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By Root 1707 0

had stood and said, “I will put an end to this once and for all. I will stop the motor of the world,” and strode out of the factory and disappeared. The Starnes heirs and the employees never saw or heard from him again. But after the company failed and thousands of other businesses also began to close their doors, the hobo often wondered if the engineer had exercised some awesome kind of retributory power. He took to asking people about the man, whose name was John Galt, and now he wonders if he might be responsible for initiating that apparently meaningless question, “Who is John Galt?” Dagny, electrified by this new information, begins to understand the concept that the author calls “the sanction of the victim.” If capable people would only reject the second-handers’ calls to altruism and refuse to cooperate, the looters and moochers, the expropriators, and the “needy” would all perish.

Dagny hires a private plane to resume her journey west. Near Colorado, she spots another plane carrying the gifted young scientist she seeks. She follows and crash-lands in a camouflaged mountain refuge reminiscent of The Mysterious Valley. This is Galt’s Gulch, where the great titans of the era have been hiding. Here reside the preeminent industrialists, financiers, builders, jurists, scientists, composers, and artists who have vanished over the previous twelve years. They are hard at work at their trades, constructing a capitalist utopia and using a reconstructed version of the Twentieth Century Motor Company’s revolutionary engine to power their endeavors.

Dagny wakes from the crash in John Galt’s arms. He is the inventor of the engine and the organizer of the titans’ strike. The strikers—including Francisco d’Anconia, whom Dagny now spots—intend to prove that minds, not muscles, are the source of all prosperity. Their plan is to bring down the collectivist system by means of its own inherent weakness: its members’ inability to think clearly enough to produce what they need to survive. Dagny gazes at Galt’s features and, like Kira meeting Leo, sees the image of her ideal man. “This [Galt’s face] was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen,” Rand wrote. But Dagny cannot stay in paradise. She will not stand by while the nation self-destructs in an orgy of altruism and decay, as Rand put it in her journals, or let go of her beloved railroad.

At this point, Atlas Shrugged veers ever more sharply toward the utterly implausible, and with the appearance of the protonuclear device designed by Galt’s evil former physics professor, Dr. Robert Stadler, and delivered into the hands of the government, it borders on science fiction. As an apocalypse approaches, John Galt commandeers the radio airwaves from his hidden mountain valley and delivers a sixty-page speech to the battered nation, anatomizing the evils of the welfare state and prophesying the victory of Rand’s now-mature philosophy of individualism, freedom, rationality, and capitalism. The speech is popular among the frightened masses. The looters and moochers decide to find John Galt and make him economic czar. But the ideal man has no desire for power; and he has a surprise in store for the enemies of freedom.

With a railroad map above her desk and a furnace foreman’s manual for steelmaking by her side, Rand wrote hundreds of pages of preliminary notes for Atlas Shrugged in the spring and summer of 1946. She started with a statement of the novel’s theme as she and O’Connor had discussed it two years earlier: the mind on strike. She was setting out, she wrote, to show the world how badly it needed its creators and producers and how it mocked and martyred them at its peril. At this stage, she didn’t foresee Galt’s long speech or the painstaking work of giving a formal structure to her free-market philosophy. She thought the message of the novel would echo that of The Fountainhead, except that, instead of demonstrating individualism within a man’s soul, it would dramatize the importance of individualism within the sweeping social, political, and moral realms of what was basically