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
Did you read the book?
Well, I'll give you long. Boring, no way, unless you're not seeing the forest for the trees. And poorly written - well, how many books are still as intensely relevant and influential fifty years after being written? That's rare company and I don't know how else you can define the writing skill.
But it isn't widely respected. They've been trying to make a movie out of it for decades, but they can't, mainly because it's a stinker.
It’s not respected by the “chattering class”, because it points out their follies. Among people who have to deal with life’s realities, it is very well respected. In 2000 there was a poll of best books of the 20th century. Among the literati class, the #1 book was Ulysses. The readers poll ranked AS # 1. And we should be glad Hollywood hasn’t made a movie of it, as they would rip it to shreds.
How many wonderful books have been made into a movie that actually doesn't suck? There is NO WAY to make a great movie out of this book without butchering it to death.
You are an imbecile, who's only motive is to create "trouble" on a thread. Atlas Shrugged is way too close as to what barry is doing now, in our time.Perhaps that is why you are so against it.
That readers poll was an internet poll wasn't it?
Atlas Shrugged is Dianetics for selfish people.
I don’t know how they compiled the poll. It was done by Random House. You may peruse it here.<Phttp://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
Don't you mean producers, you little mooch?
When are you going on strike? Why do such smart, independent people need to cling to such a poorly written book like a security blanket, whining and crying about what the liberals are doing, yet doing nothing about it except bawking “Atlas Shrugged” all over the internet like a bunch of chickens?
Is it not selfishness to extoll the “virtue” of rewarding the indolent class, in an attempt to draw attention to your “self-sacrifice” and “public service”? That in effect is what Hanks mother is doing and many of our modern day philantropists and do-gooders are doing. Their foundations and non-profits exist to obtain grants for their “projects”. As long there are needy people, they have their cause for being. If anyone actually solves the problems they claim to defend, they will thus be out of work. So for the organization, the goal is to put on the appearance of doing a “good work”, while not really putting a dent in the root cause. I’m not saying all organizations are like this, but many are. I believe they are called “poverty pimps”. I don’t think we even need to go into government welfare.
This is a FReeper book club. We read a book and discuss it.
The million dollar question is “why are YOU so opposed to this book”?
I am.
I decided that the evening of President Obamas speech would be wasteful of my time so I decided to sit down and read this chapter with no distractions. The next day, as I was listening to the reviews of the Presidents speech, I thought that they might as well be reviewing the chapter that I had read the previous night. The words weren't exact but the gist of the news was about the dystopian society presented in Atlas Shrugged.
How many times can it be said that a person was able to read about history as it is happening?
went out and got a new copy today..gonna get caught up with my reading (to catch up to y’all) while reviewing the previous threads..
BTW, at Barnes and Noble today the checkout girl asked if I belonged to their book club..told her no..she said, you should join, from what you’re buying you appear to want some good information (little smile)..a closet conservative..LOL
I have to admit quite a lot of emotional satisfaction in Hank throwing his Mom out of the office...His home life would be a lot better if he used the same techniques there.
Of course he would be living alone but that would be an improvement to the constant carping, the sly remarks and the assaults on his values.
I had to put the book down many times because of just that.
I've actually started using a lot of the terms from that book in my "normal day" speak. It fits so well.
Last week, I went to our village bookstore, which also sells used books. I got an original! I love “old stuff”.
The discrediting of science in our own age began with Rachael Carson..
It has continued with the environmental movement, and now Global warming.
I was raised with science being the touch stone of truth. Now the looters of science have turned it into the fabrication of fiction.
Unforgivable.
Absolutely! And women are especially subject to the social pressure not to be *too* smart.
So you're saying that the problem isn't just the parents and teachers trying to protect everyone's fragile self-esteem, but also the peers who punish those who DO try to excel. It's no wonder we're drifting toward mediocrity as a nation - and this new "let government take care of you" administration will do nothing to inspire achievement either.
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