The conflict of The Fountainhead is presented immediately. The Dean of Stanton Institute believes that all great architecture has been done already by the masters of the past. The rules of design come from them; all that modern architects can do is copy. The Dean believes that truth is found in the beliefs of others and that an individual should follow the established route rather than forge a new path. The Dean is a conformist.
Peter Keating is a conformist even more fully than the Dean. He, too, copies from past architects. In addition, Keating grovels before all superiors, agreeing with them in order to win approval. He uses people, leeches off of Roark’s work, and characteristically seeks to meet the expectations of others. He even chose architecture rather than the field he loves—painting—only to satisfy his mother. “Always be what people want you to be,” he tells Roark, codifying his toadying policy into a principle. Keating is a man who refuses to think for himself; he follows, he copies, he obeys. He is utterly dependent on others for his convictions. He permits his life to be dominated by them.
Roark, however, thinks for himself—indeed, part of the book’s meaning is that this phrase is a redundancy. If one thinks, it is necessarily by and for oneself; there is no other way to do it. Roark believes that architecture is a creative field, that it is important to innovate, and that new ideas have far greater value than copies of old ones. His defense of the freethinking mind is eloquent and to the point: “Why is it so important—what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right so long as it’s not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic—and only of addition at that?”
Roark upholds independence—the importance of a man thinking and acting for himself; in opposition to dependence—any form of an individual allowing his thought and life to be controlled by others. The essence of the book is the contrast and conflict between those who are independent and those who are dependent.
The conflict between the dependent and the independent takes place in different forms. One such form is the struggle between an innovator and the entrenched beliefs of a conservative society. Cameron and Roark have new ideas in architecture. They seek to build skyscrapers in an era when people have seen only two-story frame houses; they want to build with such new materials as glass, plastics, and light metals when people are accustomed only to wood and bricks. The battle Cameron and Roark fight against a society committed to following tradition is similar to the real-life struggle of such innovative modern designers as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
But Ayn Rand’s thesis applies more broadly to the world rather than simply to architecture. History abounds with examples of great thinkers with brilliant new ideas who were opposed by the very societies that most benefited from them. Socrates was executed for the “crime” of philosophizing. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo threatened with torture for defending the heliocentric worldview in opposition to the geocentric view held by the Catholic Church. Darwin was attacked by religious Fundamentalists for his theory of evolution, and Scopes was jailed in Tennessee for teaching it. Inventors and discoverers of knowledge like Robert Fulton, Louis Pasteur, and the Wright brothers were denounced and their inventions rejected by many. Roark says, in his climactic courtroom address, that: “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. . . . The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. . . . But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered, and they paid. But they won.” At this level of meaning, The Fountainhead is an impassioned defense of the innovator against the tradition-bound society that rejects him.
The word fountainhead means original source, as in the fountainhead of a river. Expressed in one form, the theme of the book is that the independent, reasoning mind is the original source of all human progress and prosperity. It is only men with new ideas who discover a way to make weapons for hunting, who discover ways to grow crops and domesticate livestock, who build the first homes and cities. The men who follow established ideas aren’t the ones who invent automobiles, electric lighting systems, or airplanes. It is not the social followers who cure lethal diseases; it is only men of independent judgment.
