Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (30 page)

Chambers was also unsettled by Rand’s godless capitalism, which might be even worse than godless Communism. Where Rand saw the free market as an essentially spiritual realm and competition as the meaning of life itself, Chambers saw only a heartless machine world. In the 1940s Rand had been one of many intellectuals seeking a plausible grounding for individual rights and democracy. By the 1950s conservatives had found an answer in religion. Defining Communism as essentially atheistic, they were able to frame Christianity and capitalism as natural partners in the fight against government regulation. If the two impulses were paradoxical or contradictory at base, that was the very point, for conservatives wanted the free market set within an explicitly Christian society. Only religion could balance the “materialism” of free enterprise, with the Christian emphasis on charity, humility, and equality blunting the harsher edges of laissez-faire. But now Rand appeared to be tacking back to the earlier nineteenth-century vision of Darwinian capitalist competition, absent the soothing balm of Christian egalitarianism.

Atlas Shrugged
represented a fundamental challenge to the new conservative synthesis, for it argued explicitly that a true morality of capitalism would be diametrically opposed to Christianity. By spinning out the logic of capitalism to its ultimate conclusion
Atlas Shrugged
show- cased the paradox of defending free market capitalism while at the same
time advocating Christianity. Rand’s ideas threatened to undermine or redirect the whole conservative venture. Even worse, given her popularity, there was the significant danger that Rand would be seized on by liberals as a spokesperson for conservatism. She might then confirm the liberal stereotype that conservatism was nothing more than an ideological cover for the naked class interests of the haves. For all these reasons, Rand would have to be cast out of the respectable right. More than just a literary judgment, the
National Review
article was an exercise in tablet keeping. The review signified Buckley’s break with the secular libertarian tradition Rand represented and his efforts to create a new ideological synthesis that gave religion a paramount role. It was as Nathan had foreseen: Rand and the conservatives were not on the same side.

Chambers’s review sent shock waves across the right. Rand herself claimed to have never read it, but her admirers were horrified. The Collective chafed at the injustice of assigning a former Communist to review her work and barraged the magazine with a number of incendiary letters angrily comparing
National Review
to the
Daily Worker
.
¹⁶
Isabel Paterson resurfaced from her own misanthropic isolation to chide Buckley for publishing such an “atrocious” review and warned him that Rand was likely to sue for defamation (she never did). The letters column of
National Review
hummed with controversy for weeks afterward. One high-profile defender was John Chamberlain, who had given Rand rare favorable reviews in
The Freeman
and the
Wall Street Journal
.
¹⁷
In an “Open Letter to Ayn Rand” Chamberlain praised her “magnificent” exposition of freedom and averred that he would continue “the lugubrious task of persuading people to read it in spite of themselves.” Chamberlain thought that much of the outcry against
Atlas Shrugged
was based on religion and lamented that Rand had not “chosen to admit just one vocal and practicing Christian in her Fellowship of the Competent.”
¹⁸

Chamberlain was right to highlight religion as fundamental to the controversy over Rand, for it was religious conservatives who most disliked her book. William Mullendore, who had long enjoyed warm relations with Rand, was repelled by the harshness of
Atlas Shrugged
. In the years since Rand had left California, Mullendore had undergone a sort of religious awakening, and he now found Rand’s work disturbing. After reading the book he sent a concerned three-page letter to his children,
telling them, “This is no defense of free enterprise. This is the promotion of the egotism and wrong understanding of one Ayn Rand. I am sorry she wrote it; and I am doubtful that I should have given her as much ‘praise’ as I did in my letter to her. It is really an evil book.” Mullendore was concerned lest his children look to Rand for guidance and carefully explained the many errors he found in
Atlas Shrugged
. Similarly, many of the
National Review
’s religious readers shuddered at Rand’s atheism and her depiction of capitalism. Rand’s “attempt to portray characters as living only by economic principles is preposterously impossible and dangerous,” wrote one, and another applauded the magazine’s attempt to draw firm boundaries, for “only when the ideological perverts are removed from the camp, will true (ergo, Christian) conservatism make the gains which are imperative for the survival of our way of life.”
¹⁹

