Francisco d'Anconia
From Conservapedia
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia, in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, was the last CEO of a copper mining company that had been in his family since the days of the Spanish Empire. He presented the public face of a playboy, interested primarily in meaningless romances while his company descended into rack and ruin. In fact he was deliberately destroying it, on the orders, as he interpreted them, of John Galt.
Contents |
Back story
In the days of the Spanish Empire, and probably at the invitation of the Viceroy of Peru, Sebastian d'Anconia came to the Andes Mountains in South America and explored them for mineral wealth. He found a rich lode of copper, and on this lode he built a fortune that would sustain his family for many generations to come.
But his successors were not the sort of "trust fund kids" that one finds today. The descendants of Sebastian d'Anconia prided themselves on following his examples of self-reliance, self-discipline, and above all, autonomy.
Youth
Young Francisco d'Anconia spent many of his adolescent years at the family compound of the Taggarts, the family that controlled the great Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. His playmates there included James Taggart, his sister Dagny, and Eddie Willers. James Taggart never impressed Francisco very much. He could tolerate Eddie Willers, because Eddie followed his lead and did not spend half his time complaining, as James was wont to do. But by far the playmate who made the greatest impression on him was Dagny. In fact, he and Dagny became not only friends, but lovers.
College
When he was eighteen years old, Francisco went to the Patrick Henry University (not to be confused with the real-life Patrick Henry College). He decided to pursue an interesting and demanding double major: physics and philosophy. To his pleasant surprise, he met two other young men who had the same plans: Ragnar Danneskjold, who descended from a long line of Viking aristocrats, and John Galt, who came to the school virtually penniless and literally worked his way through college. Despite the vast differences in their backgrounds, the three became very fast friends, though perhaps none of the three would know how fast their friendship would prove to be in the years ahead.
The strike call
A few years after his graduation (probably 1917), he received what he could only describe as a summons from John Galt to meet him at his home. He answered the summons, and was surprised when Ragnar Danneskjold joined them.
John Galt was not interested in something as mundane as a "college reunion." He told them a very disheartening and bracing story of his experiences at the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Wisconsin, where he had gone to work as an engineer. His story was this: after he completed the prototype of a motor that could run on static electricity from the atmosphere, the owner of the factory, Gerald "Jed" Starnes, died. Gerald Starnes' heirs then proposed a plan that Galt knew he could never accept. Under that plan, all the workers would work according to their abilities, and be paid according to their needs. John Galt immediately announced his refusal to work under such a plan and his intention, as he put it, to "stop the motor of the world."
He then shared with them his proposal: to call a strike of the men of the mind, and note how quickly human society would collapse without their contributions. He then asked Francisco and Ragnar to join him in this strike.
Francisco knew that merely quitting and joining the strike would not be enough for him. "To whom much is given, much is expected," and as Francisco saw it, John Galt would expect nothing less of him than that he not only quit the D'Anconia Copper Company, but also to destroy it so that no one would have the benefit of the talents of his predecessors. As he would later explain it to Dagny,
| “ | I am not merely leaving it as I found it; I am leaving it as Sebastian d'Anconia found it, and then let the world get along without him or me! | ” |
Dagny Taggart
The first person whom Francisco went to see was Dagny. He could not tell her the full particulars, because that was a secret that belonged to someone else. But he begged her to give him some reason to reject John Galt's message, though again he did not specifically identify John Galt or the message. Perhaps he should never have expected Dagny to argue effectively with him under such a handicap. But he did not merely see Dagny as a love interest; he saw that she, too, was as much a victim of what John Galt called the "looter system" as John Galt might have been, and that what she should do was to go on strike with him. He also saw that she could never bring herself to do such a thing, and he dared not share that secret with her until she was ready to hear it.
And so, with much sorrow, he bade her farewell. But he set for himself the personal goal to recruit her into the strike, no matter how long it took. The only other prospect in whom Francisco would take such a personal interest was Henry Rearden, many years later.
The playboy
Francisco needed a cover for his activities, and he found one. He became the stereotypical, if not quintessential, "Latin lover." He would throw wild parties in which he encouraged his guests to cast aside the usual notions of modesty and decorum. He would even give the appearance of having one "one-night stand" after another. Yet in fact he never once was intimate with any of the women whom he allowed to become linked with him in international gossip. As he would later explain:
| “ | Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will show you his opinion of himself. | ” |
So he never was intimate with any of these women, because he could not bring himself to stoop that low.
