FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The John Galt Line

Eddie Willers talks with the Anonymous Rail Worker in the corporate cafeteria, bringing him up to date. Dagny’s work on the John Galt Line is going so well the newspapers refuse to report it. The United Locomotive Works has gone bankrupt, and Dwight Sanders of Colorado has bought the plant. Dagny has moved into a little office near the back of Taggart Terminal, and Eddie feels badly about sitting in Dagny’s chair and taking credit for her work.

The office of the John Galt Line is on the ground floor of a half-collapsed building and is strictly a no-frills operation. Dagny is in town because she had rushed to New York upon hearing that Dwight Sanders had retired – and there was no trace of him to be found. In her office, an exhausted Dagny permits herself a small moment of weakness, longing for a man who can share her meaning of the world. Outside she sees the shadow of a man lingering near the door – but he leaves. Dagny rushes outside but sees only the rear entrance to Taggart Terminal. (No spoilers, please!)

Hank Rearden sells his ore mines to Paul Larkin to get around the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. Paul is consumed with guilt, and Hank is not interested in Paul’s rationalizations. Hank had earlier sold his coal mines to Ken Danagger, who was willing to sell his coal to Rearden at cost, even though that was illegal. Hank’s concern was not cost; he simply wanted to be the first to get the coal.

Wesley Mouch retires from Rearden’s employ to become the Assistant Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.

Hank and Eddie Willers have breakfast at the Wayne-Falkland. With the railroad in such poor financial shape, Hank wants to give Eddie a moratorium on the first payment for Rearden Metal; from his perspective it’s just good business. Eddie is shocked but takes the offer, feeling badly that this will help Jim Taggart and his friends. Hank says not to worry about them.

The American people are worried about whether the Rearden Metal bridge will stand, and they curse Hank Rearden amd Dagny Taggart for caring about nothing but money. Simon Pritchett, Claude Slagenhop, Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder are all fueling the chorus of public opinion while claiming that it arises spontaneously. Balph Eubank and Mort Liddy are the first signers of a petition from the Committee of Disinterested Citizens asking for a government study of the line before it can open.

But Dagny is thrilled. A union boss announces that he is not going to let his men run a train on her tracks, and Dagny throws him out of her office after giving him an ultimatum. Every engineer on the Taggart Transcontinental volunteers to run the first train. Pat Logan, engineer of the Taggart Comet on the Nebraska Division, gets the “demotion” to freight. Dagny is going to ride in the cab.

At the press conference, Dagny, with Hank in attendance, gives the media the details of the opening of the John Galt Line. She and Hank make it clear that their motive is profit, much to the discomfiture of the press. The first train will be a 4-locomotive mixed freight of 80 cars running the entire way at 100 mph. Hank volunteers to ride in the cab with Dagny and the crew.

Everything goes perfectly; in fact, the whole trip is a natural high. At 100 mph, the train streaks through the countryside and right through the Denver yards and station. It roars across the Rearden Metal bridge and comes to a halt at Wyatt Junction. Ellis Wyatt is positively giddy; he takes Hank and Dagny off in his convertible to his home. Over dinner, Wyatt tells them he is planning to extract oil from shale only five miles away in a magnitude previously unheard of. Hank, Dagny and Wyatt make great plans.

As they head for separate bedrooms, Hank pulls Dagny into his arms and kisses her brutally. Then he takes her into his bedroom and makes wild, hot, passionate love to her.

At the time of the publication of the book, railroads were entirely responsible for speed limits on their tracks. A 1910 law, most recently upheld in 1996, refused permission for towns to restrict train speeds.

On the John Galt Line, blocks were two miles long. In the real world of railroading, blocks are of variable length. Each block begins with a signal tower that conveys the condition of the block by a red, yellow or green signal. In the earliest days, large balls on a pole were used, which is where the term “highball” comes from. Later came semaphores, and when the Pennsylvania Railroad switched to light signals, the lights mimicked the positions of a semaphore. There is no standardization of block signals in America today; each railroad has its own unique customs.

A railroad engineer is issued a booklet with each block on the line listed by milepost and with its designated speed limit. Railroads also use speed limit signs that are often coded separately for freight and passenger trains. The speed limit on a given block is determined by factors such as curvature of the rail and the number of grade crossings. Rail yards have much lower speed limits unless the yard possesses a separate bypass track.

