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
For most of the book that is the case. As you stated, the book is primarily cast with winners and losers. But there is a part where the 'in between' make an appearance, though not until the end of the book and even then, the character that encounters them doesn't think very highly of them.
You really lost me there, Pub. Why on earth would someone with pluck and determination support FDR (maggots be upon his corpse)? And especially why "needless to say"?
I read AS the first (of eight or nine) time in the summer after my junior year in high school (1958). It was clear to me (and many of my FRiends) that Ms. Rand was warning us of the dangers that awaited us in future years, if we allowed the LIEberals to take control of our society.
Even though we knew what to look out for, and what to work against, we were overcome by them. The phrase “Silent Majority” should ring a bell in this context.
We just could not believe that Americans would vote for Representatives and Senators and Presidents whose agenda would eventually destroy America — to turn a FRee America into just another banana republic, ruled by Socialist elites.
And, we could not believe that people who should know better did not vote. C’mon — less than 60% of eligible voters voting in most general elections, and many less in the primaries?
Unforgivable!
We sowed, and look what we reaped!
We were warned, and we failed to heed the warnings.
[Afterword: I will not be around to read it, but American History of the last 50 years of the 20th and first 50 years of the 21st Century will be a most interesting read.
Maybe, just maybe, if we get off our dead asses and do something, we can derail the LIEberal/Socialist/Marxist FReight train.
In which case, the read will be a good one.
OTOH, it could be one of enslavement.
We do have our work cut out for us to prevent that outcome.]
And, you can’t take your guns.
Blame it on Johnsons Great Society.
Let me most respectively correct you:
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll spend the whole damn day sitting in a boat drinking beer!
You will certainly not get an argument FRom me on that score.
He was a deceitful, dishonest, low-life human being and not much of a President. That he had a “successful” (in the sense that he and his hangers-on got rich and had a lot of power) political career is a huge black mark on America.
That miserable sonofabitch should have been tarred and feathered and run out of Washington DC long before he got into a position of great power.
Now that I think on it, there are some other politicians who deserved/deserve the same treatment!
My father's side was different. They prospered during the Twenties and Thirties, and no one lost their jobs during the Depression. This side ended up Republican to this day.
On the matter of children in AS- Rand writes about children in ‘The Utopia of Greed’ wherein a mother speaks to Dagny about her reasons for taking the striker’s oath. It’s a very brief encounter, but a topic worth noting for future threads.
I thought you said no more spoilers... :)
Guess it’s a point of view thing. My family hasn’t always done well during tough times but when that happened my perspective on government was that they should get out of my way and stop causing me problems, not that they should save me.
FDR prolonging the Great Depression for 12 years was relatively benign compared to Johnson.
Johnson sewed the seeds of the destruction for the family and the foundation of the country.
He corrupted 3 generations with permanent victim status.
The outcomes of his policy have a direct link to both abortion and std’s and the complete corruption of the education system in this country.
Guess we will have to read it next.
I don’t remember exactly which verse it is, but in Proverbs it says, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” This works both ways, unfortunately.
LOL. The revelation was relevant to the comments made by others... sort of. And besides, I didn't give away what happens to the children. May they rest in- I'm kidding. They have no huge impact (if any) on the plot but their presence is noted by Dagny.
Sorry, I meant to say that ‘The Utopia of Greed’ is a chapter in the book.
Deep dark confession here.
I was a Democrat until I read this book the summer after I graduated from High school.
To be perfectly honest, I never paid any mind to the absence of children in the part of the book I’ve read so far until it was mentioned in an earlier Book Club thread. While some might call this a flaw, it’s not serious enough to detract from the story IMO.
I have to confess that I flirted with liberalism during my college years. Hell, I even voted for Bubba in 1992.
Since then, I have realized the folly of my ways.
22:6 And funny you should mention that, if by that you mean that a person's basic outlook is inherited from/inculcated by parents, because I was just considering the same thought with respect to myself.
But in my case, it doesn't seem to explain anything. My dad is not like that at all. He's suspicious of business, thinks they're constantly dreaming up ways to screw with us and that the government should be protecting us from them, but is too often corrupt and too lenient on business. My mom is about equal parts libertarian, hippie, and June Cleaver. And they both think Bush is a dolt (although I'm sort of starting to come around to their point of view on that one).
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