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By Root 1797 0

is both cheap and beautifully engineered—not because he believes in publicly funded housing, but because Keating has again come to him and begged for help and he is intrigued by the challenge. In exchange for the glory that Keating will receive as the nominal creator of the prize-winning Cortlandt Homes, Roark imposes one condition: His old classmate must swear to protect his blueprints from the slightest design alteration. Weak willed and by now habitually amoral, Keating does not keep his promise. He permits Toohey and a band of out-of-work hangers-on to disfigure and mar every element of Roark’s cluster of six asymmetrical buildings. Roark, acting on the premise that a creative individual has the right to confer or withdraw the products of his own mind as he sees fit, gets some dynamite and blows up the almost-completed project. He is arrested and put on trial. The prosecution argues that he is a monster for placing his ego above the need for shelter by the city’s Depression-battered poor. In his own defense, Roark delivers an eight-page speech, which can be summed up as a passionate plea for egoism “in its real meaning,” as Rand phrased it at the very beginning of her notes. “All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good,” Roark declares in court. “All that which proceeds from man’s dependence on men is evil.” Collectivism and altruism (collectivism’s religious twin) are the second-handers’ best tools for yoking the creator to their own aims, which they need to do because they can’t create anything new or worthwhile themselves. Witness Peter Keating, who testifies for the prosecution against his benefactor Roark; in the last throes of a “selflessness” that has devoured his soul, he leaves the stand and creeps home, permanently ruined and disgraced.

Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Rand is channeling the ideas of Albert Jay Nock, who argued that members of a society can be grouped in one or the other of two opposing camps: either they are “economic man,” those who produce what they need to survive, or “political man,” those who use charm or coercion to live off the productivity of others. Rand’s fascinating contribution to this formulation is her depiction of its psychology: Nock’s political man is her psychological second-hander; his economic man is her individualist hero, reliant on his own ego as the fountainhead of productivity and value. In Roark’s self-defense at trial, he says, “The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” Roark refuses to be conquered. Expecting no help, he asserts his right to deny his help to others. The jurors—and millions of Rand’s readers throughout the years—may find his crime shocking, but they also find his logic eloquent, his pride compelling, and his notion of individualism peculiarly American. They acquit him.

In fact, in his own way, Roark is as American as Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield. Self-determination, originality, defiance of authority, hard work—these are qualities Americans prize in themselves and in the national character. Yet, as a few perceptive readers have pointed out, in certain ways Roark is also an exquisite portrait of a nineteenth-century Eastern European Jew. The rights he claims for himself would, if universally acknowledged, create a perfect barrier against the anti-Semitic violence and thievery Rand knew at first and second hand in Russia; for centuries Jews’ special contributions to banking, manufacturing, trade, and capital formation had been punished by Christians even while they used them for their own ends. When Roark dedicates his destruction of the Cortlandt Homes “to every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, [and] abuse [that every creative individual] was [ever] made to spend,” and “to every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit,” he speaks for Rand’s father and grandfather, not only as Russians but also as Jews.

Russian history and temperament also figure not so subtly in the book. In Roarkland, as in Russia, productivity is prized far more than its Western