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No evidence of any kind is mentioned, of course. Who needs facts when rumor is so good for destroying people who rationally disagree with your unsupportable notions.
(The author's notions, not the poster's notions ;^)
Don't you just love authors who are biased, lying, irrational, ignorant savages?
Read the biographies and take them in context. First of all, Barbara Branden lived through the experience first hand. But, as I recall, even the biography by Anne Heller drew on archives at the ARI that were not previously available to other researchers, such as Rand's diaries.
On a fine point, while the article was not written by an admirer, the reference to Adolph Hitler was in a context, again, of the 1940s. I agree that with perhaps millions of users, that one reference was not accidental, but intended to link the two names. Still, the facts remain.
What I found most interesting is that Ayn Rand is still discussed among those who consider literary salons to be salient to the making of a cutlure.
That aside, the article buries the key fact that questions its thesis: Atlas Shrugged and her other works swept the college and high school campuses of the 1960s. That continues today. The Ayn Rand Institute sponsors literary essay contests for grades 9-12 and college. They have no lack of applicants; and they demonstrate clear insight and understanding.
From the Smithsonian Magazine article:
“Rand became a genuine public phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, where in the 1960s she was as much a part of the cultural landscape as Tolkien, Salinger, or Vonnegut,” writes Brian Doherty in Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. “NBI’s lectures and advice on all aspects of life, as befits the totalistic nature of Objectivism, added to the cult-like atmosphere.”
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
The lectures alone would not have sold themselves. For advocates of capitalism, the NBI was not an engine of creative advertising. The lectures sold readily to eager audiences who had found the works themselves. When the NBI began publishing The Objectivist Newsletter reader response cards were bound into paperback printings of Atlas and her other books. Sales of the books based on those essays - The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal in particular - far outpaced subscriptions to the newsletter (and magazine) or to the lectures. That would be expected in a market that appealed to self-defined individualists.
I have not read Doherty's book (2007), but I did read It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand by Jerome Tucille (1971) when it came out. The most cultish characters were certainly easy to write about, such as the guy in black leotard with a gold dollar sign. However, among the millions were millions who were normal, perhaps exceedingly so.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
what she said. Of course, she did not want to be misrepresentated; I think I read in an issue of The Objectivist (a magazine that evolved from The Objectivist Newsletter), that one was to make clear that he was expressing Objecitivsm
as he understood it; and not to say that that was exactly what she had said--and when was was claiming to present her view as something certainly hers, to quote a direct quote then. But this was to avoid misrepresentation.
You are correct that Ayn Rand was concerned and reasonably so, that with the burst in popularity, again broadly on college campuses, that her ideas would be wrongly re-transmitted by others who lacked complete understanding. Before I discovered Ayn Rand, I read the same sentiment in Sartre. The label "existentialist" was even used by a gossip columnist (in France) just to mean something shocking. Rand had to deal with a "Fountainhead" line of window drapes.
And this has to be in context. Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957. Those very first "Ayn Rand Clubs" on college campuses date to about 1961. That's four years.... about 1500 days of nothing in particular... It was hard to live through, as you can imagine.
Nah! That would be rejected in a heartbeat.
As I said at first, the foibles of Heisenberg and Rorty seem less interesting. The fact is that less is to be gained or avoided by diminishing the status of their ideas. Rand continues to be a target for a reason. But you cannot ignore the facts of her life, either. They just have little to do with the content of Objectivism.
She advocated for an integration of philosophy within your personal life specifically because it is true by observation that brilliant and accomplished people have wrongful ideas about much that is fundamental.
I suggest that Christopher Hitchens was a good example of that. He was brilliant. He abandoned Marxism. He said that The Virtue of Selfishness was Ayn Rand's best work, and he agreed with none of it. I think that Richard Feynman would be another like that. His commencement speech on "Cargo Cult Science" is a gold standard for intellectual honesty, but his epistemology was flawed. And his personal life was a mess, which speaks to the main thrust of our discussion here. No one wants to attack Feynman's physics on the basis of his failed relationships with women after the death of his first wife. And that is appropriate. With Ayn Rand, a different standard is in place.