Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 2: The Aristocracy of Pull (Part 1) - When Connections Beat Competence
Chapter 2 of Part II is called “The Aristocracy of Pull,” and that title is doing a lot of work. This is the chapter where Rand shows you, in vivid detail, what a society looks like when who you know matters more than what you can do. And she does it through a wedding party. Let’s get into the first half.
The Lights Going Out in Colorado
The chapter opens with Dagny at her desk, watching the calendar across the skyline. September 2. The lights of Colorado are going dark. One by one, the producers who built new towns and factories out there have vanished into thin air. No goodbye letters. No explanations. Just silence.
Ted Nielsen of Nielsen Motors is the last one standing, and even he can’t promise he’ll stay. He tells Dagny about Roger Marsh, who swore he’d chain himself to his desk before leaving, who promised he’d at least leave a note explaining what happened. Two weeks later, Marsh was gone. No note.
Dagny thinks of it as a destroyer moving through the country, turning kinetic energy into static. That’s a beautiful image, and it captures the slow horror of watching productive people simply stop existing.
The one bright spot is Quentin Daniels, the physicist working on rebuilding the motor. He’s a night watchman at the abandoned Utah Institute of Technology, using their empty lab for his own research. When Dagny asked why he refused to work for Dr. Stadler, he said: “Governmental scientific inquiry is a contradiction in terms.” I’ve met people like Daniels. The kind who’d rather be a night watchman with freedom than a department head with strings attached. He won’t collect for an intention, only for goods delivered. If he succeeds, he’ll “skin her alive” on the percentage.
Rearden’s Secret Dinner
Meanwhile, Rearden is having a secret dinner with Ken Danagger in his hotel suite. They keep the lights low so no one recognizes Danagger. They’re committing a felony: Rearden has agreed to sell Danagger four thousand tons of Rearden Metal structural shapes, in violation of whatever directive is in force this week.
Danagger explains why he needs the metal. His mines need bracing before they cave in. He’s bought a bankrupt coal company where forty men just died in a collapse. The newspapers are screaming in every direction: coal operators are profiteering, coal operators aren’t expanding enough, the government should seize the mines.
Danagger says this property will pay for itself in forty-seven years. He has no children. He bought it because he can’t bear the thought of the railroads collapsing. These two sit in a darkened room like criminals, doing the one thing that will actually keep people alive. If caught, it’s ten years in prison each. Rearden notices the prospect of jail leaves him “blankly indifferent.” When the law has divorced itself from justice, breaking it stops feeling like a moral question.
Lillian’s Surprise Visit
Rearden is standing alone in his room, thinking about Dagny, when the door flies open. It’s Lillian. She’s come to New York, uninvited, to drag him to James Taggart’s wedding.
The scene is painful to read. Lillian checks the ashtray for lipstick-stained cigarette butts, covers it with a joke. She needles him about having someone “available on call, without appointment.” Rearden nearly slaps her.
Then she switches to the guilt play. How long does he want her to exist “in the basement of his life”? She frames going to this party as his duty, his obligation. And Rearden, who has accepted his affair with Dagny as guilt, who has decided Lillian has the moral high ground, agrees to go.
He agrees because refusing would expose his real reason for refusing. So he gives in. “All right, Lillian. I’ll go.” Three words that cost him everything, delivered in a lifeless voice.
If you’ve ever been trapped where someone with leverage knows exactly which buttons to push, this scene is hard to read. Lillian doesn’t scream or threaten. She positions things so that saying no becomes an admission of something worse.
Cherryl Brooks Gets Married
Now we get Cherryl’s backstory. She’s a shopgirl from a dime store, standing in her crumbling tenement room in a wedding dress that costs five hundred times more than everything else she owns. A jaded sob sister from the press is the only person helping her get ready.
Cherryl genuinely believes Jim Taggart is a great man. She remembers how he came to her tenement, took her to expensive restaurants, introduced her to his friends by announcing “Miss Brooks works in the dime store in Madison Square.” She thought he was being brave. She didn’t see he was using her as a prop.
And that’s the cruel trick. Every time Jim paraded her poverty in front of his friends, Cherryl interpreted it as courage. At a party, she overheard someone compare her situation to Caligula making his horse a senator. She looked at the Taggart Building and decided these people just hated Jim for his achievements. The achievements that were actually Dagny’s.
The media circus around their engagement is grotesque. They photograph her at the dime-store counter, in the subway, on the stoop of her tenement. Jim is the “Democratic Businessman.” She’s the “Cinderella Girl.” A branding exercise disguised as a love story.
The sob sister gives her one piece of advice before the wedding: “There are people who’ll try to hurt you through the good they see in you, knowing that it’s the good, needing it and punishing you for it.” Cherryl doesn’t understand yet. She will.
The Wedding Reception
The reception at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel is where the chapter title comes alive. Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder are scanning the room, sorting every guest into two categories: “Favor” and “Fear.” People who came because they have pull over Taggart, and people who came because they’re afraid of his pull over them. The young ones came from Washington. The older ones are businessmen.
Jim prowls the room like a man counting his assets. He’s looking for Wesley Mouch, who didn’t show up. Orren Boyle rubs it in, and then the two have one of the most nakedly honest conversations in the book.
Boyle lays it out. You don’t buy friends with money anymore, because someone can always outbid you. Instead, you get “the goods on a man,” and then you own him. Jim got Mouch his government job by holding proof of his dirty deals. But Mouch is getting too big, and the scandal is getting too old. Boyle tells Taggart: “Wesley was Rearden’s man, and then he was your man, and he might be somebody else’s man tomorrow.”
This is the aristocracy of pull. Not talent, not production, not merit. Leverage. Blackmail. Mutual destruction pacts dressed up as friendships. I grew up in a country where this was the norm, not the exception. People collected dirt on each other the way normal people collect business cards. It works until it doesn’t.
In Part 2, we’ll cover Cherryl’s confrontation with Dagny, Lillian’s power play with Taggart, and the Rearden Metal bracelet scene that might be the tensest drawing-room moment in the whole novel.
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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.