“Midas Mulligan was a vicious bastard with a dollar sign stamped on his heart,” said Lee Hunsacker, in the fumes of the acrid stew. “My whole future depended upon a miserable half-million dollars, which was just small change to him, but when I applied for a loan, he turned me down flat—for no better reason than that I had no collateral to offer.
How could I have accumulated any collateral, when nobody had ever given me a chance at anything big? Why did he lend money to others, but not to me? It was plain discrimination. He didn’t even care about my feelings—he said that my past record of failures disqualified me for ownership of a vegetable pushcart, let alone a motor factory. What failures? I couldn’t help it if a lot of ignorant grocers refused to co-operate with me about the paper containers. By what right did he pass judgment on my ability? Why did my plans for my own future have to depend upon the arbitrary opinion of a selfish monopolist? I wasn’t going to stand for that. I wasn’t going to take it lying down. I brought suit against him.”
“You did what?”
“Oh yes,” he said proudly, “I brought suit. I’m sure it would seem strange in some of your hidebound Eastern states, but the state of Illinois had a very humane, very progressive law under which I could sue him. I must say it was the first case of its kind, but I had a very smart, liberal lawyer who saw a way for us to do it. It was an economic emergency law which said that people were forbidden to discriminate for any reason whatever against any person in any matter involving his livelihood. It was used to protect day laborers and such, but it applied to me and my partners as well, didn’t it? So we went to court, and we testified about the bad breaks we’d all had in the past, and I quoted Mulligan saying that I couldn’t even own a vegetable pushcart, and we proved that all the members of the Amalgamated Service corporation had no prestige, no credit, no way to make a living—and, therefore, the purchase of the motor factory was our only chance of livelihood—and, therefore, Midas Mulligan had no right to discriminate against us—and, therefore, we were entitled to demand a loan from him under the law. Oh, we had a perfect case all right, but the man who presided at the trial was Judge Narragansett, one of those old-fashioned monks of the bench who thinks like a mathematician and never feels the human side of anything. He just sat there all through the trial like a marble statue—like one of those blindfolded marble statues. At the end, he instructed the jury to bring in a verdict in favor of Midas Mulligan—and he said some very harsh things about me and my partners. But we appealed to a higher court—and the higher court reversed the verdict and ordered Mulligan to give us the loan on our terms. He had three months in which to comply, but before the three months were up, something happened that nobody can figure out and he vanished into thin air, he and his bank. There wasn’t an extra penny left of that bank, to collect our lawful claim. We wasted a lot of money on detectives, trying to find him—as who didn’t?—but we gave it up.”
No—thought Dagny—no, apart from the sickening feeling it gave her, this case was not much worse than any of the other things that Midas Mulligan had borne for years. He had taken many losses under laws of a similar justice, under rules and edicts that had cost him much larger sums of money; he had borne them and fought and worked the harder; it was not likely that this case had broken him.
“What happened to Judge Narragansett?” she asked involuntarily, and wondered what subconscious connection had made her ask it. She knew little about Judge Narragansett, but she had heard and remembered his name, because it was a name that belonged so exclusively to the North American continent. Now she realized suddenly that she had heard nothing about him for years.
“Oh, he retired,” said Lee Hunsacker.
“He did?” The question was almost a gasp.
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Oh, about six months later.”
“What did he do after he retired?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody’s heard from him since.”
He wondered why she looked frightened. Part of the fear she felt, was that she could not name its reason, either. “Please tell me about the motor factory,” she said with effort.
“Well, Eugene Lawson of the Community National Bank in Madison finally gave us a loan to buy the factory—but he was just a messy cheapskate, he didn’t have enough money to see us through, he couldn’t help us when we went bankrupt. It was not our fault. We had everything against us from the start. How could we run a factory when we had no railroad? Weren’t we entitled to a railroad? I tried to get them to reopen their branch line, but those damn people at Taggart Trans—”
He stopped. “Say, are you by any chance one of those Taggarts?”
“I am the Operating Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental.”
For a moment, he stared at her in blank stupor; she saw the struggle of fear, obsequiousness and hatred in his filmy eyes. The result was a sudden snarclass="underline" “I don’t need any of you big shots! Don’t think I’m going to be afraid of you. Don’t expect me to beg for a job. I’m not asking favors of anybody. I bet you’re not used to hear people talk to you this way, are you?”
“Mr. Hunsacker, I will appreciate it very much if you will give me the information I need about the factory.”
“You’re a little late getting interested. What’s the matter? Your conscience bothering you? You people let Jed Starnes grow filthy rich on that factory, but you wouldn’t give us a break. It was the same factory.
We did everything he did. We started right in manufacturing the particular type of motor that had been his biggest money-maker for years. And then some newcomer nobody ever heard of opened a two bit factory down in Colorado, by the name of Nielsen Motors, and put out a new motor of the same class as the Starnes model, at half the price! We couldn’t help that, could we? It was all right for Jed Starnes, no destructive competitor happened to come up in his time, but what were we to do? How could we fight this Nielsen, when nobody had given us a motor to compete with his?”
“Did you take over the Starnes research laboratory?”
“Yes, yes, it was there. Everything was there.”
“His staff, too?”
“Oh, some of them. A lot of them had gone while the factory was closed.”
“His research staff?”
“They were gone.”
“Did you hire any research men of your own?”
“Yes, yes, some—but let me tell you, I didn’t have much money to spend on such things as laboratories, when I never had enough funds to give me a breathing spell. I couldn’t even pay the bills I owed for the absolutely essential modernizing and redecorating which I’d had to do—that factory was disgracefully old-fashioned from the standpoint of human efficiency. The executive offices had bare plaster walls and a dinky little washroom. Any modern psychologist will tell you that nobody could do his best in such depressing surroundings. I had to have a brighter color scheme in my office, and a decent modern bathroom with a stall shower. Furthermore, I spent a lot of money on a new cafeteria and a playroom and rest room for the workers. We had to have morale, didn’t we? Any enlightened person knows that man is made by the material factors of his background, and that a man’s mind is shaped by his tools of production. But people wouldn’t wait for the laws of economic determinism to operate upon us. We never had a motor factory before. We had to let the tools condition our minds, didn’t we? But nobody gave us time.”
“Can you tell me about the work of your research staff?”
“Oh, I had a group of very promising young men, all of them guaranteed by diplomas from the best universities. But it didn’t do me any good. I don’t know what they were doing. I think they were just sitting around, eating up their salaries.”
“Who was in charge of your laboratory?”
“Hell, how can I remember that now?”
“Do you remember any of the names of your research staff?”