Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 10: Wyatt's Torch - When the Builders Start Disappearing
Chapter 10 is the end of Part I, and Rand makes sure you feel it. Everything that was built up in the first nine chapters comes crashing down. The builders start vanishing. The government tightens its grip. And the book’s most dramatic image lights up the sky.
The Hunt Begins
Dagny is on a quest. She needs to find the inventor of the motor she discovered in the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. The problem is that the factory has changed hands so many times that nobody knows anything about anything.
She and Rearden visit a Hall of Records where the clerk explains that the factory was sold twice, at the same time, to two different sets of owners. The records are tangled in lawsuits. The personnel files were burned for kindling by scavengers.
Then they visit Mayor Bascom of Rome, Wisconsin, a cheerfully corrupt small-town politician who bought the factory cheap at a bankruptcy sale, stripped the mahogany desk and a fancy shower door from it, and flipped it to a con man named Mark Yonts. Bascom doesn’t care about principles. He’s practical. He looks at Dagny and Rearden and spots immediately that they’re not married, telling them with casual amusement, “In this world, either you’re virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both.”
Rearden nearly loses it. Dagny calmly steers them away. Miles down the road, she tells him, “Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.”
Rearden’s Trap
While Dagny chases the motor, Rearden fights to keep his mills running. And he’s losing on both fronts.
Paul Larkin, who bought Rearden’s ore mines, is shipping ore to Orren Boyle instead of to Rearden. He makes excuses about rainstorms and social responsibility. When Rearden asks directly if he shipped to Boyle, Larkin fumbles through a non-answer. Rearden tells him to get out. Calmly. The sequence of betrayal is now clear.
So Rearden has to scramble. He pours money into shady deals, unsigned loans, dummy owners of failing mines. Cash handed over in unlighted corners of restaurants. He’s paying black market prices just to get the ore he used to own. His purchasing manager watches him do it and says the quiet, devastating thing: “Either you’re good at running the mills or you’re good at running to Washington.”
And then there’s Lillian. She comes to his room one night in a negligee, playing the wounded wife, mixing genuine observation with calculated jabs. She notices he looks younger, more relaxed, and wonders why. She asks about “the sanctity of contract” with a knowing smile. She slips her arms around him and he recoils so violently that they’re both shocked.
The scene between them is painful. Lillian may or may not actually love him. Rearden can’t tell. What he knows is that he feels contempt for her, and guilt for feeling it, and guilt for his affair with Dagny, and the guilt makes him unable to fight anyone cleanly. “Who am I to cast the first stone?” is the thought that paralyzes him.
Eugene Lawson, the Banker with a Heart
Dagny’s trail leads her to Washington, to Eugene Lawson, the former president of the Community National Bank of Madison. Lawson’s bank financed the Twentieth Century Motor Company’s last owners, and its collapse wiped out the savings of everyone in the region.
Lawson is one of Rand’s most effective villains because he genuinely believes he’s a good person. “Need was my standard, not greed,” he tells Dagny. He lent money based on feelings, not collateral. He remembers lace curtains and flower gardens, but not a single engineer’s name. When Dagny asks about a motor, he says, “Love, Miss Taggart. That is the key to everything.”
She asks if he’s seen the region since. He screams, “It’s not my fault!” and blames the rich who wouldn’t sacrifice to save his bank.
As Dagny leaves, he says, “I can proudly say that in all of my life I have never made a profit.”
She replies: “Mr. Lawson, I think I should let you know that of all the statements a man can make, that is the one I consider most despicable.”
That line hits hard because you’ve just read about Starnesville. You’ve seen the woman who is thirty-seven but looks sixty. You’ve seen the children who stare like animals. This man’s “love for humanity” produced that.
Lee Hunsacker and Midas Mulligan
The trail leads next to Lee Hunsacker in Oregon, who ran the Amalgamated Service corporation that took over the motor factory. He’s a portrait of entitlement. He lives in a friend’s house, refuses to do dishes, and complains that his typewriter skips spaces.
But his story reveals a key detail. He once applied for a loan from Midas Mulligan, the legendary banker. Mulligan turned him down flat. So Hunsacker sued him under an “economic emergency law” that made it illegal to discriminate against anyone seeking their livelihood.
Judge Narragansett ruled for Mulligan. But a higher court reversed the verdict. And within three months, Mulligan vanished. Closed his bank. Paid every depositor down to the last penny. And disappeared completely.
