1982 If there were an award for the most influential bad novelist in literary history, Ayn Rand would, one suspects, be a strong contender. Alisa Rosenbaum was born, Russian Jewish, in St Petersburg in 1905. It was a bad year to be Jewish, with pogroms everywhere. 1917 was a bad year to be Russian, and Alisa fled the newly established USSR in 1925 to live in the US. An astonishingly enterprising woman, she settled in Hollywood to become a screenwriter (in a language not her own, and a society of which she knew very little, and a medium that had only just discovered ‘talkies’). She changed her name to Ayn Rand, married, and made a decent living for herself in a business (films) not easy to thrive in.
Rand’s career took its definitive turn in 1932 with the anti-Soviet screenplay, Red Pawn. Thereafter her drama and (after 1943, with The Fountainhead) her fiction was ferociously pro-capitalist. She was, it was later said, a ‘hob-nailed Reagan’. Gordon (‘Greed is good’) Gecko was a pinko alongside Ayn.
Rand formulated her views into a philosophy she called ‘Objectivism’, founded on a belief in ‘Rational Selfishness’. She propagated her views in her massive novel, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. The novel revolves around the idea of the wealth-creators (i.e. moguls, magnates, and millionaires) of the US imitating their workers, trade unionising, and going on strike. The capitalistic Atlas shrugs off the burden of making himself rich, and the mass of the population descends into the dystopian chaos they have brought on themselves with their irrational demand that the state look after them. The moral, as one disaffected blogger (‘uncyclopedia’) puts it, is that ‘Poor People Are Lazy Assholes’.
Despite scathing reviews, Atlas Shrugged made the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, it recruited disciples to Rand’s political views. These views were expounded in the narrative and, in manifesto form, in a long appendix (ostensibly a radio address). In it the hero (Rand’s spokesperson), John Galt, exalts selfishness and excoriates (socialistic) selflessness. ‘Your acceptance of the code of selflessness’, he informs the American public:
has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he’s keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.
It is the working classes who are the ‘exploiters’ (grabbers). Galt’s philosophy can be summed up in his personal insignia, the dollar sign, ‘$’. Rand herself affected jewellery emblazoned with the same sacred $. When, aged 77, she died on this day in 1982, she was buried in the Kensico cemetery, Valhalla, New York. Alongside the casket was a six-foot-tall floral display in the shape of the dollar sign.
Rand has always been a controversial figure. Posthumously much of the controversy centred on Alan Greenspan, who, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, effectively ran the American economy from 1987 to 2006. Greenspan was a confessed disciple of Rand’s in his younger years and attended the 1982 funeral. Was he, with the levers of power in his hand, putting into practice her principles – had the US, under his management, become ‘Aynerica’ with the motto, ‘In the Dollar we trust’? The still loyal band of Objectivists are divided on the question, many thinking he was weak-kneed (as Ayn would never have been) in his acquiescence to the ‘mixed economy’.