The Cinder Buggy - part 24 - Chapter XLIII - Damascene; resolution of the triangle; 122 years.

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapter XLIII is the final chapter of the novel and ties up the remaining loose ends of the story.   The plot is resolved in somewhat the same way as The Driver. The triangle is resolved in a much less philosophical way than the Randian triangles. Garrett's resolution helps one appreciate the Randian novels that incorporate the personal storylines more thoroughly into the philosophical conflicts. 

Page 357 indicates that the story ends in 1901.  The story thus spans 122 years (not including Garrett's description of modern New Damascus in Chapter I). 

The final word in the book is the term "Damascene," which means "to decorate metal with wavy patches of inlay or etching." American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1976.  The "Damascene" reference in the novel was the name of a boat, but it is symbolic of the story.  The personal story of the characters is etched upon the story of iron and steel as sort of a decoration.  My own opinion is that the characters' stories are much more than decoration, but are not so integrated as the characters' stories in the Randian novels. 

In the next segment I will summarize Cinder Buggy's legacy and its proper place in American history.

The Cinder Buggy - part 23 - Chapters XLI and XLII - steel wealth and stock bubbles

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

      After reading Chapter XLI, I have a better feel of the entire scope of Cinder Buggy.  While the Enoch-Aaron conflict played a major role in the story, Cinder Buggy was about much more. The birth and growth of the American steel industry is one of the most consequential events in the history of mankind.  That fact is lost on most people today for a variety of reasons:

• The near destruction of the steel industry in the past 40 + years and the American establishment's rationalization thereof.
• The anti-capitalist, anti-industrialist orthodoxy that dominates establishment education, entertainment and information media.
• Modern western life is defined by the debased currency. government dependency, bread-and-circuses culture that prevents the victims (all of us) from recognizing long term trends and historic events - even as those events change our lives forever.

      Cinder Buggy fictionalizes steel's birth and growth and inserts Enoch and Aaron (and their families) into that story. But the reader never loses focus on the historic larger context in which those characters exist. By reading the story, one gains a greater appreciation of steel's place in history.  Garrett, especially in Chapter XLI, shows the breadth and scope of this story.  Chapter XLI also continues plotlines that first appeared in Chapter XXXVI.   While Garrett based much of the steel story on the Enoch-Aaron conflict, he went beyond that conflict to show the steel industry reaching the pinnacle of success. 

      Garrett, writing metaphorically, attributes the events of Chapter XLI to a "sign" in the "financial heavens" [p. 336] and "that sign which stood higher and higher in the money firmament." [p. 339].  This reference is as close as Cinder Buggy comes to expressing a religious view (although he writes more explicitly on religious matters in the "Apologue" to American Story.  Garrett appears - over three decades - to have sharpened his focus on God and America's relationship to God.  The New Deal and its transformation of America is reflected in Garrett's sharpened focus between Cinder Buggy (1923) and American Story more than three decades later.  

      Chapter XLII tells the reader about wealthy people with more money than they know how to spend. They cannot decide how to spend their money or enjoy their wealth. They bounce from one pointless luxury to another.  Garrett had not yet encountered the tax free foundation that uses the immense wealth of an industrialist to fight capitalism long after its industrialist-benefactor has died. 




This is another example of the story being less focused because Garrett wrote in pre-New Deal times.  Had Garrett written Cinder Buggy post-New Deal, he would have depicted the newly created wealth of Chapter XLII in a far different light. 

       In discussing the public's rush to purchase the new steel stock shares, Garrett refers to "panics inverted . . . [that] have a large displacement in the lierature of popular delusions." [p. 345].  Garrett writes as if he had lived through the 1990's stock market bubble.  Fifteen years ago, the world's only copies of Cinder Buggy sat ingored in library archive rooms while investors (unaware of history) poured their retirement money into a large bubble. 

      That a novelist would  write of panic buying in 1923 - just as the bubble that would ultimately burst in 1929 was beginning - should be sufficient reason to study his books.  That the same novelist would be shelved for decades while generations of new Americans would pursue new inverted panics is worse than a tragedy. 

Click here for Part 24. 

The Cinder Buggy - part 22 - Chapters XXXIX and XL - The Homestead Strike; Geisinger Medical Center; Danville, PA

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapter XXXIX contains much to think about while providing mostly a narrative of continuing action. 

The story revolves around a violent labor confrontation that is loosely based on the Homestead Strike of June 1892.  There were a number of similarities with (1) the events of the confrontation, (2) the physical setting and (3) the people involved (including an unnamed thinly veiled version of H.C. Frick). I will avoid writing more about the story to avoid plot spoilers.

