A mere month ago Open Road offered a promotional rate for the same two ebooks of Taylor Caldwell's novels on consecutive days. As I have previously, I put the promotion site URLs in the middle of this newletter, sandwiched between two discussions that put TC in a context with another very well known (understatement) author.

In the middle '50s and later it was usually Edna Ferber and Pearl Buck as her comparisons. That is unlikely now. Yet, a more today-oriented comparison seems appropriate with Ayn Rand. I'm making the case for what, likely, requires a book.

Still, I make a mini-case using two extracts from other reviews. I conclude with another extract from a piece by Peter Gemma, combining that with information still not available to others.

The Devil's Advocate: A revolution is waged against a totalitarian regime in this
"courageous" novel of a dystopian near-future America by a #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Chicago Tribune).

I paraphrase their review. Philadelphia: Insurgent Andrew Durant has been nursing a festering rage. And he’s not alone. Through underground networks, he’s found himself among a secret thousands, building an army called the Minute Men. They’re readying themselves for war to reclaim what was once America.

How can you not hear the refrains: The Deep State and Make America Great Again?

In the nation now known as The Democracy, independent thought is a thing of the past. The Constitution is waste paper. A conscienceless president has been appointed by the military: for life. The government has co-opted farmland crops. Citizens are divided between two classes: wealthy corporations and the destitute. Areas of the country devastated by war or natural disaster remain unchecked. On behalf of national security, neighbors are instructed to spy on one another.

[For those who don't recognize this, it echoes both Big Brother and the daily broadcasts that bombarded inhabitants of apartment buildings in the Russian curtain countries.] Exposing those who are undemocratic is law. And all dissenters are eliminated.

A stunning dystopian vision in the tradition of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. More than a half-century after its original publication, it is timelier than ever.

Amazon Barnes and Noble Google

The Siren of Selfishness, Cass Sunstein reviews Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed
by Lisa Duggan in the April 9, 2020 New York Review of Books.

My best friend in High School, oft-times our large high school class president and team captain, handed me Atlas Shrugged in the summer of 1959, just before our senior year. That was a production long in the making by Ayn Rand.

I read it. On completion, I suggested to Dale that architecture and engineering don't work like that. We went to the same college together. Chemistry killed Dale's engineering agenda within a quarter. I got my electrical engineering degree in two years.

To whit, it was easy for me to see through Rand to her vehement ideology. Still, Rand seriously believed what she wrote. She worked hard to make it sensible. She sincerely ran her whole life on it.

Sunstein tells us Duggan was interested beyond Rand's extraordinary life into her influence on contemporary politics. Note: Rand also has an easy birth year to remember, 1905, tied neatly to the Russian revolution, explaining in her circumstances why she was an ardant anti-communist.

I have always taken neoliberalism as the philosophy that starts with the premise that there is nothing that you can't value in money. Sunstein suggests that, while Duggan knows to tie Rand to neoliberalism, she wasn't quite sure what it entailed, other than a global anti-left social movement. Also that it had a significant component in resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.

In Duggan's account:
Rand's influence floats [over neoliberalism] as a guiding spirit for the sense of energized aspiration and advocacy of inequality and cruelty.
Neoliberals see the powerless not as a class, but a collection of individual failures. The rich [the very source of wealth and a boon to all society.]
Sunstein reports that after the crash of 2008, for example, Atlas Shrugged sold 500K copies in one year. Inaugurating the Age of Trump. The last paragraph of the quote above could have come straight from Fred Trump. From Duggan:
Trump is in most ways a Rand villain – a businessman who relies on cronyism and manipulation of government, who advocates interference in … "free markets," who bullies big [and little] companies to do his bidding.
She continues: Who doesn't read, is anything but self-made. But, his cabinet and donor lists are full of Rand fans. Further: His policies are Randian: tax cuts, especially for the wealthy; elimination of safeguards for consumers and workers; repeal of valuable government regulations.

TC and Rand had a lot in common, including not being taken seriously by elite circles. TC was vehement about many things. Here is a characteristic extract from a piece by Peter Gemma:
I am the only major best-selling novelist in the United States who is not tainted by 'liberalism' and Communism ... As a result, the press, which is mainly 'liberal,' has been furiously attacking me for years in their alleged 'reviews.'" She peppered the FBI with letters complaining of harassment by communists and persecution by the Internal Revenue Service. ("The primary purpose of the IRS is not to collect taxes but to force federal controls upon the people, to bribe the obedient and destroy the dissidents, [and] to elicit favors and impoverish independence").

In her long FBI file there is this observation from June of 1968: "… previous experience with Miss Caldwell demonstrates she has a penchant for intermingling fact and fiction …"
From Chapter 2 of her daughter's, Peggy's, autobiography: Even at the publication of her first novel, TC, in the early 1940s, was notorious to the IRS. Nothing resembling ideology there.

Finally, COVID-19 can't be far from anyone's mind. In the direction of hope, today some of the expected effect of the sequestering has stabilized the Coronavirus transmission rate in various localities. That doesn't lessen the tragedy, but it means that those who have the wherewithal to pay attention and put 2 + 2 together can help the rest of us out.  


Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell

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