Posted on 01/17/2009 11:27:40 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
“Who is John Galt?” The words come from the mouth of a bum to Eddie Willers, as he walks down the streets of New York. Willers notes the un-maintained spire of a building, whose gold leaf has pealed off and never been fixed. It’s September 2.
Eddie enters the office of Jim Taggart, president of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad (“From ocean to ocean!”) to inform him that there has been another wreck on the Rio Norte Line. The track is shot, and people are giving up on using the line. Jim says that eventually there will be new track. “It’s a...temporary national condition.” Eddie points out that Orren Boyle of Associated Steel has failed to deliver rail for the past thirteen months. Jim forbids Eddie to approach Rearden Steel. The Phoenix-Durango Railroad is eating Taggart’s lunch, and Taggart is failing to serve Wyatt Oil, which has brought the Colorado oil fields back to life. Jim is furious that all Wyatt cares about is money and that his oil has “dislocated the economy of the entire country...How can we have any security or plan anything if everything changes all the time?”
As Eddie leaves Jim’s office, he notes that Pop Harper’s typewriter is broken and has not been fixed. Pop won’t requisition a new one because they’re substandard, and he recites a litany of bankruptcies and mechanical failures in New York. Pop doesn’t care any longer.
We first meet Dagny Taggart in the coach section of the Taggart Comet, not the sleeper section. (The description of Dagny no doubt matches what Ayn Rand wanted to look like; it’s the description of a movie star.) Dagny hears a brakeman whistling a tune that she recognizes immediately as something by Richard Halley, but a piece she hasn’t heard before. The brakeman mentions that it’s Halley Fifth Concerto. Dagny informs him that Halley has only written four concertos. (This is a significant plot point.)
After dozing restlessly, Dagny awakes to discover that the train has been shunted onto a siding at a red block signal for about an hour. The Comet has never been late before, but the crew doesn’t care. Their sole intent is to avoid blame for anything, and they want to wait for somebody else to take responsibility. Dagny orders them to move to the next block signal and stop at the next open office. At the crew’s insistence she agrees to take responsibility.
Arriving in New York, Dagny, with Eddie in attendance, tells Jim that she has ordered from Rearden, not Boyle, to rebuild the Rio Norte Line. Jim is furious but will not take the responsibility for canceling the Rearden order. He whines that it’s unfair to give all the railroad’s business to Rearden just because he produces on schedule. He is horrified when Dagny tell him that the order is for Rearden Metal, not conventional steel. “But...but...but nobody’s ever used it before!” Dagny then turns to Jim’s noble experiment of the San Sebastian Line which Dagny states will be nationalized shortly by People’s State of Mexico. Jim comes unglued. It’s more moral to spend money on an underprivileged nation that never had a chance than to spend it on Ellis Wyatt, who simply wants to make money. “Selfish greed for profit is a thing of the past.”
Dagny interviews Owen Kellogg of the Taggart Terminal Division in order to give him the top spot at the Ohio Division, replacing an incompetent who is a personal friend of Jim’s. But Kellogg won’t take the job, resigns from Taggart Transcontinental and nothing Dagny says can keep him on the railroad. When Dagny asks why, Kellogg answers, “Who is John Galt?” Thus the plot is set in motion.
New York and the Railroads
New York was a railroader’s nightmare in the19th Century. The Hudson River was an insurmountable barrier. Approaching from the west, the Pennsylvania, Reading, Baltimore & Ohio, Jersey Central, Erie, Lackawanna and Lehigh Valley railroads all terminated at Jersey City or Hoboken, and each railroad operated its own private navy to get people across the Hudson to downtown Manhattan. From the east, the Long Island Railroad ended at Brooklyn, and passengers for Manhattan took a ferry across the East River. Only the New York Central and the New Haven had direct access to New York into midtown’s Grand Central Station, a wooden structure built in 1871.
After the War Between the States, the Pennsylvania made two attempts to bridge the Hudson, one killed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the other by its exorbitant cost. A tunnel project was impossible using the technology available at the time. A coal-fired steam locomotive hauling a passenger train under the Hudson from New Jersey would arrive in New York with its passengers and crew dead from asphyxiation. This could cause problems with return business.