As recently as the Fifties, a dispatcher might radio an engineer and say, “You own the railroad tonight.” This was a signal for the engineer to use his own judgment on following the posted speed limits. Today every rail line has track-side sensors, and every train has a FRED Unit (“friendly rear-end device”) where the caboose used to be. These tools gather data and use telemetry to pass it to the dispatcher. Thanks to these innovations, engineers with a heavy hand on the throttle are a thing of the past.

The Federal Railroad Administration now sets maximum speed limits on America’s railroads. The maximum speed for freight trains is 70 mph, and for passenger trains it’s 79 mph. Passenger trains on certain types of track with in-cab signals are permitted to go 110 mph, and Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor has its own speed limits with sections rated at 120 to 150 mph.

It is obvious that turning the Rio Norte Line into the John Galt Line involved a complete re-engineering. The first freight train runs at 100 mph around curves and grades, which would imply a total rebuild. (That train today would have been restricted to 70 mph.) It even runs through heavily populated Denver and the Denver station and yards at 100 mph, which today is an absolute no-no.

What is even more interesting is that the ride was smooth and quiet with jointed rail; welded rail hadn’t been invented yet. I often wonder if Rand didn’t anticipate the invention of welded rail decades in advance.

Traditionally, the American press was highly adversarial. Every town had a Democratic newspaper and a Republican newspaper, and there was no line separating news from editorial content. You read the paper that reflected your political bias.

After World War II, however, that changed. Thanks to media consolidation, eight companies today control most books, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, radio stations and movie studios. Because of this, the mass market reflects a bland, corporatist, internationalist liberalism, quite different from the muscular liberalism that shaped America in the 20th Century. This is the liberalism of the intellectual, not the lunch bucket. This bland liberalism defines itself as “the American Center”.

In the Sixties, younger journalists became the avatars of advocacy journalism, in which Radical Leftist opinion was marketed as bland liberalism. Over time, advocacy journalism became the norm and today dominates the media.

Howdy, Pub’!

Here we are in Chapter 8, entitled “The John Galt Line,” subtitled Dagny’s Ride To Glory. In it she ramrods her way through technical difficulties, public pressure, and political skullduggery to run her train over Rearden’s metal and their mutual bridge, after which she and Hank finally satisfy our expectation and tumble into one another’s arms. An elegy to prurience and propinquity. One of my favorite words, the latter – it means kinship or likeness, similarity in nature, which describes Dagny and Hank’s relationship. Love between the two as commonly understood is still nowhere in sight.

Within the chapter we see the upshot of the Equality Of Opportunity Bill, which is simply the division of Rearden’s empire up among sundry political operators who engineered the act’s passage. Each of these wants his own little bite of an enterprise he considers a static reservoir of wealth. He cannot create it, he cannot run it, but he can despoil it. That is life under socialism.

Quite often on FR we have one of those “when did the rot set in?” threads, the usual consensus being somewhere in the late 60’s when the (highly debatable) conventional morality of the Greatest Generation was swamped over by the licentiousness of us Boomers. Those threads generally deteriorate pretty rapidly to useless flamefests and rational folk wander off to debate more important matters such as the merits of Obama’s torso or the high drama within the New York Yankees’ infield.

But I think Atlas Shrugged gives us more than ample evidence that the rot had already set in after its current familiar form well before the days of nascent hippiedom. By 1957 Rand was already giving us polished gems of corruption with far too much verisimilitude for her to be accused merely of making them up out of whole cloth. Here are a few:

The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. “There are no objective facts,” he had said. “Every report on facts is only somebody’s opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts.”

One need look no further than MSNBC or the pages of the NY Times to note that this doctrine has been taken to heart. What counts is journalism’s social effect (that word again) and not whether its facts are correct; what counts is whether the reporter and editor have “made a difference” and not whether they have made an accurate description of events. Journalism no longer intends to reflect, it attempts to shape.

It certainly tries to in AS. Journalism is a knowing conduit of the smear campaign directed against the John Galt line -

“I don’t say that the bridge will collapse,” said the chief metallurgist of Associated Steel, on a television program, “I’ll just say that if I had any children, I wouldn’t let them ride on the first train that’s going to cross that bridge. But it’s only a personal preference, nothing more, just because I’m overly fond of children.”

Cute. And from social critic Bertram Scudder:

”I don’t claim that the Rearden-Taggart contraption will collapse…the important issue is: what protection does society have against the arrogance, selfishness, and greed of two unbridled individualists…? These two, apparently, are willing to stake the lives of their fellow men on their own conceited notions about their powers of judgment, against the overwhelming majority opinion of recognized experts. …Should society permit it? …It has always been the belief of this column that certain kinds of horses should be kept bridled and locked, on general social principles.”