The mole
Besides which, all of his playboy activities were an elaborate sham. As he continued to invite gossip, he was preparing to make some business decisions that would be thoroughly bad in any context except that of a deliberate attempt to destroy his family business.
The San Sebastian Mines
In or about the ninth year of the strike, Francisco opened the San Sebastian Mines in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. James Taggart rather excitedly built a special railway line, the San Sebastian Line, to serve those mines and the workers' community that served them. Dagny Taggart suspected that this was a bad decision, but only because Mexico was now the People's State of Mexico and was likely to nationalize the mines and the railway line at the next meeting of the Mexican Congress. So Francisco saw the service on the San Sebastian Line cut to one passenger train a day (pulled by a wood-burning steam locomotive) and one freight train every other day. Francisco accepted these service cuts without complaint.
Then, inevitably, the People's State of Mexico nationalized the mines and the railway line. But then the Mexican government discovered the truth: Francisco had opened mines where there was neither copper nor any other mineral to be found. When the story broke, Francisco was in New York City, staying at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel (probably the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel under a fictitious name). Dagny Taggart came to see him, and Francisco simply feigned innocence and asked her to try to reason out for himself why he would drive mines into mountains that could yield no minerals, for no better reason than to play an elaborate scam against a Communist government. Francisco left her with only this clue:
| “ | Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you find yourself facing an apparent contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. | ” |
Stock manipulation
In another dubious decision, Francisco actually manipulated the common stock of his company to make it look attractive to James Taggart, Orren Boyle, and their politically connected friends. Then, on the occasion of James Taggart's wedding to a young woman named Cheryl Brooks, he made a great show of protesting that his company was out of cash and could not keep going without a major loan. The stock promptly crashed, and the connected politicos lost heavily.
Lost cargoes
The third manner in which Francisco systematically depleted the assets of his company involved his old friend Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar had long since became a privateer, and was seizing government "humanitarian" cargoes and generally becoming the scourge of the Atlantic Ocean. Francisco would occasionally send messages to Ragnar whenever one of his copper-laden freighters was setting sail, in the expectation that Ragnar would attack the ship, cast the crew adrift in lifeboats, and then sink the ship with its load. One such "loss" would place a great strain on Francisco's campaign to recruit Henry Rearden into the strike: Rearden had contracted with D'Anconia Copper to ship a load of copper for the pouring of another heat or two of Rearden Metal (see below), but that copper would never reach its intended port.
Looking for conquests
At about the same time as the San Sebastian debacle, Francisco noticed that Rearden Steel was in the news. Henry Rearden had invented a new kind of alloy, the principal constituents of which were iron and copper. With this metal, called "Rearden Metal," Henry Rearden proposed to pour rail and even make an entire bridge to renovate Taggart Transcontinental's ailing Rio Norte Line in Colorado. While he was making his plans in detail, his wife Lillian gave a grand dinner party, to which Francisco d'Anconia received an invitation; apparently the rules of the social set to which Lillian Rearden belonged demanded that she not ignore him entirely.
Francisco attended, and introduced himself to Rearden. Rearden sardonically asked him whether he was "looking for conquests." In answer, Francisco said, "Yes, I have found one who will be my greatest and last." By whom Francisco meant Henry Rearden himself, though he would not explain that until much, much later.
Francisco met Rearden again at James Taggart's wedding reception. He made a few sarcastic remarks at James Taggart's expense; for instance, when James Taggart began to boast of the "replacement" of "the aristocracy of money," Francisco said that the replacement was actually "the aristocracy of pull." But Francisco had not come merely to make himself unpleasant. As he had done at Lillian Rearden's dinner, Francisco was actively cultivating his relationship with Rearden. It was on that occasion that Francisco warned Rearden, in no uncertain terms, never to buy the stock of D'Anconia Copper, nor deal with D'Anconia Copper in any way, shape or form. (Rearden would forget that advice on a critical occasion, and a load of copper that he thought would be delivered without incident wound up on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.)
In all his various meetings with Rearden, Francisco repeatedly sounded one central theme: that Rearden, by continuing to give of his talents to society, was supporting those who not only did not appreciate his talents but in fact intended to punish him in any way that they could. On one occasion, Francisco asked:
| “ | If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders—if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, and the harder he worked, the more the world pressed down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do? | ” |
Rearden said, "I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?"
Francisco answered, "To shrug."
