ayn rand nation. Copyright © 2012 by Gary Weiss.

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reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For informa-
tion, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fift h Avenue, New York, N.Y.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiss, Gary (Gary R.)

Ayn Rand nation : the hidden struggle for America’s soul /
Gary Weiss.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index and bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-59073-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-5078-7 (e-book)
1. Rand, Ayn—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rand,
Ayn—Influence. I. Title.
PS3535.A547Z975 2012
813'.52—dc23
2011041106

First Edition: March 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
 CHAPTER ONE

The Believers

T
hey knew it, those Objectivists. One of them said to me, “I
hope we have an impact on you.” He knew.
That remark was made to me at one of the monthly meet-
ings of Ayn Rand followers in Manhattan. I was becoming a
regular participant. Oddly, I was liking it and growing fond of the people
who attended. Even odder was that I was enjoying her novels and becom-
ing vaguely simpatico to her beliefs, even though they were contrary to
everything I had been taught and experienced since infancy. Her novels
were compelling and persuasive in ways that I couldn’t quite put my finger
on. The publisher Bennett Cerf had a similar reaction to Rand as a person.
He said in his memoirs that “I found myself liking her, though I had not
expected to.”1
Atlas Shrugged was on my coffee table, gathering dust, for several weeks
before I picked it up. I had a copy of one of its innumerable softcover edi-
tions, with a foreword by her aide, heir, and sidekick Leonard Peikoff. Even-
tually I forced myself to read it. Initially, I was in agreement with my teenage
self that this book wasn’t very good.
I was repelled by Rand’s leaden phraseology and too-cute way of nam-
ing her characters. The villains have names like “Balph” and “Slagenhop.”
A public official who advocates mooching is named “Wesley Mouch.” It was
Dickensian without being witty. They are physically repulsive and they
24 AY N R A N D N AT I O N

spout inanities; clay pigeons tossed in the air so Rand could blast them
with a shotgun.
For example: “A very young girl in white evening gown asked timidly,
‘What is the essence of life, Mr. Eubank?’ ‘Suffering,’ said Balph Eubank,
‘defeat and suffering.’ ” Eubank favors a law limiting the sale of any book to
ten thousand copies. But what if it’s a good story? “ ‘Plot is a primitive vul-
garity in literature,’ said Balph Eubank, contemptuously.”2
Some of my notes as I read the book: “Implausible.” “Anti-American.”
“Defense needs/establishment absent.” (Odd for a book published at the
height of the Cold War.) “Characters live in moral vacuum.” “Contempt
for poor.”
But then, as the pages flipped by, my resistance eroded. I began to ad-
mire her skill at pacing such an immense work of fiction. The Hollywood
screenwriter in her was becoming evident. I felt ashamed. It was as if I was
savoring Mein Kampf, chortling along with der Führer as he expounded
wittily on the disease-carrying vermin that were my ancestral burden. I
carried around this massive book in a tote bag, keeping its title hidden as I
walked the collectivist streets of Greenwich Village, avoiding the eyes of
passersby.
It became plain to me that her appeal is more than just political. Her
novels serve collectively as the Big Book of Objectivism, a self-help manual
as well as a work of fiction and ideological hornbook. Embedded in her
work is a singular view of the psychology of human relationships, sans
family. She never had children and didn’t provide much insight into the
parent-child relationship, but she certainly had strong opinions on how
to deal with moochers, sorry SOBs, and louses that might be found within
one’s family. The basic message is that one jettisons them without a second
thought. And as for adultery: What of it? What’s good enough for Hank
Rearden is surely good enough for any follower of his exploits as a thin, sexy
steel manufacturer, long-suffering breadwinner for an ungrateful family and
Dagny’s main squeeze.
 THE BELIEVERS 25

Racy sex scenes, steamy romantic triangles, and an unconventional

view of nuptial relations are the sugar that Atlas Shrugged and The Foun-
tainhead spread on the sour grapefruit of philosophical exposition. Nei-
ther is an homage to family values, to say the least. In both novels, all of the
major characters are isolated, existential figures, sort of what you’d find in
a fi lm noir. Not an Ozzie nor a Harriet nor a Ward Cleaver was to be found
in Ayn Rand’s fantasy world. Few children, fewer behaving like children.
No Wally, no Beaver. June Cleaver would have been a hard-charging exec
or the inventor of an ore-refining process. The Fred Rutherfords and other
second-handers and collectivists in the Cleaver family circle would have
been treated with the kind of cold contempt that only a Rand character
could dish out.
Atlas and Fountainhead made it easy to love individualism and no-
government capitalism because it was a world of healthy, young heroes and
repulsive villains. There were no inconvenient elderly defecating upon them-
selves in nursing homes. No paraplegic war veterans without means of
support. No refugees from far-off lands with unmarketable skills. No KKK
rallies. No exploitation of the poor. No rat-infested slums. No racial mi-
norities. Poverty and unemployment are a distant, alien presence. The only
member of the underclass Dagny encounters is a railroad hobo who turns
out to be an Objectivist with a lead on Galt. There is nobody and nothing
to interrupt the monotonous picture, nothing to upset the stereotypes, no
migrant workers toiling for pennies. Rand, acting as God, made those
people invisible while she whitened the hearts of American business. The
only societal problem in the world of Atlas Shrugged is that government is
mean to business and unfair to the wealthy.
The two inanely skewed Rand opuses were the intellectual backstory
of the group meetings that I attended. The members were polite and toler-
ant if one was not up to speed on Rand’s works, just as they were reason-
ably courteous to the occasional collectivist who happened by, but it was
hard to follow the discussions without having a working knowledge of her
26 AY N R A N D N AT I O N

