FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Sacred and the Profane

Dagny is awash in the afterglow of a fine night in bed with Hank. Hank, however, is contemptuous of Dagny and of himself for what he has done. But he must have her, even if it means giving up everything. Dagny laughs at him, not with anger but with delight. She wants him just as badly, and her proudest attainment is that she has slept with Hank Rearden and has earned the right. Once more they go to the mattress.

Jim Taggart has sat through a triumphal meeting with his Board of Directors while Taggart stock has skyrocketed. Yet through the fine speeches, he perceives the Board’s contempt for him and for themselves. Walking through the rain and realizing he has lost his handkerchief, Jim enters a dying five-and-ten to buy tissues and meets a salesgirl who recognizes him.

Cherryl Brooks is under the impression that it is Jim Taggart’s courage, tenacity and hard work that have produced the success in Colorado. Cherryl is the victim of hero worship, views Jim as a Great Man, and is thrilled when he asks her to accompany him to his apartment for a drink. What strikes Jim as that she is genuine.

Cherryl had left her family in Buffalo because they were losers who blamed their station in life on bad luck, rather than seeing that they themselves were responsible. She wanted to make something of herself, and so she came to New York.

At the apartment over drinks, Jim is furious with Hank Rearden for making Rearden Metal a success. Rearden didn’t deserve it and did it for his own personal profit. Cherryl has no problem with that and thinks that Jim should glory in his, Rearden’s and Dagny’s success. She thinks especially highly of Dagny. That sets Jim off. Dagny enjoys her work, therefore there is nothing to admire. Why serve industrialists in Colorado when there are blighted areas that need transportation? Jim doesn’t enjoy it, and he thinks that with all the suffering on earth, why should anybody spend ten years to create a new metal? Somebody needs to see beyond his own wallet.

But Jim lightens up when he remembers Orren Boyle’s reaction to the success of the line. Boyle turned green and holed up in a disreputable hotel with crates of booze and half the hookers in New York. Dr. Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute was not pleased but turned the issue around by demanding that Rearden give something back to the country. Bertram Scudder, who could never shut his mouth, refused comment. Simon Pritchett spread a story that Rearden stole the formula for the metal from a penniless inventor whom he then murdered.

Dagny is coming back to New York tomorrow, and Jim gives his opinion of his sister to Cherryl, who can’t believe that Jim could hate Dagny so much. Jim believes that nobody is any good and that man should spend his life on his knees begging to be forgiven for his very existence. Cherryl doesn’t understand, so Jim quotes from a book by Simon Pritchett that denies the existence of absolute standards and questions the very nature of reality. Jim believes that unhappiness is the true mark of virtue. But what Cherryl chooses to hear is ambition, and she looks up to Jim. He considers bedding her, but realizing that he has no desire for her tonight, he takes her home. Cherryl is pleased that he didn’t try to seduce her, and Jim is insufferably pleased with his own nobility.

At Dagny’s apartment, Hank drops in to compliment her on her work on the John Galt Line. Rearden is inundated with orders for his metal. Dagny’s strength has opened the way for new wealth and a new future. Hank lists the praises of Dagny from the press, then takes her brutally. But afterward Hank asks about her sexual history. She mentions one other partner she had in her teens where the relationship lasted some years. But she won’t mention Francisco’s name. Hank demands an answer and gets only a smile, which prompts him to take her again. Brutally.

Mr. Mowen of Connecticut watches a worker loading railcars at the Quinn Ball Bearing Plant. He engages the worker in conversation about people going to Colorado when other Eastern states are suffering. He wonders what is happening to loyalty. It’s because of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, says the worker, and that is why Quinn is moving to Colorado. Mowen condemns Colorado for providing very little government, just enough to enforce the law. Colorado is taking away everyone’s business. Rearden has ruined Orren Boyle; Mowen can’t get steel from him. He can’t get Rearden Metal because the backlog is too long. It isn’t fair that people can’t compete with Ellis Wyatt; there should be a limit placed on his output. And New York is running out of oil. But Wesley Mouch of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources will fix things! The worker turns out to be Owen Kellogg!

