Ayn Rand’s Dramatization of the Migrant’s Journey to Freedom
Ayn Rand’s fiction repeatedly portrays the story of individuals who leave their homeland seeking refuge from their oppressors
In a Q&A session in 1973, when asked whether immigration should be restricted because of alleged effects on America’s standard of living, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand indignantly finished her answer by asking: “How could I ever advocate that immigration should be restricted, when I wouldn’t be alive today if it were?”1
Rand came to America 100 years ago this February as an expatriate from Soviet Russia. She was indignant at the question in 1973, no doubt, because she saw clearly the fate that awaited her had she not escaped. She knew that, as an outspoken anti-communist, individualist writer, she would not have survived Soviet persecution. So, in 1926, she applied for a visa to travel to the U.S. to study the film industry. While she had assured both Soviet and American immigration officials that she planned to return to the USSR to share what she had learned, this was never her intention.
Immigration was not a subject of cultural controversy in the heyday of Rand’s career as a political commentator, as it is in ours. So, she never explicitly wrote about such a controversy in her nonfiction essays. She does, of course, endorse free trade as “the essence of capitalism’s foreign policy.” She also endorsed Isabel Paterson’s characterization of free trade, in which “any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.”2 Free trade obviously includes the freedom of movement.
Still, opponents of freedom of immigration are incredulous that it is implied by the principles of capitalism. The questioner in 1973 thinks it would be against the self-interest of a nation’s citizens to allow freedom of immigration that lowers a country’s standard of living. Rand replies forcefully that the questioner has no understanding of her conception of individualist self-interest: freedom of immigration does not have this effect and, even assuming it did, rational self-interest could never include the right to forcibly bar others’ freedom to trade, move and compete, violating their right to pursue their own self-interest.
In any case, no one who is familiar with Rand’s most famous works should be surprised for a moment by her position on immigration. Her most famous works are also the works that bear the mark of her own experience as an immigrant and of her empathy for other individuals fighting the same battle. I’m speaking, of course, of her fiction.
Rand’s fiction does not focus on the immigration of non-Americans into America. It does, however, portray the plight of the migrant, more abstractly considered. Three out of four of her major works of fiction portray heroes and heroines who must seek refuge somewhere far away from home to live in freedom — whether or not in another national jurisdiction.
Like all of Rand’s fictional heroes and like Rand herself, Rand’s heroes are unwilling to settle for a life of stagnation or oppression. They risk everything to find a better life somewhere else, even when it means picking up stakes and (often) breaking ties with everyone they know.
Anyone who appreciates Rand’s heroes would do well to ponder how their stories relate to the current immigration debate. To assist them, I will highlight the relevant aspects of these stories.
(Note: this essay contains plot spoilers.)
We the Living
We the Living, Rand’s semi-autobiographical account of life under communism in Soviet Russia, was her first novel, and the one that most obviously tells the story of the spirit of one exceptionally brave and fiercely independent would-be migrant to the West, Kira Argounova.
Like Rand herself, Kira and her family are uprooted from their native St. Petersburg by the Russian Civil War. Kira flees home with her family to the distant Crimea (in present-day Ukraine) to take refuge from the Reds behind White Russian lines. When the Reds are victorious, they return to a renamed Petrograd where they have lost everything: her father’s business, their home, most material comforts, and their freedom (they are regularly conscripted into street labor and forbidden from most other jobs).
Throughout the story, for Kira and her family the “magic words” that give them distant hope are “from abroad”: news of possible action against the Soviets, rare, smuggled cosmetics, the latest operettas, news of unheard-of comforts and freedoms — and hope of refuge abroad.3
Kira then tries to flee Russia when her lover Leo pays black market figures who “smuggle human flesh” to take them to Germany.4 “Beyond the snow was the world; beyond the snow was that consummate entity to which the country behind them bowed reverently, wistfully, tragically: Abroad. Life began beyond the snow.”5 But they are intercepted by the Red Baltic Fleet, and Leo is imprisoned. Only chance decency from the powerful gets him out.
