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By Root 1803 0

written a letter, in Russian, to the short-tenured former prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky, who was living in exile in Paris and New York. Russia’s last republican had not yet earned her enduring enmity by publicly supporting Stalin during the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. She sent him a copy of We the Living, expressing the hope that he would find in it a worthy portrait of his homeland at its turning point. (Whether he responded is not known.) Now, in mid-1940, she decided that she must take direct political action to prevent a similar calamity at a crucial moment in the history of her adopted homeland. In July, FDR won the Democratic Party’s nomination for an unprecedented third term in office, breaking an uninterrupted tradition of American presidents serving for no more than two terms. A few weeks later, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie to oppose him, and she signed on to be a foot soldier in the Republican presidential campaign. That fall, she took to the hustings for Willkie. It was the beginning and end of her active political career.

Among conservatives in the late 1930s, FDR was viewed as a madman, a traitor to his class, a warmonger maneuvering America into World War II, and worse. It would be impossible to exaggerate how bitterly he was hated. Many on the Right had voted for him in 1932, when he appeared to be fiscally conservative and friendly to business. Once in office, he declared a need for extreme measures to lift the nation out of the Depression. He assumed large new presidential powers, transforming the economy from a minimally regulated free-for-all into a federally regulated system that his adversaries regarded as European-style socialism. He kept his promise to repeal Prohibition, but to the fury of some business interests and the political right, and the relief of many unemployed and working people, he also established the first minimum hourly wage, guaranteed unions the right to bargain collectively, created Social Security and unemployment insurance, and enacted 550 separate regulatory codes that capped industrial production, set wages and prices, limited competition, and gave rise to government-backed manufacturing cartels, all of which Rand would parody to the verge of surrealism in Atlas Shrugged. Most threatening of all, perhaps, to her, he prohibited the private ownership of gold, which made it possible for the U.S. government, like the Bolshevik government of her teens and the Nazi regime then ruling Germany, to inflate the currency and, she thought, arbitrarily redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. For her, the rise of the welfare state and a managed economy smacked of Fascism. It looked very much like a covert transfer of power from the old free capitalist class to a new all-powerful government elite.

It is debatable what influence the New Deal’s economic policies had on any trend toward socialism in America; they may have helped to save capitalism from its hungry dependents, its doubters, and its organized adversaries by compromising with a mild form of collectivism. (Rand apparently never considered that one of Roosevelt’s accomplishments may have been to stave off a Russian-style insurrection.) Still, the intrepid president was so deeply, if narrowly, hated that country-club Republicans swore he possessed every vice from Stalinism to syphilis (rumored to have been transmitted to him by the first lady, who got it “from a Negro”).

When he ran for a third term, those who believed in minimal government and laissez-faire capitalism saw totalitarianism in the making. If he were to win, Rand and others believed, there might never be another federal election. America might turn to dictatorship, a notion that was not as fanciful then as it seems now, given that Hitler and Mussolini had risen to power through popular movements and were overrunning the free nations of Europe. By the summer of 1940, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, allies for the moment, had already invaded France, Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. As Rand