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RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM 197
drew, a motley assemblage with “ladies in fur hats or stoles, students
in sneakers and shirt-sleeves. There were crew cuts and long-hairs, and
beards of various lengths and colors hiding young faces. No smoking
signs were disregarded.” Rand spoke forcefully and confi dently to her
Ivy League audience and particularly relished the question-and-answer
session that followed. When an audience member questioned her “slur”
of the New Deal, “ ‘It was not a slur’ Rand shot back. ‘I intended it to be
a damnation.’ ” 19 She concluded to a standing ovation. The speech put
Rand back in a role she had last enjoyed in her Willkie days: the featured
speaker, holding forth against all comers.
After Yale she began to regularly accept invitations to visit on college
campuses. By all accounts a fascinating and effective public speaker, she
regularly drew above-capacity crowds. In public Rand cultivated a mysterious
and striking persona. Her dark hair was cut in a severe pageboy
style, and she wore a long black cape with a dollar sign pin on the lapel.
Decades after emigration she still spoke with a distinct Russian accent.
At parties afterward she chain-smoked cigarettes held in an elegant ivory
holder, surrounded by her New York entourage. Before long Rand was
receiving far more speaking invitations than she could possibly accept;
in 1965 alone she turned down more than twenty requests from colleges
and universities. She accepted only the most coveted invitations, preferring
to speak at Ivy League schools and selective public universities like
the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley.
After the publication of For the New Intellectual she established a relationship
with Boston’s Ford Hall Forum, where she delivered an annual
address for the next twenty years. One of her greatest triumphs came in
1963, when Lewis and Clark College invited her to campus for its annual
Reading Week, assigned Atlas Shrugged (among other novels) to all students
and faculty, and awarded her an honorary doctorate in humane
letters. 20
Although Rand was not included in most colleges’ offi cial curricula,
she inhabited a shadow world of intellectual resources that students
shared among themselves. One young man described his fi rst encounter
with Objectivism: “A stunningly beautiful studymate, who had read
Atlas, asked me a stunning question: ‘is it just that my father, a surgeon,
is forced to pay a greater percentage of income in taxes than do other
people?’ I had no answer.” Secure in her affl uence, this student used
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