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CHAPTER THREE
A New Credo of Freedom
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by the time she completed the “Manifesto of Individualism”
Ayn Rand’s interest in politics was all-consuming and her literary
life was at a standstill. She left The Fountainhead manuscript largely
unattended and plunged into another round of organizing efforts.
Wielding Channing Pollock’s name and her writing, Rand began meeting
as many New York “reactionaries” as possible. She was in a city
known as the reddest in America; indeed the very phrase “New York
intellectual” came to connote a certain type of leftist-literary thinker
with Communist sympathies. What Rand joined instead was an alternate
universe of other New York intellectuals, committed to free markets
and laissez-faire.
These contacts, particularly her new friend Isabel Paterson, further
introduced Rand to the American individualist tradition she had encountered
through her opposition to Roosevelt. Rand found libertarian ideas
compelling but the libertarian attitude alarming. The Willkie campaign
had energized Rand and convinced her that Americans were receptive
to capitalist ideas, but it had the opposite effect on others. Alone among
her fellows, it seemed, she believed in the possibility of political change.
Through months of letter writing, meetings, and impassioned talks,
Rand found few willing to join her crusade to develop a “new credo of
freedom.” 1 Her organizing failures increased Rand’s sense of urgency.
As she wrote to Pollock, “Who is preaching philosophical individualism?
No one. And if it is not preached, economic individualism will not survive.”
2 Rand had a new sense of mission that would eventually fi nd its
way into her uncompleted manuscript.
When she fi nally secured a publisher for The Fountainhead Rand
returned to the book a different person, with different ways of thinking
about the world. In its origins The Fountainhead refl ected Rand’s earlier
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