Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 1: The Theme - When the World Starts Breaking

The first chapter opens with a question that will haunt the entire book: “Who is John Galt?”

A bum on a New York street says it to Eddie Willers, a 32-year-old guy who works for Taggart Transcontinental railroad. Eddie doesn’t know why the question bugs him. He gives the bum a dime and walks on. But something feels wrong. Not in any specific way. Just a general dread, like that low hum you hear before a storm but can’t quite place.

Eddie’s Walk Through a Dying City

Rand spends a good chunk of the opening just walking Eddie through New York. And it’s not the New York you picture. There’s a crack running down the side of a skyscraper, ten stories long. Gold leaf is peeling off spires. Every fourth storefront is dark and closed. A giant calendar hangs over the city, reading September 2, and something about it makes Eddie uneasy, though he can’t say why.

Here’s the thing. Eddie is not a hero. He’s not a genius. He’s just a decent, loyal guy who does his job and wants things to be right. Rand uses him to show us how the world looks to a regular person when everything is quietly falling apart. He notices the cracks but doesn’t fully understand them. He just feels that nameless dread.

Then Eddie remembers a childhood memory. An oak tree on the Taggart family estate. Huge, ancient, seemed permanent. One night lightning struck it and it split open. The inside was completely hollow, rotted to dust long ago. The whole tree had been dead for who knows how long, just standing there on appearance alone. That image sticks. It is basically a metaphor for everything that’s happening in this world.

Enter James Taggart, Professional Excuse-Maker

Eddie heads into the Taggart Building to report bad news to James Taggart, the railroad’s president. And right away you can tell Jim Taggart is a disaster. Rand describes him as a guy who went from adolescence to middle age without ever passing through actual youth. Petulant mouth, limp posture, eyes that never quite look at anything.

Eddie tells him the Rio Norte Line is falling apart. Trains keep breaking down. They haven’t met a schedule in six months. Shippers are leaving. A competitor called the Phoenix-Durango is eating their lunch in Colorado. And they’ve been waiting thirteen months for steel rails from a guy named Orren Boyle who keeps making excuses and never delivers.

Jim’s response to all of this? He deflects. He blames the economy. He says it’s a “national condition.” He calls Eddie a pessimist. He talks about how Ellis Wyatt, a young oil producer who revived dead oil fields in Colorado, is “greedy” and “irresponsible” for growing too fast. He complains that “nobody can blame us” if things are bad everywhere.

I grew up in a post-Soviet country. I know this type. The manager who never makes a decision, never takes a risk, never solves anything, but always has a speech ready about why it’s someone else’s fault. Jim Taggart is that guy turned up to eleven. Every sentence he says is designed to avoid responsibility while sounding reasonable. It’s infuriating.

Dagny Takes Over the Chapter

Then we meet Dagny Taggart, and the whole energy of the chapter changes.

She’s introduced on a train, sitting in a regular coach seat because there were no sleepers available. She hears someone whistling a piece of music that sounds like a Richard Halley concerto, but one that doesn’t exist. The brakeman calls it “Halley’s Fifth Concerto.” But Halley only wrote four. When she presses him, the boy clams up and says he made a mistake. Another small mystery. Another person who knows something and isn’t saying what.

The train stops for an hour in the middle of nowhere because of a broken signal. The crew just sits there, waiting. Nobody takes responsibility. Nobody acts. Dagny storms out of the train, finds the engineer, sizes up the situation, and gives a direct order: proceed with caution to the next signal. The engineer asks who she is. She says “Dagny Taggart” and the crew basically snaps to attention. She’s the Vice-President in Charge of Operation. She actually runs the railroad, while her brother holds the title of president.

Back in New York, she walks into Jim’s office and drops the news: she’s cancelled the useless contract with Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel and ordered new rails from Rearden Steel instead. Not just regular steel rails, but something called Rearden Metal, a new alloy that nobody has used before. It’s tougher, cheaper, and more durable than anything on the market.

Jim objects to everything. He doesn’t like Rearden. He thinks they should “give smaller fellows a chance.” He says nobody has approved it. He brings up “the human element.” But Dagny doesn’t care about committee approval or consensus. She studied engineering. She read the formula. She trusts her own judgment. And she tells Jim to either cancel the order himself or shut up. He won’t cancel it. He just wants to make sure somebody else takes the blame if it goes wrong.

The Chapter’s Last Punch

There are two more beats that matter. Dagny calls a music publisher and asks about Halley’s Fifth Concerto. It doesn’t exist. Halley hasn’t written anything in eight years. He’s basically vanished. So where did that brakeman hear that music?

And then Owen Kellogg, a brilliant young engineer Dagny had been planning to promote, walks in and quits. Just like that. No complaints. No better offer. No explanation. He says it’s personal. Dagny offers him a superintendent position, then tells him to name his own price. Nothing works. He’s leaving, and he clearly doesn’t want to, but he’s going anyway.

When she asks why, he just smiles with this mix of amusement and heartbreak and says, “Who is John Galt?”

That line again. Three times in one chapter. A bum on the street, a railroad engineer shrugging off responsibility, and now a talented man walking away from a career he loves. Each time it means something slightly different, but the thread is the same: something is draining the world, and nobody can name it.

My Take

For a first chapter, this is a lot of setup. But Rand does something clever. She gives you the mystery before the explanation. You feel the wrongness before you understand it. Eddie feels it. The city shows it. Good people are leaving, mediocre people are in charge, and the phrase “Who is John Galt?” hangs over everything like that giant calendar hanging over New York.

If you’ve ever worked in a company where the competent people kept quitting and the managers kept blaming everyone but themselves, this chapter will feel uncomfortably familiar. That’s the theme. Not just “who is John Galt” but “what happens when the people who actually do things decide to stop.”

Previous: Introduction

Next: Part I, Chapter 2: The Chain

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.