By contrast, secular and agnostic libertarians were more likely to tolerate or even embrace Rand. Murray Rothbard jumped into the fray on Rand’s side. Rothbard was deeply impressed by
Atlas Shrugged,
and his earlier reservations about Rand vanished. He began attending weekly meetings at her apartment and enrolled in therapy with Nathaniel Branden. As if to prove his loyalty, Rothbard began a letter-writing campaign on behalf of Rand and her book. He sent querulous letters to Whittaker Chambers and others who had negatively reviewed
Atlas Shrugged
and began recommending it to many of his correspondents. Ludwig von Mises also hailed the book, writing Rand to tell her how much he enjoyed reading it. The novel meshed well with his deep- seated elitism. He told Rand admiringly, “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.”
²⁰
He invited Rand to attend his seminar as an honored guest.

Robert LeFevre, a radical libertarian and founder of the anarchistic Freedom School, watched the controversy with amusement. He wrote to Rose Wilder Lane, “ ‘Atlas’ has demonstrably agitated the complacent. Perhaps it’s the size. Perhaps it’s the daring. Perhaps it’s the sex angle. Perhaps it’s the anti-religious approach. Although I’ll probably not like it when I read it, but not reading it (as yet) I like it.” Once he finished the book LeFevre told friends he found Chambers’s review unfair. Rose Wilder Lane was still dubious about Rand’s contribution. She worried
“that this current ‘return to religion’ is a most dangerous tendency. . . . But the alien atheism of Ayn Rand, with its worship of Reason and of an Elite of Noble, Productive Men, and its contempt of human beings, the ‘masses,’ is no answer to the Kirks.”
²¹
Rand’s work accentuated the sharp differences that still separated libertarians from conservatives.

As controversy raged in the letters section of
National Review,
Rand suffered through her darkest days yet. She sank into a deep depression, crying nearly every day in the privacy of her apartment. Some form of letdown was probably inevitable after the long buildup to publication, and Rand’s continued use of Benzedrine may have further contributed to her emotional fragility. What she dwelled upon was the painful absence of intellectual recognition. Rand longed to be publicly hailed as a major thinker on the American scene. The Collective had satisfied her need to be a teacher and an authority, but it left unquenched her desire for accolades from intellectual peers. Rand enjoyed being a dominant figure, but she also wanted to admire, to lift her gaze upward like Howard Roark. Nathan and Alan Greenspan elicited her favor precisely because they could teach her about psychology and economics, fields about which she knew little. Mises’s endorsement was welcome, but not enough. She had already counted him among her supporters, and he held little sway outside libertarian circles. Rand directly confessed her disappointment only to Frank, Nathan, and Barbara, but her anguish was palpable to the rest of the Collective.

Rand’s quest for intellectual recognition was doomed from the outset. It was not simply that her political views were unpopular. Five years after the publication of
Atlas Shrugged
Milton Friedman advanced similarly controversial ideas in his
Capitalism and Freedom,
with little loss to his academic reputation. Friedman’s association with the University of Chicago and his technical work in economics insulated him against the type of attacks Rand endured.
²²
She had neither a formal academic post nor any academic training beyond her Soviet undergraduate degree. Yet it was her choice of style rather than form which inhibited her work’s reception. Rand’s romantic fiction, with its heavy political messages and overdrawn contrasts between good and evil, was hopelessly out of
fashion as a vehicle for serious ideas.
Atlas Shrugged
was a throwback to Socialist realism, with its cardboard characters in the service of an overarching ideology.

