Posted on 02/28/2009 7:49:58 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
We meet Mr. Mowen of Amalgamated Switch and Signal of Connecticut, who needs training from Rearden’s men before he can handle Rearden Metal, all the while bleating about whether the metal is real or a fraud.
In Colorado, Dagny is having problems with the Rio Norte Line. Ben Nealy isn’t up to the job, and she and Hank have had to buy up bankrupt companies and shuttered plants to make the necessary equipment. Her chief engineer balks at reinforcing an ancient bridge with Rearden Metal.
Ellis Wyatt shows up and gives Dagny some good advice on upgrading the facilities for Nealy’s crew. Dagny takes Nealy into his work car and tells him what is to be done and how.
Hank Rearden arrives in his new car, a Hammond of Colorado, and his attitude toward Dagny is back to where it was when they were working together at his steel mill. They spar verbally, and Dagny is pleased at her emotions. Hank designs a new bridge of Rearden Metal on the spot with an estimated cost of less than half what her chief engineer has projected. He intends to confront the doubts about the safety of Rearden Metal by building an entire bridge out of it.
Hank is in Colorado looking for a copper mine because he doesn’t want to deal with Francisco. Hank and Dagny have a sense of accomplishment, but when Dagny asks Hank for a lift in his plane to New York, Hank tells her he is flying to Minnesota. When she shows up at the local airport and finds there are no flights out that day, she discovers that Rearden has taken off for New York after all.
Back in New York, Dagny and Jim go to a dinner and conference at the New York Business Council where Dagny is scheduled to speak about Rearden Metal. Jim is in a tizzy. The National Council of Metal Industries, headed by Orren Boyle, has condemned it as a threat to public safety. The union is not sure it wants its members to work with it. A convention of grade school teachers in New Mexico has passed a resolution that children should not be permitted to ride the Rio Norte Line because of it. As Jim complains, Dagny notices that every good, reliable piece of equipment on the streets of New York has originated in Colorado.
Dagny is furious to discover that Jim has tried to get Dan Conway to sell his railroad to Taggart Transcontinental; Jim’s rationale was to use Phoenix-Durango’s steel on the Rio Norte Line to avoid using Rearden Metal altogether. Jim wants to bid for Conway’s rail, but his looter friends at the National Alliance of Railroads are all attempting to get their own hands on it.
But it gets worse when Dagny discovers that she is there tonight to debate Bertram Scudder on nationwide radio on the topic, “Is Rearden Metal a lethal product of greed?” Dagny says the question is not debatable, and she jumps out of the car. She takes refuge in a diner in the shadow of a deserted ruin of an office building and orders coffee. An old bum gives Dagny a sermon on nihilism; in the middle of it the counter boy comments, “Who is John Galt?” Another bum tells Dagny yet another legend of Galt, this one about finding a fountain of youth and being unable to bring it back.
Dr. Potter of the State Science Institute sits in Hank Rearden’s office and asks him not to upset the economy by introducing Rearden Metal. Hank is not bothered by the disapproval of his metal by the Institute. Potter believes that if the metal is not a physical danger, it’s a social danger to the country. He offers to buy the rights to the metal from Rearden for a lot of government money to keep it off the market. Rearden refuses, and Potter issues a veiled threat about Rearden needing friends in politics and government.
Mr. Mowen bails from the project and refuses to make any more switches of Rearden Metal because too many people don’t like it.
Dagny discovers from Eddie Willlers that the State Science Institute has warned people against using Rearden Metal but has not really said why. Taggart stock has crashed, Nealy has quit and the union won’t let its members work with the metal.
Dagny visits the Institute in New Hampshire to meet with Dr. Robert Stadler, once the head of the Physics Department at Patrick Henry University and one of the nation’s leading scientists. Stadler has not even read the Institute’s report on Rearden Metal. He knows that there is nothing wrong with it but says that there are other “non scientific” factors. He is concerned that the Institute, with all its government funding, has not been able to come up with anything useful. But Rearden did, and that makes the Institute look bad. The survival of the Institute is more important than the survival of Hank Rearden.
Stadler tells Dagny of the three star students he and Hugh Akston shared at Patrick Henry University. One star was Francisco, the other was Ragnar Danneskjøld – and the third was a man who is probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere. (No spoilers please!)
Dagny finds a boozed-up Jim hiding at the old Taggart estate on the Hudson. Jim has been using his pull in DC, first to get the government to seize Dan Conway’s railroad, and then to convince the Alliance to let Conway run his line for another year. But Conway has refused. Dagny tells him she is going to start her own company and build the Rio Norte Line for Taggart Transcontinental on a turnkey basis. Eddie Willers will take over Operations. Dagny will call her company the John Galt Line.
