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WHO IS JOHN GALT? 1957–1968
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A writer for New University Thought captured the mood among university
professors. Robert L. White grudgingly admitted Rand’s infl uence,
calling her “a genuinely popular ideologue of the right” and identifying
a “genuine grass-roots fervor for her ideas.” According to White, Rand
was the only contemporary novelist his students consistently admired,
and he found it “dismaying to contemplate the possibility that Ayn Rand
is the single writer who engages the loyalties of the students I am perhaps
ineffectually attempting to teach.” White thought Rand was “a horrendously
bad writer,” and, condescendingly, he thought his student’s
identifi cation with her heroic characters “pathetic.” But White was also
scared. Even though he couldn’t take Rand seriously as a thinker or a
writer, he worried that when his students outgrew her, “some of Ayn
Rand’s poison is apt to linger in their systems—linger and fester there
to malform them as citizens and, possibly, deliver them over willing victims
to the new American totalitarians.” 33 Like many of Rand’s critics it
was diffi cult for White to imagine Rand as simply another purveyor in
the marketplace of ideas.
Professorial opposition to Rand was undoubtedly fed by her reputation
as a right-wing extremist. On college campuses those interested
in Rand typically gravitated toward conservative student groups, soon
making Objectivists into a visible segment of the conservative youth
population. Atlas Shrugged had been roundly denounced by Rand’s
conservative and libertarian contemporaries, but a new generation
greeted the book with enthusiasm. A 1963 National Review survey of
student conservatives noted that “a small but appreciable headway is
being made by the Objectivists” and estimated that they composed
less than 10 percent of the student right. 34 The survey included Sarah
Lawrence, Williams, Yale, Marquette, Boston University, Indiana, South
Carolina, Howard, Reed, Davidson, Brandeis, and Stanford. The highest
percentage of self-identifi ed Objectivists were at Stanford and Boston
University (7 percent and 5 percent, respectively). In California she had
a signifi cant following at both public and private schools.
From its founding days, Rand’s ideas haunted Young Americans for
Freedom (YAF), one of the fi rst conservative youth organizations. The
brainchild of William F. Buckley, the group drew up its founding principles,
“The Sharon Statement,” during a meeting at Buckley’s Connecticut
estate in 1960. Like Rand, Buckley wanted to form a cadre of young
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