FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Exploiters and the Exploited

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.

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.

Howdy Pub’!

Here we are, Chapter Seven, wherein at last Rand’s dramatic narrative starts to hit its stride. We’ve had our introductions, antecedents, speeches of philosophical stance. Time for posterior to be propelled by a high-heeled boot.

Let’s be frank – Dagny’s man Ben Nealy is a slug. In the real world a manager that cowardly and ineffective would never have gotten a project of the tremendous scope of Dagny’s off the ground. Dagny, on the other hand, is a supremely capable woman who seems to me far happier in her role as a driving project manager than as Taggart Transcontinental’s VP of Operations, which in real life would call for a considerably different skill set (one wonders if Rand actually knew that). I hope it doesn’t seem over-critical to express once again certain reservations about Dagny’s managerial abilities. Senior management has no business making decisions over the amount of bark on railroad ties – that’s not her job. Her job is firing Nealy and she doesn’t do it.

What she does do is to take up the reins herself, shedding her mantle at Taggart to become the high-powered builder in which role she seems far more comfortable. That she is capable of running Taggart simultaneously through her minion Eddie Willers is probably a bit unrealistic, but it speaks volumes about real managerial ability. His, not hers. And yet his reward is to be patted on the head like the querulous little boy he simply cannot be.

“Quiet, Eddie,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

And of what is Eddie afraid?

”I keep thinking of what they told us in school about the sun losing energy, growing colder each year. I remember wondering, then, what it would be like in the last days of the world. I think it would be…like this. Growing colder and things stopping.” [Dagny speaking to Hank Reardon]

Eddie is afraid of flailing futilely at the oncoming tide with his world inundated around him, and Eddie is right.

One of Dagny’s more attractive human qualities – Rand might not agree – is a degree of fraternal tolerance that somehow keeps her fingers from choking brother Jim to insensibility each time he so richly deserves it. His latest offense is to set her up to “debate” the merits of Reardon metal with polemicist Bertram Scudder, the very legitimacy of which debate she rightfully and angrily rejects. One is reminded here of Congressional buffoons attempting to grill General David Petraeus over matters military and the occasional glance of pure incomprehension that equally tolerant individual managed not quite to suppress. Everyone may have a right to an opinion but that does not mean that all opinions have equal merit. Certainly not Scudder’s on Reardon metal. To Dagny it’s clear – the stuff either does what it’s supposed to do or it does not, and that is all that is relevant.

But Scudder’s approach isn’t to be avoided. It crops up during a conversation in Reardon’s office by one Dr. Potter, a representative of the State Science Institute, which has published a statement that Reardon metal is a menace to the economy. It is not the technical merits of Reardon metal that are at issue here, but:

“It is the social aspect that I am asking you to consider, Mr. Reardon,” the man said softly.

Here one feels compelled to come to the defense of what must be the most abused adjective in the English language, the word “social,” used when a charlatan wants the noun to which it’s applied to mean the opposite of what it does. “Social welfare,” for example, wherein neither the welfare of the society nor its constituent individuals actually improves (but that of the administrator does); “social justice,” for another, which means simply “theft.”

It isn’t really so much that Reardon metal is likely to damage the economy as Potter suggests, rather the opposite. Its fatal drawback is that it will be outside of the control of those who intend to direct that economy and the people within it. It is a matter of political power, not technical merit. That is, after all, what this usage of the word “social” is intended to effect, then and now. Beware of the people invoking it. It’s the bait on the barbed hook of a lie.

And so Dagny is off to the State Science Institute itself, headed by a Dr. Stadler, one of Francisco’s old professors. Unlike Francisco, who even the least perceptive reader has concluded by now is playing some sort of masquerade, Stadler is a truly fallen man. Rand’s may be an atheistic world but men and women in it do appear to possess souls, and Stadler has bartered his for the institute which keeps him. Again, the insistence that the social trumps the true:

“Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. No principles have ever had any effect on society.”

[Dagny] “What, then, directs men’s actions?”

“The expediency of the moment.”

Bleak enough, and yet Stadler feels that it is society that is supporting his selfless drive for pure science. It is, actually, money plundered from society by Rand’s looters, but Stadler cannot take the moral step necessary to free himself from the compromises he has made to maintain his playpen. If there is pity to be had here it is for Dagny. It cannot be easy to watch a man one once admired drowning in self-deception. Stadler’s former students apparently feel the same way:

“When I was at the Patrick Henry University,” he [Stadler] said, “I had three pupils. I have had many bright students in the past, but these three were the kind of reward a teacher prays for…theirs was the kind of intelligence one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world…when I endorsed the establishment of this Institute, one of these three damned me. I have not seen him since. These three…one of them was Francisco d’Anconia, who became a depraved playboy. Another was Ragnar Danneskjold, who became a plain bandit. So much for the promise of human minds.”

“Who was the third one?” she asked.

“The third one did not achieve even that sort of notorious distinction. He vanished without a trace – into the great unknown of mediocrity. He is probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere.”

Or a manual laborer or something. In any case he is not likely to be very important in our story, is he? Francisco, however, drops his mask for a time when Dagny asks him for funding support for her construction of the Rio Norte line, which in her estimation will save the country’s industrial production and hence the country itself. He declines with an agonized ”My love, I can’t!” and is, for some inexplicable reason, horrified that she has changed its name to the John Galt line.

“Dagny, why that?”

“Because it frightens you.”

“What do you think it stands for?”

“The impossible. The unattainable…”

He started laughing...“What do you like about it?”

“I hate it! …I’m sick of hearing pleas for John Galt. I’m going to fight him.”

He said quietly, “You are.”

“I’m going to build a railroad line for him. Let him come and claim it!”

He smiled sadly and nodded: “He will.”

We do finally get an explanation for Hank Reardon’s assiduous and occasionally deceitful avoidance of Dagny before the chapter closes. He is in lust with her. What Rand has running through Hank’s head as they speak about his bridge is a rape fantasy:

…Do you know what I’m thinking now, in this moment…you look so young, so austere, so sure of yourself…What would you be like if I knocked your head back, if I threw you down in that formal suit of yours, if I raised your skirt…

The moment passes for now, but what, one is led to wonder, would she be like, and why does Rand persist in presenting it in these terms? These are passionate adults, to be sure, and here the sex act is presented as both power exchange and an expression of creativity, both of which are strong in their natures. Is there room for love as well?

Clearly there is room for admiration, which isn’t quite the same thing. Room for animal attraction. Room for shared values that are rare among their contemporaries. These aspects of Rand’s theory of sex (the woman had a theory for everything) will figure larger in the coming chapters.

We leave this chapter in Reardon’s office. Their mother has come to Hank to demand that he give his brother the gift of dignity in the form of a job. Hank feels, naturally enough, that work without accomplishment is fraud, and he refuses to accede. Certain alarm bells go off in the reader to which Hank appears oblivious – why should it be his mother and not Philip who asks? And how is it that all of a sudden a job of any kind confers dignity in that crowd of useless dilettantes? The poor fellow is so perforated with familial hooks that he leaks when he drinks water already, and here they are attempting to sink yet another. Why?

We have, in this chapter, the scene set for the rest of the novel. Colorado holds the last, best hope for industrial production in the United States, which appear rapidly headed toward a renaming to the People’s States of America. Dagny is Colorado’s savior and the John Galt line, its carotid artery. And the dramatic conflict will be between her and her friends and those who are coming with the knife. We think we know who that is now, but do we?

Have a great week, Publius!

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