The Fountainhead

by Ayn Rand

  --said the social worker who had found no aim in life and could generate no aim from within the sterility of his soul, but basked in virtue and held an unearned respect from all, by grace of his fingers on the wounds of others--

  --said the novelist who had nothing to say if the subject of service and sacrifice were to be taken away from him, who sobbed in the hearing of attentive thousands that he loved them and loved them and would they please love him a little in return--

  --said the lady columnist who had just bought a country mansion because she wrote so tenderly about the little people-

  -said all the little people who wanted to hear of love, the great love, the unfastidious love, the love that embraced everything, forgave everything and permitted them everything--

  --said every second-hander who could not exist except as a leech on the souls of others.

  Ellsworth Toohey sat back, watched, listened and smiled.

  Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb were entertained at dinners and cocktail parties; they were treated with tender, curious solicitude, like survivors of disaster. They said that they could not understand what possible motive Roark could have had, and they demanded justice.

  Peter Keating went nowhere. He refused to see the press. He refused to see anyone. But he issued a written statement that he believed Roark was not guilty. His statement contained one curious sentence, the last. It said: "Leave him alone, please can't you leave him alone?"

  Pickets from the Council of American Builders paced in front of the Cord Building. It served no purpose, because there was no work in Roark's office. The commissions he was to start had been canceled.

  This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured--the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart--the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but had the excuse of a sister to support--the businessman who hated his business--the worker who hated his work--the intellectual who hated everybody--all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves. The readers were unanimous. The press was unanimous.

  Gail Wynand went against the current.

  "Gail!" Alvah Scarret had gasped. "We can't defend a dynamiter!"

  "Keep still, Alvah," Wynand had said, "before I bash your teeth in."

  Gail Wynand stood alone in the middle of his office, his head thrown back, glad to be living, as he had stood on a wharf on a dark night facing the lights of a city.

  "In the filthy howling now going on all around us," said an editorial in the Banner, signed "Gail Wynand" in big letters, "nobody seems to remember that Howard Roark surrendered himself of his own free will. If he blew up that building--did he have to remain at the scene to be arrested? But we don't wait to discover his reasons. We have convicted him without a hearing. We want him to be guilty. We are delighted with this case. What you hear is not indignation--it's gloating. Any illiterate maniac, any worthless moron who commits some revolting murder, gets shrieks of sympathy from us and marshals an army of humanitarian defenders. But a man of genius is guilty by definition. Granted that it is a vicious injustice to condemn a man simply because he is weak and small. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? Such, however, is the whole moral atmosphere of our century--the century of the second-rater."

  "We hear it shouted," said another Wynand editorial, "that Howard Roark spends his career in and out of courtrooms. Well, that is true. A man like Roark is on trial before society all his life. Whom does that indict--Roark or society?"

  "We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it," said another Wynand editorial. "We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all."

  This editorial was quoted in the New Frontiers and in many newspapers, reprinted in a box under the heading: "Look who's talking!"

  Gail Wynand laughed. Resistance fed him and made him stronger. This was a war, and he had not engaged in a real war for years, not since the time when he laid the foundations of his empire amid cries of protest from the whole profession. He was granted the impossible, the dream of every man: the chance and intensity of youth, to be used with the wisdom of experience. A new beginning and a climax, together. I have waited and lived, he thought, for this.

  His twenty-two newspapers, his magazines, his newsreels were given the order: Defend Roark. Sell Roark to the public. Stem the lynching.

  "Whatever the facts," Wynand explained to his staff, "this is not going to be a trial by facts. It's a trial by public opinion. We've always made public opinion. Let's make it. Sell Roark. I don't care how you do it. I've trained you. You're experts at selling. Now show me how good you are."

  He was greeted by silence, and his employees glanced at one another. Alvah Scarret mopped his forehead. But they obeyed.

  The Banner printed a picture of the Enright House, with the caption: "Is this the man you want to destroy?" A picture of Wynand's home: "Match this, if you can." A picture of Monadnock Valley: "Is this the man who has contributed nothing to society?"

  The Banner ran Roark's biography, under the byline of a writer nobody had ever heard of; it was written by Gail Wynand. The Banner ran a series on famous trials in which innocent men had been convicted by the majority prejudice of the moment. The Banner ran articles on men martyred by society: Socrates, Galileo, Pasteur, the thinkers, the scientists, a long, heroic line--each a man who stood alone, the man who defied men.

  "But, Gail, for God's sake, Gail, it was a housing project!" wailed Alvah Scarret.

  Wynand looked at him helplessly: "I suppose it's impossible to make you fools understand that that has nothing to do with it. All right. We'll talk about housing projects."

  The Banner ran an expose of the housing racket: the graft, the incompetence, the structures erected at five times the cost a private builder would have needed, the settlements built and abandoned, the horrible performance accepted, admired, forgiven, protected by the sacred cow of altruism. "Hell is said to be paved with good intentions," said the Banner. "Could it be because we've never learned to distinguish what intentions constitute the good? Is it not time to learn? Never have there been so many good intentions so loudly proclaimed in the world. And look at it."

