Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [86]
Finally, capitalism doesn’t serve the strong at the expense of the weak, as liberals claimed, for two reasons. First, the weak would never be able to create an equivalent level of progress or prosperity on their own, and they benefit from its creation by those more competent and motivated than themselves. Second, capitalism is a system of free and voluntary trade. Theoretically, no one is compelled to sell his labor or goods at, say, a fixed state price or to buy another’s goods based on force. The flaws and abuses of capitalism are a result of the introduction of collectivist premises in the form of government regulation and favoritism, such as tax favoritism, as she would argue dramatically and in detail in Atlas Shrugged.
Although she had been intimate with Paterson for only a few months when she wrote the manifesto, the older woman’s influence shows in the milder language and the egalitarianism of the essay. Two months earlier, “To All Innocent Fifth Columnists” had bullied and belittled almost as much as it had argued from principle. The manifesto proceeds in relative sweet reasonableness. She was clearly modifying her early Nietzschean belief in the native superiority and proud birthright of the best relative to ordinary men, which permeates her writing of the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1936 edition of We the Living, for example, the masses are “mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned” for the sake of those who are gifted, according to Kira. In the manifesto, as in the last two-thirds of The Fountainhead and in Atlas Shrugged, heroes—i.e., the creators and producers of useful new goods and ideas—are to be judged by what they make and do, not by their station or native gifts. In late-night chats with Paterson, Rand was refining her understanding of a uniquely American brand of individualism, based on a commitment to the natural and equal rights of men. The heart of Americanism, she wrote, is the principle that “Man, each single, solitary, individual man, has a sacred value which [we] respect.” In America, heroes are made, not born.
While Rand and Pollock were recruiting for their unnamed organization, Ann Watkins was doing her best to find a new publisher for The Fountainhead. She sent the author’s outline and first few chapters to eight publishers, including Simon & Schuster; Harcourt Brace; Dodd, Mead; and Doubleday. This time there were no offers, although, as with We the Living, there were close calls. At Doubleday, after an encouraging luncheon with editors, Rand and Watkins returned to the agent’s office to learn that a Mr. Thompson had vetoed the editors’ consensus to publish the book—a “bad” disappointment for Rand, she said. At Simon & Schuster, an executive tried to prove the firm’s conservative credentials by boasting that it had published the work of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s more “democratic” former sidekick. With his love of democracy thus established, he rejected The Fountainhead. Rand found this episode funny, akin to being spurned by a cartoon character, she said.
But Watkins was losing patience. Like Jean Wick, she began to display some peevishness. The book might sell if only the characters were more human, she complained to Rand. Why couldn’t they do something, instead of talking all the time? And why did Roark have to be so stiff and unsympathetic? Poor, exasperated Watkins, a link in a long chain of doubters past