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A NEW CREDO OF FREEDOM 87
Along with deleting Vesta, Rand worked to purge the manuscript of
her previous fi xation on Nietzsche. In the fi rst version of the manuscript
she prefaced each of the four sections with an aphorism from Beyond
Good and Evil. Now she removed these headings, and also removed
several direct allusions to Nietzsche in the text of the novel. Still, she
could not eliminate from The Fountainhead all of the vengeful scorn
that had powered her earlier work. Particularly in the sections of the
novel that treat Gail Wynand, her old horror at the mob returns. Rand
demonstrated Wynand’s lost possibilities by focusing on the masses
to which he has sold his soul. One desperate night Wynand walks the
streets of New York, his sense of degradation sharp as he smells the subway,
“the residue of many people put together, of human bodies pressed
into a mass,” and passes drunks, tenement housewives, taxi drivers, and
saloons. “I surrendered to the grocery man—to the deck hands on the
ferryboat—to the owner of the poolroom,” he thinks (661, 662). His discovery
of his own value is twinned with disgust for these others, who
“can produce nothing” (663). Pages later Rand tried to counterbalance
these descriptions with her positive rendering of the jury, but her contemptuous
attitudes still color the novel.
When contrasted with other contemporary celebrations of individualism,
however, it becomes clear just how innovative The Fountainhead
was. Elitism and populism were two impulses that had always coexisted
uneasily in the defense of unregulated capitalism. Nock’s Memoirs of a
Superfl uous Man, for example, is a credo shot through with educated
disdain for the common man. At the same time opponents of the New
Deal insisted that men, if left alone, could properly work out their own
destiny. Like Sumner they glorifi ed “the forgotten man,” the ordinary
workers who maintained what Paterson called “the set-up” without
interference from government. 37 Defenders of laissez-faire invoked both
elite privilege and the wonders of the ordinary, self-suffi cient citizen,
often in the same breath.
The Fountainhead fi nessed this contradiction and escaped libertarianism’s
fatal elitism through Rand’s theory of ethics. For all her bluster,
Rand’s ethics were rather anodyne. Roark tells the jury, “Degrees of ability
vary, but the basic principle remains the same; the degree of man’s
independence, initiative, and personal love for his work determine his
talent as a worker and his worth as a man” (681). The book’s hierarchy
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