Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 10: Wyatt's Torch (Part 1) - The Directive That Kills Innovation

Chapter 10 opens with Dagny and Rearden playing detective. They are in Wisconsin, trying to trace the ownership history of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, that ruined factory where they found the revolutionary motor. And it’s like peeling an onion made entirely of rot.

The factory has changed hands so many times that nobody can even tell who legally owns it anymore. A con artist named Mark Yonts sold it twice, to two different buyers, and stripped out all the machinery before anyone noticed. The records burned for kindling. The workers scattered. The whole town of Starnesville is basically dead.

This is what happens when the competent people leave. The parasites move in, strip what’s left, and then leave too. I saw this pattern growing up. Factories that used to employ entire towns, standing empty with broken windows. Different country, different ideology, same result.

Mayor Bascom and the Philosophy of the Gutter

They visit Mayor Bascom, a pear-shaped local politician who sits on his porch surrounded by stolen luxury items from the factory. Persian rugs on buckled floors. A fancy radio with a kerosene lamp on top. He is the walking definition of someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Bascom is candid in the most disgusting way. He freely admits that he bought the factory at a bankruptcy sale for peanuts and flipped it to Mark Yonts. He brags about stretching laws for friends. He openly says that nobody gets rich through principles, only through connections.

And then he drops a bomb. He notices that Dagny is not Rearden’s wife. Just says it flat out. Rearden nearly loses it. But Dagny handles it with cold composure. “Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth,” she tells Rearden later. She points out that Bascom’s worldview, where virtue and enjoyment are mutually exclusive, should sound familiar. It’s the same guilt that Rearden carries inside himself.

That’s a sharp moment. She is basically telling him: the reason men like Bascom can get away with corruption is because men like you accept guilt you don’t deserve.

The Noose Tightens

Back in New York, everything is falling apart. Eddie calls Dagny in a panic: “I think they’re planning to kill Colorado.”

And he’s not wrong. The list of proposed regulations reads like a how-to guide for destroying a functioning economy:

• The Union of Locomotive Engineers wants to cap train speed at sixty miles per hour on the John Galt Line.
• The Union of Railway Conductors wants to limit freight trains to sixty cars.
• Four neighboring states want to limit Colorado’s train traffic to match their own pathetic levels.
• Orren Boyle wants a law to cap Rearden Metal production so it can’t outperform his inferior steel.
• Mr. Mowen wants a “Fair Share Law” to give every customer equal access to Rearden Metal, regardless of who actually needs it or ordered it first.
• Bertram Scudder wants a law to prevent businesses from moving out of their states.

Wesley Mouch, meanwhile, keeps issuing vague statements about “emergency powers” and “unbalanced economy.” The language is deliberately fuzzy. The intent is crystal clear.

I remember this kind of language from my childhood. When the people in charge start talking about “fairness” and “balance,” what they really mean is: the successful are about to get punished for being successful.

Rearden’s Double Betrayal

While Dagny goes to Washington, Rearden discovers that Larkin, the so-called friend he was forced to sign over his iron ore mines to (thanks to earlier regulations), has been diverting ore to Orren Boyle. Larkin shows up three days late and immediately starts whining about being treated unfairly. He talks about “social responsibilities” and “patriotic duties” while literally stealing from the man who gave him those mines.

Rearden’s response is two words: “Get out.”

Then comes the brutal part. Rearden has to find alternative ore sources through back-channel deals, paying above market price, making handshake agreements with strangers, operating in an underground economy because the official one has been rigged against him. His purchasing manager says it plainly: “Either you’re good at running the mills or you’re good at running to Washington.”

That line hits different when you’ve lived in a system where connections to government mattered more than competence. The purchasing manager adds: “You’re the one who’s got something to be looted.” That’s the whole game in one sentence.

The Bedroom Scene

Then there’s a scene with Lillian that is genuinely uncomfortable to read. She shows up in Rearden’s bedroom late at night, half-seductive, half-accusing. She gives this whole speech about how real love means sacrificing your values, how telling an ugly woman she’s beautiful is a greater tribute than telling a beautiful one, because it corrupts the very concept of beauty.

That philosophy is so twisted it almost circles back to being impressive. Love as the deliberate destruction of your own standards. I’ve heard versions of this in real life. People who think loyalty means tolerating the intolerable.

When she tries to embrace him, he physically throws her off. He can’t help it. And then the guilt hits him like a train. He tells her he’s sorry. She walks out with “You wouldn’t understand it.” And he’s left alone, trapped between a wife he doesn’t love and a guilt he can’t shake because his own rigid honesty won’t let him forgive himself.

The Banker With a Heart

Dagny, meanwhile, goes to Washington to meet Eugene Lawson, the former “banker with a heart” who bankrupted the Community National Bank. Lawson is now comfortably employed at the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. Of course he is. The pattern Rand keeps showing: fail upward into government.

Lawson is insufferable. He talks endlessly about love, brotherhood, and his pure motives. He remembers lace curtains in the workers’ houses but can’t name a single engineer. He proudly says he never cared about collateral, only about need. He lost everyone’s savings and an entire region’s economy, and his takeaway is that he was too good for this world.

The funniest and saddest part: Dagny only wants one name, anyone who worked at the motor factory’s research lab. Lawson can’t give her even that. He was “concerned with the real workers, the men of calloused hands.” The engineers were “parasites of office and laboratory.”

He finally coughs up one name: Lee Hunsacker, the guy who ran the corporation that killed the factory. And then Lawson closes with what might be the most damning self-portrait in the whole book: “I can proudly say that in all of my life I have never made a profit.”

He says it like it’s a badge of honor. And that’s exactly the problem.

Part 2 picks up with Dagny continuing to chase the trail of the motor’s inventor, while the political situation accelerates toward the point of no return.

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Next: Part I, Chapter 10: Wyatt’s Torch (Part 2)

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.