In 1899, Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt visited Paris to see his sister, the famous impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, and while in Paris he dropped by the newly opened Gare du Quai Dorsai. This station had been built for electric railroading with an approach via a tunnel under the Seine. Cassatt saw the solution to his Hudson River problem.
Unlike the New York Central and the Great Northern, two railroads that were run under a cult of personality, the Pennsylvania Railroad was an arch-conservative company run by faceless gray men in Philadelphia who just happened to know how to run a railroad. It was the most financially successful railroad in America, and its bonds were as good as gold. The Pennsy never did anything without a lot of planning and advance work; the quality of the accountants in its Planning Department was legendary. In 1900, Cassatt acquired the Long Island Railroad, put the main stem on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue underground and electrified most of the system, causing its ridership to double.
In 1906, Cassatt announced that the Pennsylvania Railroad would build two tubes suspended in the Hudson River silt. These tunnels would carry electric trains powered by DC third rail, which would run from a location in the New Jersey meadowlands (Manhattan Transfer) into the new Pennsylvania Station in midtown Manhattan. This station would be designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White and would be modeled on the Basilica of Constantine and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, creating a true temple of the American railroad. This architectural monument opened in 1910 and was one of America’s great railroad stations until its demolition in 1963. Its replacement, Penn Station, is an underground warren sitting under the latest version of Madison Square Garden. The destruction of Pennsylvania Station created an uproar, was considered an act of corporate vandalism and was directly responsible for the movement to preserve America’s great railway stations.
With the opening of Pennsylvania Station, the railroad hooked the Long Island Railroad in by tunneling under the East River and also provided a connection to the New Haven Railroad via a high-rise bridge over the Hell Gate in Queens.
The Pennsy’s arch-rival, the New York Central, had a terrible accident in 1902 when two steam trains collided in the Park Avenue Cut, killing many. New York City banned steam trains on the island of Manhattan, and the New York Central was dragged kicking and screaming into the electric age, along with its partner, the New Haven.
Upset by the presence of a greater temple of railroading, the New York Central built a station to replace the 1871 wooden structure, which had become rather dowdy with age. Atop two levels of underground tracks would stand the New York Central’s temple of railroading, Grand Central Terminal, which opened in 1913. (Corporate egos!)
In Rand’s book, there is only one great railroad station in New York, Taggart Terminal, which has characteristics of both Pennsylvania and Grand Central. As a combination of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, it’s as though Nat Taggart created the Penn Central a century before 1968.
America and the Railroads
Today there are seven Class I railroads in North America: Union Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Kansas City Southern, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. Only the Canadian National is truly transcontinental, although the Canadian Pacific has achieved a degree of transcontinental status by purchasing trackage rights on the CSX in the US. The Kansas City Southern is more Mexican than American, and the remainder are large regional carriers. All were created by a series of mergers and acquisitions spanning nearly 150 years.
At the time of Rand’s book there were a vast number of Class I railroads, but none were transcontinental.
In Atlas Shrugged, there are two transcontinental railroads: Taggart Transcontinental dominates the northern half of the US and the Atlantic Southern dominates the south.
Railroad baron Nat Taggart founded his railroad in the 19th Century, and it was transcontinental in scope from the very beginning, not achieving that status by a process of slow merger and acquisition. This is a serious departure from railroad history. It would appear that after creating the Penn Central and buying a whole slew of other lines, Taggart created his own version of the Union Pacific to go transcontinental. Taggart did not rely on Lincoln’s government land grants for financing but did it the hard way, which makes his model the real life James Jerome Hill, the man who built the Great Northern. Like Hill, Taggart worked his way up from the bottom in railroading and was not a financial operator.
One story about Jim Hill might give an insight into Nat Taggart. Jay Gould had been using political leverage in DC to prevent Hill from laying tracks across Montana. So Hill charged into the Western Union Building in New York where Gould’s fortress of an office was located, lifted Gould bodily out of his chair and dangled him by the ankles outside his office window six stories above Wall Street until Gould agreed to call off his lobbyists. (They made ‘em tough in those days!)
Dagny Taggart and Richard Halley
Classical musicians and people who are heavily involved in classical music have a technique, called “dittersdorfing”, where they hear a piece with which they are unfamiliar and guess the composer. It is named after Karl von Dittersdorf, a contemporary of Franz Joseph Haydn, whose music sounds a lot like Haydn, but lacks Haydn’s facility with musical architecture.
