Posted on 02/14/2009 11:27:03 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
Eddie hands a newspaper to Dagny; it has a most interesting story. The People’s State of Mexico, upon inspecting the expropriated San Sebastian Mines, discovers that they are devoid of copper and utterly worthless. Dagny asks Eddie to call Francisco at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel for an appointment.
What follows is an extended flashback into the childhood of Dagny, Eddie, Francisco and Jim at the Taggart estate on the Hudson.
Francisco got a job at Taggart Transcontinental before Dagny, working illicitly as a call boy at a station on the Hudson Line. Each intended to eventually run the family business. Unlike those d’Anconias who increased the family holdings by a mere 10%, Francisco’s goal was to double them.
Francisco went to Patrick Henry University of Cleveland, the most distinguished institution of learning left in the world, but Francisco did not find all the courses interesting. He made only two close friends at college. (A major plot point for later!)
One incident shaped the relationship between Dagny and Francisco. When Dagny suggested that she get poor grades in order to be popular, Francisco slapped her – and she liked it.
Dagny began the competition with Francisco by taking a job as night operator on the railroad at a nearby station while only sixteen. She went through life without male admirers, and her idea of a good time was working on the railroad. After a formal ball, she noted that she could have squashed ten of the men she had met. It was in her freshman year at college that Dagny and Francisco became lovers.
Francisco not only went to college, but by playing the stock market he amassed enough money to buy the copper foundry where he had been working secretly at night. Following college, Francisco worked for his father. One night, meeting Dagny in New York, he said, “There’s something wrong with the world.” A few years later he told Dagny not to be astonished by anything he did in the future and asked her to leave the railroad and let it go to hell under Jim’s stewardship. He warned her that the next time they met, she wouldn’t want to see him. Over the years Francisco morphed into a worthless playboy squandering the d’Anconia fortune.
Returning to the present, Dagny goes to Francisco’s room at the hotel and finds him playing with marbles on the floor like a child. Dagny has figured out part of what Francisco intended with the San Sebastian Mines swindle. He has hurt the looters’ government of Mexico and his American investors, but Dagny can’t penetrate to the heart of what he has done.
Dagny administers a shock to Francisco when she brings up the Fifth Concerto of Richard Halley. Francisco avoids a direct answer and says that Halley has stopped composing.
Francisco lays out the reaction of the Mexican government, which had made promises to its people to be delivered by the confiscation of the mines. Now the government has to blame the greedy capitalists. The miners’ town he built was made of shoddy material and will be gone within a year. He has cost the railroad and his investors millions. Taggart Transcontinental will fail, and Ellis Wyatt will be the next to go under. He tells Dagny as she is leaving that she is not ready to hear the reasons behind what he is doing.
The Purpose of This Chapter
We’ve met Dagny, Hank and their enemies. We’ve heard about Francisco, but we’ve never met him. Now we find out about the long history of Dagny and Francisco, both in business and on a personal basis. We also find that Francisco is involved in some kind of project aimed at destroying certain people, companies and countries, but we don’t know why. (This is the book’s plot.)
Landmarks
The Wayne-Falkland Hotel is based upon the real life Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan.
The Taggart estate is based upon one of many Vanderbilt holdings, all of which were built by the descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central. “Commodore” Vanderbilt himself lived modestly in lower Manhattan. Both Vanderbilt and James Jerome Hill were models for Nat Taggart.
Ayn Rand and Sex
There are no children in this book; the plot is about adults and adult matters. It is only in this chapter that we meet our characters as teenagers and we find Francisco and Dagny as lovers.
Francisco’s slapping Dagny after that comment about doing poorly in school to gain popularity requires some history about the period. In that era popularity was considered more important than academic excellence. Smart people weren’t popular, which is why young Ronald Reagan hid his questing mind in the disguise of a backslapping athlete. Even as an adult, Reagan hid his cerebral qualities from others, which is why he was characterized incorrectly by Clark Clifford as an “amiable dunce”. Understanding this in its historical context, Dagny’s comment to Francisco was not totally out of bounds.
However, when she is slapped, Dagny finds that she likes it. There is an undercurrent of precocious sexuality and sadomasochism in that slap. When she and Francisco lose their virginity together, the prose turns purple.
