Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [52]
This was Rand’s second explicit warning that the Depression was beginning to produce political monsters of a kind she thought she had left behind in Russia. The first warning had come in the form of a casual remark by a White Russian acquaintance in Hollywood, who offhandedly suggested that certain film-industry Communists might try to prevent the studios from buying Red Pawn. Rand’s response was disbelief and indignation. There couldn’t be more than a handful of Communists in the United States, she averred. This was the home of capitalism, where competence, not rhetoric, earned rewards. And didn’t the Declaration of Independence proclaim the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the very foundation of individualism? She took Mencken’s letter more seriously but remained convinced that the American public had no real understanding of Communism and that even liberal Americans would “scream with horror” if they knew what was happening across the Bering Strait. “No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world,” she declared in a letter to Jean Wick. “This [is] my job.”
She had not yet begun to follow American party politics, apart from somewhat naively casting her first vote as a U.S. citizen for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1932. Roosevelt had campaigned against Prohibition, which she opposed as an abridgment of individual rights, and had promised to balance the federal budget and support a business revival. (He later changed his approach to almost everything but Prohibition.) In Hollywood, she had been intimate with relatively few people and was largely unaware, she later said, of the degree of “pink” penetration in America or of the growing appeal of Communist battle cries to screenwriters and directors and to some of the nation’s bankrupt farmers, miners, and unemployed industrial workers. In New York, the leftward trend was more evident, especially among the cultural elite; she gradually became aware that many literary celebrities, such as Mencken’s old friend Theodore Dreiser, Heywood Broun, Edmund Wilson, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, and critics Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson, and Granville Hicks, were members of or sympathizers with the Communist Party of the United States. At the literary cocktail parties and events that were covered in the gossip columns, they endorsed Stalinism as a noble experiment and drank toasts to the coming of America’s “Red Dawn.” Their message was that capitalism had been tested and had failed; the time had come to try Marxism on the Soviet model. It was only after living in New York for a year or two that Rand began to see the extent of the pro-Communist bias on the American intellectual left. A nineteenth-century Russian at heart, she believed that ideas have the power to change history and that intellectual leaders are the engines and agents of change. It was American intellectuals whom she eventually decided she would have to target and fight.
Now, however, she was exhilarated by Mencken’s praise of her work. Answering his letter to Gouverneur Morris directly, she hailed him as the world’s greatest exponent of the philosophy of individualism, to which she planned to dedicate her life. She vowed to confront the messengers of collectivism wherever she found them. She began a program of extensive reading to educate herself in American history and politics. To some extent, then, she was prepared to meet resistance to the plot and message of her first and most autobiographical novel.
We the Living is the least popular of Rand’s four novels—regrettably so, since it is the most lyrical, the most straightforward, and, in some respects, the most persuasive. Legend has it that writing the novel was the fulfillment of a promise she made just before leaving St. Petersburg. At a farewell party given by her parents in late 1925, the story goes, a man she barely knew pleaded with her, if she ever got