The use of the Homestead type story is significant for several reasons.

• The story involves the labor movement for the first time in Cinder Buggy.
• While not identifying the year, the use of an event from 1892 helps show the passage of time.  About two decades have elapsed since the main characters began operating their first factory in Pittsburgh.
• Garrett is telling his own story, while tying that story as much as possible to specific historic events. Garrett wants his story to be thought of in the context of the real history. While he writes of fictional characters, he uses those characters to tell the story of American industry.

Chapter XXXIX presents a challenge for followers of Garrett, as Garrett uses language that today would be considered very un-PC and derogatory toward eastern Europeans.   Establishment followers would undoubtedly use these passages to denigrate the entire capitalist message, even though Garrett wrote very sympathetically of the workers in this particular dispute.  Notwithstanding this potential controversy, Garrett's comments were not uncommon in that era.  The prevailing attitudes toward eastern Europeans at that time are exemplified in other sources, including a geography book entitled Carpenter's New Geographical Reader, American Book Company (New York 1928).

Chapter XL provides the long aftermath of the events of Chapter XXXIX. (I will be brief to avoid plot spoilers).  Garrett further indicates the passage of time by explaining how the characters, were it not for their relationship, "would have missed the Autumn and gone directly from Midsummer to the Winter of their lives."  (p. 334).

One of the characters returns to New Damascus and funds the creation of  "the finest hospital in the state."  (p. 335). This passage is a thinly veiled reference to Geisinger Medical Center. The previous owner of my book copy (the nearly anonymous tour guide from Part IV) noted in pencil in the margin (@ 1927) that this passage was a reference to "Geisinger Memorial Hospital" - as it was then known.  As I wrote in Part IV:

Danville [New Damascus] is known today primarily for Geisinger Medical Center, which opened in 1915 from the proceeds of the iron business of George Geisinger. Geisinger is today one of the premier health systems in all of Pennsylvania.

These circumstances form a rough parallel with the events of Chapter XL, but there is no known historical connection with the Homestead strike or its aftermath.  This reference helps establish the timing of Chapter XL's end as roughly the early 20th century. 

The creation and continued prominence of Geisinger allows the American iron age and the industrial revolution to live on despite the serious decline of all American industry.  Early American industry made Geisinger (and many other modern institutions) possible. The long forgotten real-life counterparts of the Gibs and the Breakspeares, through Geisinger, continue to influence individuals across Pennsylvania who have no knowledge or appreciation of how their medical treatment was made possible.  One drives by the blue historical marker on the highway where an iron mill once stood, but fails to realize that the words on this marker describe long forgotten events that, even today, make our lives possible.   Those of us who bother to read the marker might scoff at iron "T-rails" while taking medicine for granted.  While few of us place actual trust in government plans to nationalize health care, we fail to appreciate how much we owe to America's early industrialists for the health care that we will soon lose.

- - - - - 1915 - Dedication ceremony for Geisinger Memorial Hospital

- - - - - Danville iron rail marker [click to enlarge]

- - - - - Geisinger today

Garrett finishes Chapter XL with a flexible time reference -  "And so the Autumn stole upon them"  (p. 335). Garrett means, of course, the advancing age of the characters - not the changing seasons of the year. 

Click here for Part 23.

The Cinder Buggy - part 21 - Chapters XXXVI, XXXVII and XXXVIII; F. A. Hayek; W.H. Hutt; Capitalism and the Historians

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

      I had written in part 20 that the end of Chapter XXXV seemed to deviate from the plot with apparently unrelated matter that leads the story in a new direction with new characters.  From reading Chapter XXXVI, it appears that these concerns were unfounded, as Chapter XXXV appears to have set the stage for Chapter XXXVI, which takes the original story to a new level. 

      Between Chapters XXXV and XXXVI, Garrett bridges the gap between (1) compulsive gamblers that cannot stop betting on horses and (2) owners of large companies, where the company's incredible value does not truly enrich the owner because the company is too large to be sold.  Both types of people are trapped:

. . . and there seemed no way either to quit or get out.  If you had all the wealth in the world you could not sell it.  There would be no one to buy it.  In principle that was their problem.  If they could sell out they would be millionaires.  But where was there anybody with money enough to buy them out?

[p. 301].  Garrett's (and John's) solution was intended to take the story of steel in America to new heights.  A modern reader would lament that steel companies of the past 40 years have achieved the opposite of what John was attempting.    However it would turn out for John, it was obvious that the characters had come a long way from the original iron furnaces of New Damascus. 