But Francisco will not help fund the line, nor will he tell Dagny why. But he hints that her premises are wrong and that she must reach the correct conclusion herself. When Dagny suggests that she crawl, Francisco comes over to her and tenderly kisses her hand. Realizing he has given away too much, he puts on the act of a cad. He is horrified to discover that Dagny is going to name the line after John Galt, and he tells her that Galt will come to claim it.
Dagny meets with Hank to confirm the orders for the John Galt Line. The financiers are the Colorado industrialists whom the line will serve. Even Ken Danagger of the Pennsylvania coal company is in, and Hank signs on. Wyatt and Danagger have already agreed to purchase Rearden Metal simply because of the State Science Institute’s partial condemnation of it. Stockton Foundry of Colorado is going to finish the switches that Mowen wouldn’t make. The union won’t try to stop the line because there are so few union jobs available.
While Dagny reads the structural specifications for the bridge, Hank indulges in a violent sexual fantasy about her.
An Atlantic Southern freight train carrying copper for the Rearden mills slams into a passenger train in New Mexico, and the railroad can’t do anything but make excuses. Hank puts together a rescue effort that gets the copper moving again, although Hank decides to move his ore in the future via Taggart Transcontinental.
In the middle of all this, Hank’s mother shows up at the mill and asks him to give his brother Philip a job that he doesn’t deserve. Hank effectively throws her out.
Hank now tries to find some steel for the Ward Harvester Company of Minnesota, but he is interrupted by the news that the National Legislature had enacted the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. Wesley Mouch is nowhere to be found.
Hank suddenly comes up with a new design for the rail bridge. He calls Dagny in Colorado and tells her about his new design, which will outperform any bridge ever built and cost no more than a culvert. There is a hint that Dagny has broken into tears.
The State Science Institute
Rand knew about the National Science Foundation, headquartered in Arlington, VA, because it had been founded by an act of Congress in 1950. Every year it funds about ten thousand grants for research and development. It performs no actual research but acts as a clearinghouse for grants.
Rand’s State Science Institute, headquartered in New Hampshire, is a research and development facility; her model is the Department of Agriculture’s laboratory system. These facilities engage in pure research and occasionally come up with something useful. (I worked at one such lab over 40 years ago.) But the State Science Institute has not been able to come up with anything useful, and it views Rearden Metal – or anything created by the private sector – as a threat to its existence. Bureaucracies are terribly protective of their turf.
Some Discussion Topics
The public ignores hard science, and embraces the position of celebrities because, well, daggone it, they SOUND so good and they LOOK so good and they APPEAR to be so knowledgeable. But ... they aren’t. And those that put any credence to their screeds are foolish and dangerous.”
Well said! Fits Obama to a tee!
The assumption here is that the average person is stupid or childlike or both, and needs to be told what to do by someone in authority - or forced into doing something - ostensibly for his own good. As if, when given the freedom to make his own decisions - how to spend his money, run his business, choose a health-care or retirement plan, etc. he will be incapable of doing so. Thus the Nanny-Statism we have today.
I liked something Glenn Beck said recently about Libertarianism - he said that people get hung up on the whole legalizing drugs thing, but what they don't realize is that, while libertarians would say someone is free to waste his life getting messed up on drugs, the REST of society would be free to step over that person and say, "What a loser" without having to pay for his health-care or bail him out in any way.
I keep coming back to raising kids, because that is what I do right now, but it seems to me that whenever possible, letting people experience the natural consequences of their own actions is the most effective way to get them to make good choices. Maybe that is why the direction we've taken, especially recently, is so frustrating to watch. No one has to experience the consequences - of issuing a bad loan, of buying a house one can't afford, of racking up credit card debt, etc. etc.
People will make good decisions if they are forced to deal with the consequences of bad ones. They do not have to be lied to or forced to do so by an oppressive government. The Founding Fathers understood this. What will it take to make the average American today understand it?
I believe it’s explained later in the book.
Suffice to say the “shabby elite” may look down on someone from the working class, but, they won’t say no to their money.
Actually, I would submit that the average person yawns at the drivel that comes out of the mouth of a celebrity. However our ruling elites are impressed by these people and assume that since they’re impressed, we rubes are too.
I never got the whole celebrity thing either - but I think that when the whole collective of them are unified on a particular candidate or ideology, the sheeple tend to jump on the bandwagon without giving it much critical thought.
