Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (9 page)

Rand avidly consumed this literature. Mencken remained a particular favorite. She had first been drawn to his work by their shared interest in Nietzsche. Now she began regularly reading
American Mercury
, the magazine he founded, and absorbed his growing suspicion of Roosevelt. She also followed the writing of Albert Jay Nock, a magazine editor, essayist, and the author of
Our Enemy, the State
. Nock and Mencken were the first to call themselves “libertarians,” a new coinage meant to signify their allegiance to individualism and limited government, now that Roosevelt had co-opted the word “liberal.” Libertarians were few and far between, although some had gained positions of prominence. At the
New York Herald Tribune
a columnist for the weekly book review, Isabel Paterson, was making waves with her vitriol against Roosevelt. Rand read Paterson regularly.
²⁸

In 1937 Rand added her voice to this growing chorus, dispatching a blistering letter to the
New York Herald Tribune
in response to Roosevelt’s proposal that additional justices be added to the Supreme
Court. “No tyranny in history has ever been established overnight,” Rand warned. She traced the recent history of Russia and Germany, asking, “If Mr. Roosevelt is empowered to pass his own laws and have his own men pass on these laws, what is to prevent him from passing any law he pleases?” Her solution, even at this early date, was activism. “There must be a committee, an organization, or headquarters created at once to lead and centralize the activity of all those who are eager to join their efforts in protest,” she declared. Her letter urged readers to write immediately to Congress, lest they lose their lives and possessions. She closed with a reference to her favorite Sinclair Lewis novel: “ ‘It can’t happen here,’ you think? Well, it’s happened already!”
²⁹
Rand’s letter was never printed, but more prominent commentators shared its basic sentiments. Roosevelt’s disastrous bill, widely condemned as a court-packing scheme, went down to stunning defeat in Congress and emboldened his opposition. The influential columnist Walter Lippmann emerged as a new Roosevelt critic, throwing darts at the president in his national columns. In 1938 Texas Congressman Martin Dies began investigating Communist infiltration of the federal government, eventually releasing a list of more than five hundred government employees who also belonged to known Communist fronts, a move intended to blur the line between Communist, socialist, and New Deal liberal.

But it seemed almost impossible to launch any effective opposition to the popular president. A rich man himself, Roosevelt was skilled at caricaturing his opposition as tools of the rich. Often it was not caricature at all. The one organized anti-Roosevelt group, the Liberty League,
was
a secretive cabal of wealthy businessmen hoping to wrest control of government from the masses. Although the Liberty League made several awkward attempts at populism, its main financial backers were the conservative Du Pont family. Tarred as fascists after several of the group’s members praised Mussolini and called for an American dictator, the Liberty League disintegrated within a few years of its founding.
³⁰

Even as she dwelled on Roosevelt’s perfidy, Rand pursued a number of side projects. Prompted by the interest of a theater producer, she began a stage adaptation of
We the Living,
entitled
The Unconquered
.
³¹
When Frank found work in a summer stock production of
Night of January 16th
the two spent an idyllic few weeks in Stonington, Connecticut. There, in a flash of inspiration, Rand completed a new manuscript, a novel of
scarcely a hundred pages that she titled
Anthem
. Again Rand did not hesitate to borrow an idea that had worked well for another writer. She began the project after reading a short science fiction story, “The Place of the Gods,” in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Many of
Anthem
’s basic elements mirror those of the story and another famous science fiction work, Evgeny Zamyatin’s
We,
a novel that circulated
samizdat
in Russia when Rand lived there.
³²
Unlike these other works, however, Rand’s fable emphasized individual creativity and the destructive power of state control.

