Posted on 06/20/2009 7:51:34 AM PDT by Publius
Synopsis
As Dr. Robert Stadler sits in a grandstand in Iowa on a hot day, he complains to Dr. Floyd Ferris about being dragged halfway across the continent – for what? Ferris treats him with slight deference barely concealing contempt. This day will usher in a new era, and the business of today is government. Stadler glances with some trepidation at a building that looks like a giant mushroom. He is proud to be in the best section of seats until he finds he is sitting near Dr. Simon Pritchett. Ferris conducts the press to Stadler explaining that it’s his work that has made today possible. Stadler discovers from a journalist that this is all about Project X. Not knowing what to say, he settles for some vanilla verbiage for the Mainstream Media.
Head of State Thompson arrives with his entourage, which includes Wesley Mouch who takes the microphone while Stadler observes a ruined farm in the distance with a herd of goats. Nearby is a steel trestle that goes nowhere. The mushroom-shaped building is the lab for Project Xylophone, named because this project is about the use of sound as a weapon. A two mile area has been cleared for the test, but Xylophone in its present incarnation can handle a distance of one hundred miles. This weapon will now be known as the Thompson Harmonizer in honor of the Head of State. As the weapon is activated, the goats go into convulsions and die, the farmhouse collapses and the trestle disintegrates.
Stadler is horrified, especially when Ferris tells him that he is the inventor by way of theoretical work he had done long ago. Ferris explains that no one will attack any nation that possesses such a weapon. Stadler points out that America has no external enemies, but Ferris says it will save the nation from internal enemies. Only the government, freed from the profit motive, could have invented such a perfect peacekeeper. The State Science Institute has finally come up with something useful, and the government was happy to fund it.
Thompson and Mouch speak, followed by Pritchett; all praise Stadler as the inventor of the Harmonizer. Ferris hands Stadler his speech, and he is both horrified and paralyzed. Other speakers condemn a lack of faith among Americans and speak of peace and love. As the full import of what he has done hits Stadler, he excoriates Ferris: “In a civilized century!” He is told by Ferris that he has to give this speech and that truth has nothing to do with it; it’s about power. As Stadler mounts the podium, a journalist begs him to tell the truth about the men ruling America and how they intend to use the Harmonizer. Ferris pulls the journalist’s press pass and work permit, effectively sentencing him to death by starvation. Stadler gives the speech as written.
Dagny arrives in Manhattan by way of the airport bus. She had been dropped off near Watsonville, Nebraska, and had taken a train and plane back to New York. Reading the newspaper, she had seen her brother’s statement that she had died in a plane crash, not deserted. She had identified herself to a reporter at the airport to report that she was still alive.
At her apartment she tries to reach Hank at the mill but reaches Gwen Ives instead. Hank is in Colorado, and Dagny calls him at his hotel. He is relieved that Dagny is alive, and she is somewhat evasive in telling Hank what happened. Hank will fly back and see her in the evening. Dagny goes to work.
Dagny finds Cuffy Meigs, an armed paramilitary from the Unification Board, running the operations side of Taggart Transcontinental in accordance with the Railroad Unification Plan; Clem Weatherby is apparently out of the loop. Meigs gives orders to Eddie, countermanded by Dagny, then re-countermanded by Meigs. Dagny tells Eddie as much as she can without breaking her oath to John Galt. Eddie explains that Meigs is rerouting motive power so that the Smather brothers in Arizona can get their grapefruit hauled; they had “pull” in Washington. There is a pretense that trains are given their priorities for reasons of public welfare, but everybody knows that Meigs, the “Unificator”, makes his decisions based on pull. The Winston tunnel has been abandoned, as has the plan for rebuilding the old route through the Rockies.
Jim sits down with Meigs, Dagny and Eddie in her office. She is still the Vice President of Operations, she is told. She invents a story for the press at Jim’s insistence but refuses a press conference. Jim explains the Railroad Unification Plan: all railroads have pooled their resources with their gross revenue managed by the Railroad Pool Board in Washington. Revenue is parceled out by the board according to need, by the mileage of track it owns and maintains. Taggart Transcontinental is now using the tracks of the Atlantic Southern for transcontinental traffic. Dagny now understands: Taggart has the largest amount of trackage in the country, thus earning revenue for non-producing track, while Taggart gets to use the Atlantic Southern’s track for free. The board determines how many trains will be run and where. The president of the Atlantic Southern has killed himself. Jim begs for understanding from Dagny, and she realizes there is nothing to be gained from using reason with Jim and Meigs. Meigs gets up and leaves, ordering Dagny to do something about all those train wrecks.
