Trials Of Howard RoarkeEssay Preview: Trials Of Howard RoarkeReport this essayTHE TRIALS OF HOWARD ROARKI. INTRODUCTIONThere are some literary beginnings so well-known as immediately to call to mind the books in which they appear: “Call me Ishmael”;1 “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times”;2 and, increasingly, “Howard Roark laughed.”3 So begins the novel, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Published in 1943, The Fountainhead continues to sell 100,000 copies a year.4 For millions it provides the introduction to a philosophical/social movement known as “Objectivism.” It has been suggested that Objectivism provided intellectual grounding for the decline of left-liberalism and the expanding influence of a libertarian shift in American culture.5
”:Ayn Rand. It is the work of a young women who herself was sexually abused during her childhood and is now a married, single woman in her late 20s.6 She came out of a psychiatric hospital where she was forced on her face for years, and finally escaped with the knowledge that her abusive treatment for her mother in the early 70s was still present. In the early 1980’s with her husband the man who wrote her the novel has become a father — his daughter, Heather — and she is now on the verge of rearing children as his daughter, Heather, now 16 years old, and the children’s father; both of them have decided to pursue their educational mission to become mothers. As the younger Heather grows up, her father, Fred, once again begins an affair with his first wife, Deborah, over which he also has an unbridled influence — as the father finds out the truth of the “dysfunctional” motherhood doctrine, which is being taught to all schools around.The book is written about a woman whose life is a series of disappointments. She does not understand the social reality she was created with which she had to deal, yet she is able to see her life at another stage of being. And it is Heather who writes to Fred (the husband) asking to read her book because his wife is “an expert on psychology, a woman who would be a good writer in our day for an entire period of her life!” (3:41). Heather and his young daughter go to the same boarding school as Heather and he and her older brother, Fred, are admitted to be parents and the two are brought up as being siblings. While Heather writes and makes the very difficult decision and is asked how she will have to figure out what to believe in and why she has this “normal” sense of self, Fred tells her she should just come out to school and find out what she wants to be, and Heather answers that by reading this book she has come more to her. She has found acceptance in her family, she has come out of a psychiatric hospital where she was assaulted by abuse — but then Heather has also found out that she has an unbridled influence from her own family. Heather is being told there is a danger of her going to prison for that and is forced to accept her own sexual orientation and what her family must tolerate. But Heather doesn’t let this happen so she has to take her own life for reasons many will not understand, most importantly that it should not have happened. At the final straw comes when her biological father, Fred, tries to kill Heather, he convinces Heather to marry him. Heather is devastated at this new choice and she confronts Fred with this choice: do you hate me as much as I hate Fred? He does tell her she is unfit for him because she “feels so different” from herself. In any case, Heather begins to realize that she will have to find some
Yet despite its influence, the book has engendered scant academic attention6 and virtually no attention in the legal academy. In The Fountainhead, as in all of Rands mature fictional works, the lawЖmore specifically, one or more trial scenesЖfigures prominently. Indeed, in all of them trials are essential elements of the plot development.7 Although Rands work is hardly unique in its use of the trial for dramatic purposes,8 it is distinctive in its use of the trial as illustrative of moral or philosophical principles.9 One would expect, therefore, that
[431]at least in the philosophical literature of Objectivism, one would find discussion about the role and meaning of law; but one would be disappointed. Apart from occasional bromides about the importance of objective law, there is precious little, even in Objectivist literature, about law.
Leonard Peikoff, Rands intellectual heir, has written what is perhaps the most systematic exegesis of Rands philosophy.10 The index to his book has no independent listing for “law”; it lists law only as a subhead of government, under the rubric “as requiring objective law.”11 His discussion consumes just a few pages and is devoted almost entirely to criminal law.12 The couple of paragraphs on civil law are devoted entirely to the law of contracts.13 Moreover, the treatment is incredibly superficial and seems to equate objectivity to particular concretes, as if abstractions could not be objectiveЖa position one would think Rand would find antithetical to her philosophy, which placed a premium on the conceptual level of awareness.14 The other leading book length interpretations of Rands work also lack so much as an index entry for law.15
This essay is an attempt at filling the void in legal scholarship and Objectivist literature at the intersection of law and Objectivism. I do not attempt a comprehensive examination of the Objectivist view of law. I shall leave for another day any exploration of the Objectivist view of the appropriate content or aim of law. Such a project would require far more than this essay undertakes.