But the most significant obstacle to Rand’s joining the ranks of the intelligentsia was her antagonistic attitude. The caricatures of
The Fountainhead
had made her feelings clear. In
Atlas Shrugged
she rarely missed a moment to attack “those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others” (941). With her focus on the mind, Rand blamed contemporary intellectuals for every evil in the world, particularly the expanding welfare state. It was true that many prominent intellectuals had supported Communism and socialism, but Rand went far beyond standard conservative rhetoric about traitorous eggheads. She was particularly enraged by college professors, the “soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of request for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care” (923). She seemed particularly offended that Aristotelian logic and rationality were no longer dominant in American classrooms. Even scientists, in the form of Robert Stadler, came in for criticism. It was not clear if there were any living intellectuals whose endorsement Rand would have accepted.

Rand was fighting against a powerful current, not so much politically as intellectually.
Atlas Shrugged
was published just as a great era of system building had passed. Weary from Communism, fascism, and two world wars, intellectuals were above all uninterested in ideology. Daniel Bell’s book
The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s
captured the mood well. Rand’s Objectivism, a completely integrated rational, atheistic philosophical system delivered via a thousand-page novel, was simply not what most established intellectuals were looking for in 1957.
²³
Those curious enough to investigate it were repelled by her attacks on college professors and the intellectual classes.

Desperate for anything to cheer her up, Nathan convinced Rand to endorse a series of public lectures about her philosophy. If universities would not teach Objectivism, then Nathan would establish his own sort of Objectivist University. If intellectuals scorned Rand’s ideas, then he would raise up a new generation fluent in her thought. His creation of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) was intended to circumvent the intellectual establishment that was so hostile to Rand’s ideas. Not
incidentally, NBI also promised to advance Nathan’s career. He had already begun to establish himself as a therapist on Rand’s coattails, drawing patients primarily from those who found her work interesting. Now he started a second business drawing on Rand’s ideas.

Nathan’s organization drew on earlier Objectivist efforts at education. Immediately following the publication of
Atlas Shrugged
Rand had conducted informal classes in fiction writing in her apartment. The invitation-only classes were her first foray into cultural criticism. As she taught students the basics of her style, which she called “Romantic Realism,” Rand criticized the work of such authors as Thomas Wolfe for writing stories without a plot or moral meaning. Just as there was an Objectivist view on sex, there was also an Objectivist theory of literature. These fiction classes also formed the nucleus of a “Junior Collective,” whose members enjoyed less frequent contact with Rand than the original insiders. If a student showed particular promise he or she would be invited for a one-on-one audience with Rand. From there a friendship might blossom. Or Nathan might suggest that an aspiring Objectivist write Rand a letter, expressing appreciation for her philosophy; if Rand was suitably impressed a closer relationship could develop. When
Time
magazine published a negative review of
Atlas Shrugged
, Nathan instructed all members of the Junior Collective to cancel their subscriptions as an exercise in living up to their principles.
²⁴

There was also a precedent for someone other than Rand to teach the basics of her philosophy. Before
Atlas Shrugged
was published, Leonard Peikoff had given a series of lectures on Objectivism. His informal talks attracted a few members of the Collective and Murray Rothbard’s Circle Bastiat. But Leonard was too junior, and his status with Rand too insecure, for him to front an organization devoted to her philosophy. It was the charismatic and confident Nathaniel Branden who would become the public face of Objectivism, second only to Rand.

Rand was initially skeptical of the entire venture. She doubted Nathan could change the culture and worried he would be hurt trying. But she was willing to endorse his work and lend her name in support. She took no financial stake in the organization, which would remain Nathan’s exclusive possession. After creating a series of twenty lectures on “Basic Principles of Objectivism,” Nathan mailed information to a select list of area fans who had written letters to Rand. In 1958 he offered
the first course to twenty-eight New Yorkers in a rented hotel room. Confounding the opinions of almost all who had weighed in on the topic, he discovered a ready market of people willing to spend time and money on philosophy lectures given by an unaccredited, newly established institution. Undoubtedly Rand was the primary draw. In the beginning she attended the question-and-answer session at the end of each lecture. The Brandens soon discovered additional demand. Barbara began offering a similar course in Philadelphia, with Rand an occasional visitor, and developed her own curriculum on “Principles of Efficient Thinking.”