      At this point Garrett also introduces the concept of the Wall Street speculator.  Speculators and stock/commodity price manipulators played a major role in the plots of both Satan's Bushel and The Driver.  Despite the complexity involved in speculation, Garrett was very comfortable with this subject and the type of events depicted in Chapter XXXVI .  Speculators have served as both the heroes and neutral characters in Garrett's works.  They often, as here, play the role of advancing the action toward a conclusion more quickly. 

      Chapter XXXVII integrates the events of Chapter XXXVI into the old plot involving the old characters .  It becomes apparent at this point that Garrett, instead of taking the plot in a new direction, has continued the plot in a more complicated fashion with a new element. Chapter XXXVII gives the reader the feeling of experiencing the "calm before the storm," as the book proceeds to its final few chapters with good things happening to the major characters.

      Chapter XXXVIII is a continuation of Chapter XXXVII, only on a broader scale.  The financial prospects for the major characters look better than ever, as the steel industry continues to grow.  Garrett tries to place steel in perspective with a statement that could not be fully comprehended until our own time:

Nobody knew how big it should be nor could tell by looking at it what stage it was in.  Not until afterward.

[p. 322] [emphasis added].  This quote might fall into the category of unintended irony.  I am not sure if Garrett has an "afterward" planned for some point in the rest of the book.  I know that since the mid-1970's, the United States has been living in the "afterward" of the steel industry.  I lament that Garrett is not around to place the 1970's and beyond into the proper context. 

      Garrett's description of the growth of the steel industry stands in sharp contrast to the accepted doctrine in modern textbooks.  Textbooks describe steel (and other) "trusts" creating monopolies and being somehow "bad."  The modern student is left with a vague impression of big business needing government regulation to avoid the dreaded "monopoly."   Garrett's pre-New Deal description of events would surprise those whose only exposure to industrialism came from modern textbooks:

  Minor groups were continuously springing up at preciesly the wrong time.  They generally smashed up or had to be bought out by the others to save themselves from ruinous competition. The steel age cared nothing about profits.  All it wanted was steel - more and more and more. 

[p. 323].  Garrett goes on to write that specialization in the steel industry began and "only intensified the competition."  [p. 323]. But the specialty steel companies began to form trusts for the sake of preserving profitability:

So there came to be a steel pipe trust, a sheet steel trust, a bridge and structural steel trust, a tin plate trust, a trust for everything; and matters became a great deal worse because some of the biggest mills, such as John's, were never in a trust and if the pipe trust or the structural steel trust got prices too high the independent mills would begin to make pipe or structural steel. 

 [p. 324]. Garrett makes the same point as a few modern writers that have recognized the effect that competition and potential competition had on prices over the long term.  Large companies might have enjoyed large profits for a short time, but high prices always attracted the threat of competition that would drive or hold down prices.  Companies would come and go, but prices would ultimately reflect the threat of more competition.

      The main characters did their part by producing steel rails at a lower cost than their competition. This ability gave them the "whip hand." [p. 322]. 

      Establishment historians have long remained vague on the movement of actual prices and the effects of competition, while focusing on labor disputes and the supposed evils of wealth accumulation. One book I have seen cited (but have not read) for the purpose of refuting these attacks is Hayek's (and W.H. Hutt's) Capitalism and the Historians:






      I know from experience the treatment that modern text writers give to this era.  I spent my high school (and junior high school) years being bombarded with propaganda.  The text writers were consumed by vague attacks using buzzwords such as "monopoly."  I am curious as to how pervasive was this tone during the early 1920's, when Garrett wrote his books. Was he writing in response to an increasingly shrill anti-capitalist movement?  Hayek's book might help with the answer. 

      Chapter XXXVIII is important for a complete understanding of the industrial revolution and the steel industry. Chapters VII, XIII, XXXIV and XXXVIII should be required reading in history classes.  Even though Cinder Buggy is fiction, there is more truth in those chapters than in most allegedly nonfiction history textbooks.   These chapters would serve as a supplement and a practical application of a free market based economic treatise.  Without Garrett's writing, Americans will never fully understand what they lost when the steel industry shrank to its present level. 

      Chapter XXXVIII ends with mild foreshadowing of a continuation of the triangle plot.  

      Update - Click here for part 22.         

