FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Immovable Movers

A Publius Essay | 7 February 2009 | Publius

[Publius]

Part I: Non-Contradiction
Chapter IV: The Immovable Movers

Synopsis

Dagny fails to get a straight answer from the president of the United Locomotive Works as to when she will get her diesel engines and what is the source of the delay. There is even a hint she is being impolite by asking these questions.

Upon returning to the office, Eddie Willers tells her that McNamara of Cleveland has gone out of business and disappeared.

Dagny walks home through the streets of New York, and along the way she encounters signs of the times. First, there is a shop where a radio speaker is broadcasting a classical music concert with a piece that is both atonal and pointless. Then a book store advertises a novel as “the penetrating study of a businessman’s greed.” A theater shows a movie that is trivial. A couple leaves a nightclub drunk and staggering.

Arriving at her midtown apartment, Dagny puts on a recording of Richard Halley’s Fourth Concerto, which leads to a flashback on the life and career of the composer who had disappeared eight years earlier after the triumph of his opera “Phaeton”. Reading the newspaper, she stumbles upon a picture of Francisco d’Anconia, in town at his suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel for the purpose of dating a hat check girl and eating at a famous deli. Dagny drops the newspaper and silently sobs.

Jim Taggart awakens past noon to the sound of Betty Pope cleaning up in the bathroom after a night of meaningless sex. He brags to Betty that at this afternoon’s board meeting he will put Dagny in her place. He is interrupted by a hysterical phone call from Mexico. The People’s State of Mexico has not only nationalized Francisco’s San Sebastian Mines but Taggart Transcontinental’s San Sebastian Line.

Jim puts the best face possible on this development at the board meeting. He takes credit for running substandard service with old equipment so that the Mexican government could not confiscate any useful assets of the railroad. Delegating blame, he asks the board to request the resignations of the consultant who recommended building the line and the railroad’s Mexican agent.

Upon returning to his office, Jim finds Orren Boyle waiting for him. Francisco has lost $15 million in the nationalization, and Jim and Orren want to find out how he plans to recover their investments. Jim asks for a meeting with Francisco only to be told that Francisco does not deign to meet with him because Jim bores him.

The National Alliance of Railroads passes an Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule aimed at curbing “destructive competition”. Railroads defined as newcomers to an area serviced by a senior railroad must shut down within nine months. They can instead build in “blighted areas” where there is no need for rail service because “the prime purpose of a railroad was public service, not profit.” Major railroads, however, were entitled to public support to help survive. Dan Conway of the Phoenix-Durango Railroad, the intended victim of the rule, shuffles out of the meeting chamber demoralized.

Jim brags to Dagny that he has taken Conway out of the game, and Dagny is furious. She goes to Conway and offers to help him against the looters, but he demurs, pointing out that the majority has made its decision and he doesn’t have the right to buck it considering the tenor of the times. “Who is John Galt?” he asks. Conway tells Dagny that she needs to get the Rio Norte Line fixed up because it’s the only lifeline keeping Ellis Wyatt and the businessmen of Colorado going.

Returning to her office, she finds Ellis Wyatt himself barging in on her. He gives Dagny an ultimatum: in nine months time, either the railroad gives him the service he requires or he will take it down with him when its failure destroys him. Dagny tells him, “You will get the transportation you need, Mr. Wyatt.”

Dagny meets with Hank Rearden at his mill, asking him for a nine month delivery schedule for Rearden Metal rather than twelve, and Rearden agrees. He enjoys charging Dagny more for the rail, but Dagny has no problem with that. This is business, and she is not a moocher. The intent was for Colorado to save the railroad, but now the railroad must save Colorado. Hank sees their role as saving the country from its own lunacy, a lunacy that just has to be temporary. They understand each other: “We haven’t any spiritual goals or qualities. All we’re after is material things.” Dagny senses there will be a problem about that.

Railroads, Regulation and Competition

The early years of railroading saw competition that was vicious. It was not just that railroad men fought each other, they sought the aid of government in their battles. As soon as an operator of sufficient size built, operated and stabilized a line, he either acquired trackage rights over the line of a competitor, making him an ally, or acquired the competitor outright. This is how networks were built and America’s major railroads emerged.

