Galt's Gulch
Galt's Gulch, also known as Mulligan's Valley, in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, was the secluded community founded by Midas Mulligan and composed entirely of participants in the great strike of the men of the mind called by John Galt.
Contents
Beginnings
The strike of the men of the mind began, of course, with John Galt. After completing his studies in physics and philosophy at the Patrick Henry University, Galt went to work as a design engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, founded by the late Gerald "Jed" Starnes. There he completed the prototype of a motor that could draw static electricity from the atmosphere and convert it to useful motion. But on the day that he built his prototype, Jed Starnes died. His children announced a new business model, by which all the workers would work according to their ability but be paid according to their needs.
John Galt would not accept this. After Gerald Starnes, Jr. announced the inauguration of the plan, John Galt said simply that he would stop the motor of the world.
He would do this by calling all the men of the mind to go on strike against a code of "unearned rewards and unrewarded virtue," as he would later describe it to a mass audience. His plan was simple: anyone having enough savings to live on, would retire. The rest would take the lowest jobs that they could find and earn only enough to live on. Never at any time did John Galt conceive of anything as collectivistic as a "strike fund."
His first two recruits were Francisco d'Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold. Francisco set out to destroy the old family copper mining company that he had inherited, so that the world would derive no benefit from either his mind or the minds of his ancestors. Ragnar set about recruiting a crew (or perhaps Francisco recruited it for him) and eventually acquired a warship and became a privateer.
John Galt, in the meantime, continued his recruiting efforts. His next recruit was Hugh Akston, his old friend, professor, and chairman of the department of philosophy at PHU. (The head of the physics department, Dr. Robert Stadler, had earlier betrayed John Galt's trust by endorsing the establishment of the State Science Institute, so Galt did not even attempt to recruit him.) Galt next sought to recruit William Hastings, his former immediate superior at the Twentieth Century Motor Company; that effort took longer than a year.
Next, John Galt attended a concert given by a piano composer named Richard Halley. Halley had premiered his Fourth Concerto for piano and orchestra, but Galt could tell that Halley was already becoming disillusioned with his audiences even before he began to perform. Galt met him back-stage and shared with him his philosophical insights, and Halley gladly joined his movement.
Midas Mulligan
The next and perhaps most crucial recruit was Michael Mulligan of Chicago, known as "Midas" to his friends and associates. He had even gone so far as to change his name legally to "Midas" when he began to develop a reputation in the popular press as a money miser. (He was not a miser at all; he simply believed that sound banking principles did not include pretending to lend money when one might as well be giving it away.) In or about the fifth year of the strike, the Twentieth Century Motor Company went under, as Galt knew it would. A feckless man named Lee Hunsacker sought to buy the factory, thinking, as he would say later to Dagny Taggart, that at last this was his "one chance at something big." He applied to Mulligan for a business loan, and Mulligan refused, citing his prior abysmal business record.
The resentful Hunsacker sued Mulligan and asked for a court order compelling Mulligan to grant the loan. The initial trial judge, Judge Narragansett, told the jury in his charge to them that he could find no precedent for granting the relief for which Hunsacker had prayed, and believed the law under which Hunsacker had sued to be unconstitutional. The jury, perhaps in a case of jury nullification, found for Mulligan. Hunsacker appealed. In a result that perhaps even John Galt found incredible, the appellate court reversed Judge Narragansett's dismissal and remanded the case for further consideration. A second jury found for Hunsacker, who now had a judgment against Mulligan.
John Galt went straight to Mulligan and told him that this sort of travesty of justice would continue so long as men like Mulligan continued to put up with it. Mulligan would later say that he took all of five minutes to agree to join John Galt's strike. Like Francisco d'Anconia, Mulligan determined to liquidate his enterprise as he left. Unlike Francisco, the liquidation took all of twenty-four hours. He simply called in all his loans and then paid off his deposits and canceled their accounts. With that done, he vanished. A team of bank examiners later found that the books of the Mulligan Bank balanced exactly. The Mulligan Bank was wiped out, but wiped out in a manner by which not a single depositor had lost any money.
While this was happening, John Galt visited Judge Narragansett in his chambers. Judge Narragansett stepped down from the bench and vanished on or about the same day that Midas Mulligan completed his liquidation.
