Chapter 15, “Account Overdrawn,” finds us in the February of a particularly cruel winter, some five months after Francisco threw down the gauntlet at James Taggart’s wedding party with his Root of Money speech. It has not been a time of untrammeled success for the central planners of the Aristocracy of Pull. Danagger’s replacement cannot deliver coal, Taggart cannot run trains without it, and Rearden cannot produce metal without it either. Danagger’s withdrawal is proving to be a crucial, strategic blow to the production of the surplus that keeps the looters in business.
Honest production – that is, the sort that is not covered by centralized planning – now being illegal, Rearden finds himself purchasing coal on the black market, produced by men desperate to feed their families.
They mined it at night, they stored it in hidden culverts, they were paid in cash, with no questions asked or answered…they and Rearden traded like savages, without rights, titles, contracts, or protection, with nothing but mutual understanding and a ruthlessly absolute observance of one’s given word.
The ripple effect is in full evidence and it is not a pretty sight. Delays are trivial and excused in the boardroom, deadly in the field: trains of produce spoil (apparently even in the winter) and people do not eat, factories and lumberyards find production halted and fold. Passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere in a driving snowstorm without fuel or supplies, their only beacon of civilization in the wilderness being the desolate flickering of Wyatt’s Torch. They may feel that civilization has abandoned them; Rand later will be more explicit about it but in fact it is they who have abandoned it. The machine is running down.
We learn something curious about the Aristocracy of Pull – it is an international ruling class, presiding over the immiseration of entire countries. That is a term popularized by Marx to describe the steadily declining fortunes of the workers under capitalism; in fact, under capitalism those fortunes steadily grew, and it is, on the contrary, socialism that has produced that process in the real world and is producing it now within Rand’s. That is, apparently, what one abandons when one abandons the Aristocracy of Money for the Aristocracy of Pull: one abandons nothing less than civilization itself.
But we see the international nature of the problem when we discover that part of the supplies so necessary to the domestic industrial machine have been sent by Orren Boyle to a counterpart in Germany. Steel in this case, steel that should have repaired a bridge that subsequently fails, carrying five cars of passengers to a watery doom, a doom shared by the very steel that would have saved them, at the hands of Ragnar Danneskjold.
It is a crisis, but not the crisis that called for a crisis meeting in the Taggart boardroom. That crisis involves the cannibalization of Taggart Transcontinental, and it is Rand’s means of instructing us how the Aristocracy of Pull works within itself. There is the Board, there is a Mr. Weatherby from the government who represents the men who represent the men…but we see how this all works in a circular conversation peppered with names of men of influence and their interplay. What is being traded, in Orren Boyle’s words, isn’t money, it’s men.
And that’s too bad for Taggart, because one group of those men consists of shippers, or more precisely those looters now in charge of the country’s diminishing production, who demand a reduction in shipping rates in order to stave off the wolves. A second is represented by Mr. Weatherby, who makes the union’s case for an increase in salary across the board and a continuation of the short-train and low-speed policies intended to create work for all but in fact killing it. A third, suppliers of rail who must be bribed to keep Taggart running, and finally a government – the useful Mr. Weatherby again – who must grant permission for Taggart to close a line to salvage rail sufficient to make up for the deficiency. In their view all Taggart stands to lose by attempting to meet those conflicting demands is profit. In fact, it is the very sinews of the company that are being consumed.
Jim Taggart protests, of course – his meal ticket is in jeopardy. But Weatherby holds the whip hand:
“But these are difficult times [says Weatherby], and it’s hard telling what’s liable to happen. With everybody going broke and the tax receipts falling we…hold well over fifty percent of the Taggart bonds – we might be compelled to call for the payment of railroad bonds within six months…”
“WHAT?!” screamed Taggart.
“ – or sooner.”
“But you can’t!...it was understood that the moratorium was for five years! It was a contract, and obligation! We were counting on it!”
“Aren’t you old-fashioned, Jim? …The original owners of those bonds were counting on their payments, too.”
Dagny burst out laughing…she could not stop herself, she could not resist a moment’s chance to avenge Ellis Wyatt, Andrew Stockton, Lawrence Hammond, all the others.