In dealing with customers, railroads were predatory. This was standard behavior in the era after the War Between the States, a war in which American industry had defeated American plantation agriculture. Ellis Wyatt exclaims, “You expect to feed off me while you can and to find another carcass to pick dry after you have finished mine.” Wyatt is describing the world of Atlas Shrugged, but he could just as easily have been describing the second half of the 19th Century.

There is a saying in Buddhism known as the Law of Karma: “The good or bad you do in a given lifetime will come back to you in that life or a future one.” Americans prefer the pithier and more Protestant, “What goes around, comes around.” The predatory behavior of America’s railroads led to the Granger Movement which favored nationalization of the railroads. Outrage reached sufficient levels during the Cleveland Administration that Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the railroads.

Once a commission is created to regulate something, it takes about two decades before the regulated gain enough influence to become the regulators. This is a natural process, a revolving door that circulates executives from regulated industries, lawyers, lobbyists, politicians and regulators themselves. On occasion it also involves the passing of cash. Over time the ICC became the tool by which major railroads kept competitors out of the game by building a bureaucratic structure impossible for any but the best legal minds to penetrate. As long as railroads were the key movers of people and goods, this structure provided stability. But it failed as soon as real competition emerged.

By the early 20th Century, the internal combustion engine prompted states and counties to build roads to make space for all the cars pouring out of Henry Ford’s plant. After World War I, this began in earnest and increased exponentially during the Depression when the federal government created make-work jobs building bridges and highways.

The building of roads created space for trucks to compete with trains. At first, America’s highway network was a collection of two-lane roads, and trucks were not able to compete well for long distance hauling. But the Interstate Highway System changed all that. Antiquated work rules, featherbedding and deferred maintenance led to America’s railroads tearing out much of their physical plant in the Sixties. Wall Street believed it might even be in the best interest of investors to shut down the railroads and move everything by truck over the new subsidized freeway network. Railroads not only didn’t earn the cost of their capital, they were losing their shirts.

It was the Penn Central bankruptcy of 1970 that provided the reality check. The Penn Central, created in 1968 by the merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads, crashed so catastrophically that it took down all the railroads in the northeastern US.

The Penn Central’s (ex-Pennsylvania) Northeast Corridor was the single most important piece of transportation infrastructure in the area – just as important as the New Jersey Turnpike – and it ended up in the hands of the government’s Amtrak, which had been created to preserve nationwide passenger rail service after the railroads had given up on it. Passenger trains had been subsidized by the Post Office via the mail contract, but in 1967 that had been shifted to the airlines. Government ownership was good for the Northeast Corridor but ended up being a major policy mistake.

The rest of the railroad infrastructure in the northeastern US ended up in the hands of the government’s Conrail, which hemorrhaged money until the railroad sold off much of its branch network to short line operators. In 1986, the government sold Conrail back to Wall Street, and a decade later CSX and Norfolk Southern carved up Conrail between them.

The creation of a large number of short line railroads was one of the most important developments in railroading in the second half of the century. The Class I railroads had not been able to make money on these branch lines, but short line operators provided the kind of customer service the major railroads had long since forgotten. With short line operators making these branches profitable, the Class I’s could turn their attention to hook-and-haul operations on major rail trunks.

In 1980, Rep. Harley Staggers (D-WV) wrote a bill that would replace the ICC with the Surface Transportation Board and finally deregulate the railroads. Following its enactment, by the end of 1980 all major railroads were profitable again. This set off a wave of mergers that is still ongoing. Competition is stiff, and each railroad feels a need to chivy its competitors out of every last available scrap of cargo – while the trucking industry continues to eat the railroads’ lunch.

Until recently, America’s railroads had been loath to accept government money to fix up their infrastructure because of a terrible fear of Open Access, which the government might demand as its price. This would require the railroads to dispatch the trains of competitors on their tracks for a fee.