For a while Kira dreams of becoming an engineer in Russia, but her hopes are dashed when she is expelled from the university for her bourgeois origins. She watches workers at a building site, imagining herself as an engineer, but realizing it will never happen in Russia. She still has hope: “And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: ‘Perhaps . . . Some day . . . Abroad . . .’”6
Leo nearly dies from tuberculosis and then is psychologically destroyed as he is cut off from all avenues of meaningful work. Kira sees him falling apart but saves money from his work in the black market: “For the escape. For Europe. . . . We’ll do it . . . some day.”7 But when Leo is arrested for his black marketeering, he breaks. She now has nothing left in Russia. She proclaims this to a member of the secret police:
Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself? And who — in this damned universe — who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left — look! . . . . Well, here I am! Here’s what’s left after you took him, after you reached for the heart of my life.8
With Leo gone, Kira makes a last, desperate attempt to get out of this airtight cellar — on her own. She applies for a foreign passport but is told it would be pointless because “No foreign country will admit a Russian.”9 She’s told that if she tries to escape, she’ll have no money, no profession, no friends. She does not care. “I want to get out.”10 She knows that human life is more than eating and digesting food.
Her foreign passport is denied. She is indifferent: she knows no one has the right to forbid life to the living and dares to flee the country illegally. She sells everything she can to buy information about a way across the border with Latvia, and a white coat to serve as camouflage as she walks across the border in the snow. Her relatives try one last time to give her hope that things will change for the better. But she bids them farewell.
The ending of We the Living is unforgettable. But as it approaches, we see an expression of the conviction that propels Kira forward to a better life, the view that the misery and evil around her are an aberration and that things must be better, abroad:
She had to walk. There, in that world, across the border, a life was awaiting her to which she had been faithful her every living hour, her only banner that had never been lowered, that she had held high and straight, a life she could not betray, she would not betray now by stopping while she was still living, a life she could still serve, by walking, by walking forward a little longer, just a little longer.11
Anthem
None of Ayn Rand’s other novels bear the mark of the migrant experience as explicitly as We the Living. But Anthem and Atlas Shrugged feature analogous plot elements, in which heroes, beset by restrictions and oppression in their native land and wanting a better life seek to escape. Even more important, like all of Ayn Rand’s fiction, they portray heroes willing to stake everything for the sake of their happiness.
Anthem is set in a dystopian future society that has regressed to a medieval standard of living because of a global collectivist dictatorship. The word “I” has been replaced by “we.” Equality 7-2521, obviously more intelligent and curious than his peers, longs to be a scientific scholar. But he is assigned a “life Mandate” as a street sweeper. Though torn by guilt for his “sin of preference,” he refuses to accept his lot: he steals away in the night to an abandoned tunnel where he discovers remnants of ancient technology and re-invents the light bulb. Holding out hope that he will be able to become a scholar, he shares his invention with the authorities. But the Council of Scholars condemns him for the crime of thinking for himself and challenging the established “knowledge.”
So, Equality flees from his society, alone into an uninhabited, ungoverned “Uncharted Forest.” In this new freedom, he discovers further remnants of the long-lost civilization, re-discovers the word “I” and abandons the morality that had paralyzed him with guilt. He realizes that the morality that each must serve as a means to others had brought his society to its primitive state.
In rejecting the morality that bound him in service, he realizes he is not tied down to his brothers or his place of birth: “Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the lodestone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.”12 He realizes his happiness is not the means to any other end, but “its own goal.”13 With his new knowledge and conviction, he begins a plan to help his friends escape from the collectivist society and build a new and powerful free society in the Uncharted Forest.
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged repeats the pattern of Anthem’s allegory, but tells the story in a more recognizable, contemporary American setting. In this setting, all the nations of the world except America have collapsed into collectivist “People’s States.” Many of those left with ambition and hope for the future, like Argentinean Francisco d’Anconia and Norwegian Ragnar Danneskjöld, have come to America. But America is rapidly turning into a People’s State itself. The world of Atlas Shrugged represents the horror of a world where there is no longer any “abroad” left to which anyone can flee.
Like Equality, John Galt in Atlas is also an innovative genius who has invented an electrical wonder (a new source of power). But he is never tempted to share his invention with his society once he realizes the depth of its demand for his sacrifice. So, he destroys all remnants of his invention and quits his job as a researcher.
Rather than escaping to an uncharted wilderness as Equality does, Galt convinces his friends Francisco and Ragnar to go on strike with him, withdrawing the intellectual value they add to the world. Eventually they take refuge with other strikers in the American wilderness, in a valley in the Colorado mountains. Each of them is an ambitious individual who is unwilling to settle for the role of well-fed slave in the collapsing world.
