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knew, the next target was England, which was already being bombed by the Luftwaffe; Londoners were donning gas masks “against the worst madman the world has known,” Lady Boileau wrote to her. Rand’s childhood heroine, the little English girl who gunned down the German navy, was needed once again; although, since much of Europe had by now embraced a diluted form of socialism and because war always enhances governmental powers, Rand and other right-wingers also opposed the entry of the United States into the European conflict. They preferred to let Hitler march unimpeded into Russia and then enter the war against whichever dictator was left standing.

Wendell Willkie was not against American participation in the war, but he was an outspoken, clean-cut, and popular defender of business interests against the New Deal. An electric-utility holding-company president raised in Elwood, Indiana, he was a self-made businessman who inspired hope in the anti-Roosevelt forces. They especially admired his stirring speeches on the rights of property owners and the importance of industrial freedom to the continued prosperity of the country. Against Roosevelt’s chilling declaration that “the old reliance on the free action of individual wills” was a relic of the past, he insisted that “only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.” Rand couldn’t have agreed more. She seems not to have taken in his oft-repeated calls “to strike a balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of society.”

While Ann Watkins and Blanche Knopf were working out an agreement to nullify her book contract, Rand and O’Connor reported each day to the National Willkie Clubs headquarters on West Fortieth Street, overlooking Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. She told a friend that working as a volunteer there wasn’t a sacrifice but was an act of “pure selfishness,” because she was fighting for her own ideas and the right to express them. At first, she typed while the dutiful O’Connor rang doorbells, but soon she was leading a political-research action team and making speeches. During much of the month of October she campaigned on street corners and in coffee shops; often, she manned the stage of an old, boarded-up East Fourteenth Street movie theater that Gloria Swanson, a fellow conservative, had rented to run Willkie campaign films. Following each of seven shows a day, she and sometimes Swanson spoke out against the New Deal and answered the audience’s questions. “I was a marvelous propagandist,” she later said. By all accounts, she mesmerized her audiences. She was especially good when challenged by hecklers. Once an onlooker shouted, “Who are you to talk about America? You’re a foreigner!” to which she replied, in her raspy Russian accent, “I chose to be an American. What did you do, besides having been born?” She loved the give-and-take, and, as always, excelled at making abstractions understandable and complicated notions simple.

She met a larger number of interesting men and women during the campaign than she had ever met before, she told a friend, among them important members of the Old Right establishment. Gloria Swanson became a friend and political ally. Through Channing Pollock, an anti-Communist playwright and theater critic whom she met and liked, she got to know Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken’s eccentric friend, whose highly cultivated and unapologetically elitist books and essays had already given her several of the key ideas she was incorporating into The Fountainhead; Frank Chodorov, a staunch proto-libertarian magazine editor; George Sokolsky, a well-known conservative opinion maker and the son of Russian immigrants; John C. Gall, the chief attorney for the National Association of Manufacturers and, later, Big Steel; and the distinguished economist and public lecturer Ruth Alexander, who became Rand’s lifelong friend and once called her (undoubtedly to her delight) “America’s Joan of Arc.” Through their influence, she read Carl Snyder’s Capitalism the Creator: The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial