Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (50 page)

Of particular note are transcripts of more than forty hours of interviews Barbara Branden conducted with Rand in 1961, which formed the basis of Branden’s 1962 biographical sketch,
Who Is Ayn Rand?
, and her later
Passion of Ayn Rand
. The biographical interviews reveal details about Rand that cannot be found elsewhere, particularly concerning her early life and her creative process. Later research indicates that Rand’s recollections of her life in Russia are of questionable accuracy, and the listener must always keep in mind Rand’s novelistic inclination to embellishment. Nevertheless they are an invaluable resource for understanding both the younger Rand and her self-presentation at midcareer. These interviews are also held in the private collection of Barbara Branden.

Although it is affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute, an explicit advocacy organization, the Ayn Rand Archive has evolved into a professional institution on par with any university collection. The papers are well organized and include a detailed finding aid. During the course of my research I was afforded full access to Rand’s papers and benefited enormously from the knowledge and efforts of the Archives staff. Since 2001 the Archive has been open to serious scholars, but does occasionally restrict access to avoid conflict with sponsored projects. Researchers known to be hostile to Rand, or with a history of involvement in Objectivist controversies, may find their entry limited or denied.

Fortunately, primary source material on Rand’s life can be found in numerous other venues. The Ayn Rand Papers at the Library of Congress include drafts, typescripts, and galleys of
Anthem, We the Living
, and
Atlas Shrugged
and miscellaneous administrative material. The collection also contains seventy-two handwritten essays written between 1971 and 1974 for the
Ayn Rand Letter
. Also at the Library of Congress, the William Rusher Papers contain material on the Rand-inflected young conservative movement.

The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, holds several important collections, including the papers of Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane, which contain extensive correspondence from Rand. Relevant items in the papers of William Mullendore can also be found here. Other important material is in the Rothbard Papers at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Leonard Read papers at the Foundation for Economic Education, the Sidney Hook papers at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the William F. Buckley papers at Yale University.

Numerous primary source materials on Rand are also scattered among private individuals. Barbara Branden retains personal correspondence, sundry materials, and transcripts of the interviews she conducted with Rand in the 1960s, as well as tapes of interviews used in her 1986 biography of Rand. A large swath of Rand’s papers was sold at auction by Barbara Branden and Robert Hessen in the mid-1980s. Some of this material was purchased by the Ayn Rand Estate, but the bulk was purchased by manuscript dealers who have resold the individual pieces. More material undoubtedly lies in the attics and basements of former Objectivists. Recordings of lectures by Rand, Peikoff, and the Brandens are also available through several Objectivist and libertarian organizations.

The Objectivist community retains a strong sense of its own history and is a rich source of material on Rand’s cultural impact. The Objectivist Oral History Project, sponsored by the Atlas Society, has interviewed many of the major players of Objectivism and sells DVDs of their interviews. The now defunct
Full Context
magazine for many years ran a series of interviews with former Objectivists that give a vivid picture of the Objectivist subculture.

I also made use of unedited interview transcripts and edited video recordings of nearly a hundred individuals who knew Ayn Rand. These interviews were either conducted by me, uncovered in archives, created by the Objectivist Oral History Project, or recorded as part of a similar initiative at the Ayn Rand Institute. They contain the usual liabilities of oral history, that is, distorted memory and personal bias, but used in tandem with archival documents they are an invaluable resource. A full listing of interviews used is given in the bibliography.

For research on the libertarian movement that grew out of Rand’s ideas, the best sources are archival collections at the University of Virginia and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. The University of Virginia holds a large but as yet largely unprocessed accession from Roger MacBride, Rose Wilder Lane’s heir and the second Libertarian Party presidential candidate. At the Hoover Institution the papers of Williamson Evers, Patrick Dowd, Roy Childs, and David Walter illuminate early libertarianism. Material of interest can also be found in the Gordon Hall and Grace Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda, John Hay Library, Brown University, and the William Rusher Papers at the Library of Congress.

