Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar (Part 1) - Galt's Gulch Revealed

This is the last chapter of Part II, and it’s a big one. Rand uses it as a hinge between the world that’s falling apart and the secret world that explains why. Everything that’s been building for nine chapters reaches a turning point here. We start on a dying train and end somewhere nobody expected to go.

Dagny on the Edge

The chapter opens with Dagny riding a train west, and she’s in rough shape. Not physically, but mentally. She looks out the window at the prairie and feels something she’s never felt before: fear. Fear that the rail under her is fragile, that the whole network she devoted her life to is just a thin thread stretched over emptiness.

She watches the small towns go by. Signs for local businesses flash past her window. Reynolds Harvesters. Macey Cement. Benjamin Wylie Grain and Feed. These are the monuments, she thinks, to what free people once built on the edge of nothing. And between them, the ghosts: crumbling factories, broken windows, poles with shreds of wire hanging off them. She sees a gas station still glowing white in the dark, a young couple pulling in for ice cream, and she breaks down. She can’t look at them. She knows what it took to build the world that gives them this small evening, and she knows it’s being destroyed.

This is one of the moments where Rand’s writing hits a personal nerve for me. Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I saw exactly this landscape. The signs of things that once worked, slowly rusting. Buildings that used to produce things, standing empty. The difference between a functioning economy and a decaying one isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. Things just stop getting repaired.

The Tramp’s Story

Dagny finds a stowaway in her train car, an aging tramp named Jeff Allen. The conductor is about to throw him off into the darkness, which at the train’s speed would mean death. Dagny stops it. She invites the man in, orders dinner for two.

What gets her is his dignity. His suit is patched everywhere, but his collar is white from careful laundering. When she hands him food, he doesn’t grab it. He fights to unfold his napkin, to match her pace, because that’s the manner proper to men.

Allen was a skilled lathe operator. His last real job was at the Hammond Car Company in Colorado. Before that, he’d bounced from plant to plant as each one closed. Before all of that, he worked twenty years at one factory: the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Starnesville, Wisconsin.

And this is where the chapter explodes.

The Twentieth Century Motor Company

Allen tells Dagny the whole story. When the old owner died, his three heirs took over and introduced a new plan. Everyone would work according to their ability and be paid according to their need. The six thousand workers voted for it. They thought it sounded noble. They’d heard it praised their entire lives, in school, in church, in newspapers, in every movie they’d ever watched.

It took one meeting to see what they’d done to themselves.

Nobody could claim their pay as earned. Pay was based on need, and need had to be begged for in public. So it became a contest of who could demonstrate the most misery. The honest people felt shame about asking for anything. The dishonest ones milked the system for everything. A man who wanted to send his son to college was told no, not until everyone’s children could go. A widower who loved classical music was denied a record allowance because it was a “personal luxury,” while an eight-year-old girl got gold braces because a psychologist said she’d develop an inferiority complex. The old man turned to drink and eventually punched all the girl’s teeth out.

Production fell forty percent in the first six months. So they voted on who had the most “ability” and sentenced those people to unpaid overtime. The best workers learned to hide their skills. The bright young engineer who’d saved thousands of man-hours in his first year shut his brain off in the second, because his reward for excellence was punishment. People started competing for who could do the worst job. Ability became a mortgage you could never pay off.

I have to stop here and say: this is not abstract to me. My parents’ generation lived under a version of this. Not this extreme, not this compressed, but the logic was identical. When effort is punished and need is rewarded, people adjust. They hide what they can do. They learn that ambition is dangerous. It’s not that people are lazy by nature. It’s that you build a system that makes laziness rational, and then you wonder why nobody tries.

The honest lost. The dishonest won. And the Starnes heirs, who supposedly gave up their fortune out of generosity, lived like kings. Gerald Starnes threw champagne parties while workers were denied a clothing allowance. His sister Ivy controlled all distribution and ran it through pure bootlicking. The plan lasted four years, ended in bankruptcy, and at the last meeting a young man walked up to Ivy Starnes and spat in her face.

“Who Is John Galt?”

But here’s the kicker. Allen tells Dagny about the very first meeting, twelve years ago. After six thousand people voted for the plan, one man stood up. A young engineer nobody knew much about. He said, “I don’t accept this.” He stood like a man who knew he was right. Gerald Starnes called after him: “How will you stop it?” And the young man said: “I will stop the motor of the world.”

Then he walked out. Nobody saw him again.

Years later, as factory after factory went dark, as the lights went out across the country, the workers who’d been at that meeting started asking each other about him. They started repeating his words. And other people picked it up, people who didn’t even know the origin, but who felt the same thing: something had gone from the world.

His name was John Galt.

The Frozen Train

After Allen’s story, Dagny falls asleep. She wakes because the wheels have stopped. The train is dead in the middle of the prairie. She runs through the cars and finds no crew, no conductor, no porter. The entire staff has deserted. This is what they call a “frozen train,” and in this collapsing world, it’s becoming common. Workers just walk off into the night because the law that forces them to work has made working unbearable.

She finds Owen Kellogg aboard, the talented railroad man who’d quit Taggart Transcontinental earlier in the book. Together they take charge. Dagny addresses the passengers, tells them what happened, and asks for a volunteer to walk with her to a trackside phone. Nobody moves. Not one person. They just stare at her with resentment, as if she owes them transportation by the mere fact of their existence.

Kellogg volunteers. The tramp, Jeff Allen, offers to guard the train. Dagny appoints him deputy conductor on the spot, hands him a hundred-dollar bill, and tells him to keep the cattle from stampeding. His last word to her is: “Thank you.”

And that single word carries the weight of everything Allen told her about what happens when human dignity is systematically destroyed, and what it means when someone gives a piece of it back.

Previous: Part II, Chapter 9: The Face Without Pain or Fear

Next: Part II, Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar (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.