Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [199]
Not to be outdone, later that year The Saturday Evening Post published an unusually lengthy profile of her and her movement called “The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand.” The opening photograph showed the literary lion standing in front of the twin lions at the Forty-second Street entrance to the New York Public Library, her eyes huge, bright, and probing, a cigarette holder in her hand. In a photograph on the next page, an unidentified NBI student stood cradling a massive open copy of Atlas Shrugged as reverently as if it were a hymnal. Like Newsweek, the Post took Rand and her large following with a helping of irony, but without the usual venom. The writer, John Kobler, merely wondered how she had charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as “clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” She was “the free enterprise system’s Joan of Arc, with a Yankee dollar [for] her Cross of Lorraine.” It was a description she might have relished a few years earlier, but by now she made it a point never to read what was written about her in the press.
In Esquire’s review of For the New Intellectual, the wryly subversive Gore Vidal called her philosophy “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But what really galled him was the same issue that had captured the attention of Newsweek and the Post: the size of her audience. “In my campaign for the House [of Representatives in 1960],” he grumbled, “she was the one writer people knew and talked about.” The Wall Street Journal echoed the alarm, warning upper-crust parents and corporate executives that their sons and daughters were sitting around “in booths in college-town snack shops” arguing about her work with the same seriousness that earlier generations had brought to discussions of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx.
Unfortunately, Rand did read Sidney Hook’s review of For the New Intellectual in The New York Times Book Review on April 9, 1961, and for a number of reasons it provoked a weeks-long fit of rage. One was Professor Hook’s allegation that she had misread Aristotle. The distinguished philosopher and historian at NYU was making a point that Isabel Paterson had tried to make years earlier: “A is A” implies nothing, he wrote, other than a logical method to test the consistency of philosophical observations and ideas and cannot be used as the basis for a code of ethics. He disagreed that free minds cannot exist without free markets and surmised that her rhetoric drove her into corners she did not really wish to occupy. For example, if “all the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism” had actually been caused by government interference, as she asserted in the book, then what accounted for the horrors of nineteenth-century child labor, which the government had remedied? (Rand answered that if it weren’t for the jobs that capitalism had created in the first place, the children would have starved to death.) As to her blanket rejection of altruism, he wrote, “I am confident that even at some danger to herself Miss Rand would not rush out of a burning building and leave a helpless child behind. She refuses to call such an action unselfish because she falls back on the truism that every voluntary choice is a choice of the self, which she mistakes as an act for [the] self.” He ended with a gibe: Although a writer need not be a professional philosopher to write an interesting book about philosophy, substituting indignation for analysis was not the way to do it.
Another reason Rand was incensed by this review was that Hook had once been a prot