Jubilee Prosperity

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent
submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an
alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could
have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed
is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and
especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that
capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or
conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her
childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to
a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks
seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger
and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the
United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy
of every variety of what she denounced as “collectivism,” from Soviet
Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren’t immune: after
Wendell Willkie’s defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization
called Associated Ex-Wilkie Workers Against Wilkie, berating the
candidate as “the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more
guilty than Roosevelt.”

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love
of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real
affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve
her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular
novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of
someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as
Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen
she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to
her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and
admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity
of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to
its knees.

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps
to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan —
but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more
to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any
influence, saying only that Nie­tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But
“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a
year.

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