Tea at Trianon: Ayn Rand's Counter-Revolution

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 5, 2017

Ayn Rand's Counter-Revolution

From The New York Times:

At the novel’s heart was the quiet despair of hopes crushed by new lines of class and caste, as students like Kira, punished for her family’s former prosperity, had their futures stripped away. For Rand, “We the Living” was more than a novel, it was a mission. “No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world,” she told her literary agent. “That was my job.”

Only, in 1930s America, few wanted to hear what she had to say. When the novel was published in 1936, capitalism itself was in crisis. The Great Depression had cast its dark shadow over the American dream. Bread lines snaked through the cities; Midwestern farms blew away in clouds of dust. Desperate men drifted across the country and filled up squatters’ camps of the homeless and workless on the outskirts of small towns, terrifying those who still had something to lose. In this moment, Soviet Russia stood out to the nation’s thinking class as a sign of hope. Communism, it was believed, had helped Russia avoid the worst ravages of the crash. Tides of educated opinion began running strong to the left.

“These were the first quotas of the great drift from Columbia, Harvard and elsewhere,” the American writer — and former Soviet spy — Whittaker Chambers wrote in his 1952 book “Witness.” “A small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with scarcely any effort on its part.” This intellectual army had little interest in a melodramatic novel about the sufferings of the bourgeoisie. Worse, views of the book reflected an ideological divide that Rand had not known existed. Rand had taken for granted there would be “pinks” in America, but she hadn’t known they would matter, certainly not in New York City, one of the literary capitals of the world. But the champions she found were outsiders of that milieu, like the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken. Even reviewers who enjoyed her writing, though, generally assumed Rand’s rendition of Soviet Russia in “We the Living” was exaggerated or no longer true, now that Communism had matured.

Rand had thus stumbled, unwittingly, into a drama that would shape American thought and politics for the rest of the century: a bitter love triangle between Communists, ex-Communists and anti-Communists. First came the Communists, often literary men like Chambers, John Reed (of “Ten Days That Shook the World” fame) or Will Herberg. A handful of the most prominent Bolshevik enthusiasts were women, including the dancer Isadora Duncan and Gerda Lerner, a later pioneer of women’s history. (Read more.)