In the book, there is no indication that Dagny Taggart had ever taken music lessons or that her interest in classical music extended beyond contemporary composer Richard Halley. Yet a brakeman on a train whistles a melody, and Dagny immediately recognizes it as Halley, but unpublished Halley. For an old classical music person like myself, this is a stretch.
Some Discussion Topics
Question for our members: Should this thread go up next Saturday or sooner? Give it some time for thought and get back to me.
Wow - the fall colors are gorgeous. (Yes, I got distracted from the moral of your story!) I see your point, but I think human nature makes it hard to keep working for one’s own satisfaction over the years only. Otherwise, socialism would’ve been more successful.
“This is something that I am seeing in the current economic meltdown: nobody thought critically as they purchased a home that was 10-20 times their annual salary (if they actually had a salary!)”
The government forcing banks to make loans to people who the banks know would not be capable of paying back is just like later scenes in Atlas Shrugged. It is worthy of a character like Mouches.
"Who is John Galt?"... Is the first sentence to be taken as an inquiry? The reader should entertain the concept that the reference is not to a temporal entity.
"Where" or "What" was not asked about John Galt. The reader is left to wonder where this question could possibly lead.
It is ironic that many are now asking "where is John Galt when you need him?"
Thomas Paine used the "Sunshine Patriot" as a literary tool to distill a complicated argument into a readily recognizable concept for the masses. Is this the same usage?
Would a person embrace or recoil from the thought that they may themselves be John Galt?
It seems clear that Zero plans to use the hype of global warming and control over energy to impose socialism. The appointment of socialist Carol Browner as energy czar confirms my suspicion.
I think what I was trying to say is that just as we have lost the stigma of bearing children out of wedlock, stigma of being rude to others, we have lost the stigma of doing work poorly.
If you have read “The Road to Serfdom”, I think you would know you are on the right track...people forget...
Publius ...... Thanks for the fantastic idea of a Freeper Book Club and especially starting with AS.
Nam Vet
True, but the NY & Harlem lost its independence, while the New Haven hung on. People remember the New Haven, but only true railfans remember the Harlem line as an independent entity.
That is the Midas Mulligan versus Lee Hunsacker business that comes later. I'll be writing an essay in that thread linking Hunsacker to Dennis Kucinich, who as mayor of Cleveland over 30 year ago, was on the cutting edge of all this.
Ping to Chapter 1.
Would a person embrace or recoil from the thought that they may themselves be John Galt?
Here is a heretical thought. If one wanted to identify the man who "stopped the motor of the world", it would be Alan Greenspan, whose policies have led to the near collapse of the easy credit/fiat money (ie., non-gold standard) financial system.
I wonder what Dr. Greenspan would think of that.
FReeper Billthedrill likened Galt's Gulch to the Nordic Valhalla, perhaps as described by German opera composer Richard Wagner. (Billthedrill and I have an ongoing discourse about Wagner, Hitler, and today's Islamic fascists and their fellow travelers in the Left.) Every CO needs a good XO (Army) just as every Skipper needs a good Exec (Navy). Behind every American business success was an XO or Exec without whom things would not have been done properly. (There is a great deal of that in early railroading.) Rand should have saved space for us XO's.
But withhold judgment until we get there. Let the journey unfold. The idea of doing this slowly is to get people to go beyond the plot and dig into the underlay, making comparisons to the mess we're in today.
The term “close enough for government work” is a fine example of how the close tolerances of WW2 have deteriorated into the derogatory slogan it has become.
In my opinion he failed either way you look at it. He failed to provide for future contingencies allowing the system to continue indefinitely and he failed to completely destroy it so there would be an opportunity to start over. As it is now,we are in limbo. Perhaps that is what he would consider success.
How about Rahm Emmanuel’s quote: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do important things you would otherwise avoid.”
Or this headline on Yahoo News:
“Financial burden of homeownership spread unequally”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/housing_thirty_eight_percent
These Remind me of Atlas Shrugged.
well I personally know an administrator who says the opposite -but he’s not a liberal, so there ya go.
he has said though that every now and then you get an academically gifted person who has a terrible time dealing with the kids.
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