If you know anything about the modern conservative movement, you must have at least heard of one of its turning points: Whittaker Chambers’ negative review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It would not be inaccurate to say that the conservative/libertarian alliance became little more than fellow travelling at that moment. Or, perhaps, was revealed as such.

This review, thoughtfully posted by the Potowmack Institute, brings forth a time when it was possible for controversy – real controversy – to be generated by something other than decadence. It and the response to it show a time when real excitement could be generated over a controversy involving a real issue. One that’s still echoing today.

Chambers’ strategy is one often used by men of experience whose métiers do not include teaching. The first part of his review is devoted to snubbing Rand; the content of the review as a whole indicated that he seriously believes that Rand is “besotten by pride” in the Roman Catholic sense of the term – the pride that goeth before isolation from everyone on this earth – or, to use a more secular term, that she’s full of hubris. (If you were wondering why the Roman Catholic world enjoins their “elect” to become solitary, even recluses, it’s because of how the development of pride plays out in the RC world. Pride leads to disasters in the friendship world, primarily.)

Once Chambers’ effort at beating that hubris he says is in Atlas Shrugged out of the author in effigy, he then unveils a conclusion which is seemingly alogical but claims authority based upon the logic of events: this is how it’ll play out in the real world, kid. The “dark reader” Chambers points his finger to is, undoubtedly, the man or woman that either dismisses the philosophizing out of hand, perhaps with a comparison of Rand to Tolstoy, or else skips it entirely through the advanced technique of page flipping. This reader, encountering the black-and-white world without reading the proto- Objectivist speeches, or perhaps reading them as if they were a textbook of nineteenth-century thought - (“So this is what the Old Order really believed. Wow!”), will pick up a certain spirit in the book but will add their own “unconscious premises” instead of learning or absorbing Rand’s.

The concept of the dark reader is one that’s hardly touched in literary theory, most probably because the effects of such are too diffuse to track in a substantive way. But his or her presence definitely is there, based upon the fundamental fact that his or her money’s as good as anyone’s, and, once the purchase price is exchanged for the book, the new owner of that copy can do as he or she likes with it: such is the free market. Chambers says that the most likely type of dark reader that Rand would attract is a proto-Kennedymaniac. Just add the typical techno-wonk’s ability to reason critically – staying in their old mindset through dismissing anything new which conflicts with those beliefs – and you can see what Chambers was driving at when he said that Atlas had a dormant totalitarian tumor lying benign in it.

In otherwords, he identified Rand as a troublemaker. The source of this trouble was caused by the intersection of her materialist and atheist fundament with other materialistic and atheistic types. Buckley endorsed this conclusion, without sympathy, in 1964.

The response of the Randians was angry. The economist Murray N. Rothbard wrote a letter of protest, published in January of 1958, whose tone was the same as an earlier riposte, published in 1950 in the American Economic Review, of a 1949 review of Mises’ Human Action which seemed too dismissive of Mises’ basic points. Shortly after this letter was published, Rothbard left National Review, and began to be one of Buckley’s targets in 1969 as a result of them taking opposite sides with respect to the New Left. (Interestingly enough, Rothbard broke with Rand in 1961 or so because of none other than her shrill arrogance. In his eyes.)

Other Randians initially shot back insults, such as “Chambers the Christian communist” (in otherwords, “William Jennings Chambers”), and later rallied behind Rand’s official position: that conservatives are nothing more than concrete- bound mentalities, brains that are too wedded to empiricism, whose group unity is based upon fear of the popular classes. Rand doesn’t quite say it, but “fear of being beaten up” is hinted at in her article “Conservatism: An Obituary.” (Reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

That was how the battle played out. In the NR corner we have: “Rand is a materialist and atheist harridan, similar in character to your overcontrolling elder sister, whose ‘philosophy’ is easily seen through by anyone over twenty years of age. As such, those parts are easy to dismiss out of hand as amateurish. This sophomorism, combined with a certain kind of power as a novelist, will end up fueling a more virulent kind of liberalism which is headed down the road to dictatorship. Her shrillness is the result of her complete ignorance of how people actually tick. So, I have to conclude, the entire work is bad.”

On the other side: “Rand is new, and you haven’t paid attention to her. Rather than lump her into brute categories such as ‘materialist’ and ‘atheist’ – the first includes many diverse philosophies and the second might very well encompass all philosophies – take a look at what she presents herself as, in a manner that is the reverse of obfuscatory, that is in no way ‘complex’. As usual, the Tory mind looks at the new and sees ‘threat’ first.

“Besides – it looks to me like Miss Rand simply argued Chambers out of existence.”

This battle is still with us. Since the issues dealt with were part of the human condition, each side still speak to us: a young man or woman can read the original bullets and instantly decide to rally around a man that’s been dead since 1961 or a woman that died in 1982.

Interesting that a furious war of words over “nothing more” than a proffered philosophy could have led to so much durable excitement, isn’t it?