The John Galt Line has been turned over to Taggart Transcontinental as per turnkey contract, and Dagny’s headquarters building has been demolished. Hank drops in at Dagny’s apartment in his tuxedo. He has left a banquet to which Dagny was invited, but chose not to attend so as not to be seen in public with Hank. The banquet has been a bust for Hank, in that there appeared to be no reason for it, and the motives of the people there had been opaque. The theme of the banquet had been that everybody needed Hank, as though they were making a potential claim on him.

Dagny makes great plans for laying Rearden Metal track across the entire Taggart system. Hank plans to open mills outside Pennsylvania, believing that the Equalization of Opportunity Bill will collapse of its own weight. Hank and Dagny decide to take a road trip together as a vacation.

This trip is set on America’s decaying network of two-lane highways. There are no billboards, few houses and fewer cars in rural America. Weeds grow between the cracks in the concrete. What Dagny misses most is the sign of fresh paint.

Ted Nielsen of Colorado intends to build diesel locomotives but can’t find the necessary machine tools. Thinking of a closed factory in Wisconsin where Nielsen could scrounge machine parts, Dagny suggests a trip there. Much of the road to Starnesville has actually been dismantled and perhaps sold elsewhere. The town itself appears to have been dismantled except for the few inhabited dwellings scattered about at random. The school is a ruin. Above the town on a hill stands the plant of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, abandoned ten years earlier.

Dagny and Hank ask for directions from a swollen and shapeless woman who lives in a house with a useless gas stove and cooks over a stone fireplace. Her light comes from candles, and her children look like savages. She is not sure where the factory is or how far it is to the next town.

A man draws water from a squeaky pump at a communal well. Rearden asks him for directions and pays him ten dollars, but the man refuses the money, stating that it is worthless. The people of Starnesville use barter among themselves and don’t trade with other towns. The man can’t give them decent directions. Some children shatter Rearden’s windshield with a rock while neither the man nor the woman seem to care.

The Twentieth Century Motor Company’s plant is a ruin. Dagny’s exploration screeches to a halt when she uncovers the wreck of a motor and a paper description of its purpose. It is like no motor she has ever seen, except in college, where it was said that such a thing was impossible. It is a motor that runs off static electricity. Hank and Dagny realize that no one but the designer could make it work, and Dagny suspects the designer is dead, else why would he abandon it? They decide to send a crew to retrieve the motor and anything else that might be salvaged from the plant.

The documentary film “Forbidden Hollywood” covers movies made in the Thirties before Will Hays and the Production Code censored American films for 34 years. One pre-Code classic was 1933's “Baby Face”, with Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers. Lily is the daughter of a speakeasy owner in Erie, Pennsylvania, who has pimped her out since she was 14. One night, Daddy’s still blows up, killing him, and Lily goes to New York with her black girlfriend to make her fortune.

She gets a job by bedding the personnel chief at Gotham Trust and sleeps her way to the top. One man she beds and abandons early on is a bank clerk played by the young, unknown John Wayne. At each seduction and abandonment, the camera plays on the bank building, going up floor by floor. The film is done in a breathless “Mothers, don’t let your daughters do this!” style. Today’s audiences laugh and root for Lily.

Although there was no mandatory code yet for the motion picture industry, the film ran afoul of the New York State Censorship Board which objected to some sexually suggestive scenes – but really bridled at Lily’s reading Nietzsche! The producers cut some footage, added some footage and tacked on a moralistic ending. The uncensored version turned up in a vault in 2004 and has been named one of the best 100 movies of the past 80 years.