Jim tells Dagny that she is booked on Bertram Scudder’s radio show that evening for a morale-building speech; this has been mandated by Thompson and Mouch. She recognizes the telltale sign of the sanction of the victim, and she refuses to cooperate. Dagny orders Jim out of her office.
Lillian Rearden drops in on Dagny to tell her that she will appear on Scudder’s show. Lillian explains to Dagny why Hank signed the Gift Certificate: Hank’s fear of hurting Dagny by exposing their affair. Lillian explains that it was she who informed the authorities and took Rearden Metal away from Hank. Dagny agrees to appear on the show.
On the Bertram Scudder Show, Dagny tells the nation that she has been Hank Rearden’s mistress for the past two years and is proud of it. As Jim, Lillian and Scudder sit paralyzed, Dagny explains that it was blackmail concerning this relationship that caused Hank to sign over Rearden Metal, blackmail emanating from the national government. Scudder terminates the broadcast as Dagny laughs; the air goes dead.
Dagny returns to her apartment to find Hank already there. Dagny falls into his arms and sobs. Hank speaks of his love for her and how he cut himself in two, with one set of principles for his business and another for his life. Hank stuns Dagny when he says he knows she has met the final love of her life. Dagny admits that she has met him, but may never see him again. Hank takes his replacement in Dagny’s heart well enough. Without breaking her oath, Dagny explains that there is truly a John Galt, inventor of the motor, and she has spent the past month at his secret location. Hank surmises that John Galt is The Destroyer. Dagny asks if Hank can give up Rearden Steel, and he can’t – just yet. Hank now perceives the stakes and the requirements for admission to Galt’s Gulch. Dagny vows they will continue to fight the looters of the world.
The American Experiment With Railroad Nationalization
The US entry into World War I in 1917 found America’s railroads unable to keep up with the war effort. This was primarily due to over-regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose refusal to grant rate hikes deprived railroads of necessary capital. Another problem was overexpansion, which had pushed a number of railroads into bankruptcy on the eve of the war. Added to this toxic brew was labor strife, which was averted only when Woodrow Wilson pushed an eight-hour day on the railroads, thus adding to labor costs.
The railroads did their best to coordinate during the war, but competition still reigned. The government began asking for priority shipping, with each government agency chivvying the other out of freight capacity on the rails. The result was congestion everywhere; some heavily used rail lines saw freight trains stacked up one behind another for weeks.
In late 1917 the ICC recommended that Congress nationalize the operations of the railroads, so Congress created the United States Railroad Administration in early 1918. Competition was curtailed as duplicate passenger operations were cut, uniform ticketing processes created, and terminal and shop facilities shared. Standardized locomotives were ordered as designed by a government committee and paid for by government.
The USRA was moderately successful, and a number of high end infrastructure improvements came out of the exercise, all paid for by government. This influx of taxpayer money, and equipment and infrastructure paid for by it, permitted the nation’s railroads to go into the Twenties with their balance sheets restored.
While the experiment worked, it was horribly expensive, in the long run being a corporate welfare exercise. When World War II broke out, the experiment wasn’t repeated, and the railroads performed in an exemplary manner.
Discussion Topics
Homosexuals?
Rand plays with the idea of a state that is willing to slaughter its people to maintain power, but she drops it almost immediately. There are two kinds of people who run such states. One kind understands that if he starves the masses, he'll get food riots, so he makes sure they can at least eat. The other is willing to kill the rioters. Joseph Zdugashvili and Mao Tse Tung were two of the latter group.
Rand avoided the obvious implications of the state she imagined. She wrote extensively about the deaths of the passengers on the Comet when it crashed with the arms train in the Taggart Tunnel. The incident filled twenty pages and introduced several characters, all of whom were portrayed as worthy of their fate. There are also hints of violence prior to this point. Dagny Taggart mentions raiders on the frozen train, but nothing about their actual methods.
Rand portrayed the ideological battle between self love and self hate, not a contest of arms between factions of different stripes. Her method argues that the reader should appreciate himself and not view himself as worthless when compared to society. Another interesting view of a society gone mad “for the common good” is offered in Harlan Ellison's A boy and His Dog.
