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
You know, it is pretty much impossible for anyone else to follow Publius and you!
Francisco allowed their own corrupt system to flourish.
He paid full price for construction of quality housing but allowed the looters to build it with the cheapest junk they could find and to pocket the rest.
He didn't as much condone the building of shanties and he knew it would take place because of the nature of the corrupt system.
His sin was one of omission rather than commission.
He failed to step in and make it right..but allowed greed and corruption to seek it's own level.
It because books like this aren’t allowed in liberal institutions.
They were too busy carrying Mao’s little red book and copies of Marx.
New Zealand is pretty liberal already.
LOL! I hope not. There’s always “Bill, yer fulla crap.” It’d be right more often than not... ;-)
OK, it is tough in this crowd, but I think I have an insight nobody has really remarked upon. This chapter very specifically shows us two children of privilege (and Eddie), and how they chose to grow up. They are juxtaposed with James. Dagny, Francisco, and Eddie spend their days constructing machines, exploring, and being producers. James is kind of a lump, and resents them for being doers.
The most important thing that we are being shown is that Francisco and Dagny both choose to work, and work at HARD jobs in their youth. Francisco even ran away from home one winter to work on one of his father’s ships. His father’s only question was, “Did you do a good job?”
We see a lot of self-made men in Atlas, but we are shown that being born to privilege is not enough. There is no such thing as just being “lucky”. James had all of the advantages that Dagny had, and he squandered them. The real people of value know that they have to work, no matter what their starting circumstances.
Case in point: the Vanderbilt family. Have you ever seen pictures, or been to, Biltmore in Asheville, NC? That place is a testimony to raw wealth. You would think that a fortune of that size should last forever, yet Gloria Vanderbilt was about the last one of any prominence....and the fortune basically does not exist. Wealth has to be re-earned generation after generation. “Luck” only gets you so far.
I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal several years ago about a Vietnamese community somewhere near Los Angeles. The story was about various benefactors to the community. The WSJ was very clever in that they named benefactor after benefactor, and told their stories. Inevitably, these people who were giving millions started out as penniless boat people, one guy making his first 20 bucks by selling the US Army jacket he had been given as a refugee. I thought it a wonderful illustration that your starting circumstance does not have to define your entire existence.
Repeatedly in Atlas, we hear various lame businessmen lament that “they never got a chance”, and Ayn Rand shows that you have to make your own chances.
Brilliant! Great catch. I should have picked up on that one.
I’ll tackle the sex issue, too.
“I’d never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”
Jim doesn’t think much of himself, and knows that the only women who could possibly consent to be with him must feel the same way about themselves.
Use your own experience here. When someone amazing is interested in you, you feel amazing. I remember in high school, if it turned out the person that had a crush on you was kind of a loser, you kind of wondered if that was the best you could do.....? And what did that say about you if that particular person thought that they had a chance with you? Yeesh. (ooops, been there, done that!)
Dagny and Francisco are internally calibrated to their own wonderfulness (to the point of obnoxiousness, really) so they would never consider being attracted to anyone that wasn’t perfectly wonderful, as well.
{glow}
Rest assured that you are doing a great job.
Unfortunately, we are three senators short...
I do have a question about the... "callousness to the welfare of those less-than-godlike inhabitants who do their best to live up to the arrangements dictated by the idealized capitalist relationships."
I am trying to see these people as a homogeneous group who are all victimized equally. In other places throughout the book many of the poor people are described similarly. In my view, this could only exist in AS, not in the real world. Consider Appalachia prior to and during the great depression. Did the people at that time suffer greatly due to economic turmoil? My understanding is that a large number of them listened to the news on the radio and went about their daily lives pretty much unaffected. True, they were dirt poor but most that I have spoken with look back on those days fondly.
To get to my point, the poor are treated as completely dependent upon the rest of society and when the rug is pulled out from under them, they are left absolutely helpless. This, in my opinion, is not like the real world. I have heard said many times that during the depression the country people didn't know that they were poor.
Daney and Francisco make love with their minds... Jim and Betty have sex with their bodies.
Boy, did you get that one right! Our first intimate time together, I saw stars.
I wonder if Madoff sees himself as a d'Anconia type of person.
... This is a very utopian frame of mind, this business of a phoenix arising from the ashes of the past. But in those ashes will be human bones.
The characters Eddie Willers, Cherryl Brooks and "The Wet Nurse" come to mind, though there are many others.
In my view you're absolutely right. Rand has to set up a contrast between her "immovable movers" and the rest of society - that would be us poor fumblers - in her dramatic narrative. To do this she must necessarily dispense with a whole lot of complexity that is the real world - it has been pointed out already that there are no children (yet) in AS, for example. And still the thing is 1100 pages long.
I think Rand might hold that a lot of the people you mentioned are, in fact, holding to her ideals in a sort of primitive but entirely virtuous barter-economy way. I hope I'm not giving a lot away in stating that it's the sort of straightforward economic relationships that exist in the fictional Galt's Gulch. This value for that. A jar of 'shine for a tire patch. That isn't in the least fictional. It will, in fact, survive Atlas shrugging very nicely both in fiction and in the real world.
Publius, what say ye?
Oh, nicely put.
My understanding is that a large number of them listened to the news on the radio and went about their daily lives pretty much unaffected.
A technical point. Radio began making an inroad into American homes during the Depression, but those radios were expensive. The poor couldn't afford radios. In this period, illiteracy was rampant. News was transmitted when the man in the family came home and told the family during the evening meal what he had heard during the day, filtered through his own prejudices. Radio did not become affordable until the beginning of the war.
True, they were dirt poor but most that I have spoken with look back on those days fondly.
It was a case of the rest of America coming down to the level these people had always known.
I have an example from my mother's side of the family. This side did poorly during the Twenties. My mother's older sister was pulled out of high school in 1926 by my grandmother, given subway fare and sent to the Curtis Publishing Co. to seek work. Her wages were needed for the rest of the family to survive. To her credit, my aunt ended up becoming managing editor of "Ladies' Home Journal" before her retirement in the Sixties. Being a high school dropout did not hold her back, and her religious faith prevented her from resenting what my grandmother had done to her. (I would have punched the old biddy's lights out for just suggesting that I drop out of school!) Needless to say, this branch of the family was staunchly supportive of FDR and remains Democratic today.
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