Posted on 02/14/2009 11:27:03 AM PST by Publius
Synopsis
Eddie hands a newspaper to Dagny; it has a most interesting story. The People’s State of Mexico, upon inspecting the expropriated San Sebastian Mines, discovers that they are devoid of copper and utterly worthless. Dagny asks Eddie to call Francisco at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel for an appointment.
What follows is an extended flashback into the childhood of Dagny, Eddie, Francisco and Jim at the Taggart estate on the Hudson.
Francisco got a job at Taggart Transcontinental before Dagny, working illicitly as a call boy at a station on the Hudson Line. Each intended to eventually run the family business. Unlike those d’Anconias who increased the family holdings by a mere 10%, Francisco’s goal was to double them.
Francisco went to Patrick Henry University of Cleveland, the most distinguished institution of learning left in the world, but Francisco did not find all the courses interesting. He made only two close friends at college. (A major plot point for later!)
One incident shaped the relationship between Dagny and Francisco. When Dagny suggested that she get poor grades in order to be popular, Francisco slapped her – and she liked it.
Dagny began the competition with Francisco by taking a job as night operator on the railroad at a nearby station while only sixteen. She went through life without male admirers, and her idea of a good time was working on the railroad. After a formal ball, she noted that she could have squashed ten of the men she had met. It was in her freshman year at college that Dagny and Francisco became lovers.
Francisco not only went to college, but by playing the stock market he amassed enough money to buy the copper foundry where he had been working secretly at night. Following college, Francisco worked for his father. One night, meeting Dagny in New York, he said, “There’s something wrong with the world.” A few years later he told Dagny not to be astonished by anything he did in the future and asked her to leave the railroad and let it go to hell under Jim’s stewardship. He warned her that the next time they met, she wouldn’t want to see him. Over the years Francisco morphed into a worthless playboy squandering the d’Anconia fortune.
Returning to the present, Dagny goes to Francisco’s room at the hotel and finds him playing with marbles on the floor like a child. Dagny has figured out part of what Francisco intended with the San Sebastian Mines swindle. He has hurt the looters’ government of Mexico and his American investors, but Dagny can’t penetrate to the heart of what he has done.
Dagny administers a shock to Francisco when she brings up the Fifth Concerto of Richard Halley. Francisco avoids a direct answer and says that Halley has stopped composing.
Francisco lays out the reaction of the Mexican government, which had made promises to its people to be delivered by the confiscation of the mines. Now the government has to blame the greedy capitalists. The miners’ town he built was made of shoddy material and will be gone within a year. He has cost the railroad and his investors millions. Taggart Transcontinental will fail, and Ellis Wyatt will be the next to go under. He tells Dagny as she is leaving that she is not ready to hear the reasons behind what he is doing.
The Purpose of This Chapter
We’ve met Dagny, Hank and their enemies. We’ve heard about Francisco, but we’ve never met him. Now we find out about the long history of Dagny and Francisco, both in business and on a personal basis. We also find that Francisco is involved in some kind of project aimed at destroying certain people, companies and countries, but we don’t know why. (This is the book’s plot.)
Landmarks
The Wayne-Falkland Hotel is based upon the real life Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan.
The Taggart estate is based upon one of many Vanderbilt holdings, all of which were built by the descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central. “Commodore” Vanderbilt himself lived modestly in lower Manhattan. Both Vanderbilt and James Jerome Hill were models for Nat Taggart.
Ayn Rand and Sex
There are no children in this book; the plot is about adults and adult matters. It is only in this chapter that we meet our characters as teenagers and we find Francisco and Dagny as lovers.
Francisco’s slapping Dagny after that comment about doing poorly in school to gain popularity requires some history about the period. In that era popularity was considered more important than academic excellence. Smart people weren’t popular, which is why young Ronald Reagan hid his questing mind in the disguise of a backslapping athlete. Even as an adult, Reagan hid his cerebral qualities from others, which is why he was characterized incorrectly by Clark Clifford as an “amiable dunce”. Understanding this in its historical context, Dagny’s comment to Francisco was not totally out of bounds.
However, when she is slapped, Dagny finds that she likes it. There is an undercurrent of precocious sexuality and sadomasochism in that slap. When she and Francisco lose their virginity together, the prose turns purple.
“She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most – to submit. She had no conscious realization of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid – yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him: Don’t ask me for it – oh, don’t ask me – do it!”
This is Rand’s updated version of the “aching need” that appears in The Fountainhead. People who are devoutly religious become queasy at this passage and again when Rand waxes philosophical.
”’Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?’, he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin ... She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man’s lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.”
Rand here disposes of the puritanical branch of Judeo-Christianity in a few well honed sentences. She not only supports the Dagny-Francisco relationship but condemns those who would criticize it in the name of a narrow, outmoded morality. Exceptional people – the Creators – make their own rules, which may well be a tip of the hat to Nietzsche.
But Dagny has had no other partners this far into the story, and it appears that Francisco has not either. Both remain true to each other, defining their own concept of chastity. This elevates sexuality into something sacred and transcendent, which is another theme of the book.
