Who is John Galt?

Wonderful find, Brede.

Here is the page on the author Garet Garrett at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

The resource page on Garet Garett

The pdf of his novel, The Driver

from von Mises:

Here is a treasure in the history of the pro-capitalist novel. Garet Garrett, author of The People's Pottage, is the story of an upstart Wall Street speculator financier, Henry Galt, a shadowy figure who stays out of the limelight as much as possible until he unleashes a plan that had been years in the marking: he uses his extraordinary entrepreneurial talent to acquire control of a failing railroad.

A reoccurring literary motif through the book has people asking: "Who is Henry Galt?"

"The author, Garet Garrett (1878-1954), had the ability to make economic, financial, and management processes come alive in novel form," writes Edward Younkins. "Not only is The Driver a novel of high finance and Wall Street methods, it also paints a portrait of an efficacious and visionary man who uses reason to focus his enthusiasm on reality in his efforts to attain his goals."

(Edited by Ted Keer on 7/02, 12:50pm)

Post 21

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 1:05pm

There was an article in Liberty magazine about this somewhat recently:
"The Capitalist Fiction of Garet Garrett"

Post 22

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 2:24pm

This thread is going way beyond the evidence.

Garret's Galt is not "shadowy;" he's quite prominent, building a big house on Fifth Avenue and testifying before Congress. "Who is Henry Galt?" is not a recurring motif; it comes up maybe twice. Rand's Galt wasn't a financier anyway. The Younkins quote sounds Randian because it was written by a Randian, years after Atlas Shrugged and even more years after The Driver, not because she was aping Garret.

The evidence that AR was familiar with this novel lies elsewhere. Galt's daughter is a rough sketch of Dominique; her buying a statue in order to destroy it found its way directly into The Fountainhead and the surprise-house incident into Think Twice.

I find the Tesla parallels similarly farfetched. The first two pages of Google results for "Tesla Rand Galt" give us a lot of unsupported assertions with no documentation. The nearest I've seen to factual support is Maurone's #10, and it doesn't convice.

Galt had nothing to do with either of the inventions listed. Death rays were standard stuff in pop sci-fi of the era.
Don't know what the feud with Edison was about. Details, svp.
People's careers have their ups and downs. Need much better evidence for the ditch-digging parallel, in particular, evidence that Rand was aware of this fact about Tesla (more on this below).
Don't know what the Colorado allusion is about. Presumably it means that Tesla lived there. This is just the sort of contingent fact that authors change when they borrow a character. For example, Rand used FLl Wright, Louis Sullivan and William Randolph Hearst in The Fountainhead, but she moved them all to New York. Thus it suggests that she didn't know the details of Tesla's life and wasn't trying to disguise anything.
Real estate is expensive in New York. Most people there live in small apartments because that's all they can afford. The city has long been the center of American literary life, and lots of writers (including Rand herself) have lived there. Consequently, lots of novels are set in the city and lots of fictional characters live in it.
Tesla liked three-way divisions. Rand used one once. She used a 4-way division for The Fountainhead. She was fond of dualisms, too; to quote the Lennox article cited below: "consciousness and existence; the metaphysical and the man-made; reason and force, to name a few." I fail completely to see how this shows the influence of Tesla's numerology.

Yes, this is "certainly more than coincidence;" it's an example of how hard people will work in order to reach a preconceived conclusion.

I don't see Tesla listed in the index of THE JOURNALS OF AYN RAND and don't recall any print mention by Rand of him.

What this misses is that such a finding is evidence against, not for the thesis at hand. For a good discussion of the difference between plausible attribution of influence and coulda-mighta-musta speculation, see Lennox's review of Sciabarra. As long as we have no documentation that Rand knew about Tesla we have no justification for the conclusions at hand.

(By the way, my own find along these lines is Comrade John by Merwin and Webster, authors of Calumet K. It looks to me like Rand's source for the architectural ghosting Roark does for Keating. It's also a very entertaining read.)

Post 23

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 2:28pm

Edison's feud with Tesla had to do with direct current vs. alternating current -and the fact that in terms of distance, alternating won hands down, thus threatening Edison' prominance

for more on Tesla, see -

http://www.tesla.org/
(Edited by robert malcom on 7/02, 2:32pm)

Post 24

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 2:31pm

Thanks for the info. Presumably you mean Tesla was promoting AC over Edison's less successful DC. I still don't see what that has to do with Atlas Shrugged.

Post 25

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 3:12pm

Well Tesla was a Serb, and I don't see what that has to do with Atlas Shrugged either....

Peter, no one is making the strong exact claims you are attacking. For instance, if you read what I said, I said that Joe's claims of coincidence were not as baseless of those of numerologers. I did not say that there was a parallel between Rand's and Tesla's numerology.

All that is being said here (so far) is that interesting things connected to Tesla show up in the character of Galt and in Atlas Shrugged.

Post 26

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 4:07pm

If no one is making these claims any more, then I feel flattered and vindicated. You were in #16, Maurone was in #10 and #12, and so were plenty of others who show up if we take your advice to Google "Rand Tesla Galt".

