FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Concerto of Deliverance

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.

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.

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.

Howdy Pub’!

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!

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