Jim is caught very neatly here – his free money has a cost after all. And so he accedes to the salary raises that will kill his company in return for permission to pull up rail sufficient for that death to be delayed as long as possible. That rail exists only in one place – the Rio Norte Line, its first use and now its last reservoir. The John Galt Line, to name it truly, must die, and they want Dagny to give it the death sentence. She declines to make the decision for them.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “I do not know by what sort of self-fraud you expect to feel that if it’s I who name the decision you intend to make, it will be I who’ll bear the responsibility for it. Perhaps you believe that if my voice delivers the final blow, it will make me the murderer involved – since you know this is the last act of a long-drawn-out murder. I cannot conceive what it is you think you can accomplish by a pretense of this kind, and I will not help you stage it.”
In one more sense the sanction of the victim has been withdrawn. Dagny has learned the hard way, but she has learned. After considerable dithering they do summon the courage necessary for the death sentence and then hand Dagny the responsibility for the execution, at least in part because she’s the only one present who could manage to accomplish the thing. She is predictably devastated at the loss, the death of her achievement, and not only hers. As Lillian sweetly puts it later, “You’re returning from what was, in effect, the funeral of your child by my husband, aren’t you?” Nice. But Dagny is determined to keep Taggart Transcontinental moving even if it’s only in its death throes. At her emotional nadir Francisco d’Anconia is there to pick her up, the act of the loyalty of an old friend. His share of blame is not mentioned, nor is it necessary. But blame does come up, and it lands in a surprising quarter:
“Dagny, the men of your Board of Directors are no match for Nat Taggart, are they? …Then why is it that throughout men’s history the Nat Taggarts, who make the world, have always won – and always lost it to the men of the Board?”
“I…don’t know.”
“…Dagny, he fought with every weapon he possessed, except the most important one. They could not have won, if we – he and the rest of us – had not given the world away to them.”
She misinterprets.
“Yes. You gave it away to them. Ellis Wyatt did. Ken Danagger did. I won’t.”
He smiled. “Who built the John Galt Line for them?”
Dagny is a fighter and it isn’t in her to give up. And oh, she is so very, very stubborn. One comes to admire and deplore it in her. And that is why she makes herself a willing victim for the leeches, food for the vultures. It’s all futile anyway. Who is John Galt?
“I can answer it,” he [Francisco] said. “I can tell you who is John Galt. John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire – until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”
It is imperfect mythology but the point is made. There, in four sentences, is the précis of Atlas Shrugged. The rest is, as an infuriating old professor of mine use to smirk, “merely engineering.”
Rearden’s and Dagny’s return on the last Rio Norte train is met by Lillian’s long-delayed realization that it is, in fact, Dagny who is the object of her husband’s affections, his “mistress” to use a somewhat antique term for it. It is also less than entirely accurate – Dagny is anything but a kept woman. About the toxic relationship that is the Rearden marriage the less said the better, but in that conversation we are made aware of the connection between Rand’s political and sexual theories. It is simply that in neither arena may one human being properly demand that another live for him or for her. Lillian finds this out when she demands that they end the relationship:
“But I have the right to demand it! I own your life! It’s my property. My property – by your own oath…I hold first claim! I’m presenting it for collection! You’re the account I own!”
It is a rather stark and unattractive description of what remains in marriage when the love has drained away, and it is the emotional leverage which she must employ in order to “deliver” her husband in exactly the same way as Orren Boyle or Wesley Mouch delivers another man. She too is a dealer, and Hank is her stock in trade.
Up to now.
“Whatever claim you may have on me,” he said, “no human being can hold on another a claim demanding that he wipe himself out of existence.”
We will hear those words later from another mouth and in another context, but Hank has arrived. When he comes to believe that about his whole life, and not just about the confines of his married life, he will have taken the last moral step. The rest is merely engineering.
Have a great week, Publius!
Doesn't sound like such a bad concept for an economy actually. Don't like the goobermint that drove them to it, but you have to admit, the mind that thought up VIP shopper cards and similar stupidity would be laughed out of town in that world.