October 10, 1957: Game 7 of the World Series. The Milwaukee Braves beat the New York Yankees, 5-0 at Yankee Stadium, and claim Milwaukee's 1st World Championship in any sport. I have a separate entry for this event.
I don't know if Ayn Rand paid attention to sports. She probably just shrugged at it. She had, she believed, more important things to be concerned with. This was the day her novel Atlas Shrugged was published.
She was born on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, with the name Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum. In 1926, she fled the Soviet Union for America, intending to become a Hollywood screenwriter. She did not achieve that goal -- at least, not at first. I wish she had: Like Adolf Hitler and his desire to get into a prestigious Vienna art school, the world had the chance to give her what she wanted while young, instead of denying her and leading to her turn to a radical right-wing philosophy.
In her case, she named her philosophy "Objectivism," defining it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
The liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." In fact, that search usually ends for conservatives when they discover Ayn (pronounced "EYE-in") Rand.
She married actor Frank O'Connor in 1929, after they both appeared as extras in a Cecil B. DeMille film, anglicized her name to Alice O'Connor, adopted the pen name Ayn Rand, and was naturalized as an American citizen in 1931. She never intended to stay faithful to him, and didn't, often taking much younger lovers. She was an old-school "cougar."
At first, she had some interesting literary ideas. Her 1935 play Night of January 16th features a trial, with members of the audience selected as the jury, to determine whether the victim, a businessman, was killed by the defendant, his secretary and mistress. The ending of the play depends on the audience verdict, so Rand wrote it with 2 endings. It was filmed in 1941, but Rand said only a single line from her original dialog appeared in the movie, which she dismissed as a "cheap, trashy vulgarity."
In 1937, she published Anthem, a vision of a dystopian future, in which totalitarian collectivism, as practiced in the Soviet Union, has triumphed. But with fascism on the march in Germany, Italy and Spain, and taking what it wanted in Europe and Africa, few Americans were interested.
In 1940, she and her husband worked on the campaign of Republican Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie. So did the conservative Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who pleased Rand by calling her "the most courageous man in America." (Writing decades later, liberal economist Paul Krugman said that right-wing economics was Austria's revenge on the West for the breakup of its empire after World War I.)
In 1943, she published The Fountainhead, which sold well. In it, she ripped what she called "second-handers," those who attempt to live through others, placing others above themselves. She never said, "I've got mine, and damned be he who tries to tell me what to do with it, let alone take it from me." But, essentially, that was Objectivism.
Between The Fountainhead's publication and its filming in 1949, she finally got the chance to write movie scripts. In 1947, she appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, supporting their efforts, which she later described as "futile." Tell that to all the people whose lives those efforts ruined, including the innocent.
On October 10, 1957 -- 5 weeks after the publication of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, another novel embraced by a very different set of idealists, and nearly equally misunderstood -- Atlas Shrugged was published. Rand imagined another dystopia, this time in America, where industrialists, scientists and artists respond to a welfare state government by going on strike. Of all the things she wrote, the idea that industrialists and artists would be on the same side, alone, should have placed this novel in the Fantasy section of bookstores.
The leader of the strike is John Galt, a philosopher and inventor, who wants to "stop the motor of the world." The metaphor is the Greek mythological character of Atlas, who bears the world on his shoulders, "shrugging," and thus stopping the world. Essentially, the idea is that selfishness is good, and living to help others is bad.
The novel sold very well, all over the world, despite some atrocious reviews. Rand never wrote again, meaning she went from the ages of 52 to 77 without adding to her body of work. She spent the rest of her life meeting with admirers, giving lectures at universities, and occasionally giving televised interviews.
As it turned out, her views were more mixed than her legend would suggest. True, she called draft dodgers "bums," said European colonists had the right to invade and take the lands inhabited by Native Americans, called Israel's effort against the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 "civilized men fighting savages," and called homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting." And yet, she supported repealing laws against homosexual conduct, supported abortion rights, and opposed the Vietnam War and the military draft.
Her smoking caught up with her, and she developed lung cancer in 1974, dealing with it through surgery. Incurring debt as a result, she enrolled in Social Security and Medicare, those great institutions of liberalism, making her one of America's biggest hypocrites. Her husband died in 1979, and she followed on March 6, 1982.
She had no known living relatives: She had tried to get some of her family, including her parents, out of the Soviet Union, but was unsuccessful; and she and O'Connor never had children. Her true heirs are Republican politicians, like former Speakers of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich of Georgia (1995-98) and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (2015-19), the latter giving every new person who worked in his office a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
Rand was buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, Westchester County, New York -- also the final resting place of, among others, baseball legend Lou Gehrig, former New York Yankees owner and Congressman Jacob Ruppert, Broadway producer and former Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, entertainers Danny Kaye and Soupy Sales, actress Anne Bancroft, fashion designer Henri Bendel, bandleader Tommy Dorsey (but not his brother, fellow bandleader Jimmy), singer Gil Scott-Heron, 1930s New York Governor Herbert Lehman, historian Allan Nevins, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, and NBC founder David Sarnoff.
She probably wouldn't have been happy with any of those, but, given private railroads' place in the text of Atlas Shrugged, she might have appreciated her cemetery also being that of Alfred Holland Smith, once the President of the New York Central Railroad.
In 1999, Helen Mirren starred in The Passion of Ayn Rand, based on the book by Barbara Branden (played by Julie Delpy), wife of Nathaniel Branden (Eric Stoltz), Rand's literary and philosophical promoter and extramarital lover, who left her for Barbara. (Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, was played by Peter Fonda, a stretch for him, since the Fonda family tends to play left-of-center characters.)
A film trilogy based on Atlas Shrugged was released between 2011 and 2014, in the hopes of getting viewers angry at President Barack Obama's "socialist" governance. Between them, the 3 films cost about $35 million to make. Total box office receipts: About $8.8 million. It was one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time. Rotten Tomatoes has given the 3 films ratings of 12, 4 and 0 percent, respectively; Metacritic, 28, 26 and 9 out of 100. The movie about Rand did much better, perhaps because it didn't try to make her look like a hero.
A man named John Rogers once said, "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy, that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Truly, the only heroes on October 10, 1957 were the Milwaukee Braves. "Who is John Galt?" A man vastly inferior to Hank Aaron.
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October 10, 1957 was a Thursday. Game 7 of the World Series was the only baseball game played. Football was in midweek. The NBA season wouldn't start for another 12 days.
There were 2 games played in the NHL. The New York Rangers beat the Detroit Red Wings, 3-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. And the Montreal Canadiens beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-1 at the Montreal Forum. The Toronto Maple Leafs and the Boston Bruins were not scheduled.
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