When I am questioned about myself, I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.”
“To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” 1945
The old-style Soviet train took Anna and Zinovy’s gifted eldest daughter from St. Petersburg to Riga, and a newer, faster train took her from Riga to Berlin. There, on January 30, 1926, she met her cousin Vera Guzarchik, who had also received permission to study abroad and was now a medical student at the Institut Robert Koch in Germany. The two young women were photographed together, looking cold but happy in their flapper hats and secondhand finery, outside Berlin’s grand Old National Gallery. They celebrated the new arrival’s twenty-first birthday by going to the movies; they saw Der Wilderer (The Poacher), a romantic idyll starring Carl de Vogt, a German silent-screen Adonis whom Rand adored. From Berlin, she traveled on to Paris and to the port city of Le Havre, from which, on February 10, she sailed for America aboard the French liner S.S. De Grasse. She had a first-class cabin, but the passage was cheap, because winter weather made the Atlantic crossing slow and rough. The voyage took ten days.
When the ship carrying the five-foot-two, dark-eyed Russian girl lowered its anchor in New York Harbor on the afternoon of February 19, dusk had set in and a light snow had begun to fall. Rand and the other non-Americans on board were held back by U.S. immigration officials, who boarded the ship, examined their visas, and double-checked their travel plans. By the time she reached the open air, the Statue of Liberty was invisible behind her, wrapped in a bank of snow and fog. Looking up, she could see the lower Manhattan skyline, whose stone towers and copper spires pierced the sky in celebration of the American era’s busy faith in commerce. This was the dollar decade, when Americans believed that a talent for achievement and acquisition could and would create a second Garden of Eden on earth, and skyscrapers were the proof and symbol of that faith. For Rand, the brilliantly lighted windows of J. D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Building, the Singer Tower, and the ornately Gothic Woolworth Building, then the tallest and, Rand thought, the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, represented an astonishing display of American inventiveness, energy, economic aspiration, and engineering talent. They were “the will of man made visible” and “the finger of God,” she thought. In a rare display of emotion, she began to cry at the sight of them. Her tears were “tears of splendor,” she recalled in middle age.
The documents she carried conveyed the important facts about her at the time: she was Alice, a.k.a. Alissa, Rosenbaum, a twenty-one-year-old unmarried Russian female of the Hebrew race. Her immediate destination was Chicago. The ship’s manifest noted that she had promised to return to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, when her temporary American visa expired. But she had no intention of returning. In order to qualify for the visa in Riga, she had told a U.S. consular official that she was engaged to marry a Russian man with whom she was in love and to whom she would unfailingly return. The truth was that from the moment her mother’s cousins agreed to sponsor her, she had decided to resettle in the United States. She was conscious of the new, draconian U.S immigration quotas enacted in 1924, largely to impede the wave of Eastern European Jews trying to enter; if she couldn’t get visa extensions, she had decided to cross the border to Canada or Mexico and wait to re-enter the United States under the Russian permanent-resident quota, which could take many years.
It’s worth noting that in the 1960s she would become famous for celebrating honesty and integrity as indispensable virtues of her capitalist heroes. “One must never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” she would write in her famous description of the ethical man. That she could sometimes invent, exaggerate, or hide events in her own life in order to advance her hopes or bolster her public image may be partly due to her experience in Russia, especially as a Jew; for generations, small deceptions were a matter of safety or survival for Russian Jews. She made this point explicit when, in middle age, she told friends that an obligation to be truthful ends where the immoral behavior of others makes truth telling damaging to one’s own interests. Surely, she viewed Russia’s closed borders as unjust and immoral, but in later life she would give herself other reasons for moral leniency as well.
She stayed in New York for four days, the guest of relatives of Mandel Stone, who was the husband of Anna Stone, one of Aunt Eva and Harry Portnoy’s five daughters. These relatives, the Rosens, lived in a new, stately enclave on Sutton Place, near the East River, and so Rand began her American sojourn in style. She later told friends that by then she had only fifty dollars of her travel money left. She must have roamed the bustling city by streetcar and on foot. She would not have easily been able to ask directions, for her spoken English consisted of about a dozen words, “all mispronounced,” she said.
In 1926, New York, like much of the nation, was reveling in unparalleled prosperity. The miracles of capitalism were visible everywhere: in the Model T cars on the street, the streamlined diesel-electric locomotives roaring into and out of Grand Central Terminal, the automatic traffic lights, animated neon signs, radios, telephones, loudspeakers, electric refrigerators, tickertapes, and pop-up toasters. By day, airplanes buzzed overhead. By night, men and women in formal clothes walked arm in arm to restaurants, Prohibition-era speakeasies, arcades, and Broadway theaters. “I’ll never forget it,” Rand said of her first experience of New York. “It seemed so incredibly cheerful and frivolous, so non-Soviet!” Photographs from this period show her in a 1920s Louise Brooks haircut, a style she would keep until she died. Similarly, her enthusiasm for this free-wheeling, wildly optimistic, largely unregulated pro-capitalist time and place remained a lifelong touchstone of her expectations and her art.
As in Riga and Berlin, she went to the movies, which then cost thirty-five or fifty cents. In four days in New York, she saw four silent films, including The Girl Who Wouldn’t Work, a courtroom melodrama of the same general type that would bring her early fame as a playwright in 1934. She kept a journal, ranking each movie from zero to five, according to her assessment of its plot, theme, actors, and level of romantic action. Even here, she remained intensely focused on pursuing her long-term professional goals.
By the time she boarded a New York Central train to Chicago, Alice Rosenbaum had chosen a new name: Ayn (pronounced “ein” or “eye-in”) Rand. Because she was determined to move on to Hollywood as soon as she could improve her English, she knew she would need a professional name. A pseudonym would also provide camouflage, if needed, against American immigration officials who, should her visa expire, might try to track her down.
The name she picked has stirred the curiosity of readers and fueled speculation among fans for half a century. Not particularly American, or Russian, or Jewish, its clipped, mannish syllables are ethnically hard to place and gender neutral; many of her more casual readers have assumed that she was male. When asked in the 1930s and 1940s about her pseudonym, she offered different explanations, sometimes saying that “Ayn” was a Finnish female name or that she borrowed it from a Finnish writer, and at least once claiming that she made it up herself. As to “Rand,” her second cousin Fern Brown, who was eight years old when the older girl came to live with her family in Chicago, remembered Rand’s lighting on it one afternoon while the two of them sat at the family dining table, gazing at the Remington Rand typewriter Rand had brought with her from St. Petersburg. Rand repeated this story, but it can’t be true; for one thing, the Remington Rand was not yet on the market in 1926. For another, her family seems to have been aware of her new surname before she wrote to them from America. Ten years later, in 1936, she told the New York Evening Post that “Rand” was an abbreviation of her Russian surname, and in 1961 said something similar to The Saturday Evening Post. By the late 1990s, a number of followers believed that they had spotted the word “Rand” in a slightly altered version of the first six letters of the Cyrillic spelling of “Rosenbaum”