novels and nomenclature. “Checking premises” was one common catch-

phrase. Rand liked to say that people who disagreed with her were utilizing
incorrect premises in their thought processes.
I was introduced to these meetings by my initial tour guide to Objec-
tivism, a man who was literally a tour guide. His name was Frederick
Cookinham, and in his spare time he gave walking tours of “Ayn Rand’s
New York.”3 He is the author of a rambling but intriguing self-published
volume of Ayn Rand-inspired thought, The Age of Rand: Imagining an Ob-
jectivist Future World. Despite the title, it spends more time mulling Rand’s
philosophy than imagining the future. It’s a thoughtful book, at times
amusing, a quality not often found in Objectivist literature. It takes a skep-
tical attitude toward the keepers of the Objectivist flame at the Ayn Rand
Institute, and is far from hero-worshiping when it comes to Rand herself.
For example, he points out that though Rand opposed racism, “there remain
so many references in her writings to the ‘pest holes of Asia’ and ‘naked sav-
ages’ who want foreign aid from the United States, that her assumption is
clear, despite her actually defining a ‘savage’ as someone who believes in
magic.”
Fred was disturbed by Rand’s opinion of Mahatma Gandhi, as con-
tained in a 1948 letter from Rand to right-wing writer Isabel Paterson one
week after Gandhi was killed.4 She called his assassination “an almost cruel
piece of historical irony” and said that it was almost as if a higher intelli-
gence in the universe had carried out a “nice sardonic gesture.” Rand said,
“Here was a man who spent his life fighting to get the British out of India in
the name of peace, brotherly love and non-violence. He got what he asked
for.”
Fred was nonplussed. “What is she saying here?” Seemed pretty obvi-
ous to me: Gandhi was an altruist and got the fate that he deserved. It was
a good example of the cold-bloodedness that she so often displayed. Fred
doesn’t resolve his dilemma, and points out, somewhat dubiously, that
Rand and Gandhi are actually “allies,” at least in a limited sense, as both
 THE BELIEVERS 27

believed that the ends justify the means. Personally I can’t conceive of two
individuals with less in common, even if Gandhi did display individuality
of an almost Roarkish dimension.
It was clear from reading his book, and from joining him on his walk-
ing tour, that Fred was an independent thinker, certainly no cultist.5 I met
him for lunch at an Au Bon Pain sandwich-and-coffee joint in Lower Man-
hattan, not far from where Rand was famously photographed with Federal
Hall in the background, wearing a solid-gold dollar-sign brooch.
Fred was in his mid-fifties, had a salt-and-pepper beard and a discon-
certing resemblance to Richard Dreyfuss. He worked as a proofreader for a
law firm when not giving tours, and sang in a light-opera company in his
spare time. Like most people I met who sipped from the cup of Rand, Fred
first stumbled upon her books at an early age. He was eleven when he found
Anthem, one of Rand’s early novellas, and Atlas Shrugged in his brother’s
bookcase. He eagerly consumed the shorter book, which was the story of a
tyrannical society in which collectivism runs rampant, a harsher version of
the fantasy world of Atlas Shrugged, in which people are referred to by
numbers and the word “I” is eliminated. Atlas was far too big for him to
read immediately, but the book intrigued him, and he began reading it
when he was thirteen. He plowed right through it.
At the State University of New York in Cortland, he told me over our
sandwiches, “the first thing I did was join the Libertarian Party.” At the
time, libertarians were a freewheeling, quasi-anarchist group of people,
and not yet quite so neatly folded into the conservative movement as they
are today. At one point Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame gave a
speech on campus. Fred got his autograph on an issue of Reason magazine
that featured an interview with Ellsberg. Fred recalled that Ellsberg told
him that Reason’s libertarian views were close to his own. That was un-
derstandable because libertarianism, especially in its early days, had a
serious appeal to the left as well as the right. Libertarians opposed en-
croachments on one’s freedom in the style of the New Left, and received
28 AY N R A N D N AT I O N