In the ethos of the Thirties, it would have been the perfect comeuppance for Jim Taggart to be taken down by a little guttersnipe from Erie. But Rand avoids the cliches of the era and reaches for deeper meaning. Cherryl Brooks is not Lily Powers; in fact, she is the anti-Lily.

Cherryl recognizes that she “comes from dirt”. She doesn’t intend to stay in the gutter, however, but comes to New York from Buffalo with that great Gershwin spirit, seeing New York as the City of Possibilities. She intends to make it on her own and has no intention of bedding Jim Taggart for competitive advantage. She has a moral code and sticks to it. The fact that she is genuine jars Taggart, who is full of self-loathing, but for all the wrong reasons.

There is a tendency among younger people and the Devoutly Religious to believe that biblical sexual morality was the norm in American society until the Baby Boomers sent everything to hell in a handbasket in the Sixties. In the words of Sportin’ Life from “Porgy and Bess”, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

While a study of American sexual mores from the Founding onward would be fun, for our purposes the story begins after World War I. The bloodletting of the war prompted a general loosening of sexual morality in Europe and America in the Twenties. The American experience might have been less extreme, but the mistake of Prohibition undermined American respect for law and morality. The automobile took on the function of a traveling bedroom for American teenagers. American girls bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts, went drinking at “blind pigs”, as speakeasies were known, and lost their virginity.

This was a far cry from what had immediately preceded it. In that pre-war era, courting couples sat in the parlor of the girl’s parents while Ma and Pa turned in for the night. The couples sparked and spooned, and when they got too close to intercourse, a marriage was quickly arranged before things went too far.

There was of course a reaction to the change in morals in the Twenties. In East Texas, the Ku Klux Klan patrolled the parking spots where teenagers were known to congregate. Catching a couple in the act, Klansmen would pull the kids out of the car, tie them to a tree and horsewhip them. This was known as “preserving family values”.

All this came to a halt with the Depression. With people interested in just staying alive, extramarital sex became something that criminals, communists and college students did to protest bourgeois morality. With World War II, things loosened up and girls engaged to military men understood that they might not see them alive again. There was some promiscuity among women who worked in the factories and whose husbands were at war, but the role models promulgated by the popular magazines and movies of the period kept things from getting out of hand.

Put yourself in the position of a returning war veteran. You’ve lived through a tumultuous period of war, depression and social change. Coming home from the war, you want a job, a house where you and your wife can live away from the parents of either, a car and 2.3 children. You crave stability. That is what the Fifties were about, and it was an anomaly, a breathing space between periods of change. It was when chastity became trendy again.

Today, Hank’s demanding that Dagny list her prior bed partners would be considered impolite. A couple will explore each other’s sexual history, but not in a peremptory manner. It is recognized today that a woman’s body belongs to herself, and it’s nobody’s business whom she has slept with. But Atlas Shrugged is set in the Fifties and standards were different. For a 35 year old woman like Dagny to still be a virgin would be something of a longshot, but a man courting her would have a reasonable expectation that she was not all that experienced. And he would believe that he had a right to know.

Dagny’s resistence to Hank’s probing is not based on the belief that her body is her own, but is connected to the mores of the time. Dagny won’t tell because her relationship with Francisco was special, and she knows how Hank loathes him. Her silence is different from that of a modern woman.

”Things aren’t right ... The Equalization of Opportunity Bill was a sound idea. There’s got to be a chance for everybody. It’s a rotten shame if people like Quinn take unfair advantage of it. Why didn’t he let somebody else start manufacturing ball bearings in Colorado? ... I wish the Colorado people would leave us alone. That Stockton Foundry out there had no right going into the switch and signal business. That’s been my business for years, I have the right of seniority, it isn’t fair, it’s dog-eat-dog competition, newcomers shouldn’t be allowed to muscle in.”

In the Sixties and Seventies, those words didn’t come from business owners like Mr. Mowen. They came from the mouths of union bosses.