However, Norfolk Southern has accepted government money to crown-mine the tunnels on its Norfolk-to-Chicago route so they can handle double-stack containers, the latest innovation in railroading. NS is also looking at government money to expand the capacity of its I-81 line from Harrisburg to Chattanooga to take trucks off that saturated interstate, and CSX is looking for money to fix up its lines that parallel I-95 and I-85 in the South. (It’s fascinating that the states of the Old Confederacy are far ahead of their brethren in understanding the role of rail in hauling cargo efficiently.)

Today there exists the Association of American Railroads, which lobbies before Congress. It has none of the monolithic power of the National Alliance of Railroads, but there is a sentence in the book that refers to laws enacted by the National Legislature that the alliance appears to be enforcing. Much like the old ICC, its practical goal is to protect current operators against upstarts, but it’s a voluntary association. Dan Conway was a signatory, and he believes that he must, if necessary, sacrifice himself for the greater good.

Some Discussion Topics

1. Had the diesel locomotives come from the Richards Locomotive Works, run by the tall, dark and handsome Matt Richards, we would have had a different turn of the plot. But hiding behind the corporate name United Locomotive Works we see more of what we’ve seen from Associated Steel. Why does the owner believe that Dagny is being impolite in asking where her locomotives are?
2. Rand is expert at using metaphors and symbols, something she may have picked up from Edgar Allen Poe. So far, we’ve seen a rotted out tree, a bar on the upper floor of a skyscraper that is decked out like a cellar, and now a precision machine rusting away on the property of the United Locomotive Works. Of what significance is this symbol? How does it relate to its predecessors?
3. Dagny’s walk through Manhattan to her apartment reads like a tour of one of the circles of Dante’s hell. It opens a window onto the society of America’s greatest city and its influence over the rest of the country. Let’s take those four images apart and see what makes them tick.
4. We are developing a body count. Richard Halley disappeared eight years ago. Owen Kellogg left the railroad to vanish in Chapter 1. Now McNamara, the Cleveland rail contractor, has gone out of business and disappeared. Let’s build a list and watch it grow.
5. Woody Allen once said, “Sex without love is a meaningless experience – but as meaningless experiences go, it’s one of the best.” Why can’t Jim Taggart enjoy his meaningless experience?
6. The threat of the railroad’s Mexican property being nationalized was foremost in Dagny’s mind, which is why she left the railroad’s worst assets available for the looters to confiscate. Orren Boyle insisted it would never happen and Jim bought those excuses. When nationalization occurred, Jim took credit for Dagny’s quick thinking, then delegated the blame for his own failures to two fall guys who were summarily fired. Is this any different from what happens today in the offices of America’s largest corporations? What does this say about the current state of American business?
7. Dan Conway echoes Jim Taggart’s statement that it’s not right to buck the will of the majority. In his case, however, Conway is the victim of that will. Examine the holes in Conway’s logic when he gives in. Later we will hear the expression “the sanction of the victim”, but it doesn’t hurt to introduce the concept now.
8. Dan Conway is the sixth person to say, “Who is John Galt?” Contrast his use of the expression to his five predecessors.
9. We’ve seen Dagny interact with Owen Kellogg, Eddie Willers and Jim Taggart. But her interaction with Dan Conway is different; we see her emotions on display. Her interaction with Hank Rearden is of a different order of magnitude entirely; they are of like mind and joust not just as competitors, but as friends. What do we learn about Dagny?
10. ”All that lunacy is temporary. It can’t last. It’s demented, so it has to defeat itself.” Hank believes that he, Dagny and other like minded people will save the country from itself. But just how long can such lunacy last? What is the fatal flaw in their argument?

Next Saturday: The Climax of the d’Anconias

[Mom MD]

I fight to give my best exactly because I am ultimately working for Christ, not for who signs my paycheck. Christians are commanded to be salt and light in the world, not to work for perfect employers (and there are none by the way) Having said that, I would do nothing at work that would violate my conscience or bring dishonor to my Lord. What corporation is too evil to work for? I’m afraid that is a matter for personal conscience, but no matter who one works for one can be a light shining in the darkness.

