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THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905–1943
It began to dawn on Rand that there were Communist sympathizers,
or “pinks,” in America. At fi rst she had assumed, “[T]hey did not
matter in the least . . . this was the capitalist country of the world, and
by everything I could observe, Leftism or socialism was not an issue.” 56
But now she began to hear that although publishers liked the book, they
found its politics objectionable. Reviewers and editorial board members
explained to Rand’s agent that she was simply wrong about Soviet
Russia and misunderstood the noble experiment being conducted there.
Some added that though conditions might have been poor in the revolutionary
period that Rand described, everything was different now. 57
It is true that We the Living fl ew in the face of everything most educated
Americans thought they knew about Russia. As the Great Depression
ground on and unemployment soared, intellectuals began unfavorably
comparing their faltering capitalist economy to Russian Communism.
Karl Marx had predicted that capitalism would fall under the weight of
its own contradictions, and now with the economic crisis gripping the
West, his predictions seem to be coming true. By contrast Russia seemed
an emblematic modern nation, making the staggering leap from a feudal
past to an industrial future with ease. 58
High-profi le visitors to Russia reinforced this perception. Important
Americans who visited the USSR were given the red carpet treatment
and credulously reported back the fantasy they had been fed. More
than ten years after the Revolution, Communism was fi nally reaching
full fl ower, according to the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, a
Stalin fan who vigorously debunked accounts of the Ukraine famine, a
man-made disaster that would leave millions dead. The Soviet economy
was booming; Russia had even eliminated juvenile delinquency, prostitution,
and mental illness, according to the psychiatrist Frankwood
Williams, author of the optimistic Russia, Youth, and the Present-Day
World. 59
There was a sense of inevitability about it all. In educated, reformminded
circles it became conventional wisdom that the United States
would simply have to move toward Communism or, at the very least,
socialism. Whittaker Chambers, a Communist since the 1920s, remembered
the Party’s sudden surge in popularity: “These were the fi rst quotas
of the great drift from Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere . . . from 1930
on, a small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with
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