In the film adaptation of that story, the Topeka Council is the absolute authority in a post apocalypse city. Anyone who defies the council is immediately killed and the death attributed to a farm accident or some other benign circumstance, with the council blithely adding, “Oh, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul,” after they order the murder. In Soviet Russia, the order might be a profane tirade from Papa Joe, followed by the disappearance of the victim, and the state's effort to remove that person from the historical record. Why bother to lie about his death when refusing to admit that he ever lived eliminates the need to answer difficult questions?
Rand's collectivist state sabotaged a wheat harvest so that politically connected traders could ship grapefruits. Such a state has to use force. People find out why they're starving, why their friends and relatives are starving, and they're not nice when they find out who did it. But Rand never mentions the state taking action against the violators of Directive 10-289. The penalty for violation is death, but no one gets executed. This is perhaps a reflection of The Fountainhead, which portrayed the conflict between socialism and liberty as an ideological battle. Perhaps enough people did not understand what The Fountainhead was truly about and Rand changed her theme to make it more clear.
But Project X is clearly designed to keep internal order by killing a lot of people at once, and so I think your observation about regimes willing to do that is precisely accurate. One of the nomenklatura - Mouch? - blandly recommended murder in that conversation about Directive 10-289 and Kinnan put his foot down. The union thugs won't stand for it at the moment but later they will. Maybe it's just that they won't stand for people other than themselves doing it.
Rand's written violence has a fairyland-like quality to it that may have been a product both of her times (although Raymond Chandler was putting out some pretty graphic stuff) and her antecedents - as we'll see later, she writes about a gunfight like a philosopher, not a gunfighter.
I'd love to know how much she really knew about the starvation campaign in the Ukraine - at the time the novel was published Krushchev had only just made his secret speech, so a lot of Stalin's abuses were still pretty much papered over, but Rand did have relatives in the old country at the time who occasionally wrote to her. I have to wonder, though, if she had stuck that stuff into AS - would anyone have believed it?
Not Mouch. Ferris is the one who always pushes for death.
I don’t think it was Ferris and I’m not sure if it was Mouch. Rand’s style puzzles me. She dances around two dark truths, which are the use of force in a totalitarian state and the effects of incempetence in an industrial society.
Project X is demonstrated but never used. Rand’s leaders, though obviously despicable, are afraid to use physical force. Imagine a world that issues death threats then kowtows to a union leader who says they can’t threaten to kill the union men. Or else what? They’re evil enough to starve the world through stupidity and political favors, but not evil enough to actually pull the trigger.
Rand mentions a couple of plane crashes and industrial accidents as if they were headlines flashed on the New York Times headline scroll in Manhattan. The train wreck is the only detailed description. It’s reminscent of a scene in The Fountainhead. Dominique Francon meets with a bunch of wealthy do gooders in New York to discuss the plight of the poor. We would refer to this audience as limousine liberals and/or morons. Dominique tells them about the poor people she studied, how they had brand new radios (written in the 1930s) but didn’t pay the rent, spent their days drinking and ignoring their children, etc. Both scenes are described with clinical detachment. They’re not meant to make the reader sad or angry.
Those incidents have consequences, though, which are shockingly real and accurately foretold. We’re familiar with the welfare moochers of the 1980s and fools with heavy machinery were a staple of the Soviet Union. I assume she wanted to appeal to the readers’ sense of logic, rather than emotion. But anger and sorrow are natural when confronted by deadly acts of stupidity. If we didn’t get angry about them, they would happen more often.
Sheesh. Good thing the unity board won't let them fire me.
Actually, it does in fact get used, but I don't want to post a spoiler.
Late to the party, I’ve been out of town.
Consider, though, that Rand found it necessary to have the State create a weapon that is designed, primarily, to keep internal order.
Again, remarkably prescient. Ruby Ridge and the botched military style raid against Randy Weaver. Elian Gonzalez and the government sanctioned thugs that seized him, unnecessarily, at the point of a gun.
And, the most grotesque violation by the government against citizens, in recent memory, Waco.
Rand implies the US has become a country willing to use deadly force against its own citizens.
I suggest recent history shows our government has no problem with the idea of violence against its own citizens.
And, the people who are involved in these raids always use the “I was just doing my job” excuse to justify their actions.
