Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [153]
If the exchange with Mises did take place, as it almost certainly did, perhaps it isn’t surprising that at least once in her life Rand reflected something of the poisoned atmosphere of the anti-Semitic Russia of her childhood. That she tended to confront pain and fear by minimizing their importance would surely not have guaranteed a complete escape from the effects of second-class citizenship in her native city. In Atlas Shrugged, there comes a revealing moment, before Dagny’s crash-landing in Galt’s Gulch, when the heroine briefly gives up the battle to save Taggart Transcontinental. She resigns her official position and withdraws to a country cottage that had belonged to her father. She feels immense pain at the prospect of losing her railroad; startlingly, she likens her pain to the howling of a wounded stranger in whose screams she could drown at any moment. “She felt no pity for the stranger, only a contemptuous impatience; she had to fight him and destroy him.” Later, in the chapter “Atlantis,” Dagny reflects that “all the years of ugliness and struggle [weren’t real. They] were only someone’s senseless joke.” Of course, anti-Semitism was not a senseless joke. Neither were the other traumas and anxieties of Rand’s childhood and young adulthood.
In this small world, other friends of Hazlitt and admirers of Mises were drawn into her circle. In the Austrian economist’s weekly graduate-level seminar at NYU, academics, businessmen, and activists, including Cornuelle, came to listen and ask questions; many stayed in the seminar for years or even decades. One longtime student and friend of Mises was Murray Rothbard, a quick-witted twenty-eight-year-old intellectual prankster and self-styled “anarcho-capitalist.” The Cornuelle brothers had brought Rothbard to visit Rand in 1952, and Rothbard found the experience of paying court to her both fascinating and depressing. In 1954 he tried again. As the leader of a high-octane clique of young Mises students who called themselves the Circle Bastiat, he bowed to group pressure to provide an introduction to her. He arranged for a meeting between members of his circle and Rand’s Collective. The date set was for a Saturday evening in mid-July, with a follow-up meeting scheduled a week later. Rothbard and his friends survived to tell the story, and told it many times.
The Brandens were in Canada, but Rand, O’Connor, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, and other Rand associates were arrayed on the sofa and chairs in her living room when Rothbard and his young companions George Reisman and Ralph Raico entered. After introductions, she spoke mostly to seventeen-year-old Reisman, a brainy recent graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. Before the discussion got under way, Reisman presented her with a pair of tickets to a dinner event in support of Roy Cohn, who had recently resigned as Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel; Cohn had been accused of misusing the power of his office on behalf of a homosexual lover during the recently completed Army-McCarthy hearings. Reisman was on assignment from one of the dinner’s organizers to ask the novelist to come, he explained, and mentioned that McCarthy would also be there. Although McCarthy’s star was swiftly setting, Rand still supported him. She declined, however, on the grounds that, for her to become involved in a defense of Cohn, she would have to abandon Atlas Shrugged and proclaim his innocence as the novelist Emile Zola had proclaimed that of Dreyfus. At first, Reisman was amazed—not by Rand’s comparing Cohn to Dreyfus, but by her grandiosity in likening herself to Zola. After reading