Patrick Henry University
Don’t confuse this fictional school with the very real Patrick Henry College of Purcellville, VA.
One of the most enjoyable Marx Brothers movies was “Horse Feathers”, a 1932 musical comedy that revolves around the football rivalry between Darwin and Huxley colleges. The opening number has Groucho and a chorus of professors singing:
I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway;
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
Colleges of the Twenties were profoundly conservative institutions, hard as that may be to believe today. The concept of academic freedom was by no means guaranteed, be the professor tenured or not. The Great Depression was to change all that, and soon the economic theories of Karl Marx began to replace those of Groucho Marx. The great institutions of the Ivy League led the way.
It would appear that even during the Forties and Fifties, Rand held a low enough opinion of the Ivy League to locate her ideal university in Cleveland, an industrial city not known as a great seat of learning. In fact, the business of Cleveland was manufacturing.
Naming a university dedicated to reason to Patrick Henry, however, is just as problematic as naming a fundamentalist Christian college after the same man, which is what happened in Purcellville. Henry does not fit the stereotype of either a man of objective reason or of religious faith. His life and legacy are far more complicated.
Patrick Henry belongs to the same group as Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams, revolutionaries who lit the flame that George Washington kept from being extinguished. Like Adams, Henry had failed in business many times, but while Adams became a wizard at the art of political propaganda, Henry turned instead to the law. As a lawyer, Henry stood for home rule and economic self-determination, siding with the ancient British tradition of being taxed by one’s own legislators. He further argued that colonial legislatures could not assign that right to Parliament. Because Parliament had long exercised a general right to tax the colonies, Henry’s assertion was considered treasonous.
In addition to the above principles, Henry’s intellectual justification for separation from Britain revolved around corruption. There is a tendency to look at that period of American history and see a halcyon era when corruption didn’t exist. In fact, the colonial governments of early America were every bit as corrupt as some state governments today. Wherever there is a pipeline of government “cheese”, there are mice and rats attempting to divert some of that “cheese“ into their private larders. For Henry, gold and silver were too important to be diverted into the mouths of grifters, looters and moochers, which is why he became the scourge of corruption in Virginia politics. He could personally fight corruption in Williamsburg, but the corruption in London was so entrenched it could only be fought by separation. Rand must have viewed Henry as an early American model.
Following the Revolution, Henry opposed the adoption of the Constitution, arguing that it gave the federal government too much power, and his opposition led to the Bill of Rights. Yet a decade later, he executed a complete turnaround and switched to the Federalist Party, backing Washington, Adams and John Marshall, and going so far as to argue that the Jefferson-Madison Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, supporting a state’s right of nullification, would lead to civil war. He died the same year as George Washington.
Some Discussion Topics
Re: kids and trophies. My kids have a bunch of those stupid trophies from participating in sports. They are on a table in the basement family room......the room where the children are allowed to play dodgeball. Those trophies have been broken to bits, and the kids don’t care. They know that they did nothing to earn them, so the trophies have no value.
We are emphasizing that self-esteem has to be earned through hard work. It is ok if they work really hard at something and fail. We still praise the effort. That is life. Sometimes you work really hard at work, and you don’t get the promotion, you still need to take pride in the fact that you did your best. But I can be pretty cutting when I know they did a half-a$$ed job to begin with. No points for showing up. I’m wondering if my children are going to need therapy when they grow up......
Well, they’ll be in therapy, but at least they’ll be self-sufficient!
If they have indeed, killed the Golden Goose, it will spell the end of LIEberalism as a governing philosophy.
We’d all suffer for a while sorting the mess out, but them driving a stake through their own heart would not be a bad thing.
My mother and father were lifelong Democrats — don’t believe either of them ever voted non-Democrat. They came of age during the Depression, and were convinced that FDR save the country.
One of my brothers is a LIEberal — he went to MIT and got corrupted; he is unrescuable. My other brother and I are Very Conservative.
Both of my children are conservative, but it doesn’t do much good; they live in Kali-Fornia. I have 5 nieces and nephews; three are conservative and two are LIEberal.
My Southren cousins are Conservative and my Yankee cousins are LIEberal. Must be the water.
I hope to be able to tell my LIEberal family members “see, I told you not to vote for that sonofabitch!” one day.
FRankly, I’d prefer not to know!
I get an entirely different reaction to this scene. I believe they are equals and Francisco's reaction to her statement was guttural. Dagny's reaction was one of pride. Pride that he felt she was better than that and felt so passionately about that, he reacted with force. He literally slapped her out of her slip into passivity.
“One of my principal criticisms of Atlas Shrugged in general is that the act of Atlas shrugging holds an inherent callousness to the welfare of those less-than-godlike inhabitants . . .
There will be more of this later, quite a bit of it, where Rand attempts to address the question “are there, then, no innocent victims?” It is to me one of the central moral questions in AS, pertinent to current events as well.”
Excellent comments.