[meyer]

Not even a teenager has shown up. I wondered if they were all being raised in a commune-type brainwashing camp.

Like Public Schools?

[Radix]

Perhaps you might consider the particular book titled “Atlas Shrugged” the next time that you decide to pontificate on a thread that is supposed to be about a book titled “Atlas Shrugged.”

[SuperLuminal]

"What prompts people to not gave a damn about their jobs? Why is there no fear of retribution from management? "

IMHO, this mindset is the clear outcome of a strategy proposed in the late 19th century by the Fabians and finally implemented successfully during the past 40 years. That strategy being to gain control of the Nation's education system as a means to peacefully force socialism on a society.

The steps were clear:

• Create a government education agency that, in effect, eliminates the "public" school system through purse-string management;
  
• Break up the concept of local/neighborhood schools in order to eliminate the student's sense of "community belonging" by black-robed-cleric-ordered busing;
  
• Have the government schools homogenize the thinking of the student population so that no one wants to be seen as being "smarter" than the others;
  
• Staff the government schools with socialist-leaning teachers who have been churned out by the socialist-leaning universities;
• Eliminate all competitive spirit (physically and mentally) in children beginning in kindergarten and reinforce it K-12;
• Allow children to sue their "birth" parents...but not their "real" parent...the government;
• Have the government school system hide, from the "birth" parents, non-essentials such as birth control use, abortions, and, in some cases, sexual assault;
• Continually tell the government's children that their "birth" parents are wrong on the cultural and moral issues that used to be the purview of the "birth" parents;
• Inform "birth" parents that they cannot interfere with the government school social-engineering agenda; and, to make it perpetually worse,
• Have these brain-dead children go on to the socialist-leaning universities, graduate, and come back to the government schools to teach another generation. (Moronic serfs begetting more moronic serfs!)

So....we are seeing the 2nd or 3rd generation of ready-made serfs. No self-respecting serf would care about the job he/she has. In fact, in a socialist society, no serf really cares or worries about the consequences of disagreement with the boss.

When competition is bred out of a society, as has been done in this country for 40+ years: things fail, science crumbles, infrastructure rots, the entire moral fabric decays, and the government ruling class gets stronger and stronger.

So who is John Galt? "Who cares!" is the subliminal response.

[WVNight]

I can definately relate to this. You can probaly figure out why. Innovation is just plain gone now.

[WVNight]

That’s interesting. Of the three that were mentioned in the original post. One company is struggling with poor upper management decisions. One is ran by an egotist surrounded by a never ending line of yes men. One likes to lay claim to being humanistic. While the innovation that it was once famous for is bieng weaned away from the company.

[Tired of Taxes]

Welcome. I first heard about Ayn Rand in an economics college course in the mid-1980’s. When I heard she favored pure, free market capitalism and a laissez-faire government, I became a fan, without knowing much more about her.

In the late ‘90’s, I remember following discussions on atheist forums about Objectivism.

Then, in recent years, I finally watched/listened to an interview with Rand. Some of her comments were disturbing, and now that I’ve read her book, Atlas Shrugged, I can honestly say I’m not a Randian.

But, I agree with you that there is much to learn by reading her work. IMHO, her theories are not original. This book only reaffirms much of what I already knew and believed, but I’m glad she put it in writing. I disagree with a small bit of what she puts forth; then again, no one agrees with anyone 100%.

[Bob]

Easy - for all their good, they have done bad. Boeing supplies weapons that kill, Dupont has supplied materials used in war, Dow has killed people through faulty safety precautions.

So, supplying our military with weapons is somehow a bad thing to you?

As far as I'm concerned, doing that is a good thing. If it weren't for the efforts of Boeing and Dupont supplying our military during WWII, we wouldn't be communicating right now, since you'd be speaking German and I'd be speaking Japanese.

BTW, if you're referring to the Bhopal incident, that was caused by a subsidiary of Union Carbide rather than Dow.

[Tired of Taxes]

The chief problems I had with this otherwise delightful and empowering work was it's notable lack of crowds and children.... almost never are there any children in the book, except in flashbacks to Dagny's youth, etc.