One of America’s dirty little secrets is that organized labor was responsible in the Fifties for creating the American middle class as we know it, and it did so by insisting that unskilled labor be paid the same wages as skilled labor. Following the war, America had the only industrial plant in the world that hadn’t been destroyed by bombardment. American unions could demand higher wages, and the rest of the world had no choice but to pay inflated prices for American goods because we were the only game in town. An American male could drop out of school, get his union card, sign up at the local plant, marry, have 2.3 children, own a car, house and vacation home, and at age 65 retire with a full pension and go fishing. It was a great racket while it lasted.

In the Sixties, the Third World came on line as a source of cheap labor; in the Seventies, Nixon’s decision to close the gold window turned the dollar into a pure fiat currency represented by bits and bytes of computer data that flowed around the world effortlessly. The result was that high labor costs caused American goods to be priced out of world markets. Faced with such a challenge, a capitalistic concern could either go out of business or shift its manufacturing to the Third World. As a nation begins to industrialize, it does its time on the sweatshop cross, and that made it mandatory for American companies to shift work abroad. Unions were outraged, but were not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to keep jobs at home. After all, if a union lacks pricing power, what good is it?

With the end of the Cold War, the Second World came on line as a cheap labor source, effectively ending the pricing power of American wage earners.

In the book, there is no Third World because everyone outside America has accepted communism. But there is Colorado, with its minimalist libertarian government, and capitalists move there because business conditions demand it. Mr. Mowen would be best advised to shut up, discard his sense of entitlement and join Mr. Quinn in Colorado.

In the year 476, the Roman army deposed the last emperor. The Roman bureaucracy soldiered on, pretending that nothing had changed, until it gave up the ghost and taxes were no longer collected. On the frontier, Roman legions, now unpaid, deserted, either going home or marrying into the families of the area in which they were stationed.

Before the empire collapsed, in a frontier settlement a Roman judge handed down a verdict injurious to a barbarian clan chief. The clan chief’s son then murdered the Roman judge. The next day, the local Roman legion assaulted the clan chief’s compound, crucified the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Roman law – and power – were upheld, and everybody knew who was boss.

After the collapse and with the disappearance of the legions, the same events occurred, but the day after the murder of the Roman judge, the clan chief and his family swaggered around town collecting tribute from the inhabitants. There was a new boss, and everybody knew who it was.

With the disappearance of the legions, bandits took over the fine Roman roads and trade ground to a halt. In the Dark Ages, a man who had enough wealth to hire former legionnaires as thugs on horseback – later to be known as “knights” when the Church got its hands on them – could build a fortified castle and control a sector of land, preserving his version of law and order. Walled towns, castles and manors were designed to be self-sufficient because trade was a high risk effort. People over time sold their freedom to the man with thugs on horseback because he could protect them from outsiders. Thus serfdom entered the world, and people were bound to the land, never traveling more than a few miles from the place where they were born.

Australian director George Miller put some thought into just how a society unravels in his three-part Mad Max saga, with Mel Gibson in the starring role.

In the first film from 1980, “Mad Max”, Gibson plays a highway patrolman in Australia following a nuclear war. One job is to enforce a low speed limit because oil is scarce, but his main concern is that Australia’s prisons have disgorged their inmates into the outback during the confusion. Civilized life is possible along a narrow strip of coastline, but in the outback, gangs rule. People will kill for a tanker truck full of gas. The veneer of civilization is wearing thin.

In the second film from 1982, “Mad Max 2", released as “The Road Warrior” in the US, Max has to protect an oil refinery in the outback from resident gangs. The film is similar to American westerns, but with gang members in motor vehicles replacing Indians on horseback. Life on the coastal strip is vanishing.

In the third film from 1985, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, civilization exists in small settlements where people can wall themselves off from barbarians. There is no longer any oil, and animal power hauls the hulks of cars and trucks. Pig manure produces the methane needed to satisfy the energy needs of a walled settlement.