some notoriety for advocating legalization of marijuana. (Rand did, too,

though it was hardly a central plank in her platform.)
I ran by him the name of a Reason writer I once knew, but Fred hadn’t
heard of him. “I don’t keep up on the news,” Fred told me. Instead, he spent
his off hours reading books. Indeed, Fred was a quiet sort, studious and well-
informed on historical minutiae. He was a regular at the bimonthly meet-
ings of the American Revolution Roundtable.
Fred felt sufficiently simpatico to Rand’s philosophy during her lifetime
that he attended her funeral in 1982, braving the cold of the northern
Westchester cemetery to see her buried beside her long-suffering husband,
a kindhearted, alcoholic former actor named Frank O’Connor. Fred met
Rand only once—“barely,” he said—just to get her autograph. It was 1978,
and Leonard Peikoff had just given a lecture on the “Basic Principles of
Objectivism” at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Rand was in attendance, as she
often was when a member of her inner circle was speaking. Fred found that
Rand was just as she was described in the press. “Irascible,” he said. “Short
fuse.” He found it amusing.
I asked what Rand meant to him, and Fred was, unsurprisingly, philo-
sophical. “Because I was so young, there wasn’t very much there for Rand
to compete against,” he told me. “I often wondered how I would have turned
out if I hadn’t happened to pick up that book or had happened to pick up
some other book.”
Rand’s influence on Fred was a bit of a surprise to me: She actually
made him less anti-union and less of a cold warrior. He was from a conser-
vative, Republican household in Upstate New York. Very “white bread,
mayonnaise,” Middle American. His father had a management position at
a road construction company, and negotiated with a muscle-flexing Team-
sters Union then run by Jimmy Hoffa. Unsurprisingly, the elder Cookinham
took a dim view of unions. “It was Rand who got me out of that mentality,
and got me more sympathetic to unions. She made the point that as people
have a right to form companies, so they also have a right to form unions.”
 THE BELIEVERS 29

Fred was right. Rand was opposed to the Taft–Hartley Act, a postwar
measure that weakened unions and enabled states to enact “right to work”
laws that prohibited companies from firing workers who wouldn’t join
unions. In a 1949 letter, she objected to “government’s ‘right to curb a
union’—or to curb anyone’s economic activities.”6
“People don’t expect that,” said Fred. “A lot of libertarians and Objec-
tivists I don’t think get this. They have a kind of instinctive fear and hatred
of unions.” It is instinctive, apparently, for many on the right to feel that
companies can bind together in their own rational self-interest—Rand op-
posed antitrust laws—but that the same actions are bad when carried out
by their employees.
Rand, he said, also kept him from falling into the paranoid “Buckley-
ite” Cold War worldview, by not subscribing to conspiracy theories and the
anti-Communist hysteria of the times. He pointed to one of her essays,
“Extremism, Or the Art of Smearing,” which appeared in her anthology
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, as an example. “That, by the way, is the only
place in any of her writings in which she mentioned Joe McCarthy, and
then only parenthetically, just to say ‘I am not a supporter of Joe McCarthy,’ ”
he noted. Fred’s argument had a kernel of truth, except that the purpose of
the essay was to attack critics of McCarthyism, not to knock McCarthy or
the paranoia he engendered.*
Fred was actively involved in the Libertarian Party in New York
through the mid-1990s. He worked in the thankless trenches of politics,
passing out leaflets on the inhospitable sidewalks of New York. Over time
he became disillusioned. Libertarians in New York forever occupy a tiny

* Rand did say in the “Extremism, Or the Art of Smearing” essay (fi rst published in 1964) that she was
“not an admirer of Senator McCarthy.” However, other accounts portray her as a supporter of McCarthy.
See Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, pp. 246– 47. In the “Extremism” essay she has no
partic u lar bone to pick with McCarthyism— she says that it was never “proven” that McCarthy had
engaged in trumped-up charges against people. The purpose of the essay, in fact, was to denounce use
of terms like “McCarthyism” and “extremist,” which she viewed as smears applied to people who were
merely anti- Communist. Hence the “smearing” title of her essay, which attacks smearing of the right,
not by the right.
30 AY N R A N D N AT I O N

