambitions without becoming overbearing. This book is dedicated to my father, but it is my mother who perhaps best understands what it means to me. Gail, Chuck, and Sara welcomed me to their family with open arms and quickly learned when to ask and not ask about the book. My husband, Nick Cizek, has heightened my highs and lessened my lows, both personal and professional. His courage, compassion, and honesty are my version of the heroic.

ESSAY ON SOURCES

PUBLISHED WORKS BY RAND

The scholar of Ayn Rand has an enviable problem: a surfeit of published sources. Rand’s enormous corpus of fiction and nonfiction, including bound volumes of her newsletters, is readily available in libraries and bookstores across the country. Many of her speeches have been reprinted in her nonfiction books. In addition to work that Rand herself published, posthumously her estate has released a steady stream of material, including her earliest efforts at fiction, her question-and-answer sessions at public speeches, transcripts from writing courses, and volumes of her letters and journals.

Unfortunately, there are grave limitations to the accuracy and reliability of the putatively primary source material issued by Rand’s estate. Discrepancies between Rand’s published journals and archival material were first publicized by the Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra, who noticed differences between the
Journals of Ayn Rand
(1999) and brief excerpts published earlier in
The Intellectual Activist
¹
After several years working in Rand’s personal papers I can confirm Sciabarra’s discovery: the published versions of Rand’s letters and diaries have been significantly edited in ways that drastically reduce their utility as historical sources.

The editor of the
Letters of Ayn Rand
(1995) acknowledges that “some of the less interesting material within letters” and “the routine opening and closing material” have been deleted.
²
These omissions are of high interest to the historian, for it is here that Rand notes details of her schedule, makes offhand comments on recent events in her life, and includes unique touches that personalize her communication. Looking at the originals of Rand’s letters has helped me reconstruct the web of contacts she maintained and track shifts and developments in key relationships. I did not discover any changes to the body of her correspondence. The letters as published have not been altered; they are merely incomplete. Scholars can benefit from this material, but historians in particular should note that important insights can be gleaned only from the originals.
³

The editing of the
Journals of Ayn Rand
(1997) is far more significant and problematic. On nearly every page of the published journals, an unacknowledged change has been made from Rand’s original writing. In the book’s foreword the editor, David
Harriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own as necessary for greater clarity. In many cases, however, his editing serves to significantly alter Rand’s meaning.

Many of the edits involve small words that carry great weight, such as “if” and “but.” Sentences that Rand starts with the tentative “if” are rewritten to sound stronger and more definite. Separate sentences are joined with “but.” Changes are sometimes made for what seem to be unarticulated aesthetic preferences, such as replacing Rand’s “heated-over” with “warmed-over.”
⁴
Rand’s original wording here is significant, for it provides evidence of her lingering difficulty with idiomatic and vernacular English. These rough patches have been edited out of her fiction and published writing but remain in her private notes as a valuable testimony to her origins and linguistic development.

The editing also obscures important shifts and changes in Rand’s thought. Early in her career Rand idolized the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she used as inspiration for Howard Roark. Even in this early phase of infatuation, however, there were seeds of Rand’s later disillusionment with Wright’s “mysticism.” Reading his book
The Disappearing City
she noted to herself, “More of Wright’s ideas. Some beautiful, a great many too many not clear.” That hint of disappointment is muted in the published journals, which render Rand’s sentiments more positively as “Some beautiful, a great many not clear.”
⁵
Gone too is the Nietzschean-style repetition of “many too many,” which marks Rand’s continued attraction to the German philosopher.

Even more alarming are the sentences and proper names present in Rand’s originals that have vanished entirely, without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change. While arguing in her notebooks against a specific point of view, Rand would often attack by name an exponent of that view. For example, she mentions two libertarians, Albert Jay Nock and James Ingebretsen, while disagreeing with ideas she attributes to them. The erasure of these names from the published diary changes the nature of Rand’s intellectual work, making her ideas entirely self-referential instead of a response to the larger social and political world in which she operated.
⁶

Other omissions serve to decontextualize Rand entirely. Gone is a pessimistic musing about the degeneration of the white race, as well as casual slang like “nance” (homosexual).
⁷
It is not surprising that Rand’s diaries reflected the prejudices and prevailing ideas of her time; indeed, it would be more surprising had she remained unaffected.

Considered individually, many of the changes to Rand’s diaries are minor, but taken as a whole they add up to a different Rand. In her original notebooks she is more tentative, historically bounded, and contradictory. The edited diaries have transformed her private space, the hidden realm in which she did her thinking, reaching, and groping, replacing it with a slick manufactured world in which all of her ideas are definite, well formulated, and clear. Even her outlines for her major novels have been rewritten, with different drafts collapsed into one another. Given Rand’s titanic clashes with editors who sought to modify her work, it is not hard to guess what her reaction would be to these changes.

The
Journals of Ayn Rand
are thus best understood as an
interpretation
of Rand rather than her own writing. Scholars must use these materials with extreme caution. They serve as a useful introduction to Rand’s development and a guide to the available archival material, but they should not be accepted at face value. Accordingly, I quote from the
published diaries only the sections that I have personally verified as accurate with the archival records, and I note where important discrepancies exist. (The only exception is in the case of Rand’s earliest philosophical journals, which were lost after publication, so that no originals remain.) Similar problems plague
Ayn Rand Answers
(2005),
The Art of Fiction
(2000),
The Art of Non-Fiction
(2001), and
Objectively Speaking
(2009). These books are derived from archival materials but have been significantly rewritten.

ARCHIVAL SOURCES

In light of the bowdlerization of Rand’s published papers, the starting point for rigorous historical and philosophical inquiry into her work must be archival. The Ayn Rand Archives, which holds original versions of the materials described above, is the definitive resource for scholars. Material here ranges from the mundane to the spectacular, from household ephemera to the most wrenching of Rand’s diary entries during the agonies of her break with Nathaniel Branden. The archive consists of two related collections, the Ayn Rand Papers and Special Collections. Together they encompass more than two hundred document cartons, which hold manuscripts, fiction and nonfiction notes and outlines, screenplays, business and personal correspondence, fan mail, research files, personal photographs, daily calendars, address books, memorabilia, press clipping files, Objectivist periodicals, materials from Objectivist organizations, and Russian academic and legal documents. There are more than three thousand handwritten pages and several hundred hours of interviews with Rand and persons who knew her, and more than eleven hundred pages of letters sent to her from Russia by the Rosenbaum family. The archive has an active acquisitions program and has taken steps to digitize and preserve its ever-expanding holdings.