Rand’s vision is only a little different. Starnesville, Wisconsin is a vision of hell. The town isn’t much more than a ghost town, with no job base, no school, no gas, no electricity and no running water. Federal Reserve Notes are useless, and people use barter within the town. Nobody trades with other towns, and people aren’t even sure how far away the next town is. All we are missing is the local clan chief with his thugs on horseback declaring that Starnesville is his fief. It’s the Dark Ages descending on America. Here Rand gives the reader a foretaste of what is to come when this degradation of society spreads to the cities.

In the old west people took care of themselves without turning slovenly and letting their children become wild.

Have you been to the welfare office of a fairly large city? Or to a Food Maxx on food stamp day? I see the MM effect happening in mid to large size cities. Heck, you can see it now in large urban areas. It's happening now in Mexico with the drug cartels.

When you lose a large employer in a small town, you lose not only those jobs, but the surrounding economy suffers as well. In times past, people moved on, found a new ventures, took risks, did what they could to get by. Now we have an entitlement mentality. So when jobs are lost, they are frozen with indecision, unable to shift gears, and call to the government to rescue them. Katrina is a prime example of when a populace expects government to provide all of the means. So if the whole shebang collapses, I can see this happening.

One thing that has helped me in approaching this study is to look at AS as an allegory or parable. I can’t remember if it was in one of these threads or some other thread where the point was made that Rand wrote philosophy books, not easy reading novels. That is true, she was using fiction to illustrate her concepts. Many writers do this. I have a tendency when reading to just accept whatever is written and not get all stressed over the details, for good or for bad.

OK, I’m going to try this again. I just don’t get everything in the town going to “rack and ruin”. The big employer left and so they are back to feudal days? Why does it compute that only the big industrialists can make everything rosy?

That part of the book didn't strike me that way. Remember the old axiom: whatever you reward, you get more of. These people are surrounded by a society where ambition is vilified, and increasingly, tangibly punished. Where apathy, mediocrity, and sloth somehow elevate those who display them in the eyes of others. A nation that is like that to an even greater degree than the United States of 2009. If we lived in that nation a lot of us might end up the same way.

Meanwhile, I haven’t written a single word on my favorite character in the book, Cherryl Brooks, who was introduced in this chapter.

Yes, I expect very interesting things from Cherryl. While I'm six or seven chapters ahead at the moment, this is my first time reading AS, so I don't know yet what's going to happen. She idolizes Jim for being all the things he actually is not, but that Dagny, from whom she intends to defend him, is. Presumably if Cherryl's going to play a more major role this will come out and we'll get to watch the resolution unfold.

I saw something on the history channel about Polish Jews during WWII that managed to either escape or didn't get rounded up in the first place.

They have made a movie about it.

They essentially went to the forest and made a mini city.

They had shoemakers, and builders and other skilled labor.

It worked because the people had skills.

If you took 200 random people today and stuck them in the forest only a handful would survive without electricity.

Most people are useless when it comes to survival without modern conveniences...We are so removed from food sources..

Give me a guy that hunts and a guy that knows how to saw and hammer over a stock broker or an insurance guy or a car salesman.

A good portion of folks let their kids run wild now and it's not in collapse...It's because of relativism..

God forbid you tell a kid no, or you can't have it or even worse...earn it.

Well, Publius, you kinda threw me for a loop with that essay about Lily Powers. If I were going to choose a similar character from a novel, it would be Dreiser’s Sister Carrie rather than Rand’s Cherryl Brooks.

There is no way that Jim Taggart would have been taken down by a little guttersnipe from Erie. That would have been contrary to his character. He would recognize the gold digging guttersnipe for what she was. He would bed her and move on. But Cherryl didn’t fit that mold. Taggart recognized that she was different. Unlike most women and men Taggart encountered in his miserable existence, this young lady didn’t have an agenda. She doesn’t want anything from him; she is simply honored to be in the presence of someone she believes is a great man on his night of triumph.