  The Banner editorials were written by Gail Wynand as he stood at a table in the composing room, written as always on a huge piece of print stock, with a blue pencil, in letters an inch high. He slammed the G W at the end, and the famous initials had never carried such an air of reckless pride.

  Dominique had recovered and returned to their country house. Wynand drove home late in the evening. He brought Roark along as often as he could. They sat together in the living room, with the windows open to the spring night. The dark stretches of the hill rolled gently down to the lake from under the walls of the house, and the lake glittered through the trees far below. They did not talk of the case or of the coming trial. But Wynand spoke of his crusade, impersonally, almost as if it did not concern Roark at all. Wynand stood in the middle of the room, saying:

  "All right, it was contemptible--the whole career of the Banner. But this will vindicate everything. Dominique, I know you've never been able to understand why I've felt no shame in my past. Why I love the Banner. Now you'll see the ans
wer. Power. I hold a power I've never tested. Now you'll see the test. They'll think what I want them to think. They'll do as I say. Because it is my city and I do run things around here. Howard, by the time you come to trial, I'll have them all twisted in such a way there won't be a jury who'll dare convict you."

  He could not sleep at night. He felt no desire to sleep. "Go on to bed," he would say to Roark and Dominique, "I'll come up in a few minutes." Then, Dominique from the bedroom, Roark from the guest room across the hall, would hear Wynand's steps pacing the terrace for hours, a kind of joyous restlessness in the sound, each step like a sentence anchored, a statement pounded into the floor.

  Once, when Wynand dismissed them, late at night, Roark and Dominique went up the stairs together and stopped on the first landing; they heard the violent snap of a match in the living room below, a sound that carried the picture of a hand jerked recklessly, lighting the first of the cigarettes that would last till dawn, a small dot of fire crossing and recrossing the terrace to the pounding of steps.

  They looked down the stairs and then looked at each other.

  "It's horrible," said Dominique.

  "It's great," said Roark.

  "He can't help you, no matter what he does."

  "I know he can't. That's not the point."

  "He's risking everything he has to save you. He doesn't know he'll lose me if you're saved."

  "Dominique, which will be worse for him--to lose you or to lose his crusade?" She nodded, understanding. He added: "You know that it's not me he wants to save. I'm only the excuse."

  She lifted her hand. She touched his cheekbone, a faint pressure of her finger tips. She could allow herself nothing else. She turned and went on to her bedroom, and heard him closing the guest-room door.

  "Is it not appropriate," wrote Lancelot Clokey in a syndicated article, "that Howard Roark is being defended by the Wynand papers? If anyone doubts the moral issues involved in this appalling case, here is the proof of what's what and who stands where. The Wynand papers--that stronghold of yellow journalism, vulgarity, corruption and muckraking, that organized insult to public taste and decency, that intellectual underworld ruled by a man who has less conception of principles than a cannibal--the Wynand papers are the proper champions of Howard Roark, and Howard Roark is their rightful hero. After a lifetime devoted to blasting the integrity of the press, it is only fit that Gail Wynand should now support a cruder fellow dynamiter."

  "All this fancy talk going 'round," said Gus Webb in a public speech, "is a lot of bull. Here's the plain dope. That guy Wynand's salted away plenty, and I mean plenty, by skinning suckers in the real-estate racket all these years. Does he like it when the government muscles in and shoves him out, so's the little fellows can get a clean roof over their heads and a modern John for their kids? You bet your boots he don't like it, not one bit. It's a put-up job between the two of them, Wynand and that redheaded boy friend of his, and if you ask me the boy friend got a good hunk of cash out of Mr. Wynand for pulling the job."

  "We have it from an unimpeachable source," wrote a radical newspaper, "that Cortlandt was only the first step in a gigantic plot to blow up every housing project, every public power plant, post office and school house in the U.S.A. The conspiracy is headed by Gail Wynand-as we can see--and by other bloated capitalists of his kind, including some of our biggest moneybags."

  "Too little attention has been paid to the feminine angle of this case," wrote Sally Brent in the New Frontiers. "The part played by Mrs. Gail Wynand is certainly highly dubious, to say the least. Isn't it just the cutest coincidence that it was Mrs. Wynand who just so conveniently sent the watchman away at just the right time? And that her husband is now raising the roof to defend Mr. Roark? If we weren't blinded by a stupid, senseless, old-fashioned sense of gallantry where a so-called beautiful woman is concerned, we wouldn't allow that part of the case to be hushed up. If we weren't overawed by Mrs. Wynand's social position and the so-called prestige of her husband--who's making an utter fool of himself--we'd ask a few questions about the story that she almost lost her life in the disaster. How do we know she did? Doctors can be bought, just like anybody else, and Mr. Gail Wynand is an expert in such matters. If we consider all this, we might well see the outlines of something that looks like a most revolting 'design for living.' "

  "The position taken by the Wynand press," wrote a quiet, conservative newspaper, "is inexplicable and disgraceful."