I noticed the same, as I was reading the book. I don't want to spoil the story by talking about if and when children are mentioned as the story continues. (Others here have not read the book completely.) But, even at this chapter, I was wondering about children.

My thinking was: Rand didn't have children, did she? Children are important to me, and they probably would play a prominent role in a story I wrote, if I were a writer, because I'm a parent. But, when I was single, I didn't think much about children, either, and I probably would not have placed them prominently in a story, if I'd written one at that time. So, I suspect Rand is writing from that point of view, as someone who isn't a parent.

But, this question about children extends deeper, and it brings me to question something Rand puts forth later. But, I'm waiting for later chapters before bringing it up. I don't want to spoil the story for anyone.

[CottonBall]

Exactly like public schools - but more like boarding schools where they can’t go home to be reeducated by their parents.

[Tired of Taxes]

When nationalization occurred, Jim took credit for Dagny’s quick thinking, then delegated the blame for his own failures to two fall guys who were summarily fired. Is this any different from what happens today in the offices of America’s largest corporations?

Nope! At this point in the story, I remembered all the similar situations I'd encountered in workplaces.

What does this say about the current state of American business?

Too many employees are looking out for themselves, with little to no consideration for their employer nor the quality of their work. A job well done is not their top priority. The appearance of doing a good job is what's most important to them. Jim Taggart represents many executives and employees in management positions.

According to my last employer, "it's hard to find good people." I can relate to this story about a railroad. I worked for an airline, and later I worked for a family-owned business in the travel industry. At this point in the story, I found myself relating most to Eddie Willers (however, I'm female). In my last position, my employer was the woman who truly ran the company, even though officially she was second in command, just like Dagny. I was her trusted assistant for years. Most of the other employees at that company were good, too, but there were times when they were dishonest, passing the blame, like Jim Taggart.

[patj]

I struggle with contributing any worthwhile substance to this discussion. I have never done well with symbolism. Give it to me straight, say what you mean, mean what you say, don't dress it up in unnecessary verbage. That being said, and referring to the rusted engine, as someone has pointed out, is representative of letting good ideas die. Or, maybe, no good deed goes unpunished.

I remember reading of someone being in a restaurant in the old Soviet Union and waiting to be served while waitresses stood around and talked. They were going to get paid anyway, why work. Also, while working summer jobs, I worked for our city. Everyone there was there because of who they knew, everyone figured they couldn't be fired because of who they knew. Very inefficient people. Others I knew worked summers in union jobsites and were told, "Don't work so hard, do you want to make us look bad?". I think of all this when I read this book because hard work, chance taking, innovation that should be admired is punished and risk-avoidance, little effort and laziness is rewarded. I find it hard to read this book for great lengths of time because it sounds so much like what is going on around us, that it becomes an overload, and I need to get away from it for awhile.

[SoftballMominVA]

Look, you and others are reading way, WAY too much into my comment. This thread is not a referendum on Dow or Dupont, it is a discussion on the book Atlas Shrugged. The question asked concerned why people didn’t seem to give a damn and I am trying to enter the idea that they don’t believe in what they are doing and are just there for a paycheck - that perhaps something in the back of their minds sees what they are doing as antithical to their moral conscience. I could have said McDonalds or Google or GE and made the same point but I went with the easier defense contractors.

This thread is about Atlas Shrugged not about your feelings as to whether or not I offended you, or whether they have done ‘good’ somewhere in there past - which I have twice offered as a given.

My question still is on the table — Is the reason some people do not appear to care about their jobs because somewhere they feel their corporation does ‘bad’ and therefore they are just getting a paycheck and at what point do you bow out?

[SoftballMominVA]

As far as children go.....I wonder if it is a sign of the times in which the book was written. For better or worse, we are now a child-centered society. I doubt that any major piece of literature could come out of our time period without at least significant mention of children or pets as a stand-in for children.