Like Equality, Galt wants to rescue his friends and comrades in spirit from the collapsing world. But he struggles to convince them to join. To achieve this goal, he formulates a new moral philosophy, giving full and conscious voice to the values of ambitious people pursuing their own happiness through creative production. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden eventually join, but not without first having to break free from one form or another of the same errors that tied Equality to his society. But like Equality, Galt and the other strikers hope eventually to rebuild society when the country collapses and the road is clear. And this is the society Galt envisions:
Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.14
Here it is hard not to see that Galt wants to make America a refuge for those who would escape the rest of the world’s People’s States. He does not imagine that all who come will be paragons of virtue. Some will be irresponsible, but in the society he creates, none of these will have the power to drag others down with them.
A sanctuary for free minds
In 1946, just after she had begun work on Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was also at work on a screenplay dramatizing the history of the development of the American atomic bomb. Though the screenplay for “Top Secret”would never be completed, nor the movie ever made, her research notes draw connections between many of the themes we’ve already explored. The atomic bomb was a quintessential American innovation made possible by the relative freedom in America vs. in the Axis nations — and by the minds of the immigrants fleeing those nations:
The fact is that Germany did not, could not and never would have created the atomic bomb; nor Italy; nor Russia. . . .
Is it an accident that since the beginning of the machine age, all the great, basic, epoch-making inventions and discoveries [“the steam engine, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph, the motion picture, the radio”] have come from America and England? Mostly from America, secondly from England — and with very few contributions from all the other countries. Why? Anglo-Saxon superiority? No. The inventors were of all races and nationalities. But they all had to work either in America or in England. . . . If we take the greatest invention of man and do not draw from it the lesson it contains — that only free men could have achieved it — we really deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on our particular heads.15
Rand goes on to speak of how Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner all had to flee various statist dictatorships to continue their work. “They could not continue to work there. They had to escape to a free country.”16 Rand’s notes for Lise Meitner’s story are particularly evocative, as it must have reminded her of her own story escaping Soviet Russia:
Lise Meitner is forced to leave Germany. On the train going to the frontier, she is snubbed and pushed around by arrogant Nazi brown-shirts; the Nazi State has damned her on three counts: the old are useless, women are useless, Jews are useless. She sits alone in a corner of the train, her mind intent on the inexplicable experiment; she makes calculations on a piece of paper. A solution occurs to her suddenly; it is a stunning solution — but she must keep quiet about it. At the frontier, Nazis search her luggage: they take from her an old camera, a typewriter, and other physical objects of such nature; nothing of value to the State, they declare, can be taken out of Germany. We see a close-up of Lise Meitner — the broad forehead, the intelligent eyes. What she is taking out is in her mind.17
Ayn Rand saw America as an important sanctuary for free minds who rebel against oppressive regimes. She held that even when they sought refuge from an enemy nation during the deadliest war in human history.
Ayn Rand’s fiction is well known for celebrating heroic individuals who create value in the pursuit of their happiness and so defy tyrannical governments who would suppress them. And for Rand the quest for happiness is morally sacred: each of us has the right to pursue our happiness to the ends of the earth.
It’s no wonder then that some of Rand’s heroes and heroines literally go to the ends of the earth — as she did herself when she immigrated to America. So there should be no confusion why she would later say she could never advocate the restriction of immigration. Anyone surprised by this does not grasp the moral meaning of Ayn Rand’s fiction.
Ayn Rand, “Censorship: Local and Express,” Q&A Session, Ford Hall Forum, Boston, June 1973.
Ayn Rand, “The Roots of War,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 35.
Ayn Rand, We the Living (New York: Signet, 2011), 70.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 338.
Ibid., 340.
Ibid., 426–27.
Ibid., 469.
Ibid., 470.
Ibid., 489–90.
Ayn Rand, Anthem (New York: Signet, 1961), 95.
Ibid., 95.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 978.
Ayn Rand, “An Analysis of the Proper Approach to a Picture on the Atomic Bomb,” January 2, 1946m 16, Ayn Rand Archives, 048_04B_009.
Ibid.
Ibid., 048_04B_007.
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