SECONDARY SOURCES

There is a large body of secondary scholarship on Rand, much of which has enhanced and sharpened my own ideas, and only a fraction of which I can mention here. Scholarship on Rand has gone through roughly three overlapping waves. The first books written about Rand attempted to either vindicate or denounce her philosophy. Into the critical camp fall works like William O’Neil’s
With Charity towards None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy
(1971) and Sidney Greenberg’s
Ayn Rand and Alienation
(1977). Books that defend Rand, many written by her former students, include Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglass B. Rasmussen’s
The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand
(1984), Leonard Peikoff’s
Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America
(1982), and David Kelley’s
Evidence of the Senses
(1986). These works were largely consumed by the Objectivist community itself, a world riven with breaks and schisms dating from Rand’s day. These dynamics are described in Kelley,
Truth and Toleration
(1990) and
The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism
(2000).

The 1986 publication of Barbara Branden’s
Passion of Ayn Rand
, followed by Nathaniel Branden’s
Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand
(1989), decisively shifted the terms of debate by bringing Rand’s personal life front and center, at the same time attracting a broad popular audience. As a historical source, Barbara Branden’s biography has both strengths and weaknesses. Like the material issued by Rand’s estate, it does not adhere to rigorous standards of accuracy. Sentences that are presented in quotes as if they were spoken verbatim by Rand have been significantly edited and rewritten, as anyone who listens to or reads the original interviews Branden used will quickly detect. Rand never lost either her Russian accent or her awkward sentence structure, and her actual words are full of circumlocutions and jarring formulations. Like the editors of Rand’s journals, Branden has created a new Rand, one far more articulate than in life.

Moreover, Branden’s biography is marred by serious inaccuracies and tales that do not stand up to historical investigation, including the now debunked story that Rand named herself after her typewriter. Too often Branden takes Rand’s stories about herself at face value, reporting as fact information contradicted by the historical record. Although Branden’s biography was the first book to describe Rand’s early life, it should be used with caution and in conjunction with volumes like Jeff Britting’s short biography,
Ayn Rand
(2004) and Anne Heller’s
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
(2009). Shoshana Milgram’s forthcoming authorized biography should become another resource of note.

Nonetheless, as Rand’s closest friends for nearly twenty years, the Brandens’ memoirs remain important as accounts of Rand’s personal life. Barbara and Nathan were privy to Rand’s inner doubts, triumphs, and insecurities as were no others. Both memoirs are marked by a certain amount of score settling, often between the Brandens themselves. Responding to postpublication criticism, Nathaniel Branden released a revised
My Years with Ayn Rand
(1999), notable primarily for its softened portrait of Barbara Branden and an addendum describing Rand’s encounter with his third wife. All three of the Brandens’ books concur in the fundamentals of their first meeting with Rand, the progress of their relationship with her, and the events surrounding the rise and fall of NBI. Still the
scholar of Rand must be careful with these sources. Clearly colored by personal bias, they also exert a more subtle interpretative power, for instance glorifying the Brandens’ importance to Rand at the expense of other significant figures such as Leonard Peikoff and Frank O’Connor. Though it often goes overboard in its attacks on the Brandens, James Valliant’s
The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics
(2005) subjects both books to intense scrutiny and offers an alternative account of Rand’s break with Nathaniel Branden. Jeff Walker’s
The Ayn Rand Cult
(1999), based on interviews with former Objectivists, follows the Brandens’ emphasis on Rand’s personal life.

Accounts that attempted to return discussion to Rand’s ideas include ARI scholar Alan Gotthelf’s
On Ayn Rand
(2000), published as part of the Wadsworth philosophy series, and Ronald E. Merrill’s
The Ideas of Ayn Rand
(1991). Louis Torres’s
What Art Is
(2000) explores Rand’s aesthetic theory. Leonard Peikoff’s
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
(1991) offers the orthodox Objectivist exegesis of her thought.