The founding of the Gulch
Midas Mulligan did not leave his bank penniless. He converted all his holdings into gold (still lawful for an individual to hold in those days) and bought a vast tract of land in a secluded valley in the Rocky Mountains. The floor of this valley was at an elevation of 8000 feet above sea level and was probably in a cup-like formation in either Colorado or Wyoming; the novel never makes clear where. He cut off all means of access to the valley except for one road, which he camouflaged. Then he built a small house and a large stockpile of seed, livestock, and other provisions. As he later explained, he wanted "never again to look in the face of a looter."
Judge Narragansett then came to see Mulligan in his new home, and asked for a leasehold so that he could build a house of his own. Mulligan granted the lease. Shortly thereafter, Richard Halley came to Mulligan to ask for the same thing. (William Hastings lived out his life on the "outside" and later died.)
The event that probably transformed the valley from a simple place of refuge for a tiny subset of the strikers to a thriving community was probably John Galt's decision to build another electrostatic motor in the valley. Galt built a very large motor and used it to drive a bank of dynamos to generate electricity. John Galt took great pains to keep his invention secret: even though he never expected that anyone would ever set foot in the valley who was not a part of his strike (an expectation that would prove moot later on), he kept his invention, and the power installation, locked down. He erected a large blockhouse of granite and installed a special sound lock in the front door (and presumably in all the other doors). This door would open only when someone repeated, slowly and with an inflection that would indicate understanding and wholehearted belief, the Oath of the Strike that John Galt had written. He carved this oath on the transom over the front door. It read thus:
| “ | 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. | ” |
Now the valley had a basis for trade: John Galt had become a provider of electric power, and Midas Mulligan was in essence a feudal landlord—and furthermore, Mulligan's land holding was remarkably resource-rich. Francisco d'Anconia determined this by assaying the rocks in the mountains that ringed the valley. Soon, Francisco had begun driving a mine into the mountain. What Francisco could do, perhaps others could do—as soon as John Galt could recruit them.
Any economy needs a bank, and Midas Mulligan could provide one. He re-established the Mulligan Bank as a bank that dealt exclusively in gold. Ragnar Danneskjold then announced his plan to bring the proceeds from the sale of seized government "relief cargoes" to the valley and distribute these in various accounts that he opened in the Mulligan Bank, in the names of the existing strikers and also in several names in a long list of prospects that John Galt and Francisco d'Anconia drew up and maintained. Ragnar proposed to refund all income taxes collected from these people since John Galt's initial defiant announcement to Gerald Starnes, Jr. If the beginning of the strike was in the year 1917, as seems likely, then the income tax would have existed for four years.
As a result of these activities, the valley not only had resources available for anyone having the knowledge to exploit them, but also capital available to lend to support this activity.
The Colorado debacle
As Dagny Taggart began her efforts to renovate the Rio Norte Line of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad (and eventually take over the line temporarily as the John Galt Line), John Galt recruited several more men into his strike. Some of these were businessmen and inventors of the sort that could exploit the resources of the valley and thus enable the valley to support more of the strikers with full-time gainful employment. Among these was Dwight Sanders, who had built a company that produced the first monoplanes.
Then came the disastrous decision by the United States government to promulgate a series of new laws and "directives" that effectively destroyed the boom that had begun in Colorado after the John Galt Line had opened. John Galt was on the scene, of course, and recruited several Colorado businessmen to join his strike, and to come to the valley where they could build new lives for themselves right away. The most spectacular defection was that of Ellis Wyatt, who had devised a method for extracting oil from shale. Wyatt set fire to his entire shale field and left a sign on his property explaining his actions:
| “ | I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours. | ” |
With abundant start-up capital and natural resources ready for the taking, the community now known as Galt's Gulch began to thrive. More and more strikers built homes in the valley and went to work for the most recent defectors. In the last years of the strike, the valley gained an oil field, a foundry, an airstrip, and an automobile factory, all its own.
Naming
John Galt did not ask anyone to name Galt's Gulch after him. The strikers did so probably for two reasons:
- John Galt's new electrostatic motor was the source of the valley's electrical power, and a more abundant source than any of them could have imagined.
- John Galt himself, as the prime mover of the great strike, was regarded as the man who made the Gulch possible.
But John Galt preferred to call the place Mulligan's Valley, after Midas Mulligan, who had bought the land and still owned it and leased it to all the others who lived and worked there.
