Rand, Ayn | A complete draft of Rand's important first speech delivered at the Ford Hall Forum

Rand, Ayn

Ayn Rand's first lecture at the Ford Hall Forum: autograph manuscript of "The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age" (New York, 7 March 1961)

Autograph manuscript, 53 leaves (280 x 217 mm), written in blue ballpoint pen with extensive emendations in blue and red ink and red pencil throughout; light discoloration at left margin of first page, otherwise in fine condition.

The complete working manuscript of Rand’s first lecture at Ford Hall Forum—marking the beginning of a two-decade speaking tradition and signaling her emergence as a public intellectual.

Delivered on 26 March 1961 at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum, Rand’s lecture critiques what she saw as the erosion of ideological clarity in American politics. “I am addressing an audience consisting predominately of my enemies,” she begins, “that is, of so-called "liberals".” The text comments on the convergence of liberal and conservative parties, concluding that “the intellectuals … are now homeless refugees, left behind by a silent collapse they have not had the courage to identify.” She explains that in the 1930s she envied "liberals" for their intellectual approach to political problems. "By 1956, I had no cause to envy the "liberals" any longer. For many decades, the "liberals" had been representatives of the intellect in America... while the so called "conservatives," allegedly devoted to the defense of individualism and capitalism, went about apologetically projecting such a cracker-barrel sort of folksiness that Li'l Abner would have found embarrassing, the monument to which may still be seen in the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange, in a costly display of statistical charts and models proudly entitled: The People's Capitalism."

Rand links this collapse to the nineteenth-century failure of intellectuals to embrace capitalism, which she claims led to the “shameful, sordid, ugly history of the intellectual development of the last hundred and fifty years.” She sharply criticizes the absence of principle in contemporary political discourse, using the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates as an example: “Did the candidates discuss foreign policy? No—just the fate of Quemoy and Matsu. Did they discuss socialized medicine? No—just the cost and the procedure of medical aid to the aged. Did they discuss government control of education? No—just who should pay the teachers' salaries: the federal government or the states.”

The manuscript offers a window into Rand’s writing process: whole paragraphs are rewritten, lines struck through, and marginalia added in tight script and angled insertions. This reflects efforts to sharpen her call to arms, culminating in a rallying cry at the bottom of the final page: “a new type of intellectual, a new radical: the fighter for capitalism.”

The text differs significantly from the version later published in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1989).

Rand went on to deliver eighteen more lectures at Ford Hall Forum over the next twenty years. Complete manuscripts of her public addresses are rare at auction.

PROVENANCE:

Sold at a benefit auction for the Ford Hall Forum’s 75th Birthday Gala, 1983 — Sotheby’s New York, 10 June 2010, lot 69 ($68,500)