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THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905–1943
of its poor and needy. I do, for when we begin trading our freedom
for monetary security, we lose both.” Another confessed, “My hatred of
Roosevelt became in time almost a mania. He stood for almost everything
I hated. It is quite clear that your own feeling equaled or exceeded
mine.” Rand’s individualism ran against the mainstream intellectual
currents of her day, but it echoed the common Victorian idea that
dependence would create weakness or lead to moral degradation. As a
Presbyterian minister from Indiana testifi ed, “In Howard Roark I rediscovered
the ‘individual’—the individual I had been brought up to be
and believe in, but who had been lost somewhere in the miasma of intellectual,
moral, and spiritual confusions spawned in the unhealthy jungle
of preachers, professors, and the poverty of the Depression.” Rand was
right to sense that there still existed a strong antigovernment tradition
in America and an almost instinctual fear of bureaucratization, regulation,
and centralization. Even as it promoted a new morality, politically
the novel reaffi rmed the wisdom of the old ways. 50
To those who already leaned libertarian the novel offered a striking
counterpoint to traditional ideas of laissez-faire. As she had intended,
The Fountainhead made individualism a living, breathing faith. Rand’s
emphasis on creativity, productivity, and the power of individuals came
as a bracing tonic to James Ingebretsen, who was just out of the army
when he read The Fountainhead and Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfl uous
Man. As he explained to a friend, “Howard Roark is the answer to
Nock[,] meaning creation, not escape, is the answer to the messy world
we are living in. Freedom, not enslavement to others, is the answer for
all of us. And so my course is crystal clear to me now.” Shortly after
writing this letter Ingebretsen moved to Los Angeles, where he helped
organize the Pamphleteers, one of the fi rst libertarian groups founded
in the postwar era. Similarly the journalist John Chamberlain found
that the combination of old and new solidifi ed his political opinions.
Chamberlain read Rand’s book in conjunction with Paterson’s God of
the Machine and yet a third libertarian book published in 1943, Rose
Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom. He remembered that the three
writers “turned Nock’s conception of social power into a detailed reality”:
“These books made it plain that if life was to be something more
than a naked scramble for government favors, a new attitude towards
the producer must be created.” In the 1930s Chamberlain had been
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