Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (29 page)

Ignoring the daily drudgery of economic life, Rand portrayeds capitalism and capitalists as creative, even glamorous. Dagny and Hank rush from one crisis to the next, the fate of their companies always hanging on a single decision that only they can make. Every company mentioned in
Atlas Shrugged,
from the smallest concern to the largest multinational corporation, is eponymous, signifying the link between individual and firm. Rand also tied corporate capitalism to individuals through her focus on inventions and discoveries. Many of her protagonists have an entrepreneurial bent and accumulate wealth through an ingenious invention or by making a scientific breakthrough. Even Dagny, whose railroad is the emblematic old-economy business, is successful because she has an outstanding conceptual grasp of the marketplace and is the only executive who understands the potential of new technologies to improve her operations.

With its blend of old-fashioned economic individualism and modern corporatism,
Atlas Shrugged
is simultaneously nostalgic and visionary.
⁵
Rand drew a clear connection between her ideal of capitalism and the imagined American past. When the competent go on strike, they retreat
to Galt’s Gulch, a refuge nestled deep in the mountains of Colorado, where they re-create a nineteenth-century world. Residents of the valley are on a first-name basis with each other and attend Chautauqua-type lectures at night. The former head of Sanders Aircraft is a hog farmer; a federal court judge supplies the eggs and butter. Rand’s heroes are a diverse band of “producers,” including industrialists, artists, and scientists, whom she intended to embody moral truths. These producers lead moral lives because they do not extract resources from others, but depend on their own talents and ingenuity to advance. Once gathered together in the strike, they represent the pure and honest West, set against the corruption and overweening power of Washington.

Rand made clear that these individualist principles underlay not only Galt’s Gulch, but industrial corporate capitalism, properly understood. In books like
The Organization Man, White Collar,
and
The Lonely Crowd
contemporary social scientists bemoaned the large company as a place of soulless conformity. By contrast, Rand presented corporate capitalism as the ultimate field for expression of self. She was able to offer this alternate vision because she focused entirely on heroic individuals like Taggart and Rearden, who are able to shape great organizations in their own image.

For those who could plausibly self-identify as the “producers” that Rand celebrated, the novel was a powerful justification of their livelihood. Rand’s defense of wealth and merit freed capitalists from both personal and social guilt simultaneously. A businessman who reprinted five hundred copies of her speech “Faith and Force” for distribution at his own expense made this clear in his cover letter: “Dear Friend: Is success wrong? Is it evil to earn a profit—as much profit as you can make honestly? Why should the morality of the successful person be criticized because of his success? . . . You may not agree with Miss Rand’s answers, but I don’t think you will ever forget her basic message.”
⁶

A potent source of Rand’s appeal was “The Meaning of Money,” a speech from
Atlas Shrugged
. “So you think that money is the root of all evil?” asks dissolute copper magnate Francisco D’Anconia, misquoting the biblical injunction against love of money. He draws a direct correlation between money and merit, identifying wealth as the product of virtue, and concludes, “money is the root of all good.” This message spurred many corporations to spread the good news, and Rand granted several
requests to reprint the speech. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation asked permission to reproduce the speech “for internal distribution to supervisory personnel.” The company explained, “We feel that this material is very much in line with some of the economic principles we have been disseminating.”
⁷

Businessmen were attracted both to the content of Rand’s ideas and their unification into a cohesive, integrated whole. One executive told the management of his company that Rand could help them “probe deeper into the philosophic and economic causes of the decline of freedom. . . . Miss Rand explains completely the inseparability of right moral action, private property, free economic activity and rational action. Each is proven to be inextricably woven into the others. And as one reads and grasps the proofs she offers as the absolute, and always superiority of a free society, he begins to see why so many of our efforts to thwart collectivism, welfareism, etc., fail so miserably.”
⁸
Rand offered both an explanation for any antibusiness sentiment and an action plan for the future. This combination bowled over Clement Williamson, president of Sealol Incorporated in Providence, Rhode Island, who told her, “after years of trying to arouse business leaders to conviction and action in the field of government and politics, I feel that I now have the key which will eventually unlock the tremendous potential available in this group. Nowhere in my literature researching have I found the one answer except in this philosophy of yours.”
⁹
Rand’s readers felt that she had penetrated to the root causes of the regulatory and social environment that bedeviled them.

In Rand business had found a champion, a voice that could articulate its claim to prominence in American life. Invitations to symposia and conferences began to stream in. Rand was recruited to speak at a meeting of the National Industrial Council on the “Ethics of Capitalism,” and three times presented at the week-long seminar of the President’s Professional Association, an organization affiliated with the American Management Association. Two professors at the Columbia Business School excerpted
Atlas Shrugged
in a textbook and invited her to address a course on the conceptual and institutional foundations of modern business. Business could even offer Rand an intellectual platform of sorts. The
Atlantic Economic Review,
published by a Georgia business school, invited Rand to contribute to a symposium on
The Organization
Man,
asking her to write about “A Faith for Modern Management.”
¹⁰
The many executives who distributed excerpts from
Atlas Shrugged
or sent copies to their friends further spread her message.