Although set in a generic dystopia,
Anthem
is Rand’s extrapolation of Communist Russia far into the future, to a time when even the word “I” has been lost. The novel opens with the first line of Equality 7–2521’s furtive diary, “We know it is a sin to write this,” and continues in the first-person plural, giving the novel a sonorous, almost biblical quality. Over the course of the story Equality 7–2521 finds a hidden tunnel where he can escape his oppressive collectivist society, finds love with Liberty 5–3000, and invents electricity. Rather than welcoming Equality 7–2521’s lightbulb, the despotic Council of Elders tries to kill him and destroy his invention. The two lovers flee into the forest, where Equality rediscovers the word “I.”

Anthem
was a significant departure from Rand’s earlier work because the story’s hero is a creative and productive individual rather than an alienated misanthrope. Rand was moving from a reactive depiction of individualism to a more dynamic and positive celebration of individual creativity and accomplishment. Much of this must have come from her research into Frank Lloyd Wright, whose architectural brilliance far outweighed the crimes of William Hickman and Ivar Kreuger, her previous literary inspirations. Integrating technology, discovery, and invention into her story broadened her reach and made the book a relevant commentary on the potentially destructive nature of state control.

Strange in style and provocative in substance,
Anthem
aroused little interest among American publishers but was recognized as a trenchant political parable in Britain. It was released there in 1938 by Cassells, the same firm that handled British distribution of
We the Living
. Despite the cool reception it initially received in the United States, Rand considered
Anthem
one of her favorite pieces of writing. The brief novel was her hymn to individualism, “the theme song, the goal, the only aim of all my writing.”
³³
It had been a welcome break from the planning of her novel-in-progress.

Anthem
had not, however, cured her of the squirms. Returning to New York in the fall of 1937 Rand still found it impossible to complete the plot and outline of her larger novel. She couldn’t begin writing until she had the whole narrative structure down, but the pieces of the story remained stubbornly fragmented and inchoate. She decided to escape her daily struggle by volunteering in the office of a noted New York architect, the modernist Ely Jacques Kahn. She worked for him without pay for six months in an arrangement that was kept secret from the rest of the office staff. Kahn was flattered and pleased to have attracted the interest of a budding novelist, and Rand earned his gratitude by expertly rearranging his files during her tenure. He took his new “employee” under his wing, offering her anecdotes from his own career and gossipy tidbits about other prominent architects. Rand cast him in the novel as Guy Francon, a once talented architect who is an incurable social climber.

One morning Kahn suggested a resolution to her creative impasse when he told her that the greatest problem architects face was housing. Rand remembered, “[T]he moment he said ‘housing,’ something clicked in my mind, because I thought, well now, there is a political issue and an architectural issue; that fits my purpose.”
³⁴
Thinking over his words at lunch, Rand quickly visualized the rest of the story. Peter Keating would seek a commission to build a public housing project. He would convince Roark, who is motivated by the intellectual challenge of the housing problem, to design it for him. Roark agrees to help on the condition that his building be built exactly as designed. When Roark’s plans are nonetheless altered he would destroy the building, an action that would allow Rand to explain the supremacy of the individual creator over the needs of society. The rest of the characters would react accordingly. Toohey would attack Roark, Wynand would try to defend him, Peter would retreat in shame, and Dominique would return to him.

Rand’s excitement over the central unifying idea of housing indicated how significantly her sense of the novel had shifted. It had begun as an abstract tale about the superior man struggling against the suffocating mob, a thematic remnant from her obsessive reading of Nietzsche and her earliest stabs at fiction. The writing of
Anthem,
which for the first time featured a triumphant hero, marked an important move away
from this dark view of human possibility. Now her attraction to the symbolic issue of public housing, which both fit her topic and encapsulated her political views, indicated that Rand had come to see the novel as an overtly political work. The presentation of her hero remained primary, but Rand had ceased resisting the larger implications that could be drawn from the story.

With the plot finally set Rand began writing. The book would be divided into four parts, with each of the central characters the focus of one section. She began with her second-hander, Peter Keating. The first three chapters she wrote toggled between Keating and Roark, describing their very different paths through architecture school at the Stanton Institute for Technology. The writing was slow and painful, but it was progress nonetheless.

