Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 5: Account Overdrawn - The Bill Comes Due
The title of this chapter is perfect. An account overdrawn. You’ve been spending what you didn’t earn, borrowing from competence you didn’t build, and now the bank is calling. Every system has a buffer, a margin of error built by the people who actually knew what they were doing. This chapter is about what happens when that buffer hits zero.
The Cascade
Rand opens with a verdict: “It was the first failure in the history of Rearden Steel.” For the first time, an order was not delivered. But by the time it was due, nobody was left to care.
What follows is one of the most methodical destructions I’ve seen in fiction. Danagger’s cousin cuts the workday to six hours to “raise morale.” Experienced foremen quit. Coal delivery to Taggart Transcontinental arrives one day late. That one day ripples outward. A freight train carrying lettuce and oranges from California waits at coaling stations. By the time it reaches New York, the produce is rotten and dumped into the East River. Three orange growers go bankrupt. Two lettuce farmers follow. A commission house closes. A plumbing company folds. A pipe wholesaler disappears. Nobody connects any of it.
I grew up watching exactly this kind of cascade in the post-Soviet economy. A factory closes because it can’t get parts. The supplier closes because they lost their biggest customer. The town loses its tax base. Young people leave. And every step of the way, somebody in an office is writing a report explaining why it’s nobody’s fault.
Winter Takes What’s Left
The winter is brutal. Rand makes the point that snowstorms were never this destructive before. Not because they were weaker, but because there were people who maintained the roads, the plows, the power grid. All of that depended on competent people who have now either quit, vanished, or been regulated into paralysis.
Three trains get trapped at Winston Station in the Rockies for five days. No trucks can reach them because Hammond’s trucks are worn out. No planes can reach them because Sanders’ airplanes are past their limit. The passengers sit in freezing, darkened cars and look out at the only light visible for miles: Wyatt’s Torch, still burning on the horizon.
Wesley Mouch rations coal to three hours of heating per day. Professors burn their books for warmth. Fruit growers burn their orchards. And Bertram Scudder writes that “privations strengthen a people’s spirit.” Sure. I heard versions of that line my entire childhood. When the system fails, the propaganda always pivots to making suffering sound noble.
The Board Meeting
The center of this chapter is a board meeting at Taggart Transcontinental. The board wants to close the John Galt Line. They’ve already decided. But nobody wants to say it. They dance around with “it seems to me” and “if we were to suppose.” They try to get Dagny to state the conclusion so they can pin responsibility on her. She refuses. “I have no opinions.” “I propose nothing.” When they push, she tells them: “Are you counting on my not saying that the responsibility is yours, that it was your goddamn policies that brought us where we are? Well, I’m saying it.”
A man from Washington named Mr. Weatherby delivers the real message: grant wage raises to the unions, and you’ll get permission to close the Line. If you refuse, we might call in the bonds we hold. When Jim protests that there was a contract, a moratorium, Weatherby replies: “An obligation? Aren’t you old-fashioned, Jim? There aren’t any obligations, except the necessity of the moment.”
Dagny laughs out loud. Because that’s exactly what was done to Ellis Wyatt and every other producer whose contracts were broken by directives. Now the same logic is turned on the people who created those directives.
The Last Train
The Line is voted closed, effective March 31. Dagny and Rearden go to Colorado to salvage machinery from dead factories. Ted Nielsen, the last shipper, has already vanished.
The scene at the last train is devastating. The platform is packed. An old woman looks at Dagny with hopeless appeal. A man on a crate yells about greedy parasites. Above it all, Wyatt’s Torch twists in the wind.
Afterward, Dagny walks along the abandoned track and finds the factory of Roger Marsh. It stands intact, like a body whose eyes have just closed. She sees a single weed growing from the entrance steps. In a flash of hatred, she drops to her knees and rips it out by the roots. Then she kneels there, on the steps of a dead factory in a dying town, and thinks: What do you think you’re doing?
That moment is Rand at her best. No speeches, no philosophy. Just a woman pulling a weed from a corpse.
Francisco and the Prometheus Answer
On the night the board votes, Francisco is waiting for Dagny in the lobby. He knew what they would do. For once, he doesn’t mock her. He takes her arm and talks about the men who built cities, who said “it is” instead of “it seems to me.” He tells her the story of Sebastian d’Anconia, who waited fifteen years for the woman he loved. She realizes, with a shock, what he’s telling her. But she can’t afford to believe it. Not from him.
They find scratched into a bar table: “Who is John Galt?” Francisco answers. “John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire, until the day when men withdraw their vultures.” That line is the entire novel in one sentence.
Lillian Finds Out
The chapter ends with Lillian discovering Dagny is Rearden’s mistress. Her reaction isn’t grief. It’s fury that she lost her leverage. She screams about ownership, about his oath, about her right to his life. He tells her, quietly, that nothing on earth will make him give Dagny up.
The chapter closes on Rearden feeling a new kind of freedom. The knowledge that what Lillian feels no longer has power over him. The guilt is gone. The account she held over him is closed.
The title works in every direction. The economy’s account of competence is overdrawn. Jim’s account of political favors is overdrawn. Lillian’s moral leverage over Rearden is overdrawn. Everyone has been spending what they didn’t earn. And the balance is zero.
Previous: Part II, Chapter 4: The Sanction of the Victim
Next: Part II, Chapter 6: Miracle Metal
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.