Ayn Rand's ideal man

Writing around 1928, Ayn Rand quoted William Edward Hickman's credo — 'What is good for me is right' — and hailed it as above. She was then planning a novel, The Little Street, whose hero Danny Renahan was, in the words of Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra, deliberately modeled on Hickman as her first sketch of the ideal man. Of Renahan she wrote that he 'is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.' The quotes are page-cited to the published Journals of Ayn Rand, and the modeling is documented by historian Jennifer Burns in Goddess of the Market (Oxford University Press).

“The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard.”

• Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman (Dutton, 1997), pp. ~21–27 — the Hickman and Renahan entries
• Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009) — Rand modeled Renahan on Hickman
• Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State University Press) — on Rand's early Nietzschean period

Hickman was one of the most notorious criminals in America in 1928. In December 1927, aged nineteen, he took twelve-year-old Marian Parker from her Los Angeles school by lying that her father had been in an accident, then held her for a $1,500 ransom, taunting her family in notes signed variously 'Death,' 'Fate,' and 'The Fox.' He murdered and dismembered her, and delivered her body to her father at the ransom exchange. He was caught via fingerprints from a prior forgery conviction, confessed, and was executed in 1928. This is the man whose psychology Rand called the 'strongest expression of a real man's' she had encountered.

• Contemporaneous press coverage, Los Angeles, December 1927–1928 (the Marian Parker case; Hickman's ransom notes and confession)
• Crime histories of the Parker/Hickman case ('Fate, Death and the Fox'); Hickman executed at San Quentin, 1928

This is the passage the viral version omits, and it matters. In the same journals, Rand explicitly separated the archetype she wanted from the crime she deplored: she called the real Hickman 'a purposeless monster' and blamed society for producing him, fixating on what she saw as the mob's self-righteous fury more than on the killing itself. She was not celebrating a child's murder; she was abstracting a psychological trait — total independence from the opinion and needs of others — and prying it loose from the man who embodied it in its most monstrous form. We grade the admiration honestly precisely so this line stays visible.

“A brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim?”

• Journals of Ayn Rand (1997) — Rand's notes on the Hickman case, distinguishing the archetype from the crime and condemning the 'monster'

The through-thread inside Rand's own writing is documented. Her early notes for The Fountainhead describe its hero Howard Roark in the terms above, and elsewhere she wrote, 'One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself. Fine!' The core Rand admired in Hickman — the self as sovereign, the world as worthless, the herd as nothing — is the same core she built into the architect-hero who dynamites a housing project rather than compromise. This is a claim about the continuity of an idea across her notebooks, not a claim that Roark is Hickman. What persisted was the psychology of contempt for 'the mob,' refined into a virtue.

“[Howard Roark] has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world.”

• Journals of Ayn Rand (1997), pp. ~78, 93 — early notes for The Fountainhead and Roark's 'superiority / worthlessness of the world'
• The Fountainhead (1943): Roark dynamites the Cortlandt housing project rather than see his design compromised — a bestseller, later a film

Rand's influence on the American right is not in dispute: Alan Greenspan was a member of her inner circle before chairing the Federal Reserve; House Speaker Paul Ryan credited Atlas Shrugged as the reason he entered public life and reportedly had staffers read it (before distancing himself in 2012); her novels remain perennial sellers across the conservative movement, and her ethic of the heroic individual against a parasitic collective echoes through decades of anti-'welfare-state' politics. What we will NOT assert as fact is a clean causal chain — '1928 diary about a killer, therefore Reaganomics.' The admiration is documented; the philosophy's reach is documented; the claim that the one determines the other is an interpretive frame. We pose it as a question worth sitting with, not a verdict: what does it say that this ethic's earliest, purest expression was a mind that saw no reason other people should exist?

• Alan Greenspan's membership in Rand's 'Collective'; correspondence and public acknowledgment of her influence
• Paul Ryan on Atlas Shrugged (and his 2012 distancing); Rand's sustained sales and citation across the U.S. right
• See: 'The Trickle-Down Myth' — the policy outcomes of the ethic this page traces to its root