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INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! 49
Court. “No tyranny in history has ever been established overnight,”
Rand warned. She traced the recent history of Russia and Germany,
asking, “If Mr. Roosevelt is empowered to pass his own laws and have
his own men pass on these laws, what is to prevent him from passing
any law he pleases?” Her solution, even at this early date, was activism.
“There must be a committee, an organization, or headquarters created
at once to lead and centralize the activity of all those who are eager
to join their efforts in protest,” she declared. Her letter urged readers
to write immediately to Congress, lest they lose their lives and possessions.
She closed with a reference to her favorite Sinclair Lewis novel:
“ ‘It can’t happen here,’ you think? Well, it’s happened already!” 29 Rand’s
letter was never printed, but more prominent commentators shared
its basic sentiments. Roosevelt’s disastrous bill, widely condemned as a
court-packing scheme, went down to stunning defeat in Congress and
emboldened his opposition. The infl uential columnist Walter Lippmann
emerged as a new Roosevelt critic, throwing darts at the president in his
national columns. In 1938 Texas Congressman Martin Dies began investigating
Communist infi ltration of the federal government, eventually
releasing a list of more than fi ve hundred government employees who
also belonged to known Communist fronts, a move intended to blur the
line between Communist, socialist, and New Deal liberal.
But it seemed almost impossible to launch any effective opposition
to the popular president. A rich man himself, Roosevelt was skilled at
caricaturing his opposition as tools of the rich. Often it was not caricature
at all. The one organized anti-Roosevelt group, the Liberty League,
was a secretive cabal of wealthy businessmen hoping to wrest control of
government from the masses. Although the Liberty League made several
awkward attempts at populism, its main fi nancial backers were the conservative
Du Pont family. Tarred as fascists after several of the group’s
members praised Mussolini and called for an American dictator, the
Liberty League disintegrated within a few years of its founding. 30
Even as she dwelled on Roosevelt’s perfi dy, Rand pursued a number of
side projects. Prompted by the interest of a theater producer, she began
a stage adaptation of We the Living, entitled The Unconquered. 31 When
Frank found work in a summer stock production of Night of January 16th
the two spent an idyllic few weeks in Stonington, Connecticut. There,
in a fl ash of inspiration, Rand completed a new manuscript, a novel of
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