Chapter Summaries and Commentaries

Part Three: Chapter 5—Their Brothers’ Keepers

Taggart Transcontinental doesn’t have copper wire for desperately needed repairs. The copper
shortage reaches crisis status when Francisco d’Anconia, on the hour and day that his
company is to be nationalized, destroys every mine, piece of property, and bank account
belonging to d’Anconia Copper. Nothing remains for the looters to expropriate. Francisco and
the elite members of his staff disappear.

Philip and the Wet Nurse both ask Rearden for a job. He rejects Philip because of his
incompetence. He says that he would hire the Wet Nurse if possible, but the Unification Board
won’t permit him to do so. The Wet Nurse warns Rearden that his Washington superiors are
planning to spring a new restrictive policy on Rearden, although he doesn’t know the details.
The looters are slipping their men—thugs, not steelworkers—into Rearden’s mills.

The collapse of the economy accelerates under the rule of gangsters such as Cuffy Meigs. He
sends thousands of freight cars needed for the Minnesota wheat harvest to a soybean project
in Louisiana, which is run by the mother of a Washington politician. The Minnesota crops rot,
meaning starvation for many in the coming winter.

One night, an emergency calls Dagny to the Taggart Terminal, where she sees John Galt
standing in a group of manual laborers. After she gives the group its orders, she walks into the
tunnels, knowing that he’ll follow. There, alone in the tunnels under the Terminal Building,
Dagny and John Galt make love for the first time. He warns her that he’ll lose his life if she
inadvertently leads the looters to him.

Cuffy Meigs and people like him gain prominence. As the country becomes more fully
socialistic, thugs like Cuffy Meigs, whose only goal is to plunder, take control. When the
government robs the productive, it also attracts criminals to itself. Dagny realizes that it
makes no difference if the railroad’s storehouses are raided to support the needy or to bloat
the gangsters; either way, the producers are expropriated, making the creation of goods and
services impossible. Whether motivated by starvation or exploitation, the welfare workers and
the criminals are united in the act of robbing the productive.

Cuffy Meigs sends the Minnesota freight cars to Louisiana because he gets a kickback from the
politicians funding the soybean project. If Eugene Lawson, the sniveling former banker, were
running the railroad, he would send the cars to Louisiana because the starving people of the
blighted southern areas desperately need soybeans. Either way, the wheat growers of
Minnesota are abandoned, the railroad is transformed into an instrument of bureaucratic
whim, and the citizens are left without grain. When altruism is the dominant moral code, the
producers are robbed. Every parasite can join the feeding frenzy.

This chapter’s title refers to the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Ayn Rand shows what the
religious injunction to be your brother’s keeper looks like in practice. Three instances in this
chapter embody this injunction. The first instance occurs when the seed grain and the future
existence of the Nebraska farmers is seized to feed the starving populace of Sand Creek,
Illinois. In this age of enlightenment, says Eugene Lawson, men realize that they are all their
brothers’ keepers. The second instance occurs when James Taggart, desperate to hold on to
the looters’ policies that grant him power, begs Dagny to somehow find a way to make the
policies work. “Dagny, I’m your brother,” he pleads. Despite his role in Cherryl’s death, the
endless roadblocks he has placed in Dagny’s path, and the literal impossibility of making the
 Chapter Summaries and Commentaries
Part Three: Chapter 5—Their Brothers’ Keepers

policies work, he appeals to sibling obligation, hoping to force Dagny into action. The third
instance occurs when Philip Rearden, an irresponsible moocher concerned that his gravy train
will end if Rearden retires and vanishes, pleads for a job that he can’t successfully perform.
His brazen request is possible only because he feels justified in arguing that an obligation to
one’s brother should supersede all other considerations. In all cases, Ayn Rand shows that the
unproductive try to argue that an individual is obligated to help either his literal brother or his
figurative brothers—humanity. She insists that the motive behind this injunction is to enslave
the productive to the moochers, who feel that they have biblical license to take what they
want.