“She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most – to submit. She had no conscious realization of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid – yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him: Don’t ask me for it – oh, don’t ask me – do it!”
This is Rand’s updated version of the “aching need” that appears in The Fountainhead. People who are devoutly religious become queasy at this passage and again when Rand waxes philosophical.
”’Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?’, he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin ... She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man’s lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.”
Rand here disposes of the puritanical branch of Judeo-Christianity in a few well honed sentences. She not only supports the Dagny-Francisco relationship but condemns those who would criticize it in the name of a narrow, outmoded morality. Exceptional people – the Creators – make their own rules, which may well be a tip of the hat to Nietzsche.
But Dagny has had no other partners this far into the story, and it appears that Francisco has not either. Both remain true to each other, defining their own concept of chastity. This elevates sexuality into something sacred and transcendent, which is another theme of the book.
Patrick Henry University
Don’t confuse this fictional school with the very real Patrick Henry College of Purcellville, VA.
One of the most enjoyable Marx Brothers movies was “Horse Feathers”, a 1932 musical comedy that revolves around the football rivalry between Darwin and Huxley colleges. The opening number has Groucho and a chorus of professors singing:
I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway;
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
Colleges of the Twenties were profoundly conservative institutions, hard as that may be to believe today. The concept of academic freedom was by no means guaranteed, be the professor tenured or not. The Great Depression was to change all that, and soon the economic theories of Karl Marx began to replace those of Groucho Marx. The great institutions of the Ivy League led the way.
It would appear that even during the Forties and Fifties, Rand held a low enough opinion of the Ivy League to locate her ideal university in Cleveland, an industrial city not known as a great seat of learning. In fact, the business of Cleveland was manufacturing.
Naming a university dedicated to reason to Patrick Henry, however, is just as problematic as naming a fundamentalist Christian college after the same man, which is what happened in Purcellville. Henry does not fit the stereotype of either a man of objective reason or of religious faith. His life and legacy are far more complicated.
Patrick Henry belongs to the same group as Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams, revolutionaries who lit the flame that George Washington kept from being extinguished. Like Adams, Henry had failed in business many times, but while Adams became a wizard at the art of political propaganda, Henry turned instead to the law. As a lawyer, Henry stood for home rule and economic self-determination, siding with the ancient British tradition of being taxed by one’s own legislators. He further argued that colonial legislatures could not assign that right to Parliament. Because Parliament had long exercised a general right to tax the colonies, Henry’s assertion was considered treasonous.
In addition to the above principles, Henry’s intellectual justification for separation from Britain revolved around corruption. There is a tendency to look at that period of American history and see a halcyon era when corruption didn’t exist. In fact, the colonial governments of early America were every bit as corrupt as some state governments today. Wherever there is a pipeline of government “cheese”, there are mice and rats attempting to divert some of that “cheese“ into their private larders. For Henry, gold and silver were too important to be diverted into the mouths of grifters, looters and moochers, which is why he became the scourge of corruption in Virginia politics. He could personally fight corruption in Williamsburg, but the corruption in London was so entrenched it could only be fought by separation. Rand must have viewed Henry as an early American model.
Following the Revolution, Henry opposed the adoption of the Constitution, arguing that it gave the federal government too much power, and his opposition led to the Bill of Rights. Yet a decade later, he executed a complete turnaround and switched to the Federalist Party, backing Washington, Adams and John Marshall, and going so far as to argue that the Jefferson-Madison Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, supporting a state’s right of nullification, would lead to civil war. He died the same year as George Washington.
Some Discussion Topics
RE the chapter - I really admire d’Anconia’s character. We don’t yet know why he is doing what he is doing, but we have hints that it was difficult and painful for him.
The difference between his “Who is John Galt?” and the others’ is that he is paddling his own metaphorical canoe, not being carried by a current he feels powerless to control. We don’t understand where he is taking it, but he is clearly the one in control.
Thank you for heading back to the questions. I'd like to see more of that.
The parallels between the way the People’s State of Mexico, the way they use the economic situation to justify seizing property and to gain the power to plan for society while blaming the greedy rich and the current situation where the leftists (in congress, Fannie, Freddie, ACORN and the auto workers unions) caused the economic crisis, use the situation to gain power over the affected industries and blame the greedy, rich CEO’s. When I watch the news it is like deja vu from the first time I read AS.
