Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 4: The Immovable Movers - The Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule
Chapter 4 opens with Dagny standing outside the Taggart Building, thinking about motive power. About how this massive skyscraper only stays standing because of the engines rolling across the continent beneath it. And honestly, that’s a pretty solid metaphor for what’s about to happen in this chapter: the engines are starting to stall.
Another One Vanishes
First bad news of the chapter: McNamara, the best contractor in the country, just quit. Not got fired. Not went bankrupt. Just closed up shop and vanished. Eddie Willers delivers this to Dagny and they’re both stunned. The guy had contracts worth a fortune and a waiting list for three years. And he walked away from all of it.
This is now a pattern in the book. Talented people keep disappearing without explanation. If you’re keeping count, this is another one to add to the list alongside Richard Halley and others. Something is pulling these people away, and nobody can figure out what.
Dagny Walks the City at Night
After the McNamara news, Dagny feels drained. She walks through New York looking for something that might give her a spark of joy. What she finds is depressing. A radio blasts chaotic music with no melody. A bookstore pushes The Vulture Is Molting, “a fearless revelation of man’s depravity.” A movie theater promotes a drama about whether “a woman should tell.” The whole sequence reads like Rand saying: this is what culture looks like when it gives up on greatness.
Dagny goes home and puts on Richard Halley’s Fourth Concerto. Here we get Halley’s full backstory. Decades in obscurity, critics saying heroism was “out of key with our times.” Nineteen years after his opera Phaethon was booed off the stage, it got performed again and received the greatest ovation the opera house had ever seen. The next day? Halley retired. Sold his rights and disappeared.
Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I’ve seen this kind of thing. People who build something amazing, endure years of being mocked, and then right when the world finally notices them, they’re done. Not because they ran out of energy, but because they understood what the applause actually meant.
Mexico Nationalizes Everything
Now we cut to James Taggart, and what a contrast. He’s sitting in wrinkled pajamas past noon, nursing a hangover, his girlfriend Betty Pope making snarky comments about his sister. This guy runs one of the biggest railroads in the country.
He perks up long enough to brag about putting “the skids under” Dagny at the Board meeting. Then the phone rings. Mexico City. The People’s State of Mexico just nationalized the San Sebastian Mines and the San Sebastian Railroad. Everything Jim invested in, gone.
But Dagny had already stripped the line down to one train a day and pulled out all the good equipment months ago. Mexico got almost nothing. Jim walks into the Board meeting and takes credit for Dagny’s foresight. He even suggests firing the consultants who recommended the investment, which was his own idea. No shame at all.
Francisco d’Anconia lost fifteen million of his own money in those mines, and nobody can figure out why he doesn’t seem to care. That’s a thread Rand is pulling slowly, and it’s one of the more interesting mysteries in the book.
The Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule
Here’s the centerpiece of the chapter. The National Alliance of Railroads passes something called the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule. On paper, it sounds reasonable: stop “destructive competition” in regions where there isn’t enough business for multiple railroads. In practice, it’s designed to do one thing: destroy Dan Conway’s Phoenix-Durango railroad in Colorado, so that Taggart Transcontinental gets the territory by default.
Nobody names names in the speeches. They talk about “public welfare” and “cooperation.” But when the vote happens, everyone looks at Dan Conway. The rule passes with only five dissenting votes. And then nobody cheers. Nobody talks. Everyone just leaves quickly. They know what they did.
For anyone who lived through Soviet-style “planning” or post-Soviet privatization schemes, this scene is painfully familiar. The language of collective good being used as a weapon to destroy whoever is actually productive. I’ve seen it happen in real life. The words change, the mechanism stays the same.
Jim rushes to Dagny’s office, gloating. Her reaction is immediate: “You rotten bastards!” And then she goes straight to Dan Conway to offer to help him fight it in court.
Dan Conway Gives Up
This is the saddest scene in the chapter. Dan Conway, a man who built a great railroad from almost nothing, just accepts his destruction. He won’t fight because he signed the Alliance agreement and gave his word to abide by the majority. Even though the majority just voted to take everything from him.
Dagny argues with him. She tells him the agreement won’t hold in court, that she’ll testify on his behalf. But Conway is broken. He says he was trying to do good for everyone, and he can’t understand why they turned on him for it. Dagny fires back: “Don’t you see that that’s what you’re being punished for, because it was good?”
Conway’s answer is the saddest line: “Oh God, it’s so damn unjust!” But he won’t fight. He’ll go back to running his small original line in Arizona. Maybe go fishing.
Before Dagny leaves, Conway tells her something important: get the Rio Norte Line ready before he shuts down, because Ellis Wyatt and the other producers in Colorado can’t survive even a single day without rail service. “It’s all on your shoulders now.”
Ellis Wyatt Delivers an Ultimatum
Then Ellis Wyatt, the oil producer from Colorado, storms into Dagny’s office unannounced. He’s furious. Nine months from now, you’d better have trains running in Colorado that match my needs. If you fail me, I’ll take all of you down with me.
Dagny doesn’t defend herself, doesn’t explain that she opposed the rule. She just says: “You will get the transportation you need, Mr. Wyatt.” She takes responsibility for the company’s name, even when she didn’t cause the problem.
Dagny and Rearden Make a Deal
The chapter ends with Dagny visiting Hank Rearden. She needs the Rearden Metal rail delivered in nine months instead of twelve. Rearden says “I’ll do it” and charges her twenty dollars extra per ton. No drama, no negotiation theater. Just two competent people making a deal.
Their conversation is probably the most enjoyable part of the chapter. They talk about what Rearden Metal could do for the world: trains running at 250 miles per hour, planes that weigh practically nothing, chicken wire that lasts two hundred years, kitchenware passed down for generations. It’s two people who genuinely love building things, getting excited about possibilities.
The chapter closes with Rearden looking out at his mills and saying: “Whatever we are, it’s we who move the world and it’s we who’ll pull it through.”
That’s the title explained. The “immovable movers” are the people like Dagny and Rearden, the ones who keep everything standing through sheer force of competence and will. The question the book keeps asking is: what happens when even they can’t hold it together anymore?
Previous: Part I, Chapter 3: The Top and the Bottom
Next: Part I, Chapter 5: The Climax of the d’Anconias (Part 1)
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.