She omitted much of the obvious consequences of violence that would not be shocking to her intended audience. But her discussions of Dagny Taggart and her lovers are borderline explicit for 1957. Her novels repeatedly trashed collectivism, but also offered discussions of sexuality a bit more frankly than the prudish nature of the era. The two characters in Anthem run off to live together outside of the mainstream without the benefit of marriage. Howard Roarke rapes Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. Dagny Taggart’s sexual adventures are discussed in more detail than any aspect of Atlas Shrugged except for objectivism. I wonder how much of Rand's ideal was against the sexual mores of the era.
Kay Ludlow is another insight into this. She tells Dagny that she quit movies because all the roles it offered were home-wreckers and such (sluts) instead of independent women who could do whatever they wanted, such as marry a philosopher turned pirate. Some comedian cracked wise about women and pirates when he asked, "How many women fantasize about being ravaged by an English professor wearing a turtleneck?"
No, I think it was Ferris. Ferris is always wanting to kill people. He mentions it in the first person there, and his attitude is referred to by others elsewhere as well.
The wuss. ;-)
It's too bad actually. If Mouch DID try to kill somebody, he's such a moron he'd probably end up shooting himself, and everybody'd be better off.
Ann Coulter once commented that the only way for an actress to win an Oscar was to portray a whore at some point in her career.
Ann then proceeded to list Oscar winners that won for their portrayal of a prostitute or had “played a prostitute” on their screen resume.
The list is pretty impressive:
Jane Fonda
Julia Roberts
Kim Basinger
Nicole Kidman (she won after Ann made her comment)
There are others, however, their names escape me at the moment.
Rand does mention what happens to the violators of the Directive: they go rogue, become villains, form gangs that roam the wilderness. That is the only course I could see. Screw starving to death, take what you need, and if you have to kill a few “authorities” to get it, so what? Even if they eventually kill you (I think that is why the military is moving around so much in the novel, hunting gangs/raiders), it’s better that going out like a wimp.
The plan executed by Galt, D’Anconia, and Danneskjold is to bring the world to its knees by being as stupid as society claims to desire. When John Galt says he plans to return to New York, they try to talk him out of it by describing some of what they expect to happen. The story mentions gangs of raiders only a few times. None of the characters ever encounter such types. Hank Rearden will encounter something like them later (I'll avoid the spoiler details) but the antagonists are not a raider gang. They had other motives.
Part of this is Rand playing black and white. Individuals are good, collectivist government busybodies are bad. It's difficult to portray the rugged individualist as the good archetype when some of the rugged individualists resort to armed crime for survival. But Danneskjold does the same thing and Rand uses him as irony; the brilliant philosopher turned pirate because society would accept nothing else from him. Mr. Spock was hardly the first person to realize that, “In an insane society, a sane man must appear insane.”
Rand could have explored this and added some interesting characters and subplots to the story. In all honesty, I wanted to murder James Taggart around page 100. I didn't need to read about the fiftieth time he used influence peddling to stick it to somebody he didn't like, which was anybody. The reality of the world coming down on people's heads is gripping drama. Think of the description of the wreck in the Taggart Tunnel. It's one of the most captivating parts of the book. The collectivist mindset kills people. Imagine if Rand knew about Soviet adventures with nuclear submarines and power plants.
And not all of the black market in such a world is evil. In a world where boot-licking is the most marketable skill, some will be better at it than others. In any economy, some people will hoard the benefits they receive and some people will share them. Cheryl could have been such a character. It would have been interesting to see how bureaucratic inertia frustrated her efforts. This theme was played out in The Fountainhead. Catherine, Ellsworth Toohey’s niece and abandoned bride of Peter Keating, becomes a miserable social worker, of the type that enjoys knowing that others suffer, and feeds on making them suffer some more. But she didn't start out that way.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that are there other, and equal, themes to Atlas Shrugged besides the stupidity of Karl Marx. Rand lived that lifestyle herself. IMO, the best part of AS is quoted in my profile.
The plan executed by Galt, D’Anconia, and Danneskjold is to bring the world to its knees by being as stupid as society claims to desire.
It's the very core of Atlas Shrugged. The only thing I'd change is ...by being appearing as stupid as society claims to desire...
It's difficult to get an intelligent adult to 'dumb down' (think Orwell's 1984). The lefties know this, and are aggressive in getting to your children while they are young.
Also the gulchers all need and have an outlet for their creativity.
An observation that I think is relevant - There have been documented instances in colonial America where, captured Europeans had feigned feeble mindedness in order to escape their captors wrath. Of course, this doesn't make them stupid, it is just another form of self defense.
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