Rand showed her completed chapters to two outside readers, her literary agent and Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand idolized Wright, seeing him as a true creative genius and the embodiment of the Overman Nietzsche celebrated. She was sure he was a kindred spirit who would appreciate what she had written. But Wright, who had never heard of Rand before, sent the chapters back with a brusque note, rudely telling her the novel was implausible because no architect could have red hair like Roark. Rand was undeterred. Kahn helped her secure an invitation to a formal banquet where Wright was to speak. She spent three hundred dollars on a matching black velvet dress, shoes, and a cape, a splurge she could ill afford as her savings dwindled. After a formal introduction Wright again rebuffed her overtures. Rand was simply another unknown hoping to cash in on his fame.
³⁵

Rand’s agent, Ann Watkins, was more appreciative. She began shopping the chapters around, and in 1938 brought Rand an offer from Knopf. Rand would receive five hundred dollars upon signing and another five hundred dollars upon completion of the manuscript. Knopf also committed to publishing Rand’s book as a “leader,” publicly identifying it as one of the most important books of the season. The catch was that Rand had one year to complete the book. It was an impossible task. She wrote as fast as she could, but even a year’s extension of the original contract was not enough time. In October 1940 Knopf canceled the deal.
³⁶
She had completed slightly more than a quarter of her projected book.

It was at this juncture that Rand became smitten with Wendell Willkie. The last of the dark horse presidential candidates in American politics, Willkie swept to the 1940 Republican presidential nomination on a feverish surge of support at the Party’s National Convention.
³⁷
He had first come into the public eye as the chairman of Commonwealth and Southern (C&S), a utility company fighting Roosevelt’s proposed Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was intended to bring electricity to the blighted towns of Tennessee, northern Alabama, and Mississippi, a region bypassed by the forces of modernization. Roosevelt’s solution was the creation of publicly owned utilities that would provide affordable electricity for the conveniences of modern life, such as refrigerators and radios, to customers otherwise overlooked by private industry. As part of the plan the utility companies would have to sell their holdings to TVA-backed public utilities. It was the kind of government assault on private industry that made Rand’s blood boil.

As chairman and former general counsel for C&S, one of the major companies targeted by Roosevelt’s reform, Willkie had fought the government’s plan. His efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and when the courts upheld Roosevelt’s legislation TVA proceeded to purchase private holdings and lower electricity costs for homeowners. Willkie himself helped negotiate some of the agreements. In the meantime, though, he had made a name for himself as a Roosevelt foe. He had certainly caught Rand’s attention, for she thought he had delivered an honest and effective defense of the utility company’s rights. Willkie also claimed to be representing a constituency larger than his company. During congressional hearings on the TVA a flood of telegrams expressed support for the company’s suit.
³⁸

Now, in the summer of 1940, Willkie claimed to be arousing similar support in his last-minute bid for the Republican presidential nomination. His claim to a groundswell of genuine popular enthusiasm was questionable; as Alice Roosevelt Longsworth quipped, Willkie’s support came “from the grass roots of a thousand country clubs.”
³⁹
Allegations of fraud dogged both his nomination and his earlier work for the utility companies. The telegrams touted as spontaneous manifestations of his popularity turned out to be part of a carefully orchestrated corporate campaign.

In a season of lackluster candidates, however, Willkie was popular enough to briefly unite a powerful faction of Republicans behind his candidacy. He was championed by the cosmopolitan East Coast Republicans, who valued his business experience and progressive openness to involvement in world affairs. Rallying behind Willkie they chose to overlook the unfortunate reality that only a year before their standard bearer had been a registered Democrat. This fact outraged the Republican Old Guard, the Party’s isolationist wing. They saw Willkie as a tool of eastern moneyed interests who would drag them into the European war. Willkie thus presided uneasily over a deeply divided party that was momentarily united by their hunger for victory over Roosevelt.