In this instance,someone unfamiliar with the story could take this line the wrong way. As in 'don't do your best' (Re: the discussion of 'dumbing down' students and reigning in union workers). The true intent being that his 'best' is not up to par. I'm sure that I'm over analyzing it but I have found that there are several instances that I had to go back over and reread lines to understand Rands intent.
3 ...no flights out. What does this tell us about the state of American transportation?
The state of air travel was in flux as Rand wrote this book. Some of her references to things such as planes and steam locomotives may be partially the result of the 10 year span that it took her to write it.
4 ...old office building with a good, clean diner in its shadow.
Distant skyscrapers, factory chimneys,dilapidated houses,small grimy shops and the fog on the river. This is from the preceding paragraph. We are descending. The diner is at the bottom of the skeleton of a building. This is where the city sprung from and now is retuning to.
5 The counter boy says, “Who is John Galt?”
I enjoyed reading this encounter as it was a change of pace from the rest of the introductions. The people were unimportant as specific characters but the conversation helped to flesh out the story. "It's no use, Lady" said the old bum beside her. (How many times have we heard some version of this about today's problems?) I don't know if it was Rand's intention but I certainly got the impression that the 'bum' was someone who had once been at the top of the (now skeleton) building.
It’s Nealy’s rejoinder that caught my eye. “That’s an unpopular attitude...” So the question for me was, why was it an unpopular attitude?
Eddie would make an excellent lower line commander.
He follows orders exceptionally well but he is not a leader, a risk taker.
It sounds Like both he and Reardens Mother have the same attitude. Even the most worthless person deserves anything they wish for. This attitude seems to be pervasive among the moochers.
I think that is part of why the earlier generations in the US were so rugged...
Errors killed. The Darwin Award candidates eliminated themselves effeciently.
It’s cruel, but true. And the alternative is what we’re dealing with now, which is awful in a different way. Personally, I’d rather sink or swim on my own.
That was what I was was trying to get across in my initial post on the topic - that what is important is that the job gets done right, not that someone has "done his best." But that attitude is frowned upon because God forbid we suggest to someone that his "best" isn't good enough - we might hurt his feelings, and after all, we really can't expect anyone to do better than his best, right? When whole generations of people are raised to believe this, it is hard to make it about getting the job done right anymore.
Kind of the flip-side of people buying houses they couldn't afford with no money down: they get to keep the profits if the value of the home goes up, yet get bailed out if the value goes down.
The “drivel that comes out of the mouth of a celebrity” garners far more public attention than it warrants while the rebuttal (the truth?) is buried or not shown. Bling is king in our dumbed-down society, just as it was in AS.
How do you think so many people got hoodwinked re: Obama?
PS You and I, and others of our ilk, yawn at the drivel and the bling we know to be false. So far, without much effect.
I sense that is changing.
PPS A sleeping giant awakening? Finally?
Actually, I don’t think people were hoodwinked by President Obama as much as we’d like to think. It’s nice to blame MSM for foisting President Obama off on people, but, we have to remember that Ronald Reagan was able to get elected.
Democrats are currently over reaching themselves. They think they have a mandate, because they have an overwhelming majority in Congress.
Democrats were not voted for so much as Republicans were voted against. People were fed up with the profligate spending of Republicans.
Bottom line, Republicans spent their way out of office. Democrats are working on doing the same thing.
President Obama reminds me of a shiny new car. It looks good and sounds good, but, after a couple of months, it’s discovered it’s actually worse than the car it replaced. But, because of payments, you’re stuck with it until you can get rid of it for a better model.
“In this instance,someone unfamiliar with the story could take this line the wrong way. As in ‘don’t do your best’ (Re: the discussion of ‘dumbing down’ students and reigning in union workers). The true intent being that his ‘best’ is not up to par. I’m sure that I’m over analyzing it but I have found that there are several instances that I had to go back over and reread lines to understand Rands intent.”
This is a hallmark of Rand’s style, and one I find most intriguing. Sometimes you will see an apparently contradictory statement, or even action, which won’t be clearly understood until much later in the story. Look back at Frisco from a vantage point later on (or even examine his inconsistencies to this point.)
And all of the characters, good and bad, in The Fountainhead behave and speak in similar inconsistent fashion. But their true meanings always become clear later on (sometimes Rand even resorts to laying it out explicitly).
Kirk
I know, I hate that.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I confess to being frustrated at times by the actions of the public as a block. Freepers even have a name for the group, Sheeple. I don't think it springs from stupidity or a childlike nature. I think it's more a case of apathy, blended with the ignorance bred of a half century of dumbing down the public skewls. (Reference the threadlet going on about how celebrities are accorded credibility by the credulous)
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