Two incidents nearly ended any hope that Francisco had of convincing Rearden to "shrug off" his burden. One, as mentioned, was the incident in which Rearden had rashly contracted with D'Anconia Copper to deliver a load of copper to him, but that load ended up at the bottom of the sea. At that time, Francisco had said to Rearden, "I swear to you, by the woman I love, that I am your friend." The other was when Henry Rearden discovered that Dagny Taggart was the woman whom Francisco loved—but Henry Rearden had been having an affair with Dagny himself. In a jealous rage, Rearden hauled off and slapped Francisco across the face with the back of his hand. Francisco summoned all his self-discipline not to strike back.
Directive 10-289
In May of what would become the last year of the strike, the United States Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources issued Directive 10-289, under which all persons would be legally attached to their jobs, and all inventions and other intellectual property would be nationalized and become an intellectual common. Francisco called Dagny and simply asked her whether she had yet received news of what he called "the moratorium on brains."
Within twenty-four hours, Dagny Taggart had disappeared. Then on May 15, John Galt told Francisco that he had discovered, from his position as a spy in the Taggart Terminal, where Dagny might be found. He then told Francisco that he should go to her and tell her of the strike, saying that he had "earned" this chance. From Galt, that was a significant concession, because Francisco knew that John Galt had fallen in love with her.
Francisco did go to see her. But he did not tell her the secret of the strike. He did, however, tell her the secret of his sham playboy persona, and his deliberate acts to destroy his company.
He was probably on the point of winning her final defection when a special bulletin broke on the radio: the eight-mile-long Taggart Tunnel through the Rocky Mountains had been demolished in a colossal wreck that was the result of a series of thoroughly bad, and probably politically motivated, dispatch decisions. Among other things, the Taggart line's signature coast-to-coast express, the Comet, had been sent into the tunnel pulled by a coal-burning steam locomotive, not the Diesel locomotive that was the only sort of locomotive that was safe to use in the tunnel. The Comet had stopped halfway in the tunnel after the engineer and everyone else on board had been asphyxiated. (The fireman had managed to run to the western adit of the tunnel and was thus the only survivor.) Then a United States Army freight special crashed into the rear of the stalled passenger train, and the resulting explosion sealed the tunnel forever.
Dagny immediately left to return to New York, though Francisco begged her, "In the name of everything held sacred to you, don't go back!" He probably realized that Dagny continued to function in a society that did not thank her, because she loved her work too much to leave it.
The scab
In June of that year, Francisco took his annual one-month vacation in Galt's Gulch, the self-sufficent community that the strikers had established in a hidden valley in the Rockies. There, John Galt surprised him by saying that he had a scab staying in his house. This was something that Francisco positively had to see. He was shocked to discover that the "scab" was Dagny herself, who had crash-landed in the Gulch after trying to follow one of John Galt's recruitment flights.
During Dagny's stay in the Gulch, Francisco gave her a tour of "D'Anconia Copper No. 1," a mine he had driven into the mountainside that ringed the valley. Dagny observed that he transported his copper ore to the valley floor on muleback, and suggested that he build a railroad instead. At first he protested that laying rail would be too expensive, but Dagny said with complete confidence that she could build a railroad easily and inexpensively. But in the middle of her presentation, she lamented that she could not lay such a short stretch of rail and abandon an entire transcontinental system.
John Galt listened to this, and sternly told her that if she decided to remain in the Gulch, she would have to hear, in excruciating detail, about every failure of Taggart Transcontinental. Dagny asked for time to consider her decision.
Francisco then invited Dagny to stay at his house, rather than at John Galt's house. Dagny then said that John Galt had engaged her as his cook and housemaid, and therefore had the prior claim on her. John at first asked her to make the decision herself, as an adult, but she insisted that the decision belonged to him, as her employer. John Galt then turned to Francisco and refused the permission. The two men realized at once that Dagny had been testing their commitment to the philosophical principle that John Galt had just finished outlining:
| “ | Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever. | ” |
At the end of the month, Dagny decided to return once again to the outside world, saying that she would continue to fight for John Galt's principles in that arena. Francisco admired her courage, but knew that any such effort by her was futile.
The conquest of Henry Rearden
Francisco would not see Dagny again until the next winter. As the fall approached, he laid his plans to complete the destruction of D'Anconia Copper. He knew that the People's State of Chile intended to nationalize all his remaining holdings. So he quietly placed explosive charges in all his facilities, timed to explode at the moment that the Chilean parliament would call itself to order to consider the nationalization bill.
This happened on September 2, 1929. The next day, New York City's scrolling calendar display showed, not the date of September 3, but Francisco's personal message of defiance and vindication:
| “ | Brother, you asked for it! | ” |
Francisco signed that message with all his names in full.
