Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [195]
A few weeks after the Wisconsin speech, she presented the first of eighteen annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, a famous stronghold of free speech on the Northeastern University campus in Boston. The speeches typically began at seven thirty in the evening, but fans who had traveled from around the world to hear her—from as far away as Africa—would line up starting in midmorning (or, as the decade progressed, even the night before) and exchange ideas, news, and gossip all day long. Followers met future spouses, employers, and business associates in line and at postlecture parties. Because, beginning in the mid-1960s, the event took place in April, it became known as “the Objectivist Easter.” Meanwhile, Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on campuses from Harvard and MIT to Stanford. She hosted regular syndicated talk-radio programs on WKCR-FM at Columbia University and on WBAI-FM, New York’s quirky “free speech” station. Some of her university lectures were carried live on the National Educational Radio Network, the forerunner of NPR. In all cases, her cool intelligence and passionate commitment to ideas as a life-and-death matter turned young adversaries into grudging admirers. Throughout the 1960s, students came to jeer but stayed to listen, then bought her books and joined her movement.
While her underlying message assailed the communitarian spirit that took hold in the 1960s, her specific positions on issues of the day were often classically liberal, as well as farsighted and brave. As an extension of her commitment to individual rights, she consistently championed minority civil rights and equality of opportunity between the sexes (stopping short of the idea of a woman as president, since she believed that every woman should properly worhip a man, or men). Condemning the first use of force in any context, she opposed the Vietnam War long before her contemporaries did. And she spoke plainly and forcefully against state governments’ bans on abortion. “Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved,” she told an audience of fifteen hundred people at the Ford Hall Forum, five years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 and in a state, Massachusetts, in which abortion was then illegal. “An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being,” she declared. When she opposed popular movements, her reasoning was original and often, in its peculiar way, progressive. She condemned the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 as much for its threat and use of force in taking over administration buildings and its attempted subversion of countervailing opinion (that is, free speech) as for its original goal of overturning a prohibition against political organizing on campus. She was always worth hearing.
Nathaniel Branden at age eighteen, a few months before Rand met him.
Rand and O’Connor, Chatsworth, 1951.
O’Connor, Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, and Rand at the Brandens’ wedding in New York, February 1953.
The Collective at the wedding of Nathaniel Branden’s sister Elayne and Harry Kalberman, April 1955. From left: Joan Mitchell, Alan Greenspan, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Leonard Peikoff, Elayne Kalberman, Harry Kalberman, Rand, O’Connor, and Allan Blumenthal.
Rand and Branden in the mid-1950s, during the early years of their affair.
Barbara Branden, late 1960s.
Publicity photograph for Atlas Shrugged, taken in Bennett Cerf’s Random House office on Madison Avenue, 1957.
Rand greeting admirers at the National Book Awards ceremony, 1958. That year, Atlas Shrugged was nominated for a National Book Award in fiction.
Barbara, Nathaniel, Ayn, and Frank at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, 1963.
Rand, Nathaniel, and Barbara at the 1962 wedding of Larry Scott and Patrecia Gullison. A year or so later, Nathaniel and Patrecia began an