Down to brass tacks now for Hank Reardon in chapter 26, “The Concerto of Deliverance,” a reference to Richard Halley’s Fifth, the theme of which opened the novel, whistled by a young brakeman on one of Taggart Transcontinental’s trains. We know now where that young fellow ended up. Hank and Dagny, on the contrary, are still fighting a losing battle out in the real world and so is John Galt himself. Francisco has disappeared, presumably digging copper ore out of the side of a mountain in Colorado with a pick and shovel. He can do that; he can design an ultramodern smelter, he can run an enormous multinational firm, but the looters can do none of those things, and it’s starting to bite.
Hank has been given more than fair warning, no doubt about it. And now the mechanism of government takeover has begun to chew at his steel mills, the only productive ones left in the country and hence the ones most likely to be expropriated by a political class that still feels it is the material resources, and not the men, who create the wealth that will keep their game afloat.
It works through the goons who have infiltrated his plant, the ones the Wet Nurse stoutly refused to help import. An agitprop campaign against The Wealthy in the media has attempted to rally popular support for an end to the exploitation of labor at the Rearden facilities, such as it is. In truth the only labor that is actually producing anything there is firmly on Rearden’s side, but they have no microphone, no paid media shills, no voice.
Nor is it only his mills the looters are moving on. They attach his income, his savings, his assets on a pretext and then tell him they’ll release it…in time. Hank chuckles.
He had a few hundred dollars in cash, left in his wallet, nothing else. But the odd, glowing warmth in his mind, like the feel of a distant handshake, was the thought that in a secret safe of his bedroom there lay a bar of solid gold, given to him by a gold-haired pirate.
They’re moving on Hank himself, and it’s he, and not his assets, that they’re hoping to freeze. His family is hostage, helpless even to purchase groceries without his signature. Brother Philip’s motives for seeking work at the mill are finally revealed – he is trying to keep an eye on Hank for the government, as we suspected all along. His ex-wife Lillian has taken refuge with them in his own house, having nowhere else to go, her last value to the ruling class having disappeared in divorce. They speak in terms of starvation, of utter destitution. (One wonders what happened to the diamond bracelet Lillian got from Dagny for the chain of Rearden metal, but it is apparent that these people are not even capable of that sort of asset management).
We have questioned Rand’s understanding of her own heroes, which is a backhanded tribute to her power as a novelist. That wouldn’t be possible if her characters weren’t drawn finely enough to be able to measure their observed behavior against Rand’s theoretical explanation of it. We cannot question her supreme understanding of her villains. This, for instance, concerning Lillian:
The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if – he thought with a shudder – as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it…
She set out to break Hank like a horse she intended to ride, just as the looters imagine all of society to be, a powerful but brute animal saddled for guidance by the clever. They’re in charge because they’re clever, and the measure of that cleverness is the fact that they’re in charge. It’s a nice, tidy, self-consistent world view untroubled by circularity, or, for that matter, by results. The media can spin results, after all, at least for a time, but they can’t spin facts as fundamental as an empty granary.
Hank is summoned to a meeting at which absolutely nothing of substance is said except for his frank denial to play the game. He wonders at the uselessness of the whole thing until he arrives back at his steel plant to find it under siege. Union goons and government agents are attempting a takeover and it is being resisted by force of arms. We have come to the shooting at last.
And the first shot was into the body of the Wet Nurse, who was unceremoniously dumped onto a slag heap by the invaders. He wasn’t quite finished, however, and Rearden finds him after he has dragged himself some one hundred vertical feet to the edge of a ravine near the roadway.
A scum of cotton was swimming against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm lying stretched in the weeds, but the body was still…
It might actually have been better to remain that way, for over the course of the next four pages we are treated to the bathos of an operatic death scene. The young man is at last conferred the dignity of a name – it is Tony – and a kiss from the belatedly paternal Rearden as he breathes his last. We are spared an aria but that’s about all. Yes, of course the young man has achieved his moral epiphany but we knew that two chapters ago. He is, as Cherryl Taggart before him, an innocent playing a game far beyond his capacity, who pays for it with his life.
