Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Thomas F. Bertonneau

Thus "the man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, and that an individual conscience is a useless luxury." (60) Thus "the woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly school-teacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless school-children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil." (61) Thus "the man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap plays in which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels." (62)

So it goes for sixteen instances--car by car, and over a thousand words--before, in the Dantesque circumstance of the Objectivist contrapasso, every Jack and Jane of the mean-spirited wretches painfully asphyxiates. Just to make sure that the sentence achieves its goal, Rand has an Army munitions train enter the Tunnel at high speed from the opposite end. The resulting detonation buries the disaster under a mountainous tomb.

A passage from her recently published Journals (63) suggests that Rand must have had actual people in mind as models of those who die, with time enough to feel the pain of their deaths. Testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in November 1947 on Communists in the film industry, Rand called attention to William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, for which screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood had earned Film Academy accolades in the previous year. Rand had hovered in and around Hollywood for two decades but she had never achieved a significant screen-credit; Warner Studios even farmed out the screenplay for The Fountainhead to someone else.

In Sherwood's script, as Rand remarks, "a returning war hero is denied a seat on a plane, to make room for an offensive businessman who is obviously rich." (64) Later, the same hero "takes a job in a drugstore owned by a national chain, where he is treated unfairly, offensively and antagonistically." (65) Finally, "the picture denounces a banker for being unwilling to give a veteran a loan without collateral, a refusal which is treated as though it were an act of greedy selfishness." (66) Rand characterizes the last as "the all-time low in irresponsible demagoguery on the screen." (67)

Readers of Modern Age probably react to those scenes in Wyler's film quite as Rand does, but that is not the point. I assert that Rand plausibly thought of Sherwood himself when she sent the adenoidal, second-rate playwright to his death in the Tunnel. The parallelism leads us to suspect that in the Tunnel episode Rand composes a cataclysme a clef. And what then does Atlas become but a grand fantasy of godlike revenge, a theater of resentment assuaged, a daydream of limitless ego? In Part I of the novel, Hank Rearden says to Dagny Taggart when they have concluded a contract by which the former will supply Rearden-Metal rails for the John Galt Line: "We haven't any spiritual goals or qualities. All we're after is material things. That's all we care for." (68) In the morally inverted context of Rand's universe, the denial of a spiritual component functions as the equivalent of a claim to godhead. It is the "looters" who ceaselessly invoke "the spirit." They nevertheless get interred under a rocky collapse while the materialists fling aside mountains with their rails of super-alloy.