Post 27

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 4:49pm

Come on, Peter. You said: "Tesla liked three-way divisions. Rand used one once. She used a 4-way division for The Fountainhead. She was fond of dualisms, too; to quote the Lennox article cited below: "consciousness and existence; the metaphysical and the man-made; reason and force, to name a few." I fail completely to see how this shows the influence of Tesla's numerology."

This was in response to me with: "That's not very helpful, Jay. The specifics Joe mentions are verifiable concretes, and very rare ones indeed. ... This resemblance goes a little beyond numerology." I did not mention Tesla's numerology, of which I am unaware, or Rand's numerology, which so far as I know doesn't exist. My sole point was to say that the resemblances Joe posited were more significant than the sort of resemblances numerologists posit. Is that still unclear?

Post 28

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 7:09pm

Peter, lighten up. I know this is in the dissent forum, but it's more in the spirit of banter.

And for the record, I KNOW Galt didn't invent the death ray, I didn't say Galt WAS Tesla, but was implying that Rand might have nicked some of his bio for the story. And Colorado was where Tesla conducted major experiments.

Incidentally, the Journals show Rand's research on a story about the bomb where she discusses people like Oppenheimer and Fenyman, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to wonder about the influence of Tesla's work on Atlas, given the electrical nature of his work and Galt's static electricity motor.

Seriously, if you don't know the allusion, don't go commenting about how far-fetched it is.

And for Christ's sake, I even hinted that the numerology bit was far-fetched.

I mean, c'mon. Nobody's suggesting an Illuminati conspiracy here.

(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/02, 7:15pm)

(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/02, 8:18pm)

(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/02, 11:50pm)

Post 29

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 7:25pm

I'm with Peter. This is the kind of coincidental occurrences collection that becomes confused as 'evidence' - it leaves me with a "WTF, am I reading a tabloid!" feeling in my gut.

Post 30

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 7:27pm

Spoilsport.

And Batboy IS real. Even got a musical.
(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/02, 7:28pm)

Post 31

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 2:19am

Well, since the name was brought up, it is suggested that Oppenheimer was the basis for Stadler...

Post 32

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 6:38am

A good case has been made that Francisco was Jewish.

Post 33

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 9:04am

The numerology remark was in response to Maurone in #10. Long novels subdivided into multi-chapter books are not rare, and the number, in my experience, is usually either three or four.

"In the air," "implying that Rand might have" and "it wouldn't be farfetched" are just the sort of phrases Lennox takes up in his review. I can add nothing to what he says.

We have documentation that Rand knew about Oppenheimer; she met him during her screenwriting days and told Barbara Branden that she used him for Stadler. The deduction
     Rand knew Oppenheimer.
     Rand, so far as is documented, never even heard of Tesla.
    Ergo, Rand used Tesla for Galt.
would not get you far on a logic exam.

Physicists may correct me, but I don't believe Oppenheimer's or Feynman's work had to do with electricity, static or otherwise.

Yes, I've seen Adam Reed's case that Francisco was Jewish and that Rand's life and work teem with coded Jewish references. I found it as unconvincing as the Galt-Tesla connection.

Post 34

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 10:11am

Oh, I thought Ted was joking about Frisco being Jewish!

Post 35

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 12:49pm

The Francisco being Jewish was a new one on me, but long knew of those 'coded' references to various Jewish significances - and indeed, could say they may have some basis, but no more than in structuring the other theses that were her philosophy...
(Edited by robert malcom on 7/03, 12:50pm)

Post 36

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 1:58pm

Add "may have some basis" to the list. If this thread goes on much longer I fully expect to see "it is not impossible."

Post 37

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 2:04pm

Andrew Galambos was a major fan of Tesla and reportedly hired private investigators to try to recover some of Tesla's allegedly lost notebooks.

Galambos related in one of his lectures that Tesla had provided George Westinghouse, as I recall, with the math/engineering solutions for AC transformers as well as the brushless AC motor. Due to the legal problems that Edison was creating for Westinghouse, he was virtually bankrupt when Tesla approached him for his agreed-upon fee, at which point Tesla signed the rights over to him for free, knowing that if he asked for his money it would completely bankrupt Westinghouse and Edison would win.

Perhaps more telling as to Tesla's moral character, at one point during WWII, I believe, he approached the U.S. government with a missile/aircraft defense system which he claimed would forever prevent any missile or enemy aircraft from penetrating the U.S. airspace. He offered to give them the details on the condition that they make the system available worldwide to any country that asked for the technology. The U.S. government turned him down, and he never divulged the design.

One investigator into Tesla relates how he arrived at Tesla's home and seated himself at a heavy metal table which was floating, unsupported, in mid air, presumably locked in place via some electromagnetic system. Rumors and bits of scattered info has it that he was working on things like robots and AI in his last years.

(Edited by Phil Osborn on 7/03, 2:06pm)

Post 38

Friday, July 3, 2009 - 4:16pm

Yes, and when he died, the government people [FBI?] went thru his apartment and took boxes of papers away...

[from wikipedia -]Immediately after Tesla's death became known, the government's Alien Property Custodian office took possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing his work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.[102] One document stated that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]".
(Edited by robert malcom on 7/03, 4:25pm)

Post 39

Saturday, July 4, 2009 - 11:26am