Ayn Rand – Anthony G. Flood

Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases

“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012[1]

I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.

Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you. Continue reading “Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases”

When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony

Sometimes a fact can be so plain that it’s overlooked, so obvious as to be devious. Herbert Aptheker’s conspicuous silence about C. L. R. James, for example, took me 40 years to notice. (To my knowledge, no one else had noticed it before or since). The absence of any mention by the passionately anti-communist Ayn Rand about the cerebral Communist “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer is a silence that neither she nor any Objectivist writer felt comfortable addressing afterward.

From reading Jennifer Burns’s 2009 The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, I’ve learned that in 1946, basking in the success of her novel The Fountainhead, Oscar-winning film producer Hal Wallis (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon) tasked her to write screenplays, one of them titled Top Secret:

Rand began a careful investigation of the Los Alamos [New Mexico atomic bomb] project, even securing an extensive audience with the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project. The film was never produced, but Rand’s encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.[1]

Burns didn’t source this assertion. (I wish I had picked up Burns’s book when it came out.) I was therefore pleased to find a 2023 essay by Ayn Rand Institute archivist, Brandon Lisi: Continue reading “When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony”

On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen

In “Alain on Monasticism,” a stimulating Substack offering, my friend and philosopher extraordinaire Bill Vallicella (“Maverick Philosopher”) asked about the fruitfulness of arguing for or against a sense of life. The occasion was his recent re-reading of On Happiness by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), whose nom de plume was Alain. My interest is not in Alain’s antipathy toward monkish existence but rather in Bill’s (apparent) ambivalence toward mere attitudes that imply (or entail) philosophical claims. Since I’ve probably misunderstood the problem Bill was cornering, I’m hoping that what I’ve written below will move him to set me straight. He writes:

Alain . . . frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don’t share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this, argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his “whole being” that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.

For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.

In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:

. . . in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

He continues:

The worldling’s attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone’s sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills. Continue reading “On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen”

When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism

I recently acquired the new edition of Otis Q. Sellers’s 1961 booklet Christian Individualism: A Way of Life for the Active Believer in Jesus Christ (CI) which, to my surprise, I did not already own. [Learning of this gap in my collection, Sam Marrone, my friend and brother in Christ, graciously sent me a copy of the 3.5″ x 5.5″ original, which arrived April 10th. Thanks, Sam!—A.G.F.] The text was reset by the folks at The Word of Truth Ministry, which makes nearly all of Sellers’s writings and recorded messages available, mostly free of charge. The publication is available for sale on Amazon.

What caught my eye was his quotation of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), playwright, novelist, and philosopher of individualism. I doubt he would have cited her on individualism (or anything else) had he known she was an enemy of Christianity.

In 1957 Rand had published Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, but even in 1961 she was probably best known for The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel that was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper six years later. In the year that novel came out, Rand began working on “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” A “condensed” portion (which you can read here) appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest.[1] When he cited it, it was already 17 years old and something that would have been collected in the war-related scrap drives. I’m inclined to think he had bought it when it came out and kept it from the paper salvagers.

Continue reading “When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism”

Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography

I may be fairly described as (among other things) road-kill along the way to the definitive biography of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). In 1997 I sought and gained the cooperation of his widow, Joann, and Lew Rockwell, then president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to begin that project.

All I managed to do, however, was fulfill the prediction that this effort would overwhelm me. My enthusiasm for the idea of telling Murray’s story and expounding his ideas blinded me to the fact, obvious to everyone but me (and perhaps my mother), that I was not up to the task. The life of Rothbard, an intellectual giant, awaits its Hülsmann. And if the interval between the death of Ludwig von Mises and the production of Guido Hülsmann’s Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism is any guide, the wait is far from over.

On display below is barely refined ore mined from not only from secondary sources but, more importantly, from interviews conducted with people who knew Murray: in the first place JoAnn Rothbard, but also Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, George Resch, John McCarthy, and James Sadowsky. Readers who have profited from Justin Raimondo’s An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement as well as Murray’s own monograph, The Betrayal of the American Right will discover a fact or two not related in those works, which I highly recommend.

I was pleasantly surprised when, in 2010, Gerard N. Casey, Professor (Emeritus), School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin, and Associate Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute cited my unfinished essay (first published on my old site in 2008) in his fine monograph Murray Rothbard, a sure milestone on the road to the “definitive biography” project.¹

Murray Newton Rothbard was born in the Bronx on March 2, 1926. His father, David Rothbard, a shoemaker’s son, was raised in Vishigorod, Ukraine, 40 miles north of Warsaw on the Vistula. David, who had attended Hebrew school as a child, abandoned Judaism because its scriptures told of a God who had instigated the violent behavior of the Israelites, and that horrified him. Continue reading “Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography”