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.
Keep my questions about Eddie in mind...he has an obvious role in the book, what you think about him so far is accurate. I’d be interested to hear what you think of him and his fate later.
The introductory thread has reached 310 posts, which is wonderful by FR standards. The Chapter 1 thread reached 141 posts before petering out, which is respectable.
The book is a genuine page-turner with a few dead spots along the way -- and one huge dead spot toward the end. It's occurred to me that perhaps I should accelerate the pace in order to maintain the momentum and keep the members of our FReeper Book Club interested. So I have 3 options:
I'm interested in feedback before charging ahead.
It’s especially ironic, as Greenspan is a disciple of Rand, and was a member of her inner circle.
Two chapters / week, please!
As a full time grad student, part-time instructor, I’d go for 1 chapter per week, but if it’s two, I’ll try to keep up.
Just got the book today, so I have a bit of catching up to do
bump
I working off of memory from reading it last summer, so a faster pace would be fine by me. The idea of adding the next chapter as the previous thread peters out sounds like a good idea. You can always slow it down if people havce trouble keeping up.
For the record, I think I read the whole thing in about three weeks the last time.
I like the idea of once a week. It makes the postings at a predictable time (and the choice of beginning of weekend works for me) and gives me a week to mull over the discussion.
If the concensus is that one a week is too slow, an adaptable posting schedule is appealing. I’d vote for post when the previous thread wanes.
In any case, I’d say give the once a week pace some time before making a change.
I’m still playing catch up.
I’ll go along for the ride.
I’m struck by the similarities rereading this book, especially today.
Taxman Bravo Zulu!
Thanks for hosting this thread — I may not post on it very FRequently, but I’ll Lurk ‘N Learn, if you don’t mind.
AS is my all time favorite book, and my I am saddened beyond words to see so many of the prognostications Ms. Rand made 50 years ago becoming factual.
Perhaps with increased awareness of the dangers of Socialism, we can begin to right the ship of state. If not for us, then for our children and grandchildren.
We’ll need a lot of help, and this may be a starting place.
This image strikes me as the core of the problems of society in this book (and by extension today's society). The tree sheltered Eddie as a child and the discovery that it was actually rotten at the core and was going to fail sooner or later is a metaphor for our society. People are consumed with appearance, not substance. Pop doesnt order a new typewriter because no matter how 'new' it may be, inside it is trash.
Moral rot, like the tree's core, is a bit harder to pinpoint...When did the tree begin to rot? At what point could it have been saved? When did our country begin to rot? At what point can we be saved?
I like option 3 because it’s more flexible.
Your statement jogged something in my memory. A few years ago, FReeper RobRoy, who is a member of our Puget Sound FReeper Chapter, once described the vista of downtown Seattle as seen from his office as a veneer of sparkle and glitter with nothing but corruption underneath. I'm paraphrasing, but I think I've captured the sentiment. That ties into your interpretation of the tree and also the unrepaired spire.
You pretty much nailed it.
I consider our current western culture to be a gold plated garbage can.
Publius, how the heck are you?!
We should get together before I move to central Kentucky.
I like the one or two chapters a week.
I’m reading the book now. I will sure be checking these sites to see what the others have to say.
***Post a new chapter thread whenever the momentum of the previous thread has lagged.***
This is my vote.
Hi Pub,
I vote for keeping it to 1 chapter a week. Folks that are working and need family time might drop out if the pace was too rapid.
I personally, although I have the time, like keeping it a little slow and relaxed.
I like two chapters per week, with the thread starting on a set day (like Saturday) each week. But I’ll do whatever.
Thanks again for putting this together!
I like option 3
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