Part One: Ayn Rands real man Recently I was rereading Scott Ryans fascinating, albeit highly technical, critique of Ayn Rands philosophy, Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality, and getting a lot more out of it the second time, when I came across a fact culled from a posthumous collection of Rands journal entries. In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, What is good for me is right, a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. The best and strongest expression of a real mans psychology I have heard, she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.) At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan.According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, 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 ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should. (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.) A wonderful, free, light consciousness born of the utter absence of any understanding of the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rands life, her kind of man. So the question is, who exactly was he? William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a real man worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes. You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. Other than that, he was probably a swell guy. In December of 1927, Hickman, nineteen years old, showed up at a Los Angeles public school and managed to get custody of a twelve-year-old girl, Marian (sometimes Marion) Parker. He was able to convince Marians teacher that the girls father, a well-known banker, had been seriously injured in a car accident and that the girl had to go to the hospital immediately. The story was a lie. Hickman disappeared with Marian, and over the next few days Mr. and Mrs. Parker received a series of ransom notes. The notes were cruel and taunting and were sometimes signed Death or Fate. The sum of $1,500 was demanded for the childs safe release. (Hickman needed this sum, he later claimed, because he wanted to go to Bible college!) The father raised the payment in gold certificates and delivered it to Hickman. As told by the article Fate, Death and the Fox in crimelibrary, At the rendezvous, Mr. Parker handed over the money to a young man who was waiting for him in a parked car. When Mr. Parker paid the ransom, he could see his daughter, Marion, sitting in the passenger seat next to the suspect. As soon as the money was exchanged, the suspect drove off with the victim still in the car. At the end of the street, Marions corpse was dumped onto the pavement. She was dead. Her legs had been chopped off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area. Quite a hero, eh? One might question whether Hickman had a wonderful, free, light consciousness, but surely he did have no organ for understanding ... the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. The mutilations Hickman inflicted on little Marian were worse than reported in the excerpt above. He cut the girls body in half, and severed her hands (or arms, depending on the source). He drained her torso of blood and stuffed it with bath towels. There were persistent rumors that he molested the girl before killing her, though this claim was officially denied. Overall, the crime is somewhat reminiscent of the 1947 Black Dahlia case, one of the most gruesome homicides in L.A. history. But Hickmans heroism doesnt end there. He heroically amscrayed to the small town of Echo, Oregon, where he heroically holed up, no doubt believing he had perpetrated the perfect crime. Sadly for him, fingerprints hed left on one of the ransom notes matched prints on file from his previous conviction for forgery. With his face on Wanted posters everywhere, Hickman was quickly tracked down and arrested. The article continues: He was conveyed back to Los Angeles where he promptly confessed to another murder he committed during a drug store hold-up. Eventually, Hickman confessed to a dozen armed robberies. This is going to get interesting before its over, he told investigators. Marion and I were good friends, he said, and we really had a good time when we were together and I really liked her. Im sorry that she was killed. Hickman never said why he had killed the girl and cut off her legs. It seems to me that Ayn Rands uncritical admiration of a personality this twisted does not speak particularly well for her ability to judge and evaluate the heroic qualities in people. One might go so far as to say that anyone who sees William Edward Hickman as the epitome of a real man has some serious issues to work on, and perhaps should be less concerned with trying to convert the world to her point of view than in trying to repair her own damaged psyche. One might also point out that a person who has no organ for understanding ... the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people is what we today would call a sociopath. Was Rands ideal man a sociopath? The suggestion seems shockingly unfair - until you read her very own words. No doubt defenders of Ayn Rand, and there are still a few left, would reply that the journal entry in question was written when she was only in her early twenties and still under the spell of Nietzsche, that as her thinking developed she discarded such Nietzschean elements and evolved a more rational outlook, and that the mature Rand should not be judged by the mistakes of her youth. And this might be a perfectly reasonable position to take. Unquestionably Rands outlook did change, and her point of view did become at least somewhat less hostile to what the average, normal person would regard as healthy values. But before we assume that her admiration of Mr. Hickman was merely a quirk of her salad days, lets consider a few other quotes from Ayn Rand cited in Scott Ryans book. In her early notes for The Fountainhead: One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in ones way to get the best for oneself. Fine! (Journals, p. 78.) Of The Fountainheads hero, Howard Roark: He 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, p. 93.) In the original version of her first novel We the Living: What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rands stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 - 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.) On the value of human life: Man is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes ... When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy. (Journals, pp. 253-254, 288.) As proof that her Nietzschean thinking persisted long after her admirers think she abandoned it, this journal entry from 1945, two years subsequent to the publication of The Fountainhead: Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen -- and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman. (Journals, p. 285.) So perhaps her thinking did not change quite so much, after all. And what of William Edward Hickman? What ever became of the man who served as the early prototype of the Randian Superman? Real life is not fiction, and Hickmans personal credo, which so impressed Ayn Rand - what is right for me is good - does not seem to have worked out very well for him. At first he heroically tried to weasel out of the murder rap by implicating another man, but the intended fall guy turned out to have an airtight alibi (he was in prison at the time). Then he heroically invoked the insanity defense. This effort likewise failed, and in 1928 he was sentenced to death by hanging, to be carried out at San Quentin later that same year. Hickman reportedly died yellow - he was dragged, trembling and fainting, to his execution, his courtroom bravado having given way at last.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 21:00:03 +0000
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