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By Root 1609 0

in 1946 she contributed a series of short articles to the organization’s newsletter, The Vigil. Each was framed as an answer to a civics question. “What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?” she asked rhetorically (individualism versus collectivism, she answered) and “What Is the Proper Function of Government?” (to protect individual rights against encroachments by other individuals and groups. It must never initiate the use of force but may use force in response to attacks from violent criminals or foreign powers). These little lessons served as a crash course in libertarian political thought for uninitiated members of the MPA and, later, as a rough foundation for some of her post-Atlas nonfiction. She may have attended a few free-for-all evening sessions in which MPA stalwarts debated with leaders of liberal Hollywood groups and which usually ended in shouting matches and “smears” (a favorite word of the time) in the next day’s trade papers. “Reds!” exclaimed the MPA. “Fascist anti-Semites!” returned the Screen Writers Guild, using 1940s code for anti-Communists. Unintended slapstick notwithstanding, the depth of animosity, fear, and bad faith that existed between Left and Right during this period is hard to capture. At one point, Rand suspected her own treasured literary agent, Alan Collins, of acting on behalf of the “Communist spark-plugs planted around [Hollywood and New York],” whose assignment it was to recruit and use “literary agents and publishers … as stooges.” Her suspicions were somehow allayed, because Collins and his associate, Perry Knowlton, remained her New York agents until her death. According to Robert Vogel, “we were all seeing ghosts, no question about it.”

In the fall of 1946, the political friction intensified. The crime novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, got a brainstorm for an “American Authors Authority” that would own, license, and tax all literary copyrights belonging to members of the Screen Writers Guild, the Authors Guild, and other writers’ unions. Because the guilds were immensely powerful and could influence producers and publishers to buy or not buy authors’ works, Rand and her conservative colleagues saw this as a naked ploy to loot every American writer of his ownership rights and impose a Communist monopoly over the nation’s literary output. Side by side with the unlikely trio of John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and Dorothy Thompson, Rand and her fellow MPA members formed the American Writers Association to fight the Authors Authority and the guilds. At the invitation of the New York newspaper columnist Benjamin Stolberg, she joined the board of the new organization, too. Meanwhile, Albert Mannheimer, who sat on the Screen Writers Guild committee that had proposed the plan, fought it from within, while left-wing committee members tried to “chop his head off.” He and Rand gossiped about Hollywood’s fractious politics on weekends, when they weren’t talking about his plays or her progress on Atlas Shrugged.

At the same time, the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) announced its intention to investigate Communist infiltration of the movie industry. The committee—led by its publicity-seeking chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, who was assisted by Representative Richard M. Nixon of California and the volubly anti-Semitic Representative John Rankin of Mississippi—planned to descend on Hollywood in the spring of 1947, to gather information for public hearings scheduled for the following October in Washington, D.C. The MPA went into action. That winter, Rand and the executive board met as often as three times a week, selecting emissaries and discussing tactics for the spring preliminary hearings. As Rand’s special contribution, she composed the “Screen Guide for Americans,” addressed to movie producers and executives who wanted to avoid the appearance of left-wing influence. She warned them not to “smear” success, the profit motive, or wealth, and not to “glorify” the common man. “Don’t spit