Laws and customs
Galt's Gulch did not have many ordinances as such. The Gulch was in essence a feudal society. Midas Mulligan was the landlord (hence John Galt's custom of calling the place Mulligan's Valley), and all rents flowed to him. The community had no "village plan commission" or "zoning board." As the landowner, Midas made his own decisions about land-use planning and seems to have tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. Aside from such questions, under Judge Narragansett's guidance, the residents of the Gulch probably conducted their affairs according to the principles of English Common Law.
John Galt described the Gulch to Dagny Taggart as a place of rest. The Gulch had no police force or sheriff, because it had no crime. Judge Narragansett's judicial activities were probably limited to the occasional Request for Judicial Intervention to ratify arbitration agreements. The judge might also have reopened his law practice to assist his neighbors with the drawing-up of contracts.
However, the Gulch had several unwritten customs which arose, as Galt also explained, as a reaction to the things that the residents sought to rest from. No one ever remained in the Gulch at another person's expense, nor asked nor granted any unremunerated favors. Every resident was expected to pay his rent to Midas Mulligan, or else pay room and board to the leaseholder of any house in which he stayed. Similarly, no one ever "borrowed" something belonging to another; instead one rented it and was expected to negotiate a rent with the owner. (And if one discovered that he was renting the same article often enough to make it a significant expense, then he might ask Midas Mulligan for a loan, if necessary, and buy the article.)
For example, when John Galt wished to take Dagny Taggart on a driving tour of the valley, he needed to secure a car, because he did not own one. (He didn't need to own a car in a place where he stayed only one month of the year.) So he asked Midas Mulligan for the use of his car. But he did not "borrow" that car in the usual sense; he rented it and actually paid a daily rental on it. Dagny thought that behavior strange, but Galt explained it as an example of "resting" from the constant stress of living in a society in which one's fellow citizens constantly demanded certain things of one and expressed no willingness to pay for those things.
Immigration
Immigration to the Gulch was predicated on three criteria:
- The immigrant must be a striker,
- The immigrant must be prepared to find gainful employment in the valley, and
- The immigrant must under no circumstances reveal the valley's location or even its existence to the outside.
The only person, other than a permanent immigrant, to visit the valley was Dagny Taggart. Though she declined to stay, she agreed to keep the existence and location secret. Henry Rearden guessed the secret of the existence, not of the valley per se but of a place where the talented men who had quit and vanished had repaired to. But he would not learn the location of the valley until Francisco d'Anconia brought him to the valley in October of (presumably) 1929.
Defense
Galt's Gulch had no defense other than its seclusion. So that the Gulch would remain secluded, John Galt devised a system of directed-energy beams, which he called "refractor rays," that would heat the air seven hundred feet off the ground and create a one-way mirror in the air. From above, any pilot looking down into the valley would see nothing but a desolate-looking crater ringed by nearly shear cliffs.
The only pilot ever to penetrate the screen uninvited was Dagny Taggart. She came in hot pursuit of Galt after one of his recruitment flights, and descended to 8700 feet altitude, lower than Galt or any of the other strikers thought that anyone would be brave (or foolhardy) enough to descend. The rays blinded her temporarily and shorted out her aircraft's engine. She came down in a barely controlled crash landing and was injured. Happily, her injuries were easily treatable, and by then Galt's Gulch had a resident physician. (He had joined the strike when the federal government had promulgated the socialization of medicine three years before Dagny's surprise visit.)
Henry Rearden came close to penetrating the screen and suffering his own crash landing two weeks later, when he searched for Dagny from the air. At the last minute he pulled up and left the valley without knowing how close he had come to making an electrifying discovery—or getting himself killed.
Technically, the Gulch had a one-ship navy, that being Ragnar Danneskjold's privateering vessel. But Danneskjold's activities were limited to seizing government "relief" shipping, destroying the ships of the D'Anconia Copper Company at Francisco d'Anconia's request, and a one-time shore raid on a steel mill on the coast of Maine, after Orren Boyle's Associated Steel Company attempted to make Rearden Metal at that site. For much of the history of the Gulch, these were the only offensive military actions that any member of the Galt's Gulch society took.
Retransformation
In September of the last year of the strike, Francisco d'Anconia completed his destruction of his old family firm, on the very day that the People's State of Argentina attempted to nationalize it. But he did not come to the valley permanently. Instead he applied for a job at Rearden Steel as a furnace foreman. Henry Rearden was his personal recruitment project, and had been ever since Rearden had announced his invention of the Metal that bore his name.