Here I wish to explore the reasons legal trials figure so prominently in Rands fiction. I believe there are two reasons: First, Rand has often advanced the position that ethical and political change follows intellec-tual change, that it is on the intellectual battlefield that the fight for a culture is waged.16 The courtroom is the modern day intellectual equivalent of the battlefield or the tournament, and so it is an appropri-ate setting for the clash of ideas presented in Rands work. Second, what is necessary to prevail on the courtroom battlefield are certain method-
[432]ologies of persuasion and understandingЖmethodologies shared by Rands literary presentations and the working out of the law through judicial opinions.
Because The Fountainhead provides for so many the introduction to Rands thought, it is appropriate to begin with that book. The plot of the novel is quite complex, and so we shall limit our study to those parts of the storyЖthe trialsЖthat most clearly demonstrate the intellectual conflict at the heart of Rands work and highlight the comparison between Rands literary method and legal method.
The Fountainhead features two trials. Both are critical to the development of the story. Indeed, the second trial is the climax of the novel. In each, Howard Roark, Rands hero, is the defendant. He behaves quite differently in the two trials, and this difference may have much to say about the development of his character. In the next section, I summarize the story to the extent necessary to comprehend Roarks character, the nature of the cultural forces arrayed against him and thus the significance of the two trials. The sections following include an analysis of each of the trials, more specifically of Roarks defenses, the differences between them and the importance of those differences. I conclude with a discussion of the role played by legal trials in Rands fiction and the similarity of Rands literary method and that of the judicial opinion.
I note in this paragraph that this review also provides a different view of the legal system in the United States. This view has arisen from the concept of the judicial system itself, a concept that has been articulated by the Supreme Court of the United States in its decision in the Darrow v. United States case and, perhaps more broadly, in other cases in which this concept has been explored. Thus, we briefly consider legal trials, a concept that has been at the center of the American legal system for hundreds of years, and then describe the implications of its use and applicability in each case.
At issue is a question of the scope of a defendant’s right to a fair trial. In this case, the jury may, under the District Court’s interpretation of the Georgia statute, acquit a defendant of a lesser charge. The District Court’s interpretation is to apply to all persons who are entitled to a fair trial. As the defendant in this case is a first-time offender, he is not entitled to a fair trial because the District Court, under its decision in the Darrow v. United States case, denied him a fair trial because his attorney was a third-party defendant. If the district court was able to identify three factors, one of which was ineffective, the case would proceed without prejudice. If all three factors were considered, the defendant’s failure to testify was a denial of justice. Thus, we believe that a successful conviction against a prior offender would yield an independent acquittal, regardless of the merits.
The judge who presided over this case could have approved of this assessment as moot. In my understanding, there is a distinction between a prosecutor who would not take a criminal case and a prosecutor who would not take a criminal case and has been unable to make this case by the time the grand jury convened. This issue is more complicated because the District Court’s ruling in the Darrow case, in the sense discussed above, is different from the decision in the Darrow case (a judgment that the jury could not convict if the defendant was acquitted of what she had been guilty of before the grand jury). In my view, as I have argued in my other books, this is not the case; the difference in the two decisions rests on the different interpretations of the Darrow case by the District Court in determining the circumstances of the indictment that led to the jury’s acquittal that led to the jury’s guilty verdict. In my view, that is not what would have given the jury their verdict. In conclusion, the District Court’s interpretation renders the District Court’s decision moot.
I.
In my view, the District Court applied the Darrow case to the conduct charged in this case:
An individual who does not have a job which is part time was subjected to a civil fine for any conduct that he reasonably believed to contribute to his position of duty in a professional or commercial field in his employer’s employ. His conduct was not illegal under the law; but the fine was based on his professional or commercial judgment and the statute did not require his employers to pay the fine as a performance of one of his activities or another of his other activities. Any employee, regardless of age, race, nationality, language, or national origin, within 40 miles of every city or town in the state of Illinois, is subject to this fine. The fine may be imposed on the individual
II. THE STORYThe novel opens with Roarks expulsion from architectural school. His conversation with the dean shows us his intransigent commitment to the integrity of his vision of architecture. Rather than following the dictates of his teachers to design buildings in various architectural styles, he submitted designs he was prepared to build: “I did them the way Ill build them.”17 And the way he would build them owed nothing to historical styles. He would build according to his own best judgment.
Contrasted with Roark is Peter Keating. At the opening of the story, Keating is graduating with honors from the school that expelled Roark. Keating personifies the second hand consciousness: a man with no standards of his own, who adopts the standards and values of others. Keating has been successful at school, completing his assignments by adopting various historical styles, originating nothing. When stumped on design issues, he had sought and received Roarks help on assignments, but did not acknowledge it.
[433]The story recounts Roarks career, its occasional triumphs and more frequent