BrainGlutton:
I was thinking – and I’m not the first to say so – that Roarke’s “modernist” buildings as Rand describes them resemble, more than anything else IRL, the bleak monumental structures Speer put up for Hitler in Berlin – the latter being described by James Howard Kunstler in The City in Mind
What were the Soviet Palaces of Culture you mentioned? I can’t find anything when searching.
Orissa:
I hope this isn’t too much of a derail, but does anyone have a theory as to why Rand used Irish surnames for so many of her characters, in both ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’?
To whit: Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart, Howard Roark, Peter Keating, and Ellsworth Toohey.
Even her former heir apparent, before the falling out, changed his name from Blumenthal to the quasi-Hibernian Branden.
Simple- she couldn’t make them obviously Jewish so she made her characters the next best thing- the Lost-Tribe-Descended Irish!
Yup, it’s true. Although she thought that they had some good ideas, she found too much of their philosophy uncomfortably close to anarchy.
FriarTed:
What?
From Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Chapter 27:
The Mayor shook his head some more. He found the Christian churches baffling. When he was growing up, the goyim were all Catholics, unless you counted the shvartzer, which nobody did. They didn’t even rate being called goyim. The Catholics were two types, the Irish and the Italians. The Irish were stupid and liked to fight and inflict pain. The Italians were stupid and slob-like. Both were unpleasant, but the lineup was easy enough to comprehend. He was in college before he realized there was this whole other set of goyim, the Protestants. He never saw any. There were only Jews, Irishmen and Italians in college, but he heard about them, and he learned that some of the most famous people in New York were this type of goyim, the Protestants, people like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Astors, the Morgans. The term Wasp was invented much later. The Protestants were split up into such a crazy bunch of sects nobody could even keep track of them all. It was all very pagan and spooky, when it wasn’t ridiculous. They were all worshipping some obscure Jew from halfway around the world. The Rockefellers were! The Roosevelts even! Very spooky it was, and yet these Protestants ran the biggest law firms, the banks, the investment houses, the big corporations. He never saw such people in the flesh, except at ceremonies. Otherwise they didn’t exist in New York. They barely even showed up in the voting surveys. In sheer numbers they were a nullity – and yet there they were. And now one of these sects, the Episcopalians, had a black bishop. You could joke about the Wasps, and he often did so with his friends, and yet they weren’t so much funny as creepy.
So in Rand’s New York, unless she ran in elite circles, the only people she ever would have met with Anglo-Saxon names would have been the shvartzer (whose ancestors, on emancipation, had taken the surnames either of their old masters. mostly of English descent, or of U.S. presidents, all of whom to date in 1866 had had Anglo-Saxon surnames, with the sole exception of Martin Van Buren). Mind you, I’m talking about the '40s and '50s, before African-Americans started taking Arabic or “African” names as a political statement.
