Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 2: The Aristocracy of Pull (Part 2) - The Wedding of the Looters
The second half of this chapter is basically a bomb going off in slow motion at a wedding. James Taggart’s wedding reception, to be exact. And what a reception it is. Every looter, moocher, and favor-trader in the country has gathered in one ballroom, dressed in formal wear, drinking champagne, congratulating themselves on how well things are going. By the end, they’ll be running for the phones.
The Bracelet Standoff
Before we get to the main event, there’s a tense little scene between Dagny, Lillian Rearden, and Hank. Lillian tries to get the Rearden Metal bracelet back from Dagny. Remember, Dagny traded her own diamond bracelet for it at a party, making a public statement about what she values. Lillian now wants to undo that exchange.
What follows is a carefully layered confrontation. Lillian tries every trick: social pressure, veiled implications, faux concern about Dagny’s reputation. She dances around suggesting that Dagny and Hank are having an affair, but she won’t say it directly. She keeps hinting, nudging, trying to make Dagny feel the weight of what others might think.
Dagny’s responses are devastating in their simplicity. “No.” “I don’t.” “No.” She refuses to play the game. Lillian wants ambiguity, innuendo, the polite fiction that everybody participates in. Dagny gives her nothing but clarity.
When Lillian finally gets close enough to the accusation, Dagny just says it out loud: “Mrs. Rearden, is this the manner and place in which you choose to suggest that I am sleeping with your husband?” Lillian panics and denies it instantly. And Rearden, who has been watching silently, tells Lillian to apologize.
Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I saw this kind of social combat constantly. The indirect accusation, the insinuation wrapped in concern, the expectation that nobody will ever name the actual thing being discussed. Dagny’s refusal to play along is almost physically uncomfortable to watch, because it breaks a social contract that most people never break. You’re supposed to accept the innuendo and retreat. She doesn’t.
Francisco Crashes the Party
Then Francisco d’Anconia walks in, and the chapter shifts into a different gear entirely.
Jim Taggart is in the middle of a pompous speech about freeing the world from the tyranny of money, about replacing the aristocracy of wealth with something nobler. Francisco finishes his sentence for him: “the aristocracy of pull.” And the room goes quiet.
Francisco is magnificent here. He treats Jim’s wedding like a royal affair, bowing to Cherryl with genuine grace. Poor Cherryl. She’s still the shopgirl from Buffalo who thinks Jim is a great man. She’s wearing a wedding veil and she has no idea what she’s married into.
Francisco then proceeds to tell Jim, in front of everyone, that he knows exactly who his hidden stockholders are. Every fake name, every front company, every politician from every People’s State who has parked stolen money in d’Anconia Copper. Jim squirms. He tries to change the subject. Francisco won’t let him.
The scene is funny and terrifying at the same time. Francisco is smiling like it’s all a joke while systematically exposing the entire corrupt network that connects Washington to Santiago to the looters in the ballroom.
The Money Speech
And then comes the speech. Someone says “money is the root of all evil,” and Francisco takes that ball and runs with it for several pages.
This is one of the most famous passages in the novel. Francisco argues that money is not evil but rather the opposite. It’s a tool of voluntary exchange between producers. It’s the material form of the idea that you must give value to get value. He traces the history of wealth from slave empires to free markets, arguing that America’s greatness came from being the first “country of money,” the first place where people understood that wealth must be created, not seized.
The speech is long. It’s a lecture. Rand doesn’t pretend otherwise. But some of the lines land hard. “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” Or: “When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.”
I’ll be honest, there are parts of this speech that feel like they were written about the country I grew up in. The pattern Francisco describes, where production is punished and looting is rewarded, where the destroyers seize gold and leave counterfeit paper, where the honest man’s only choices are to become fodder or to quit. That’s not abstract philosophy. That’s Tuesday in a lot of the world.
After the speech, a woman tells him she doesn’t agree but can’t explain why. “I don’t go by my head, but by my heart.” Francisco’s response is ice cold: when people are starving, your heart won’t save them.
The Bomb Goes Off
Now comes the real twist. Francisco privately tells Rearden what he’s actually been doing. While everyone assumed he was a careless playboy, he was systematically destroying d’Anconia Copper from the inside. The ore docks in Valparaiso will burn tomorrow. The mines at Orano will collapse in a rockslide. Other mines have been running at a loss for over a year with cooked books. And every looter, every politician, every favor-trader who hid their stolen money in d’Anconia Copper stock is about to lose everything.
Rearden’s first reaction is to laugh. Pure, involuntary laughter. And then he catches himself, horrified by his own response.
Francisco doesn’t wait for the news to reach the morning papers. He “accidentally” lets slip to a minor bureaucrat that something is wrong with d’Anconia Copper. The panic spreads through the ballroom like cracks through a wall about to collapse. People start running. Phones ring. Jim Taggart screams “Is it true?” Francisco smiles and says: “Money is the root of all evil, so I just got tired of being evil.”
Taggart runs out. Cherryl, the bride, her crystal veil trailing behind her, tries to follow him. He pushes her aside. She falls against Paul Larkin.
The chapter ends with three people standing still while the room falls apart around them. Dagny, looking at Francisco. Francisco and Rearden, looking at each other. Three pillars in a wreckage of panic.
My Take
This is the chapter where Rand shows what the “aristocracy of pull” actually looks like when the pull stops working. These people built nothing. They produced nothing. They sat in a ballroom toasting their own cleverness while their fortunes depended entirely on the producers they despised. And one man, who understood the system better than any of them, pulled the rug out.
The cruel irony is Cherryl Brooks. She’s the only truly innocent person at this wedding, and she’s the one left standing in a cloud of crystal veil, pushed aside by the husband she thought was a hero. Everyone else at least chose this game. She just walked in from a dime store in Buffalo and believed what the newspapers told her.
Francisco is playing a longer game than anyone suspects. And Rearden is starting to feel the pull of it, even as he resists.
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Next: Part II, Chapter 3: White Blackmail (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.