When professional reviewers looked at
Atlas Shrugged,
they tended to overlook this celebration of business and the tight philosophical system that Rand had woven into her story. Instead they focused on her bitter condemnation of second-handers, looters, moochers, and other incompetents.
Atlas Shrugged
inspired a shocking level of vituperation. Reviews were often savage and mocking commentaries rather than literary assessments. The
New York Times Book Review,
which had generously praised
The Fountainhead,
featured a scathing article by the former Communist Granville Hicks, who declared, “Loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear that the book is written out of hate.” For the most part, reviewers did not primarily object to Rand’s political or moral views, or even her adulation of the superior man. What they focused on instead was her tone and style. “The book is shot through with hatred,” wrote the
Saturday Review
. Others complained about Rand’s repetition, grim earnestness, and utter lack of humor.
¹¹

Reviewers were right to notice that alongside its reverent depiction of capitalist heroes,
Atlas Shrugged
had a decidedly misanthropic cast. In many ways the novel was the final summation of the theory of resentment Rand had first formulated in Crimea. It was also a return to the mood of her earliest unfinished fiction. Once again Rand let loose all the bile that had accumulated in her over the years. Particularly when John Galt takes center stage, Rand’s text seethes with anger and frustration and yields to a conspiracy theory that sees the world as a battleground between competence and incompetence. Galt tells his radio audience, “What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. . . . But we—we, who must atone for the guilt of ability—we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we have the least to say” (688). Rand’s Manichaean worldview comes through in Galt’s speech, with a competent elite facing off against an ineffectual commons.

Beyond the idea of conspiracy, Rand’s ethical revolution led her to see natural human sympathy for the downtrodden as an unacceptable stricture on those she designated “at the top of the pyramid.” Through Galt Rand reversed the typical understanding of exploitation, arguing:

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong. (989)

In these passages Rand entirely drops the populism and egalitarianism that characterized her earlier work, reverting to the language used by earlier defenders of capitalism. Although she did not use explicit biological metaphors, her arguments were like a parody of social Darwinism.
Atlas Shrugged
was an angry departure from the previous emphasis on the competence, natural intelligence, and ability of the common man that marked
The Fountainhead
.

Why such a dramatic shift in thirteen years? Partly Rand was simply tending back to the natural dynamics of pro-capitalist thought, which emphasized (even celebrated) innate differences in talent. These tendencies were exaggerated in Rand’s work by her absolutist, black- and-white thinking. Her views on the “incompetent” were particularly harsh because she was so quick to divide humanity into world-shaking creators and helpless idiots unable to fend for themselves. This binarism, coupled with her penchant for judgment, gave the book much of its negative tone. Because she meant to demonstrate on both a personal and a social level the result of faulty ideals, Rand was often merciless with her characters, depicting their sufferings and failings with relish. In one scene she describes in careful detail the characteristics of passengers doomed to perish in a violent railroad crash, making it clear that their deaths are warranted by their ideological errors (566–68). Such spleen partially explains the many negative reviews Rand received. After all, by renouncing charity as a moral obligation she had voluntarily opted out of any traditional expectations of politeness or courtesy.
Atlas Shrugged
demanded to be taken on its own merits, and most book reviewers found little to like.

Politics undoubtedly played a role, too. Rand’s book was a full frontal assault on liberal pieties. She liked nothing more than to needle her antagonists and was often deliberately provocative, even inflammatory. One character declares Robin Hood the “most immoral and the most contemptible” of all human symbols and makes a practice of seizing humanitarian aid intended for poor countries, giving it instead to the productive rich. Another hero proudly assumes the nickname “Midas” Mulligan, while the discourse upon “money, the root of all good” continues for several pages (387–91). Then there were the hopelessly hokey parts of
Atlas Shrugged,
which even Rand called “those gimmicks”: mysterious dollar-sign cigarettes smoked by the cognoscenti, a death ray machine operated by the government, the gold dollar-sign totem that marks Galt’s Gulch, the repetition of the question, “Who is John Galt?”
¹²
Criticized for her lack of humor, Rand was actually having plenty of fun with
Atlas Shrugged
. But liberals did not get the joke.

Conservatives were no less offended. The most notorious review of
Atlas Shrugged
was written by Whittaker Chambers and published in
National Review,
the most influential conservative magazine of the time. Chambers had become a household name through his testimony against Alger Hiss in a Soviet espionage case and his subsequent best-selling memoir,
Witness
. Once a dedicated Communist, Chambers had shifted far to the right, becoming a mentor to William F. Buckley Jr., who asked him to review
Atlas Shrugged
as his first assignment for
National Review
. Buckley, who disliked Rand, surely knew what the outcome of such an assignment would be. In
Witness
Chambers had written movingly about his religious conversion and his belief that only God could rescue mankind from the evils of Communism. It was not hard to predict how he would react to Rand, an avowed atheist. Chambers was uninterested in the book and reluctant to write such a negative review, yet at Buckley’s request he plunged into battle with an article entitled “Big Sister Is Watching You.”
¹³

In his vitriolic review Chambers noted Rand’s popularity and her promotion of conservative ideals such as anti-Communism and limited government, but argued that because she was an atheist her underlying message was faulty and dangerous. According to Chambers, Rand’s
triumphal secularism was hopelessly naïve and fundamentally unable to combat the evils of collectivism. In fact, by criticizing collectivism without the guidance of religion, Rand’s work verged into the very territory of absolutism, Chambers maintained. He found
Atlas Shrugged
marked by strong fascist elements and ultimately pointing to rule by a “technocratic elite.” The review was marked by a strong personal animus. Rand’s writing was “dictatorial” and had a tone of “overriding arrogance”; she was not sufficiently feminine, hinted Chambers, speculating that “children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy.”
¹⁴
In a stunning line, Chambers intoned, “From almost any page of
Atlas Shrugged,
a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”
¹⁵
At base it was a clash of two radically different versions of human nature. Rand’s novel showed mankind, guided by rationality alone, achieving heroic deeds. Chambers, traumatized by Communism, saw rational man as a damned and helpless creature trapped in dangerous utopian fantasies of his own creation.