substratum of the local political scene, with little impact on the electorate
or the political dialogue. “I saw a lack of seriousness of purpose,” he told
me. Fred had a similarly negative opinion of the Tea Party, which he dis-
missed as “amateur stuff,” with even less of a future than the Libertarian
Party. “A flash in the pan,” was his verdict. “A media creation.”
Fred clued me in to the regularly scheduled meetings of New York City
Objectivists, which were held the last Sunday of every month. The regular
venue was the Midtown Restaurant, a coffee shop on East 55th Street that
was as bland and generic as its name. Sitting at tables pushed together near
the front were about twenty mostly middle-aged men and women, some of
whom were Rand followers since the 1960s, when her deputy Nathaniel
Branden gave lectures at the McAlpin Hotel and other venues in Manhat-
tan, usually on or around 34th Street. Rand lived nearby, in the dowdy
Murray Hill neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan, during the last
three decades of her life. The offices of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, an
early version of the Ayn Rand Institute, were in close proximity.
Murray Hill was the ground zero of Objectivism for Rand’s last three
decades in New York. Rand lived the life of a modest retiree or reasonably
successful freelance writer, not a dowager. Her last home was in a nonde-
script apartment building at 120 East 34th Street, and she previously lived
in a sprawling postwar residential monstrosity at 36 East 36th Street. Some
of her closest followers, including Nathaniel and Barbara Branden (ranking
second and third in the Objectivist hierarchy), lived nearby. I was surprised
we weren’t meeting somewhere in Murray Hill or near Wall Street, given
their historical links to Objectivism and abundance of inexpensive eateries.
This was the same regular Objectivist gathering that was profiled in
The New Yorker a year earlier. Expecting hard-eyed right-wing fanatics,
I  was surprised that these were mellow, low-key individuals. The atmo-
sphere was academic, intellectual, about what one would find at a Mensa
meeting. There was the same thrown-together quality. A former tennis pro
here, a hedge fund manager there.
 THE BELIEVERS 31

The Ayn Rand group meetings were an ad hoc successor to the Collec-
tive, which was the self-consciously ironic name that Rand and her acolytes
gave to weekly gatherings at Rand’s apartment in the 1950s and 1960s. The
Collective is probably best known for being a kind of Objectivist Jordan
River, at which Alan Greenspan was baptized in the faith. The direct Rand
connection to Manhattan had eroded ever since the Comintern of the move-
ment, the ARI, set up shop in the more congenially right-wing environs of
Orange County, California, a few years after Rand’s death.
The meetings had a structure. First the members of the group intro-
duced themselves for the benefit of newcomers, and then there was general
discussion as people dug into their late lunches. (Separate checks were
given despite the size of the group, as was suitable for people who rejected
collectivism in all its forms.) I noticed that introductions tended to domi-
nate the meetings, as members used the opportunity to expound on the
events of the day, discuss books they’d read, and announce upcoming
events in the Objectivist community.
The August 2010 meeting was one day after the Glenn Beck Restoring
Honor rally, and I expected the Randers to feel gratified and enthusiastic.
Beck was a big fan of Rand. He mentioned her favorably on a number of
occasions, and his attacks on churches promoting social justice could have
easily emerged from Rand herself. But nobody talked about the rally ini-
tially. These were talkers, intellectuals, not rally-goers. Presiding was Benny
Pollak, who was originally from Chile and worked for a Wall Street bank. He
also was a founding member of the New York City Skeptics, which cast a
gimlet eye at pseudoscience, quackery, and the like. I’d long been attracted
to the skepticism movement, and it never occurred to me that there might be
synergy between skepticism and Objectivism. The commonality was dis-
taste for mysticism, which Rand mentioned frequently and with her custom-
ary contempt.
I sat between Fred and Don Hauptman, a cheery brown-bearded fel-
low. Don contributed occasional articles on Rand-related subjects to The
32 AY N R A N D N AT I O N

New Individualist, an Objectivist newsletter, and once spent $50,000 at

Christie’s to buy the original galley proofs from an interview Rand gave
to Playboy in 1964. “I’m comfortable,” he explained to me. Opposite me sat
Sandi, a young para legal at an immigration law firm who had just read
Atlas Shrugged a second time, “and I don’t think there’s anything in it I
disagree with.” A few seats over was Iris Bell, who had done some graphic
design work for Rand, and was included in an oral history that was about
to be published by the ARI. She and her husband, Paul, who first encoun-
tered Objectivism listening to a Nathaniel Branden radio broadcast in
1960, were the most senior Objectivists at the meeting. Their views, sea-
soned by years of study, were granted a certain deference.
Except for the Rand preoccupation of almost everyone in attendance,
these were the kind of people one might find at any ordinary Manhattan
dinner party, though the atmosphere was considerably more sober. The
same could have been said about the Collective, I imagine, except for
the added element of Rand herself dominating the proceedings. Most of the
Collective members were friends and relatives of Barbara Branden, and
many were Canadians like the Brandens. Winnipeg-born Leonard Peikoff
was Barbara’s cousin. Her best friend Joan Mitchell was briefly married to
Greenspan, and brought the future Fed chairman into the fold. The demo-
graphics of both old and new Ayn Rand salons were uniformly Caucasian
and largely Jewish. (Two of the Objectivists in attendance at the Midtown
Restaurant had flirted with Orthodox Judaism before being rescued by Ob-
jectivism.) One difference was age: The latter-day Collectivists were consid-
erably older than the twentysomethings who used to crowd around Rand.