That word “social” again, not to mention claims of a phony “scientific” consensus that might have issued from the capacious yaps of Al Gore and James Hansen. We have with further poignant familiarity a petition from an “expert” committee, and of course the mandatory public opinion poll -

A few businessmen… did not hire metallurgists to examine samples, nor engineers to visit the site of construction. They took a public poll. Ten thousand people, guaranteed to represent every existing kind of brain, were asked the question: “Would you ride on the John Galt Line?” The answer, overwhelmingly, was: “No, sir-ree!”

It’s a public relations campaign undertaken by political thugs and abetted by journalist sympathizers who want nothing more than to share the power. The railroad unions do their part by threatening to prohibit their members from running the train. Dagny puts paid to that little ploy in the space of a single paragraph:

“You want a stranglehold on your men by means of the jobs which I give them – and on me, by means of your men. You want me to provide the jobs and you want to make it impossible for me to have any jobs to provide.”

Politicians, academia, the literati, the media, and now the labor union. It is 1957 in the real world and yes, the rot has set in. Here in this chapter we have the précis of the novel: that the main impediment to achievement is the political power of those who cannot achieve themselves but intend to control it and everything else, and the only way to break that control is to remove from the system the means of conferring that political power onto the unproductive.

The union backs off – it has little choice. Every single operational individual on the Taggart Lines volunteers to ride Dagny’s chariot of fire. And they provide an armed escort, one per mile of track. It isn’t ceremonial. Dagny’s opponents would not stick at sabotage and everyone knows it.

I might point out that these individuals, here celebrated for their independence and courage, are the same ones cursed earlier in the novel for enervation, incompetence, and ennui. Rand is attempting to have it both ways and that, I’m afraid, won’t do. It brings to the fore a question that I don’t believe Rand completely addresses in AS – is the relationship between employer and employee strictly on the basis of largesse – “jobs which I give to them” – or is there an element of reciprocity, a responsibility on the part of the employer toward an effective and ethical employee? And if there is the latter, at what point is Atlas shrugging an action that is impermissible by the very morals that mandate it? I’ll leave that an open question for now but I think it’s a central ethical question in the novel and I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with the way Rand addresses it.

We have, though, already seen Francisco d’Anconia’s view of that issue. It is that he provided the jobs for people who couldn’t do that for themselves – point taken – and that he allowed them to be defrauded by the system in which they were participating. Were there no ethical employees in that arrangement, no one who did what he paid them to do honestly and effectively? And if there were, did he not betray them, judged by his own standards? Or does he deny the reciprocity? My sense is that he does feel that he betrayed them and that it haunts him, a deplorable but inevitable cost of his own shrugging. In that sense Francisco is not only pretending to fall but really has. We have already seen within Rand’s atheistic world the artifact of soul, and now we encounter the inherent concept of sin. I find this exceedingly curious.

To the fun part – we have for the next dozen or so pages Rand’s best effort at descriptive writing nearly uninterrupted by dialogue. It is the exhilaration of speed, the expression of high achievement in a train doing no less than a hundred miles an hour over untested rail. It is a metaphor for the sort of life the immovable movers lead, the reward due them for their own personal excellence and that of their followers for their faith.

It’s quite a performance, actually, although those of us who live in the west might look askance at the notion of a freight train hurtling through a small town at a hundred miles an hour, traffic being protected by nothing more than an occasional cross-buck sign and the native caution of someone who suspects that although no train has heretofore done so, some lunatic might decide to run one at breakneck speed through the community. Stranger things happen all the time out here.

At last there is a triumphant arrival, a climax to this crypto-sexual Ride of the Valkyrie that is reflected later in Dagny and Hank’s physical congress in Ellis Wyatt’s house. Earlier in the chapter Hank’s wife has scoffed at the notion that Dagny is his mistress – how well she knows her husband, nearly well enough – and yet here they are in one another’s arms. It shouldn’t be a surprise. They are two people very much alone. Propinquity. They thirst, they ache for peers. Either Hank and Dagny will find them, or they will find Hank and Dagny.

One of them, at least, knows the score:

“Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, “To the world as it seems to be right now!”

He emptied the glass with a single movement…She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant…It was not the conventional gesture meant as a celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger,…movement substituted for a scream of pain.

“Ellis,” she whispered, “what’s the matter?”

…“I’m sorry,” he said. “Never mind. We’ll try to think that it will last.”

Have a great week, Publius!

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