Notice this book also mentions very very little of anything of a soft, cuddly nature. No one is mentioned as having a pet or of anything gentle. There are adults that do the stand in for children, and they are there for us to ridicule

I think Ayn purposely leaves out any type of tenderness or presents it in only the most adult of lights also because this is an adult book - it is not there to evoke smiles or light moments brought on by big eyes and cute expressions. Without ruining the book for those that havent finished it, there will be moments coming that one will really scratch their heads at the lack of mention of children and I think it is partly deliberate and partly a result of the adult centered society in which the book was written.

[M Kehoe]

$

5.56mm

[florida grl]

Could you add me to your ping list? I’m reading this book now and these discussions are helping me get more out it.
Thanks

[gracie1]

Another point that I’d like to bring up is when Dagney is walking through NYC.

The meaningless symphony that is playing. Now I realize that personal tastes vary greatly, but much of what passes for “art” these days is pointless, destructive, empty and celebrates the vile and vulgar. I can’t remember if is Alinskys Rules for Radicals, or if it was the oft quoted list tasks to achieve a communist takeover of the US that had as one of its tenants the destruction of art as an expresssion of the beauty in life.

Next is the novel that denigrates the greed of the businessman. The popular culture currently elevates the trait of altruism. Now as a Christian, we are obliged to tend to the basic needs of those who are truly helpless. That is what Christian charity is about. Secular altruism/charity is quite another thing. Secular altruism is the confiscation of what is mine to those someone else has deemed worthy (usually a member of a protected victim class). We see this in the countless “human interest stories” in the newspapers. The most outrageous one I’ve seen lately was the one in a Detroit paper about the 28 year old woman with 10 kids, and all of the difficulties she encounters.

The next item is the trivial movie playing in the theater. Now I enjoy theatrical escapism as much as the next person, but again like the music playing from the radio, much of popular culture today is either vapid or destructive.

They man and the woman staggering from the nightclub represent how people, when confronted with such a meaningless existence, simply resort to feeding their fleeting appetites, no matter vulgar or self-destructive.

[Publius]

Excellent work!

[gracie1]

The competition of the railroads you discussed brought something else to mind. The railroads represent an older technology. The auto, the truck and the highway represent new innovation. People and businesses no longer had to rely on the railroads, with there schedules and fixed system of tracks. Travel was now at the convenience of the shipper, the traveler, the businessman. I can get up and go anywhere I want, whenever I want thanks to the interstate highway system. The railroads had to go through an agonizing restructuring lasting decades to return to a profitable business model.

Compare this to our system to transporting something even more important, ideas. The old system was the print media and the broadcast establishment. They alone decided what was reported on, how it was reported, and how it was disseminated. Enter first talk radio, and now the internet with the blogosphere. No longer are we dependent on ABC news, the NY Times. We are free to report, opine upon, discuss and disseminate ideas as we all see fit. It is truly the free market place of ideas. And the old media is facing the same fate the railroads faced in the mid 20th century. Either face the competition, find a niche and compete as best you can, or face destruction. That is why the next battleground will be free speech. Shutting down talk radio, then regulating the internet.

[Radix]

"I remember reading of someone being in a restaurant in the old Soviet Union and waiting to be served while waitresses stood around and talked."

When I was in the Army overseas, I spent a month or so as an "Augmentee" for the APO. I was assigned to the "Locater" area. We forwarded mail to Military who had PCSd.

I never before witnessed such a slovenly group of Troopers in my entire Enlistment period. A bunch of layabouts with the cushiest MOS I'd ever imagined. I could not believe my own eyes at was going on there.

After the Christmas Season was over, I went back to my own Unit. I was told later that Company was attempting to get me reassigned to the APO permanently. It was tempting, but I declined. Apparently the vast majority of "Augmentees" were chomping at the bit to get such an EZ assignment.

My point is, human beings do things because of their diverse interests. People are indolent generally because of their upbringing or their individual level of intelligence. IMHO!

A person (people) does themselves a favor by at least attempting to assimilate the symbolism of a great work.

In the world that you seem to prefer, there would be no such things as Pi and the wheel would never have been invented.

I do not intend to seem insulting, I am simply intrigued by your expressed lack of interest in the sublime.