Queen of the Cult

Ayn Rand the World She Made By Anne C. Heller Nan A. Talese 2009, $35.00, pp. 592

When Ayn Rand published her second blockbuster novel Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Alan Greenspan, then starting out as a Wall Street economist but still a member of her close circle of young acolytes, wrote that the book was “radiantly exact” and so would compel all honest readers into agreement with her case for individualism.

Today, ironically, we are living the consequences of Rand’s ideological evangelism. Its appeal was, in part, her certainty. Greenspan who, in fairness, was skeptical of some Randian precepts, nevertheless applied similar open-and-shut reasoning to economic policy during his long chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when asked to regulate sub-prime mortgages or complex derivatives—the investment vehicles that make it cheaper to buy bonds, stock, currencies or commodities—he refused, claiming with avuncular confidence that the market regulated itself. Competition among free individuals was a sufficient check on the dangers of greed and fraud.

Nothing could change his mind­—until the current financial crisis. Forty years of observation, he now admits, turned out to be wrong. In those 40 years, in fact, financial turmoil had erupted time and again; it just didn’t compare to today’s devastation. Ideology trumped empirical observation. There was, after all, a place for government, apparently, and pure individualism may well have met its limits. Greenspan recanted.

No one can deny that Ayn Rand was a figure of power, persuasion and unbendable will. Whether she was a truly fine thinker and able novelist is quite another matter. In her competent and gracefully written biography, journalist Anne C. Heller, former managing editor of The Antioch Review and fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, deals with neither the first issue nor the second. To the contrary, she seems to accept Rand’s greatness as a thinker and novelist without argument. Rand considered her first major novel The Fountainhead, published in 1942, the preeminent case for individualism. The enormous Atlas Shrugged, was her grand case for capitalism. Did she seriously add to the understanding of either issue? Or was she principally an ardent, effective and melodramatic proselytizer of previously developed ideas? Heller does not address such concerns.

What we do learn, and in great detail, is a more sordid side of Rand’s life. It is not clear that the biographer’s intention was to show how Randianism—or Objectivism, as she called her philosophy—had all the earmarks of a full-blown cult. But the story she tells warrants the conclusion. After a certain age, Rand tolerated neither criticism nor discourse and accepted into her circle only those who supported her completely. She created rules to live by, but she had the cult leader’s double standard. One should only fall in love with a great person, for example, like her famed hero of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, the brave architect who rebelled against society to create his vision. But Rand fell in love with and married Frank O’Connor, a beautiful man who could have modeled for the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and whose other distinctions were merely kindness to others and a saint-like tolerance of Rand. When she was 50, she took as her lover her leading acolyte—25 years her junior—whose life she subsequently tried to ruin.

Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg to moderately prosperous Jewish parents. They survived the murderous anti-Semitic pogroms around the time of Rand’s birth. World War I and the Russian Revolution changed their lives still more. She was 12 when Lenin’s government closed her father’s large pharmacy; she was in the store when the soldiers arrived.

By the age of 10, Rand knew she wanted to be a writer, Heller reports, and arguably her political views had been formed almost as early. By her teens, she came to hate collectivism, and her love of the “free” United States blossomed. Not yet 21, she bravely left her family behind to join cousins in Chicago in 1926, getting her visa from the Russian authorities by claiming she would visit the U.S. for six months and return to make propaganda films for the Soviet Union. Russia never saw Rand again.

When the ship landed in New York City, the young woman was thrilled by the new skyscrapers, especially the Woolworth Building, which she thought was the grandest of all (it was indeed the tallest of its time). They were “the will of man made visible,” the young atheist wrote.

Immediately, the new immigrant changed her name to Ayn Rand. It was far from unusual for Jews to modify their names at the time, but her choice was rather extreme. As a youngster, I had always thought she was Nordic. No doubt, this was partly her intention. Ayn Rand became who she wanted to be. She rarely admitted to being Jewish.

Those who believed the characters in her novels were props for bold, romantic and superficial ideas would not be surprised to learn that her first professional jobs were in Hollywood, where she made a decent living as a script writer. There she also met the gorgeous aspiring actor Frank O’Connor, marrying him in 1929.

