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Ayn Rand 8pp AMS for "Los Angeles Times" Sunday Column "War & Peace" - Copiously Edited, 900+ Words In Her Hand!
Ayn Rand 8pp AMS for "Los Angeles Times" Sunday Column "War & Peace" - Copiously Edited, 900+ Words In Her Hand!
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Description:

Ayn Rand
n.p., June 12, 1962
Ayn Rand 8pp AMS for "Los Angeles Times" Sunday Column "War & Peace" - Copiously Edited, 900+ Words In Her Hand!
AMS

An 8pp autograph manuscript by Russian-American writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982), signed by her at the top as part of the manuscript title, "The Ayn Rand Column." Ca. mid-June 1962. N.p. Inscribed overall on paper in blue ink, with Rand's copious handwritten edits in blue ink, red colored pencil, and pencil. Pages are paginated in the upper right corner, with word counts at lower right. Rand's total word count of the completed manuscript comes to 898 words, but with all of cross outs, that total is most likely much higher. Expected wear including light, even toning. A partially rusted staple mark on the first page and staple holes on subsequent pages. Else near fine, and a remarkable example of Rand's writing and editing at work. 8.5" x 11." Housed in a dark blue clamshell presentation case gilt-embossed along the spine, and with an excerpt from the manuscript, also in gilt, embossed on the front cover. The case measures 9" x 11.75" x .75."

A similar Ayn Rand signed autograph manuscript - of her November 18, 1962 column "Post-Mortem, 1962" submitted to and published by the "Los Angeles Times" - sold at our December 11, 2024 auction for $21,250 including the buyer's premium.

Ayn Rand wrote a Sunday weekly column for the "Los Angeles Times" between June and December 1962, writing a total of 26 columns. This manuscript corresponds to Rand's second-ever column submission, "War and Peace," which was published on June 24, 1962 in the "Times." Rand's contract with the "Los Angeles Times" was generous in that she could write about whatever topic she chose, and that she retained complete editorial authority. The column was to be between 750-1,000 words in length, and in exchange Rand was paid $50. (Syndication of Rand's column, which would have been the real moneymaker, failed to materialize.) Eventually, the failure to syndicate, along with other considerations, led Rand to terminate her professional relationship with the "Los Angeles Times" after only six months.

By all accounts, Rand loved her time as a columnist. She relished being a "girl-reporter" (her words) and the task of writing and polishing a column of substantial content and length each week challenged her intellectually. Rand particularly liked how the format of her "Times" column forced her to economize her writing. She developed a procedure which she called "editing in layers" whereby she wrote the first draft and then made several rigorous passes, ruthlessly cutting as she went. This manuscript shows this exact process; Rand excised portions freely, from words to entire sentences. She changed word choices here and there. She also changed something as significant as the column title; the working title of this manuscript, "A Peace Plan," is struck through and replaced with "War and Peace."

Of Rand's 26 columns published in the "Los Angeles Times," five discussed art and culture; six addressed the society and economy of the United States; seven explored philosophy; and eight articles expounded about foreign affairs. The "War and Peace" manuscript falls into this last category. Rand introduces the term "statism" to speak at length about different types of big government: socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, and the "welfare state." She defines what she sees as good and bad government, and, using examples from the past, mostly in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, illustrates the sinister ways that dictatorships operate.

Rand's manuscript reads in part (silently omitting her cross outs and other edits):

"The Ayn Rand Column

War and Peace

One of the ugliest characteristics of today's world is the mixture of frantic war preparations with hysterical peace propaganda, and the fact that both come from the same source - from the same political philosophy. If mankind is ever to achieve peace, the first step will be made when people realize that today's peace movements are not advocates of peace.

Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, these movements keep screaming that nuclear weapons have made war too horrible to contemplate, that armed force and violence should be abolished as a means of settling disputes amount nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from 'welfare statism' to socialism to communism. This means that these movements are opposed to the use of armed coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force and violence against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed.

Under any political system, in any organized society, the government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. That is the crucial difference between a government and any private organization. Private individuals or groups deal with one another peacefully, by means of trade, persuasion, discussion, and voluntary agreements; they cannot resort to force; those who do, are criminals - and it is the proper duty of the government to restrain them.

In a free, civilized society, the use of physical force is outlawed by the recognition of men's inalienable, individual rights. The power of the government is limited by law to the role of a policeman that protects men's rights and uses force only against those who initiate its use. This is the basic political principle of the only social system that banishes force from human relationships: laissez-faire capitalism.

But a statist system - whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or 'welfare' type - is based on the opposite principle: on the government's unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. The differences among statist systems are only a matter of time and degree; the principle is the same. Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims.

Nothing can ever justify so monstrously evil a theory. Nothing can justify the horror, the brutality, the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter of statist dictatorships. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are will to advocate or tolerate - in the name of love for humanity.

Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war, that leaves men no choice but to fight to seize power over one another. In a full dictatorship, that civil war takes the form of bloody purges, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In a 'mixed economy,' it takes the form of 'pressure group' warfare, each group fighting for legislation to extend its own advantages by force from all other groups.

Statism is nothing more than gang rule. A statist dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When statist rulers exhaust their own country's economy and run out of loot, they attack their neighbors. All the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones. For instance, World War I was started by monarchist Germany and Czarist Russia, which were 'mixed economies' of a predominately statist kind. World War II was started by the alliance of Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia and their joint attack on Poland.

Observe that in World War II, Germany and Russia dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home - while the finest one of the 'mixed economies,' the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies. Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. Yet it is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate - in the name of peace.

There is no moral justification for the vicious doctrine that some men have the right to rule others by force. But so long as men continue to believe that some sort of alleged 'noble purpose' can justify it - violence, bloodshed and wars will continue.

It is time that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or is led to a Nazi gas chamber or a Soviet firing squad, with no voices raised to defend him. Will such a man feel any love or concern for the survival of mankind? Or will he be more justified in feeling that a cannibalistic mankind, which tolerates dictatorships, does not deserve to survive?

Yet those who are seriously concerned with peace, those who love man and do care about his survival, realize that war cannot be outlawed by lawless statist thugs and that it is not war but force that has to be outlawed."

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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  • Dimensions: case: 9" x 11.75" x .75"
  • Medium: AMS

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April 23, 2025 10:00 AM EDT
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