  The circulation of the Banner dropped week by week, the speed accelerating in the descent, like an elevator out of control. Stickers and buttons inscribed "We Don't Read Wynand" grew on walls, subway posts, windshields and coat lapels. Wynand newsreels were booed off the theater screens. The Banner vanished from corner newsstands; the news vendors had to carry it, but they hid it under their counters and produced it grudgingly, only upon request. The ground had been prepared, the pillars eaten through long ago; the Cortlandt case provided the final impact.

  Roark was almost forgotten in the storm of indignation against Gail Wynand. The angriest protests came from Wynand's own public: from the Women's Clubs, the ministers, the mothers, the small shopkeepers. Alvah Scarret had to be kept away from the room where hampers of letters to the editor were being filled each day; he started by reading the letters--and his friends on the staff undertook to prevent a repetition of the experience, fearing a stroke.

  The staff of the Banner worked in silence. There were no furtive glances, no whispered cuss words, no gossip in washrooms any longer. A few men resigned. The rest worked on, slowly, heavily, in the manner of men with life belts buckled, waiting for the inevitable.

  Gail Wynand noticed a kind of lingering tempo in every action around him. When he entered the Banner Building, his employees stopped at sight of him; when he nodded to them, their greeting came a second too late; when he walked on and turned, he found them staring after him. The "Yes, Mr. Wynand," that had always answered his orders without a moment's cut between the last syllable of his voice and the first letter of the answer, now came late, and the pause had a tangible shape, so that the answer sounded like a sentence not followed but preceded by a question mark.

  "One Small Voice" kept silent about the Cortlandt case. Wynand had summoned Toohey to his office, the day after the explosion, and had said: "Listen, you. Not a word in your column. Understand? What you do or yell outside is none of my business--for the time being. But if you yell too much, I'll take care of you when this is over."

  "Yes, Mr. Wynand."

  "As far as your column is concerned, you're deaf, dumb and blind. You've never heard of any explosion. You've never heard of anyone named Roark. You don't know what the word Cortlandt means. So long as you're in this building."

  "Yes, Mr. Wynand."

  "And don't let me see too much of you around here."

  "Yes, Mr. Wynand."

  Wynand's lawyer, an old friend who had served him for years, tried to stop him.

  "Gail, what's the matter? You're acting like a child. Like a green amateur. Pull yourself together, man."

  "Shut up," said Wynand.

  "Gail, you are ... you were the greatest newspaperman on earth. Do I have to tell you the obvious? An unpopular cause is a dangerous business for anyone. For a popular newspaper--it's suicide."

  "If you don't shut your mouth, I'll send you packing and get myself another shyster."

  Wynand began to argue about the case--with the prominent men he met at business luncheons and dinners. He had never argued before on any subject; he had never pleaded. He had merely tossed final statements to respectful listeners. Now he found no listeners. He found an indifferent silence, half boredom, half resentment. The men who had gathered every word he cared to drop about the stock market, real estate, advertising, politics, had no interest in his opinion on art, greatness and abstract justice.

  He heard a few answers:

  "Yes, Gail, yes, sure. But on the other hand, I think it was damn selfish of the man. And that's the trouble with t
he world today--selfishness. Too much selfishness everywhere. That's what Lancelot Clokey said in his book--swell book, all about his childhood, you read it, saw your picture with Clokey. Clokey's been all over the world, he knows what he's talking about."

  "Yes, Gail, but aren't you kind of old-fashioned about it? What's all that great man stuff? What's great about a glorified bricklayer? Who's great anyway? We're all just a lot of glands and chemicals and whatever we ate for breakfast. I think Lois Cook explained it very well in that beautiful little--what's its name?--yes, The Gallant Gallstone. Yes, sir. Your own Banner plugged like blazes for that little book."

  "But look, Gail, he should've thought of other people before he thought of himself. I think if a man's got no love in his heart he can't be much good. I heard that in a play last night--that was a grand play--the new one by Ike--what the hell's his last name?--you ought to see it--your own Jules Fougler said it's a brave and tender stage poem."

  "You make out a good case, Gail, and I wouldn't know what to say against it, I don't know where you're wrong, but it doesn't sound right to me, because Ellsworth Toohey--now don't misunderstand me, I don't agree with Toohey's political views at all, I know he's a radical, but on the other hand you've got to admit that he's a great idealist with a heart as big as a house--well, Ellsworth Toohey said ..."

  These were the millionaires, the bankers, the industrialists, the businessmen who could not understand why the world was going to hell, as they moaned in all their luncheon speeches.

  One morning when Wynand stepped out of his car in front of the Banner Building, a woman rushed up to him as he crossed the sidewalk. She had been waiting by the entrance. She was fat and middle-aged. She wore a filthy cotton dress and a crushed hat. She had a pasty, sagging face, a shapeless mouth and black, round, brilliant eyes. She stood before Gail Wynand and she flung a bunch of rotted beet leaves at his face. There were no beets, just the leaves, soft and slimy, tied with a string. They hit his cheek and rolled down to the sidewalk.