Nathaniel Taggart

Nathaniel Taggart is the founder of Taggart Transcontinental in Atlas Shrugged: a nineteenth-century adventurer who built the first railroad across the continent without a dollar of government money, and whose statue stands in the Taggart Terminal concourse. He is dead before the novel opens and is nonetheless one of its most important figures, because he is the standard against which his descendants are measured.

The builder

Nat Taggart began with nothing and took no subsidies, no land grants and no loans he could not repay on his own terms. He was hated in his own time and the novel is direct about why: he never asked anyone's permission, never appealed to the public good, and never pretended his railroad was anything other than his own enterprise built for his own profit.

The stories told about him are legends the novel presents as legends. That he was tried for the murder of a state legislator who tried to have his charter revoked, and that the charge could not be proved. That he threw a government official down three flights of stairs. That he once, needing money to finish a line, put up his wife as security against a loan — and that she agreed to it. Rand's use of the material is deliberate: the reputation is what a culture that has accepted altruism produces about a man who has not. See Independence and Pride.

Mrs. Nathaniel Taggart, the wife of that story, is otherwise almost absent from the novel. Dagny Taggart is named after her.

His function in the novel

Dagny goes to the statue. It is the one place in the terminal she visits when she needs something, and what she gets from it is not comfort but a reference point: evidence that the thing she is trying to do has been done, by someone who did not apologise for it.

The novel's structural use of him is the contrast with James Taggart. Nat built the railroad; Jim inherited it and keeps it by lobbying. The distance between them is the distance between wealth produced and wealth obtained by pull, drawn inside one family so that no political argument is needed to make the point. See Statism, Antitrust and Exploitation.

He also supplies the novel's answer to a standing objection about capitalism's history. The usual account is that the transcontinental railroads were creatures of federal land grants and could not have existed otherwise. Rand's counter-example is a man who did it without them and was resented for it, and the historical case she pointed to for that shape of achievement is James J. Hill's Great Northern, built without land grants while the subsidised lines went bankrupt.

Common misunderstandings

That the legends are presented as fact. The novel frames them as things people say, and is careful to note that the murder charge was never proved. The point is the reputation, not the biography.
That putting up his wife as security is endorsed as a transaction in a woman. The story turns on her agreeing to it, and the novel treats it as her decision. Readers find it the most jarring thing about him, and it is worth noting that Rand chose to include it in a portrait she plainly intends as admiring.
That he is a robber baron in Rand's sense. Rand distinguished sharply between businessmen who made money by production and those who made it by political favour, and Nat Taggart is the pure case of the first. See Capitalism and Trader Principle.
That he is background colour. He is the novel's only pre-decline producer, and the only evidence inside the book that the world Dagny is trying to preserve ever actually existed.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Hill, James J. — the Great Northern Railway, built without federal land grants, is the historical case Rand cited for this pattern of achievement.

The builder

His function in the novel

Common misunderstandings

See also

Discussion

References