And how intoxicating this is for Jim Taggart! Cherryl fulfills a need of his that no gold-digger would have been capable of doing. As Taggart bathes in her oblivious and honest admiration of him, he is able momentarily to believe his own press releases. The lies become his reality for most of the evening until he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Rather than feeling any remorse, Taggert feels smugly satisfied that he has conned this innocent young thing. And he feels superior.

It is because of Cherryl’s goodness that Taggert is going to pursue her. She doesn’t hide her poverty ridden past. She isn’t ashamed of it or guilty because she has taken steps to escape it. She has a moral sense of values that makes her reject and rise above the sloth of her family. She simply wants to achieve something in her life. She doesn’t affect a phony sense of sophistication with her move to the Big City, but readily admits that she has a lot to learn. She’s eager and excited to face what her new life has to offer.

Poor Cherryl. Little does she realize that she has jumped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire with her chance meeting of Jim Taggart. Little does she realize that he is the kindred spirit of the relatives from whom she fled.

Yes, a lot of people have lost the “art” of survival, which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be revived through trial and error. Yes, there are lots of looters around now and those that want to be taken care of. I’ve lived in a city where the biggest employer left, I know of no one that turned out the way this story goes. Imagine you’re unemployed and have no prospects of another job. What do you do? That’s the question here. Right now, the way things are going in this country, it isn’t hard to do. Are you already making plans? Do you have a loose outline in your head of those friends/relatives that you could band with? Plans on how you could live? I’m thinking that there would be a barter system. I’m thinking that there would be a black market. I’m thinking that there would be like-minded people that would band together. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. ;)

Or take a look at the Siberian city of Kadykchan

Interesting. (I sort of wonder what brought this place to your attention.)

I went to your link and looked at all the pictures. Since I noticed that many were just different views of the same building, I thought to go to Google maps and zoom in to get a sense of how big the place was, and then finally out to see where it is (or was?).

We do have our ghost towns too.

ML/NJ

I agree with you.

The people that are going to survive have preselected themselves...You saw it with Katrina, we just went through it here in Ky with the killer ice storm.

When you sit on your fanny and wait for rescue you are gonna die.

Those folks with sufficient initiative will figure out a way to survive but you don’t have time for trial and error.

Great article. I wonder how many of those critics realize how much they sound like characters in the novel that they haven't read. Not many, would be my guess. As the author points out, Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, with the artificialities necessary to fiction an inherent part. What is astonishing, and it will be apparent in the next chapter, is how very accurate the events of AS turned out to be right down to last detail.

I love Whittaker Chambers and think that Witness is the finest piece of Cold War literature ever penned, but in his criticism of AS he committed the cardinal sin of the critic - there is not a single indication in it that he had actually read the book he was criticizing. His was the outrage of the convert at the defiant apostate, I think. But what he found objectionable about the novel is the very least part of it, IMHO.

Of course the left will sneer. It is, after all, what they do best. Declaring a looter like Madoff a capitalist is simply proof that they don't know the very terms of the discussion. But they'd better be concerned about one thing - if even those of us who aren't ubermenschen decide that enough is enough there won't be enough government revenue to support their precious social programs and printing money without it is a freight train to disaster.

One of the things that drives me nuts in the book and in real life is the double speak.

I so want someone to tell the looters that they are spouting a load of bull.

I could have cheered when Hank did it with his Mother over her request to give Phillip a job. Even then he didn’t go far enough.

Double speak was a key element in the novel 1984...

Propaganda, disinformation, double speak is a key element of leftist movements everywhere..we’ve lost the march with confronting this.

Erosion of the language is the first step..It is so entrenched that it requires an all out war but the talking heads lack the guts...Talk radio is confronting it to some degree but the first line of battle is calling a spade a spade in every aspect of your own life.

I’ve already started doing it every opportunity I have.

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