One month later, Henry Rearden joined the strike. With him came virtually every one of his regular employees, including a second physician for Galt's Gulch, to wit, Henry Rearden's infirmary director.
If the strike had needed to continue, this would still have been a transforming event. By all estimates made before his arrival, Henry Rearden had the potential to triple everyone's production. But the sudden defection of Rearden and his entire workforce was a devastating blow to the "outside" economy. From that event to the final collapse of American society was now only a matter of time.
John Galt accelerated this decline with his three-hour speech. At the end of it, he called upon any man of the mind left on the outside to
| “ | Stop supporting your own destroyers! | ” |
With that inspiration, thousands of people seceded from the organized society and set up miniature Galt's Gulches all over the country. These were armed camps of hunters and gatherers, with about as much coordination as the TEA Party movement of 2009 (which is to say, next to none, despite various accusations to the contrary).
Then John Galt was arrested, and the government attempted to prevail upon him to take the post of "Economic Dictator" of America, which of course he refused. Ragnar Danneskjold now organized the last and greatest offensive military action by the Galt's Gulch community: the rescue of John Galt. In this operation, Danneskjold had the cooperation, and indeed active participation, of half the male population of the Gulch, in addition to his own ship's crew.
The rescue was successful, and John Galt returned to the Gulch on the day that the lights went out for the last time along the Eastern Seaboard.
Ragnar Danneskjold brought his ship permanently into dock, having concluded that he would have no more "relief cargoes" to seize, because the United States government was no longer sufficiently organized to send any. He then announced his intention to retrofit that vessel as a passenger ship.
In the next springtime, John Galt made the final decision. The outside society was now collapsed, and as John Galt stated the case, the road was now clear. The strike was now settled—by default.
The novel does not make clear the future history of Galt's Gulch. Doubtless Midas Mulligan decided to keep the Mulligan Bank's central offices in the Gulch, and the other strikers decided to maintain a presence there at least as long as it had resources to exploit. That, furthermore, Galt and Mulligan would decide to keep the location of the Gulch secret is only logical to suppose; the experiences of the strike would convince them that they would need a place to retreat to, should their newfound fortune reverse itself yet again. Contrary to the ridiculous accusation by Whittaker Chambers, John Galt never intended to be a dictator, "technocratic" or otherwise. His goal had been liberation, not conquest. And because there can be no such thing as conditional liberty, he could never be sure that future generations would not decide to revert to the same failed principles that had destroyed their world once before. (William Bradford might have been shocked to learn that today the people of the society that inherited his own legacy are now repeating exactly the sort of experiment that he himself tried, and then discarded, while serving as governor of the Plymouth Colony, namely to run it as a collective farm.)
Spoilers end here.
Literary parallels
The notion of a technological genius leading a retreat from the larger society into which he was born is not limited to Ayn Rand, nor to Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand herself explored the idea earlier, in Anthem, whose hero reinvents the electric light, discovers that his society will not and indeed cannot appreciate it, and escapes to an abandoned house that he decides that he can fortify.
Nearly a century earlier, Jules Verne explored the concept in many of his projects. The most celebrated of Jules Verne's novels that explore this concept are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Master of the World, and Robur the Conqueror. However, in each of these cases, the genius defector is clearly a villain, pursuing an insane and vindictive policy that might be described as vigilantism in the context of international law—specifically, an attempt to impose a peace on the world by using an impervious vessel, either a submarine or an airship, to destroy the abilities of various nation-states to make war. (At least one motion picture project recast Jules Verne's most famous villain, Captain Nemo, as an anti-villain—a sympathetic character who still pursues his goals in a single-minded manner. In this version (Captain Nemo and the Underwater City), Captain Nemo's mission is simply a retreat from the world to an impregnable and indeed undetectable position, and does not include any offensive action.)
Attempts at imitation
Since the publication of Atlas Shrugged, several students of Objectivism entertained notions, from time to time, of imitating Galt's Gulch. Nathaniel Branden reported that a number of them once proposed to "buy or lease an island, establish a free-enterprise society on it, and become so prosperous as to spread the philosophy of capitalism by example." (emphasis in the original.)
No one is currently proposing to establish anything quite like Galt's Gulch today. But certain elements of the militia movement have proposed to imitate the spontaneous secessions from society that take place immediately after John Galt makes his three-hour speech.
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