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WHO IS JOHN GALT? 1957–1968
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“that this current ‘return to religion’ is a most dangerous tendency. . . .
But the alien atheism of Ayn Rand, with its worship of Reason and
of an Elite of Noble, Productive Men, and its contempt of human
beings, the ‘masses,’ is no answer to the Kirks.” 21 Rand’s work accentuated
the sharp differences that still separated libertarians from
conservatives.
As controversy raged in the letters section of National Review, Rand
suffered through her darkest days yet. She sank into a deep depression,
crying nearly every day in the privacy of her apartment. Some form
of letdown was probably inevitable after the long buildup to publication,
and Rand’s continued use of Benzedrine may have further contributed
to her emotional fragility. What she dwelled upon was the painful
absence of intellectual recognition. Rand longed to be publicly hailed
as a major thinker on the American scene. The Collective had satisfi ed
her need to be a teacher and an authority, but it left unquenched her
desire for accolades from intellectual peers. Rand enjoyed being a dominant
fi gure, but she also wanted to admire, to lift her gaze upward like
Howard Roark. Nathan and Alan Greenspan elicited her favor precisely
because they could teach her about psychology and economics, fi elds
about which she knew little. Mises’s endorsement was welcome, but not
enough. She had already counted him among her supporters, and he
held little sway outside libertarian circles. Rand directly confessed her
disappointment only to Frank, Nathan, and Barbara, but her anguish
was palpable to the rest of the Collective.
Rand’s quest for intellectual recognition was doomed from the outset.
It was not simply that her political views were unpopular. Five years
after the publication of Atlas Shrugged Milton Friedman advanced similarly
controversial ideas in his Capitalism and Freedom, with little loss to
his academic reputation. Friedman’s association with the University of
Chicago and his technical work in economics insulated him against the
type of attacks Rand endured. 22 She had neither a formal academic post
nor any academic training beyond her Soviet undergraduate degree. Yet
it was her choice of style rather than form which inhibited her work’s
reception. Rand’s romantic fi ction, with its heavy political messages
and overdrawn contrasts between good and evil, was hopelessly out of
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