The couple returned to the East, and Rand poured herself into The Fountainhead. After more than four years of arduous work (she also wrote plays and one was produced on Broadway), she published it in the middle of World War II. Her hero defied conventional architectural teaching to build the greatest skyscraper in the world. “Who will stop me?” Roark asks at one point. Great artists, to Rand, have no doubts about their ability to triumph. They also ravage women. In both her major novels, sexual aggression is a major theme and the female the longing victim. Heller argues that Rand identified with the masochistic women who were central to her fictional sex scenes.

The novel got poor, even scabrous reviews. Orville Prescott in The New York Times was aware of its lure: “Her book is so highly charged it seems to vibrate and emit a shower of sparks,” he wrote. But he also thought it was the equivalent of a Boris Karloff movie. Cultural critic Diana Trilling wrote, “Anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing.” One major positive review did appear in the Sunday Times, which Heller uncritically calls the most perceptive. But Rand was disappointed because the reviewer compared the book to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which she felt was ponderous and inferior. In her biography, Heller observes no irony in this observation.

Sales of The Fountainhead did not take off right away, but when they did, the book became a sensation. But Rand’s sparks were mistaken by many for brilliance, and she was vaulted into the conservative intellectual world, soon drawing thousands of readers to her ideological banner.

Her cause, she declared, was fearless individualism. She was appalled by altruism and believed, like Roark, in taking “what you want.” It is remarkable that she began The Fountainhead during the Depression, when millions suffered, but she hated intervention by government in affairs of personal freedom. Unlike many Jews of similar background, she railed against all welfare state policies and by 1947 was testifying about the dangers of communism as a sympathetic witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee along with Robert Tayor and Clark Gable.

Atlas Shrugged, which took a decade, more or less, to write was published in 1957 to still more scathing criticism. Although Heller calls the reviews “hateful and dishonest,” the excerpts she cites do not have that tone. Heller seems to think that no defense is needed for a plot in which most of America’s great thinkers and artists gather together and go on strike, no longer advancing science or making good art. Again one man, one leader is exalted: John Galt. Sales were strong. Murray Rothbard, a then-famous libertarian, praised Rand’s paean to capitalism as the greatest novel ever.

Heller’s achievement is to demonstrate, perhaps inadvertently, that Rand created something virtually indistinguishable from a cult. A domineering evangelist, her devotees were much younger than she, as apparently were most of her readers. She took as a lover her principal disciple Nathaniel Branden, a youngster who first wrote to her at 19 and with whom, six years later, she was having an affair. She named Branden her “intellectual heir,” and he energetically played the part, producing Randian publications and making speeches. When years later, after resuming their sexual liaison he wanted at last to quit, she banished him, disparaged his abilities and accused him of stealing her money. For good measure, she enlisted many of her friends, including Greenspan, to renounce him, too.

Roark was based partly on Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Rand had met, but, hampering any future relationship, Wright was sympathetic to socialism. It is not clear from this biography that Rand seriously read economics, though she was acquainted with the accomplished Austrian free-market economist, Ludwig von Mises. Her disciples often believed she invented laissez-faire capitalism, writes Heller. The devoted Greenspan, who invited Rand to his swearing-in as Gerald Ford’s chief economist in 1974, when she was already ill with lung cancer, shared her inflexible interpretation of economics.

What attracted acolytes to Rand’s totalitarian way of thinking? Over-simplification, perhaps. Certainty. If her economic prescriptions were more than merely articulate dogma, Heller does not convey it, except in occasional snippets of argumentation. Rand died in 1982, still the darling of a certain segment of conservatives. Guards were posted to keep Nathaniel Branden from attending the memorial service. He never abandoned Randianism, however, though he did finally recognize the importance of emotions. To Rand, all that mattered was rationality, or so she claimed.

Jeff Madrick is senior fellow of the Schwartz Institute of the New School and editor of Challenge Magazine. He is completing a book on the history of American economics since 1970, The Age of Greed and the Men who Made It.