The last person to see him was a flower seller on a Chicago street corner. He bought bluebells, winked at her, and said, “Do you know how much I’ve always loved it, being alive?” Then he walked away and was never seen again.
Judge Narragansett retired six months later. Nobody heard from him after that, either.
Dagny notices the pattern but can’t quite name it yet.
The Starnes Heirs
Hunsacker sends Dagny to the Starnes heirs, the children of Jed Starnes who founded the motor company. They’re in Durance, Louisiana, and they’re a wreck.
Eric Starnes killed himself on the wedding day of a girl who rejected him, slashing his wrists in her bedroom. Gerald Starnes is drunk in a flophouse, picking nickels off sleeping men. And Ivy Starnes sits in an incense-filled bungalow, blaming the failure of her plan on human greed.
Her plan? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The factory paid everyone the same minimum. Twice a year, everyone voted on each person’s needs and abilities. Those with greater needs got more. Those with greater abilities were punished with fines and overtime.
Dagny listens and feels something she can barely contain. “Remember it well,” a cold voice tells her inside. “It is not often that one can see pure evil.”
But Ivy Starnes does give Dagny a name. The chief engineer was William Hastings. He quit the day after the plan was introduced. He was the second man to quit.
Hugh Akston in a Diner
Dagny finds Mrs. Hastings in Brandon, Wyoming. William Hastings is dead. But before he died, his wife tells Dagny, he spoke of a young assistant who had invented the motor. Hastings loved this man. The motor was finished just before Jed Starnes died. After that, Hastings never mentioned the inventor again.
Mrs. Hastings gives Dagny one lead: she once saw Hastings having dinner with two men at a railroad station. One was young and tall. The other was elderly, distinguished. Years later, she saw the elderly man working as a cook in a roadside diner in the Rockies.
Dagny finds the diner. And the cook turns out to be Hugh Akston. The philosopher. One of the greatest minds of the age, frying hamburgers.
Dagny offers him a job running the dining-car department of Taggart Transcontinental. He says no. She asks about the young engineer. He says, “Give it up, Miss Taggart. You won’t find him.”
He tells her: “If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
Before she leaves, she asks him about his three famous students. Francisco d’Anconia. Ragnar Danneskjold. And a third whose name “would mean nothing to you.” She asks if he’s proud of how they turned out. He looks at the sunset and says, “More proud than I had ever hoped to be.”
He gives her a cigarette. Later, driving away, she notices it has no brand name. Just a trademark stamped in gold: the sign of the dollar.
The Directives
At Cheyenne station, waiting for a train, Dagny overhears two men talking about new government directives. She grabs a newspaper.
Wesley Mouch has issued a package of regulations. Maximum train speed: sixty miles per hour. Maximum train length: sixty cars. Equal number of trains across all states. Steel production capped to match competitors. No manufacturing company allowed to move from its location. A moratorium on all railroad bond payments for five years. And a special tax on Colorado to fund the enforcement.
Every one of these rules is aimed at the heart of what Dagny and Rearden built. The John Galt Line is killed in a single page of newsprint.
Wyatt’s Torch
Dagny’s first thought is Ellis Wyatt. She remembers him standing in front of her desk, months ago, saying: “If I go, I’ll make sure that I take all the rest of you along with me.” She remembers the glass he hurled against the wall on the night of their victory.
She gets on Train Number 57, heading for Wyatt Junction. She sits in the dark, listening to the wheels on Rearden Metal rails, thinking about the bondholders who trusted her. Their investment is now worthless scraps of paper.
Then the train makes an unscheduled stop. People crowd the platform, all staring in one direction.
In a break between mountains, the hill of Wyatt Oil is a solid sheet of flame.
Ellis Wyatt is gone. He left a board nailed to a post at the foot of the burning hill. It reads:
“I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours.”
And that’s how Part I ends. Not with a whimper. With a fire that can be seen for miles. The first of the builders has quit, and he’s made sure everyone knows it.
The question that’s been lurking in the background of every chapter finally comes into focus. Something is happening. The best people, the most capable, the ones who actually make things work, are disappearing. And someone, somewhere, is collecting them.
Who? And why?
Part II has the answers. But first, Rand wants you to sit with that fire burning in the sky.
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