Posted on 07/11/2009 7:43:38 AM PDT by Publius
Synopsis
The union at Rearden Steel demands a raise without bothering to ask Hank, and the impetus comes from the new workers inserted by the Unification Board and spotted by the Wet Nurse. The Unification Board rejects the raise petition, but the Mainstream Media runs stories in favor of the union and against Hank. Then the workers attack managers and disable critical equipment. The IRS attaches Hank’s assets due to a delinquency in paying income taxes that had never occurred. A bureaucrat calls Hank to apologize, claiming it was all a mistake. Then Tinky Holloway calls and asks Hank to attend an evening meeting in New York. Hank agrees to attend although Holloway’s insistence on a specific time has his guard up.
Holloway and Claude Slagenhop are working on intelligence provided by Philip Rearden, who is afraid that if Holloway pulls off a power play, Hank will desert. That would mean that Philip can’t inherit the mills; they will be confiscated.
At home Hank takes a call from his mother; she wants to meet with him at his old home. Present are his mother, Philip – and Lillian. They are there to beg for forgiveness and mercy; the money they have isn’t enough to live on since Hank’s assets were attached. Hank doesn’t care. He perceives that his family is terrified that he will desert and that the government will come after them. Philip tells Hank that he can’t desert without money – and a piece of the puzzle falls into place. So that was what the attachment order was about! And his family were to be hostages! Enraged, Lillian tells Hank that she was bedded by Jim Taggart; she pauses in her tirade as Hank watches her deflate. Hank tells them he could have forgiven them had they urged him to desert.
Hank arrives at the Wayne-Falkland suite that had previously been occupied by Francisco. Present are Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Jim Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris and Tinky Holloway. They want to know what policies Hank wants changed – while Lawson checks his watch frequently. They have a plan that will give Hank a five percent price increase for steel; this will ripple on to price increases elsewhere. But there will be no pay raises. Jim tells Hank about the success of the Rail Unification Plan, and Mouch tells Hank there is now going to be a Steel Unification Plan. Every operator will be allowed to make as much steel as he can, but revenues will be pooled and distributed by the number of blast furnaces each company possesses. Hank quickly does the math and realizes that this is a plan to bail out Orren Boyle. Eugene Lawson says that it’s Hank’s duty to comply and suffer because Boyle is simply too big to fail. Hank suggests that they junk all their regulations, let Boyle fail and let him buy Boyle’s assets; they balk. He suggests they simply expropriate his mills, and they recoil in horror. He asks how he can produce if he produces at a loss; Ferris says he will produce because he can’t help himself. Jim says that Hank will do something to fix the problem – and the last piece fits. Francisco was right – he is the guiltiest man in the room because he had accepted the reality that these men had created. Hank walks out.
Hank arrives at his mill to find it on fire and hears gunshots; there is a mob storming the mill, and open war has broken out. Hank turns around to head for the east gate and discovers the Wet Nurse lying wounded in the dirt. He’d tried to stop the rioters; in return, they shot him and dumped him on the slag heap. The riot had been executed from Washington as grounds for introducing the Steel Unification Plan; the meeting in New York had been a decoy. Hank carries the dying Wet Nurse in his arms, but he dies along the way.
Hank enters via the east gate and heads for the infirmary still carrying the dead boy. His loyal employees are winning the war with the rioters, but the front gate is the scene of a major battle. A man on the roof of a building by the gate fires into the crowd and doesn’t waste a bullet. Two rioters club Hank to the ground, and someone shoots and kills the attackers; Hank awakes on the couch in his office. The new furnace foreman, Frank Adams, had killed his attackers and was instrumental in organizing the battle for the mill – and Frank Adams turns out to be Francisco d’Anconia! Francisco now consummates the long-delayed recruitment of Hank Rearden.
Discussion Topics
Reading John Galt’s Objectivism Speech
The next chapter contains the long radio speech by John Galt that is Rand’s philosophical treatise on Objectivism. It’s important because Rand regarded it as the centerpiece of her book, but it stops the action absolutely cold and constitutes a huge dead space. There is only one way to properly handle the speech.
A Note on Next Week’s Thread
Thus far, these threads have been posted by myself with Billthedrill coming in later in the day to add his piece. Next Saturday, however, the posted essay will be a joint production of Publius and Billthedrill, many weeks in preparation.
In the first draft of next week’s essay, I thought my discussion questions were difficult, but Billthedrill has sharpened those questions to a razor’s edge. (I almost cut myself reading them.) It’s going to require a lot of thought and work on the part of our book club members. In reading the speech, you might want to take copious notes; you’ll need them.
I have tremendous faith in our members, and I know you’ll be up to the challenge.
bookmark
At this point, they had been married for 10 years. I could easily see Lillian, being the manipulative creature she is, likely would have let herself get pregnant as another means of control on Hank. Being wealthy, she knows or anticipates she doesn't have to deal with the nasty realities of runny noses or little bottoms.
But Hank is the real issue: would he have left? Would he have taken the child with him? In the real world, I'm pretty confident Hank would take the child with him. I can't see even the character of Hank Reardon of AS leaving his child behind to face destitution and starvation, esp since the child would be very young (< 10 yo). IMHO, Rand doesn't deal with the issue of children because a) her characters are ideal people, and she wants to focus on them. b) she had no real world experience herself and couldn't fit it into her philosophy. Which is too bad. How she would have dealt with the unearned, unconditional love, of a parent for their child would be interesting.
We brought it up in the discussion of Galt's Gulch (Chapter 22?) - one of the speakers is very specific that children and family aren't invited along, and we recall that Galt's first boss, the engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, took his annual month there without his wife until he died. And yet there were two children in the Gulch, two little boys far too young to have acceded to the social contract that was Galt's oath, or even to have understood it. Were Hank in extremis maybe the kid, if he wasn't a little monster spoiled by public education into thinking that he was (as a Rearden scion) entitled to the world, might have been admitted. Or Rearden would find somewhere else. It isn't as if the Gulch is the only safe haven.
Could Hank have abandoned him? We're getting into spoiler territory here; suffice it to say that some of Rand's main characters seem to make more of an effort to protect their subordinates and dependents than do others, when at last their shoulders shrug. Whether a child would have come under that category is difficult to say.
One complication within Objectivist theory is that it presupposes independence on the part of persons who intend to follow its precepts. Children are a difficulty and an exception - Rand said so herself outside the novel - but what I envision is a sort of Heinlein-like moment at which the young person may either elect to become a citizen by invoking the Oath or...well, that's a difficulty. Live somewhere else? Accept some sort of non-citizen dependency such as a slave in ancient Greece? Starve? Suicide? The individual's freedom of choice there is limited by those choices available, and unless others are silly enough willingly to submit to the yoke of socialism that option might not be available. OTOH, judging by current society there might be no shortage of such earnest sheep. Best of luck to them, as long as it isn't on my back.
Part 3
The Utopia of Greed
'The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley - two fearless beings, aged seven and four.'
..."They represent my particular career Miss Taggart...
...You know of course that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the strikers oath by his own independent conviction... ...I came here to bring up my sons as human beings."
Seven and four, well within the timeline of the valley. Running her bakery was not the only thing she was doing.
As a contrast to the Bakers story, the testimony of the tramp to Dagny -
"...Now, if a baby was born we didn't speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts are to farmers."
Since the Starnes choice was the antithesis of the Gulchers I think that children were indeed welcome in the valley. Those who had been corrupted through exposure to the outside world would have had to wait until they were able to make the choice on their own. Naturally occurring births and deaths along with disability are rare in Atlas Shrugged, possibly in an attempt to keep the novel at a reasonable length :-)
BTTT
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