“Seven Shows a Day”: Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, Individualism, and the Presidential Election

Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Ayn Rand, a Russian-born American philosopher-novelist, published her first best-seller in 1943. Its hero, an individualist, stated: “The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion.” He observed: “Men have been taught that the highest value is not to achieve but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute.” Howard Roark spoke for Ayn Rand. In the election of 1940, the Democrat advocated “distributing wealth and products more equitably. . . The day of the enlightened administration has come.” The Republican defended “free enterprise” as practical and moral: “we still have by far the highest standard of living; . . . not only better machines, but more freedom.” For an individualist, the choice would have been obvious—as indeed it was for his creator. She interrupted her work on the novel to work on the political campaign of the Republican candidate her protagonist would have supported: Wendell Willkie. During Willkie’s presidential campaign, the actress Gloria Swanson rented an old, boarded-up theater for several weeks. Ayn Rand was one of the speakers, and, according to Swanson, she “held the audience hypnotized.” As Ayn Rand remembered: “I went on for half an hour, and stayed for seven shows a day.” A few years later, she autographed a copy of The Fountainhead as follows: “To Gloria Swanson----from your fellow-fighter of 14th Street--the statement of what we did and will fight for.” Her campaign speeches were part of the world of her fiction—as applied to a particular presidential election. During the election of 1940, culture and politics shared a stage.

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 Presented in Session 74. Women in American Individualist Politics