Rich old man is dying and his scabrous family descends.
They have to wear masks until the will is read.
When the masks are removed, their faces are transformed to reveal their true selves.
That is part of Francisco's role in this book.
He is presumed to be a playboy but his character is one that reveals the truth of other characters and of systems.
Dagney is revealed through her interactions with him as a hard working, practical, problem solving , truthful woman. She is an embodiment of integrity.
Jim is revealed as a looter.
The cleptocracy of Mexico is revealed in the claiming of the mine, the parasites of hangers on who expected to make a fortune off the effort of their better is unmasked.
Franciso role is to shine the light of truth.
Agree with the 0-dark-thirty wakeup, go to work, feed the family routine while the LIEberals plotted and worked to steal the country.
HST, and not to get into a “cudda, wuudda, shudda” discussion, the Silent Majority slept through election day and when it woke up, the country had been stolen.
It is now up to us to take it back.
The point of AS, as I see it, was to warn us of the dangers of the LIEberal/Socialist/Marxist agenda, and to cause us to act to prevent it FRom happening.
We did not, and, now that it has happened, we need to understand how it happened and take any and all necessary actions to “undo” the LIEberal/Socialist/Marxist takeover.
As painful as it may be, we must face the fact that our country has been stolen, and it is up to us to take it back.
Are we up to the task?
As far as the kids not really being in the book, in a way I felt they were. The liberals just reminded me of what kids want before they understand that life isn't fair, sometimes you lose, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. Every time I read the line “for the public good” I chuckled. How many times have liberals cried, “it's for the children”? It is rhetoric that tries to play on guilt/emotion, and if you are against it, you must be evil and hate your neighbors (or their children). To hell with logic, the big picture or the simple mathematics that prove they are wrong.
Nice catch.
It “for the children” that survive abortion, the children that survive their fatherless families and random gang violence.
As much as I enjoy the philosophy, the one complaint I have against Rand's objectivism is the complete lack of God in her works. I do realize that it serves her point better to have the world totally reliant upon the works of productive men and women. However, as to your question about sex, I cannot fathom the act of two becoming one as a testiment of pure love without God being in the mix. Perhaps that is why I have never understood Rand's point in describing Dagny and Francisco, or Roark and Dominique for that matter.
Now back to the show. The motor of the world is coming to a halt.
I like the questions - and the summaries and historical context have really enhanced my enjoyment of the book. Thanks for all your hard work!
I was surprised by the S&M overtones, especially in something written in the 1950s, and that is part of what is giving me pause about allowing my 13 year old to read it - as happy as I am that he would be willing to tackle a book of this size!
#1 - Jim seems to think of “virtue” and profitability as being mutually exclusive. I see that in today’s culture too. The irony in the book, as in real life, is that true virtue comes from paying one’s own way, exchanging a quality product for the fruits of another’s honest effort.
Wait until he or she is 18.
A bump for the Sunday evening crew. Thanks again for taking this one on, Publius, I’m really enjoying it. After all the years since first I read this novel I just noticed its rather strict construction - three sections of precisely ten chapters apiece. Thirty weeks. I think this will work out just fine. ;-)
She, Chris Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and David Sirota are on a journey from doctrinaire liberalism, via honest liberalism, to conservatism. Paglia will be the least surprised when she reaches her final destination.
Dang. I am in the 16th month of a 16th month project implementation at work, and haven’t been able to follow this at all...This is one of my favorite parts of the book, when the mine hoax is exposed...
I like the way you are driving this...I hope to pick it up on the other side.
My parents grew up in the depression too. Italian immigrant families. My father to this day is still a democrat. But I can’t understand why. He is vehemently against welfare, pro-family, and proudly American. I remember during the Carter administration the cognitive dissonance he was going through. Seeing the flag being burnt in Teheran, the failed rescue, the giving away of the Panama canal. Yet he could not vote for Reagan.
Thus the point that d'Anconias are expected to increase the family fortune. It is interesting that Francisco then goes on a seemingly wanton indulgence spree. We will see his point later.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.