Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 7: The Exploiters and the Exploited (Part 1) - Building the John Galt Line

Chapter 7 opens with Dagny standing on a bridge in the Colorado mountains, watching the Rio Norte Line take shape. Green-blue rails made of Rearden Metal stretch across the landscape, and for a moment you can feel her satisfaction. But this chapter is really about all the pain it took to get here, and all the new pain that’s coming.

Everything Is Broken, and Dagny Has to Fix It Herself

Rand spends the first section cataloging every obstacle Dagny faced during construction, and honestly it reads like a horror story for anyone who’s ever managed a project. Every supplier, every contractor, every engineer either can’t do the job or won’t.

Mr. Mowen, the switch manufacturer, refuses to work with Rearden Metal because it requires a new furnace, new processes, retraining his workers. Dagny has to double the price of her order just to get him moving. Rearden sends metallurgists to train Mowen’s people at Rearden’s own expense. When Summit Casting goes bankrupt halfway through filling her spike order, Dagny flies to Chicago in the middle of the night, bribes and threatens officials, gets the padlocked factory reopened, and has a crew working before sunrise. When drill heads run out because the regular steel supplier dropped the ball, she calls Rearden, who buys an abandoned tool plant and has it producing Rearden Metal drill heads within a week.

Every single piece of progress requires Dagny to push through a wall of incompetence, fear, and refusal. Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I recognize this pattern very well. When systems start decaying, the people inside them stop taking initiative. Nobody wants to be the one who made the decision. Nobody wants responsibility. So the few people who still care end up doing everything themselves, fighting the system at every step.

Her contractor, Ben Nealy, is the perfect example. The guy thinks “muscles” are all you need to build anything. He won’t order Rearden Metal drill heads. He won’t replace substandard crossties. He just shrugs and says he’s “doing his best.” Dagny’s response is one of my favorite lines in the chapter: “I’ve hired you to do a job, not to do your best, whatever that is.”

Ellis Wyatt Shows Up

Then something good happens. Ellis Wyatt, the oil producer who stormed into Dagny’s office with an ultimatum back in Chapter 4, walks up the track to meet her. But this time he’s not angry. He says “Hello, Dagny” and she understands immediately: it’s forgiveness, acknowledgment, respect. He’s been coming to the construction site regularly, quietly helping organize the supply system, watching over the work. When Nealy complains about Wyatt acting like he owns the place, Dagny curses him out.

This is a small moment, but it matters. Wyatt went from threatening to destroy Dagny to actively supporting her. The difference? She’s actually doing the work. She kept her word. In Rand’s world, that’s the only credential that counts.

Rearden Proposes a New Bridge

The best scene in this section happens when Dagny discovers Hank Rearden at the construction site. He’s there with his notebook, doing calculations on the old bridge, which is falling apart. Her engineers quoted two million dollars for a new Rearden Metal bridge. Rearden says he can do it for eight hundred thousand. He already designed a new type of truss that can only be built with his metal. He’d been thinking about it for years, long before Rearden Metal even existed.

They sit together on frozen lumber, going over sketches and load calculations, and for a moment the whole chapter feels different. These are two people who genuinely love solving problems. No politics, no manipulation, just engineering. Rearden wants to build the bridge not to save Taggart Transcontinental but to prove his metal to the whole country. “Let them see a bridge of Rearden Metal,” he says.

There’s also a quiet tension between them. When Dagny asks for a ride back to New York on his plane, he says he’s flying to Minnesota. But the airport attendant later tells her Rearden actually flew to New York. He lied. And Dagny has no idea why. The chapter doesn’t explain it either, just leaves it hanging.

Jim’s Trap and the Walk in the Rain

Back in New York, Jim convinces Dagny to speak at the New York Business Council dinner in defense of Rearden Metal. Sounds reasonable. But in the car ride there, Jim keeps nervously listing all the attacks against Rearden Metal: the National Council of Metal Industries says it’s unsafe, the steel workers’ union debated banning it, grade school teachers in New Mexico resolved that children shouldn’t ride trains on the new line.

Then Jim drops the real information. He tried to buy Dan Conway’s old Phoenix-Durango rail to replace the Rearden Metal track, and Conway refused. Conway is selling his rail to tiny railroads at a loss rather than let Taggart have it. And the dinner isn’t just a speech. It’s a radio debate. The question: “Is Rearden Metal a lethal product of greed?” Dagny’s opponent: Bertram Scudder, a professional critic of industry.

Dagny’s reaction is immediate. She orders the car stopped and walks out. In sleet. In evening sandals. She will not participate in a debate that treats the question of Rearden Metal’s safety as a legitimate controversy. “You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable?”

She ends up in a small diner near the East River, sitting at a counter in her evening gown, drinking coffee. An old bum gives her his philosophy: there’s no human spirit, man is just an animal, don’t believe in dreams. A young bitter kid asks “Who is John Galt?” And a small tramp in a cap says he knows who John Galt really is: an explorer who found the fountain of youth on top of a mountain but never came back, because it couldn’t be brought down to men.

It’s a strange, haunting scene. Every piece of equipment in that diner comes from Colorado. The toaster is from Marsh, Colorado. And when Dagny sees it, she drops her head on the counter. Colorado is building the world, and the world is trying to destroy Colorado.

The State Science Institute Comes Knocking

The chapter then cuts to Rearden’s office, where a man named Dr. Potter from the State Science Institute is sitting across from him. Potter is vague, meek, but with a faint undertone of threat. He keeps telling Rearden that the Institute doesn’t have a “favorable opinion” of Rearden Metal. He keeps asking Rearden to “consider the social aspect.” He represents the best brains in the country, he says.

Here’s the thing: he never actually states what he wants. He just circles. This is part one of what will clearly become a bigger confrontation, and it already feels sinister.

This first third of Chapter 7 establishes the pattern for everything to come. The people who build things are fighting on two fronts: the physical work itself, and the entire establishment trying to stop them. Dagny and Rearden are winning the first fight. The second one is just getting started.

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Next: Part I, Chapter 7: The Exploiters and the Exploited (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.