And the game is afoot. Gunfire in the background reminds us that we are at war, and as he drops the cooling corpse off at the dispensary Hank spies the lynchpin of the factory’s defense.
On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend…
We wince. Rand, who has taken the trouble to inform herself of the minutiae of railroad and steel plant, is on considerably less firm ground with regard to firearms, unfortunately, and this won’t be the only time. While it is conceivable that two-gun heroes of the silver screen might attempt to hipshoot from an elevated position into an oncoming mob in two separate directions at once it is not recommended combat procedure. Even an infallible paragon of accuracy must encounter the inconvenient necessity to reload, a two-handed process which in real life tends to happen at the most awkward moments.
But this fellow, whoever he is, is also good enough to intercept a direct attempt on Rearden’s life some moments later and carry him from the fray.
“Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell and fired at the thugs.”
“Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I’ve ever had. He’s the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning…Told me to arm our men…Frank Adams is his name – who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum who came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman!”
Frank Adams. Francisco d’Anconia, of course, and we learn here that in fact he did not spend the intervening time making the unoffending Colorado mountainside pay for his sexual frustrations at the point of a pick and shovel, but instead sought out the man he described as his “greatest conquest.” And so Hank is, as at last they sit down for the conversation that is the final one that all of the other industrial magnates had before they disappeared into the protective rustic arms of Galt’s Gulch.
All but one, that is. Dagny is still out there.
Have a great week, Publius!
This is the root of the dimocrats philosophy. Every leader on the left is portrayed as being very intelligent and every leader on the right portrayed as a simple boob. We have seen it in the attacks on Sarah and GWB, but it goes back to Reagan and probably beyond.
I've had lib friends tell me that they trust government because they are the best and brightest and know what is best. I continue to pound my head on that wall and try to convince them that these people are only in it for the power, but it is impossible to argue logic with illogical people.
One of the best parts of the home scene was Lillian begging Hank to use his signature to buy goods so the household wouldn’t starve.
Hank refused, due to his morals. Hank couldn’t ask for credit because he was unsure if he’d ever be able to repay what he borrowed.
That particular scene left a deep impression on me.
This is again an example of the trap Rand set for herself. Of all the industries taken over by government, steel is treated as the first one in which physical violence was needed. Considering the animosity expressed by Jeff Allen, the tramp from Twentieth Century Motors, one expects some serious violence in such a situation. Greed was the motive for the Starnes’ actions. They suffered no losses when they wrecked the wages of their employees. Iris Starnes, in particular, got to personally destroy anyone she didn’t like, which was everyone.
So where were the riots? Rearden suspects that something strange is happening when he is confronted by his family and by the various looters, but he can’t see what it is. This is hard to believe. With all of the companies and industries that failed around the world, no one expressed his anger with violence after a Paul Larkin ended thier careers.
Rand also demonstrates that while she spent plenty of hours researching steel and railroads, she learned whatever she knew about firearms from watching silly cowboy movies. Francisco D’Anconia seems not to have mastered rifles. Odd.
The story in this part is the predictable outcome of the events. Rand is using the characters she created to illustrate between good intentions and Hell. Her focus is on a single story arc, which defines good story telling, but it opens itself to criticism for the appearance of deus ex machina.
A glaring parallel with Jim Taggert's outburst with the violent destruction of an antique vase (the value of which could have fed a family for a year) in the previous chapter is enlightening. Jim and Lillian are mental twins.
We see this happening in banana republics regularly. Zimbabwe & Venezuela come to mind most quickly. Leftists simply cannot comprehend the concept that a nations wealth comes only partially from the natural resources. The second piece of the puzzle is the people who manage what resources they have at their disposal. No, they seize the resources, run out the successful people who they don't outright kill, then divid the spoils to their supporters. But the supporters didn't work for the wealth, didn't develop it, don't appreciate the value of it, and so they squander it.