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.

What I think most people are missing when Ayn Rand writes about Hank and Dagny is that they’re the last two standing. They’re both driven to success and define their lives by their success.

As two people with very powerful personalities, of course they are drawn to one another. There is no one else they know that is as they are.

At this point, both Hank and Dagny are not only sharing their passion, they’re also using each other to try and insulate and reassure themselves against the coming collapse. A collapse they see happening all around them, yet deny there is nothing they can do about it.

Changing the subject just a bit, have you ever compared the description of “The Banner” in “The Fountainhead” to the MSN homepage?

Back to AS: I personally know two people who have remained one man shops here in CA, because the headache involved with adding employees just isn’t worth the monetary gain.

Between the two of them, they’ve probably kept 10 or more $15/hr+ jobs off the market. Not to mention the cost to suppliers, due to less demand from these shops.

Reminds me just a bit of Owen Kellog.

According to my mom, her tax guy has been inundated with requests for advice on reducing taxable income. And, of course, these are people who make in excess of 200k.

Atlas is Shrugging and, as in the book, those who abdicate any responsibility for their actions are being willfully blind to what is happening.

Even the Little Guy is shrugging. "Newsweek" has pointed out that thrift and parsimony on the part of the American consumer is pushing the economy more deeply into depression. Our economic system is based not just on consumption, but debt. Without ever increasing debt, the whole shebang just falls apart.

The Little Guy is also shrugging when he buys firearms and ammunition. People can't put their fingers on just what wicked thing is coming their way, but like a wolf they can sense it.

That's a theme I intend to develop a little later - Atlas shrugging isn't likely to be a handful of super-talented entrepreneurs getting entry-level jobs, but a very large number of people who shrug in small ways. Just as you mentioned, not doing anything that is likely to generate extra revenue for the government. Buying a used car and paying cash. Bartering a little. Growing some garden vegetables. And refusing to purchase newspapers and watch television programs that incessantly push the government line.

Lots of people shrugging in little ways. The newspapers are already starting to feel the pinch. The reply on the part of the looters in government will be to find additional things to tax - e-commerce, for example. And by placing as many people as possible on the government payroll - the Obama Youth. The Obama Youth versus the garage sale crowd. That, I suspect, is part of what Atlas shrugging might look like. More on this later.

When I read comments from the left denigrating the ideas of Ayn Rand, they invariably call her names and encourage those of us who agree with Ayn Rand to “leave and go to Galt’s Gulch.”

The left refuses to understand that if all the high wage earners in the US were to go on strike and refuse to do anything but the most menial jobs, our government would collapse.

It doesn’t require going anywhere, it just requires doing less.

Actually, that’s what I mean by going “on strike.”

When one does less of the economic activity that is taxed, the looters get less taxes.

I’m not advocating quitting entirely, just slowing down.

Although, quitting to the point of doing just menial labor does sound good at times.

[...]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. [...]

I noticed another element in the relationship between Jim Taggart and Cherryl: His interest in her is almost solely based on the amount of 'good' he is seen to be doing 'for' her. He sees her as a welfare case and his pride in showing her off in public is saying in effect "look how magnanimous I am, and how good I am for saving this wretched pathetic creature from her life". Cherryl's social awkwardness is a (if not the only) point of pride for him, and serves to back up his misperception of her.

It isn't real, of course, and (perhaps later in the story) his annoyance with her develops when she begins to lose that awkwardness and her modest background becomes less obvious to his socialite peers.

She is a prop in the stageplay that is his false existence. She doesn't really need him any more than Taggart Transcontinental needs him. But he needs *her* to justify and showcase his shallow worldview.

The names of the destructive government programs is similar to what is going on today.

Look at the destruction done in AS by the Equalization of Opportunity act. Compare to recently proposed or passed acts:

Employee Free Choice Act - eliminates secret ballots when voting on union representation.

Making Work Pay Tax Credit - redistributes money from those who work and pay income tax to those who pay no income tax.

Better late to the party than never.....

Starnesville: of course the people who are still there are wallowing in self-destruction. They did not have enough interest in self-preservation to bother to leave. My grandmother emigrated from “the old country”, and two of my sisters went back to visit the village and our second cousins. They were appalled at the utter lack of ambition and enormous quantities of alcohol. Think about it: the ambitious ones left.....

I think that is why our country was once so great: it was a self-selecting population of go-getters. No ambition? Stay put in the old country.

Just another Atlas Shrugged moment in the news. Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial on ethanol mentions various groups, including, the “Union of Concerned Scientists”. I had to giggle, it sounded just like one of those stupid committees worried about Rearden Metal.

Until next week, then.

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