See, I don’t think the issue is “innocent victims”. Those that would be victims of “shrugging” are already victims of the current system. It goes to the fundamental “moral argument” of the left - that the LEFT has the best interests of everybody at heart when, in fact, the free market provides the best opportunity to the most people.
More to the point, however “innocent” some victims might be, it is not “shrugging” that made them victims in the first place. The left created these “human shields” and ultimately, are morally responsible for the outcome.
It should matter little how intellectual and/or “superhuman” you are in a system of liberty. Hard work is an equal measure of a free man. It only matters when people aren’t free. There is the genesis of “victim-hood”.
I tend that it is less callous to the average “victim” to let the gov’t that institutes such victim-hood fall. That’s the point.
Or, I guess you could say, who’s zooming whom?
~faith.
I read AS for the first time last year. It was wonderful and tedious, at the same time. Slightly masochistic, even. Rand would be proud.
“Wealth has to be re-earned generation after generation. “Luck” only gets you so far.”
Thomas Stanley, in his book, “The Millionaire Next Door” posits that wealth rarely transfers past the 3rd generation. This is why 80% of millionaires are consistently 1st generation.
The first generation that earned wealth had a healthy respect of what it took to earn that wealth. The 2nd generation does not, but at least were parented with the values of those that did. The 3rd generation are twice removed from the respect of what it takes to earn wealth, and so, IF their parents leave them anything, it evaporates.
Hard work is necessary to create or maintain wealth. I was just agreeing with your point - and the point in the book.
More to the point: there is a consistent fabrication of the left - that wealth is static, that there is a “wealthy class”. There is not. Wealth is dynamic. People become wealthy - all the time. People become un-wealthy - all the time. That dynamic quality of wealth - as a function of hard work and effort - is what makes America great. So, OF COURSE, the left would adamantly deny it.
>>Pride that he felt she was better than that and felt so passionately about that, he reacted with force. He literally slapped her out of her slip into passivity.
I took it this way too.
(BTW, how do you do italics in HTML?)
Same as you would to start a new paragraph, but replace the P with an I. To turn off, use / before the I.
This year, my oldest son’s CYO Varsity basketball team has been undefeated and they have won all four of the tournaments they have played. The trophies from these wins (and my other son’s Pinewood Derby Car win) hold a place of honor, while dozens of “participation” trophies have been chucked in a box in a closet. The kids do know the difference, which is encouraging. I don’t understand why the coaches still waste money on the “participation” trophies. Throw the kids a pizza party for their effort instead - it will mean more to them!
One of the things I have been pondering as I read this book and watch events unfold in real life, is the direction to encourage them in considering future careers. I want them to be “producers” - but I don’t want their production to be exploited by the “looters”. My 10 year old is interested in both alternative fuel and in water purification - both very productive, but very exploitable. What would John Galt say?
And, in all fairness, Rand was writing at a time when it was common/acceptable for...
If you watch the Rand/Wallace video posted at the beginning of this thread, the contrast of the era is quite evident. In my opinion Wallace is a product of the popular culture of the time w/cigarette constantly in hand and stereotype questions. Rand, on the other hand seems to be ,well, timeless. I mean that this interview if it was held today would be conducted differently by the interviewer but Rands answers would not have changed.
(Thanks for the posted video links ISee)
I can't tell you what he'd say. It would be a spoiler and against our rules.
Very true. I’ll ask again in a few months!
This is my first time to read the book, so I am taking my time to read it and love these weekly chats. How many times have you read the book?
I have had the book forever and never read it until now. Thanks to all for not spoiling it for those of us that have not read it yet!
Then I wonder why Rush picked it!
Well, mark that one off my list. (My list is pretty empty now. Looks like only the former Soviet satellites are practicing capitalism to any extent. Know anything about Japan?)
I think my main issue with AS is that it assumes that socialism would be so far entrenched that the only way to “beat it” is by letting its consequences take root.
It concedes to the failure of Conservatism to win in the arena of ideas. I understand that the left is handing out money like candy and that money can trump ideology.
Still. I’m not quite ready to subscribe to the idea that the message of Conservatism is a lost cause. I intend to continue to spar in the arena of ideas. If that is too D. Taggert or H. Reardon of me, so be it.
I understand the point: socialism can only survive off the back of capitalism, looters and moochers off of producers. What if the producers shrug? Fair enough.
What if, instead, the producers sell a better idea to so-called ‘middle people’? I still believe this to be a center-right nation. President Obama’s chief economic message was one of tax cuts, combined with a claim of a more responsible government. See my tag line.
Both Clinton and Obama won by sounding more Conservative than their opposition. McCain learned what we all knew: you can’t out-liberal a liberal. But. The reverse is also true. You can’t out-Conservative a true Conservative. Neither Clinton nor Obama could have out-flanked a true Conservative. When true Conservatives come to the table, the message still sells.
Before I shrug, I darn sure want to make darn sure that I sold the message of true compassion - and THAT is Conservatism. In the true sense of the words, “compassionate Conservatism” is an oxymoron. If you have to point out that YOUR brand of Conservatism is “compassionate”, you’ve already lost the battle.
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