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250
LEGACIES
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several that had been recorded, but the level of activity never approximated
NBI’s. Nathan’s transgressions had profoundly damaged Rand’s
willingness to popularize her work.
Instead Rand restricted her teaching to a small group of students,
most of whom were pursuing graduate degrees in philosophy. These
students were primarily interested in Rand’s theory of concepts, which
she laid out in The Objectivist in 1967 and would publish in 1979 as
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. In these smaller courses Rand
often discussed topics she did not write about, leading to the development
of an Objectivist “oral tradition” carried forth by this remnant of
the larger movement. Her lectures and Peikoff’s extension of her ideas
provided fertile ground for later Objectivist philosophers, but Rand
had little new published work to offer. In 1971 she released her last two
nonfi ction books, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and The
Romantic Manifesto, both collections of previously published articles. 7
In the outside world the “Objecti-schism” diminished Rand’s authority
considerably. In the year following her split with Branden subscriptions
to The Objectivist dropped sharply, from twenty thousand to
fourteen thousand. Stepping into the vacuum, entrepreneurial Rand
enthusiasts began to redefi ne her philosophy to suit their interests.
Objectivism had always been more than NBI, for the institute’s rigidity
repelled many a would-be student. Anne Wortham was a devoted reader
of Rand when she visited the New York NBI, but she was disappointed
by the “big-wigs” on stage and Rand herself, who “seemed cold, dogmatic,
authoritarian, without that benevolent sense of life that she wrote
so eloquently about.” Although she never enrolled in an NBI course,
Wortham continued a “private” relationship with Objectivism and used
Rand’s ideas to inform her later academic work in sociology. 8 Similarly,
after Jarrett Wollstein was ejected from NBI for daring to teach a course
on Objectivism at the local free university, he continued to identify
Rand as a major infl uence on his thought. Wollstein started one of the
most successful neo-Objectivist organizations, the Society for Rational
Individualism, which published The Rational Individualist, a journal “in
basic agreement with Objectivism.” 9
Despite its stated orientation, The Rational Individualist published
the fi rst serious challenge to Rand’s hegemony, an “Open Letter to Ayn
Rand” by Roy Childs Jr., a student at the State University of New York,
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