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
Well written.
LOL!
Thank you for the clarification. I don’t blame the MSM for Obama’s election, however, I believe that the MSM did not thoroughly investigate him, and had they done so, the outcome may have been different.
McCain did not help his cause, and FRankly, I am embarrassed that he got the nomination.
HST, the Republicans missed a golden opportunity in 1994 to defeat LIEberalism, and as you stated, spent themselves out of office.
Perhaps Obama’s election will cause a true conservative party?
I’m expecting the Republicans to purge themselves of the Olympia Snowe’s and Susan Collins.
Republicans allowed themselves to compromise too much in order to stay in power. Power became the goal, rather than taking care of the nation.
Roger that!
This will be an expensive lesson for the American people — perhaps in a few years the American people will really understand the all too real dangers of the LIEberal mentality and will have purged those who hold such notions FRom the body politic?
“Power became the goal, rather than taking care of the nation.” [And, I might add, preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution.]
Just so! In AS, Rand warns us of the dangers of that notion.
One wonders how she was so prescient in that respect?
Research being different from development.
What...actually face reality? HORRORS!
Rand was deadly accurate when it comes to foretelling the consequences of government and business getting in bed together. I’ve seen “Atlas Shrugged” called “cartoonish and shallow” but, if AS is cartoonish, what does that make our current society, which resembles AS so well?
My concern is that much of the “stimulus” spending is actually designed to keep the libs in power. Even if we do have a solid conservative Republican party, if the media, the schools, the census redistricting, and the perpetuation of the “culture of gimme” are stacking the deck in their favor, we will still lose elections.
I’ll be referring to the LIEberals as looters in the future.
And, you are correct — the “stimulus” is to stimulate keeping the looters in power.
We have a tough road ahead of us.
Liberals think that people are too stupid to think for themselves and take responsibility for knowing what the date is. -- rlmorel
Aside from the fact that it's done with the public money I don't find it any more paternalistic than a time/date/temperature sign on the side of the bank. To me it's more symbolic of a fiddling-while-Rome-burns preoccupation with trivia when society is running off the rails (literally in AS's case).
What the government should be saying to themselves is "Nothing works. People who make things work are nowhere to be found. Is this the result of something we did and if so we'd better get about un-doing it post haste. If, on the other hand, this problem isn't due to something we did, we better leave well enough alone because it would be arrogant to think we can make it better. We work for the government so it's a given that anything we do will make the problem worse, which is why we're government employees instead of having actual jobs."
Now I realize that you all are more familiar with Rand and with AS than I, and whatever happens to the calendar in future chapters may have tipped you off to the motives that led to its creation, but that was the way it seemed to me at first blush.
Oops. Meant to include you in the to: for my last post. Publius had some nice things to say about the line I quoted.
That would make a great tag line if it were shorter.
Aside from the fact that it's done with the public money I don't find it any more paternalistic than a time/date/temperature sign on the side of the bank.
If the display showed date, time and temperature, I would agree with you. But it's done with public money at the Mayor of New York's orders, and it only shows the date and nothing else. That makes me agree with "rlmorel" that there is the whiff of paternalism there. A caldendar display leaving out time and temperature is like a freeway bridge that constricts to two lanes. It's typical of government and not up to the job.
Most gracious of you.
It has bothered me that I have missed this excellent thread due to work over the last two months...I am going to try to re-engage if I can.
I began re-reading “The Road to Serfdom” again, and boy, it is hitting me just as powerfully as “Atlas Shrugged”. More so, because it shows where we could be going.
Interesting take. I admit that to an extent the absence of time and date for some reason makes me lean a little more towards your interpretation.
“I began re-reading “The Road to Serfdom” again, and boy, it is hitting me just as powerfully as “Atlas Shrugged”. More so, because it shows where we could be going.”
And Hayek was describing what had ALREADY HAPPENED, so it wasn’t just blind supposition.
Kirk
How about "Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, administrate. Those that can't administrate, have gubmint jobs."
LOL !!!!
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