Then he applied for a job at Rearden Steel, not under his true name, but under the name of Frank Adams. He signed on as a furnace foreman. He learned quickly that the Unification Board was moving several workers into the plant who had no experience in a steel mill, and that they planned to start a riot to coincide with a conference that several members of the Bureau had scheduled, to which they "invited" Henry Rearden. At that conference, they would explain the Steel Unification Plan, under which all the steelmakers of the country would work "as a team" and be paid according to the blast furnaces they owned, regardless of productivity (or lack of it).
Francisco organized the regular employees as a militia to fight the rioters when the riots broke out. Henry Rearden returned to the mills when the riots were in their full fury, and Francisco had to intervene personally to rescue Rearden from two thugs who had clubbed Rearden senseless.
After Rearden recovered, Francisco went to see Rearden in his office. At last Rearden was ready to hear Francisco's great secret, and to follow Francisco wherever he led him. Rearden thanked him profusely and, as a sign of friendship, called Francisco by his first name. Francisco, in turn, called Rearden by his short name, "Hank."
Henry Rearden followed Francisco's direction and set out for the Gulch. Francisco then told all of Rearden's regulars that Rearden had now chosen to "vanish" from the world. All of them decided to do the same thing, with the result that Henry Rearden's mills fell silent for the first time since their founding.
The rescue of John Galt
On November 22, John Galt made his famous three-hour speech. Shortly thereafter, John Galt was arrested. Dagny Taggart gave every indication of having turned him in to the authorities in order to protect her railroad, but Francisco knew her better than that. He now had merely to wait for the final series of disasters to convince Dagny that any further "strikebreaking" was futile.
The final event was the abortive presentation of the "John Galt Plan for Peace and Prosperity." In that episode, John Galt made a rapid movement on a stage so that millions of people, watching on the still-new medium of television, would see plainly that someone had been holding a gun on him. Galt then said, "Get...out of my way." After that, the authorities stopped transmission.
Dagny, as Francisco expected, returned to her office to pack. Francisco met her outside, at the plinth of the statue of Nathaniel Taggart, the original founder of Taggart Transcontinental. Both of them noticed a number of people fleeing New York, with their personal belongings lashed to the roofs of their cars, after hearing that a malfunction at the notorious "Project X" had destroyed the Taggart Bridge across the Mississippi River. Whether that was the final disaster that caused Dagny to join the strike, or whether she had made up her mind before hearing of that, Francisco did not know then, but that did not matter. She turned to Francisco, raised her right hand, and declaimed,
| “ | I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. | ” |
The two could not make their way to Galt's Gulch right away. John Galt was still in the government's hands. Ragnar Danneskjold had found out exactly where, and had planned a commando-style raid to free him. Dagny and Francisco participated in that raid, which was all the easier because the kind of men who were guarding the facility where John Galt was held prisoner did not have the best minds in the world. They rescued Galt easily, took him to Ragnar's waiting plane, and took off for the Gulch. As they passed over New York, the city was plunged into darkness as the power grid failed catastrophically and permanently.
Francisco now devoted his full attention to his one copper mine, and had plans laid to drive or sink more mines, in a society that would have better respect for the rule of law. He even had designed a new type of smelter that would allow him to process his ore much more efficiently, and looked forward to supplying Henry Rearden with large quantities of copper with which to make his new Metal.
Spoilers end here.
Typology
Francisco is one of the three primary anti-villains of Atlas Shrugged; the other two are John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjold. He is not so much a type as a larger-than-life figure that was one of Ayn Rand's examples of a complete man. He is a productive genius who decides to show what would happen if someone were to devote such genius to the deliberate impoverishment of a company that is under threat of nationalization. The purpose is to show that a man of the mind can always defend himself against the worst attacks of a society that rewards failure and punishes success. The price is high: in this case, the destruction of a fortune that has lasted for centuries. But the prize is much more valuable: simple liberty.
Francisco is an "anti-villain," and not a hero, for this reason: all of Francisco's life-altering decisions were made in advance of the primary action of the novel. A literary hero makes his life-altering decisions in the course of the story, which is why Henry Rearden is actually the hero of this novel, even if he finally follows Francisco's lead.
Francisco also indulges in self-parody as cover for his activities: he pretends to be a "Latin lover." But his actual personality is more like that of the original conquistadores, like Hernando Cortez and Francisco Pizzaro, from whom Francisco probably got his first name.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