Yet another distinct cycle of writing about Rand began in the mid-1990s, when scholars began to draw on documentary and archival material to craft increasingly sophisticated analyses of Rand’s philosophy and writings. The first author to integrate Rand’s life and thought was Chris Sciabarra, who situated Rand within the tradition of dialectical philosophy in
The Russian Radical
(1995). Though written without access to Rand’s personal papers, Sciabarra’s book employed original research and brought to light hitherto unknown information about Rand’s educational background. Along with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, Sciabarra attempted to draw Rand scholarship out of the Objectivist ghetto by assembling a broad range of contributors for the volume
Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand
(1999). Sciabarra and several collaborators also launched the
Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
, a publication that touts its independence from any group, institution, or philosophical perspective. The prolific libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan, once an acquaintance of Rand’s, added to the academic literature with his study
Ayn Rand
(1999).

In recent years there has been an explosion of scholarship on Rand, much of it fed by the newly opened Ayn Rand Archives and funded by the Ayn Rand Institute. Modeled on other libertarian advocacy groups, such as the Institute for Humane Studies, the now defunct Volker Fund, and the Liberty Fund, ARI has launched an Objectivist Academic Center that runs seminars and conferences on Rand’s thought and supports a journal,
The Objective Standard
. The newly active Anthem Foundation, an affiliated organization, offers grants and other financial support to university professors interested in Rand. These efforts have yielded
Facets of Ayn Rand
(2001), a sympathetic memoir by Charles and Mary Ann Sures;
Ayn Rand
(2004), a short and factually accurate biography of Rand written by the head archivist, Jeff Britting; and Valliant’s
The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics
(2005). The Institute has also sponsored a series on each of Rand’s major novels, edited by Robert Mayhew, which includes
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
We the Living (2004),
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
Anthem (2005),
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead (2007), and
Essays on Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged (2009). Although they are clearly written by partisans of Rand and thus lack a critical edge, the essays in Mayhew’s books are based on historical evidence and carefully argued. They represent a significant step forward in Objectivist scholarship.

Another major source of funding for Objectivist scholars is the charitable foundation of BB&T, one of the country’s largest banks. Run by John Allison, an avowed Objectivist, BB&T has stirred controversy with its grants to universities that require the teaching of
Atlas Shrugged
. Most of the scholars supported by BB&T are also affiliated with ARI in some capacity, including the Aristotelian scholar Alan Gotthelf and the philosopher Tara Smith, who holds the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism at the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of
Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics
(2006). The success of Smith’s book, which received generally positive reviews from her peers, suggests that Objectivism may finally be granted a hearing by the guild of professional philosophers.

Though orthodox Objectivist scholarship has taken important steps to engage in dialogue with the broader academic community, it remains hampered by a spirit of faction. Rand’s emphasis on judgment and moral sanction remains important to many ARI-funded scholars, who have attacked independent outposts like the
Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
and are often unwilling to acknowledge the work of independent scholars. Until these disputes evolve into the more routine, measured, and impersonal disputation of scholarly life, Objectivists will remain stigmatized within the intellectual world.

Finally, Rand has begun to find her place within the literature about conservatism and the American right that has flourished of late in the historical profession. When historians first turned their attention to the success of conservative politics and ideas, many have noted Rand’s presence among the thinkers who inspired a rising generation. Earlier work on conservatism tended to make perfunctory acknowledgment of Rand or situate her as an irrelevant outcast from mainstream conservatism. George Nash’s seminal
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
(1975) framed Rand as an extremist outsider effectively silenced by Buckley’s
National Review
, an interpretation Buckley himself promoted in his fictional
Getting It Right
(2003). Still, for much of this early work Rand remained a cipher. For example, Lisa McGirr’s excellent study,
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(2001), inadvertently quotes Rand several times as she describes the libertarian worldview of Orange County activists. In one of the few academic discussions of the student libertarian movement, Jonathan Schoenwald’s essay in the edited volume
The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums
(2001) ignores Rand and identifies Murray Rothbard as the sole source of right-wing radicalism. Rand and libertarianism more generally are given a thorough, albeit brief, treatment by John Kelley in
Bringing the Market Back In: The Political Revitalization of Market Liberalism
(1997).