The Cinder Buggy - part 20 - Chapters XXXIII, XXXIV and XXXV; H. G. Wells; Things to Come; new plot developments and the expansion of the steel industry

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

Chapter XXXIII appears to an anti-climax both for the triangle (see part 15) and for New Damascus.  "And New Damascus unawares was delivered to its fate (p. 287)."  The triangle resolution did not include the elements that Ayn Rand usually included in her triangles.

Chapter XXXIV contains descriptions of new technology and new machines.  These machines and the prosperity they brought were the result of the conclusion of the Enoch-Aaron conflict.

Fancy a tool larger than an elephant keeping vigil before a row of furnaces, pacing slowly up and down, apparently brooding, and then at the right moment opening a door and plucking forth a block of incandescent steel weighing many tons, neatly, with not the slightest effort, and nowhere in sight a human being!

Fancy another tool to drudge and fag for this one!  It comes running up, stands still while the other gently lays upon its back the white-hot slab, then runs and dumps it on a train of rollers.

     [p. 290]

These descriptions are reminiscent of the film sequences in H. G. Wells' Things to Come (1936) that showed miraculous new machines bringing new prosperity at the end of that film's thirty + year war.  [Cinder Buggy preceeded Things to Come by 13 years and the novel upon it was based by nearly a decade.]  The difference was that H.G. Wells' machines truly were a miracle, as Wells' entire post-war world was created by conquest and was based on the dream of one-world socialism.  By contrast, Garrett's machine descriptions in Chapter XXXIV resulted predictably from the profits generated by innovation and competition in the iron and steel industries.

The world of today has moved away from the competitive, profit driven scenarios described by Garrett and is coming very close to the vision of H.G. Wells.  Yet  the only miracle machines we see enable new forms of texting while improved manufacturing takes a back seat.   The western world has seen an unprecedented decline in manufacturing in the time since the world began moving toward the Wells' utopian vision.

Garrett describes the world that Wells' utopia would ultimately replace: 
    

     Man's  environment was made over twice in one generation.  Nothing was built but to be built again on a greater scale.  It seemed impossible to make anything big enough.  Wonders were of a day's duration. 
     In twenty-five years the country's population doubled. [see Part 9 and Part 11]. In the same time the production of things unto the use, happiness and discontent of people increased five, ten, twenty fold.  Man had now in his hand the universal power of steel.  It extended his arms and legs unimaginably, grotesquely.
     The production of metallic fibre increased more than one hundred fold.  Railways were built which if placed end to end and run around the globe would have circled it six times.  Those already grown when the steel age came were not yet old when a ton of freight was transported more than 2,500 miles annually for each man, woman and child living on American soil.  Food was cheaper and more abundant than ever before in the life of man because the railways, pursuing the sun, had suddenly opened a virgin continent to bonanza farming.    

[p. 288.]   

     The balance of Chapter XXXIV is not a narrative, but an essay on the type of men that brought the steel revolution to America. 

      Chapter XXXV returns the focus to the activities of John and Thane.  In describing the changing fortunes of steel companies, Garrett provides a new way to present the idea of buying low and selling high:

The time to buy steel plants was when the sky was visible at Pittsburgh; the time to sell them was when the smoke was so dense that the sun at midday resembled a pickled beet.

[p. 293.]

       Garrett generally moved effortlessly between historical essay and narrative, as he did in Chapter XXXV:

The barbaric invasion that overturned Roman civilization was more obvious as a spectacle but no more extraordinary, no more unexpected, and perhaps as it shall turn out, no more significant, than America's economic invasion of the world in the steel age.

[p. 294].  Garrett could write as if he lived 1,000 years in the future, summarizing the rise and fall of his own civilization.  These passages have more impact today - 90 years later.  We have seen the rise and the fall of our steel (and every other) industry and are beginning to place those events into the broader context of the life of western civilization.  When Garrett wrote these words (and this story) in 1923, the steel industry remained strong and was relatively new in the United States.  Today we have seen it come and go (it is more accurate to say it was cast out).  Garrett's words now resonate louder because we are learning what we have lost.  Garrett's words achieve more impact with the perspective of time. 

      The balance of Chapter XXXV introduces three new characters and includes them in new activities with the old characters.  These pages appear to make the narrative awkward, as new conflicts arise with little apparant connection to the prior conflicts.  My own conclusion is that Garrett enjoyed the historical essay portion as the main focus of his work and sought to fit a plot into his essays.  He did not succeed in fitting the plots to his essays as seamlessly as did Ayn Rand.   As I have written before, the New Deal had not yet arrived to give Garrett's plots the same clarity from which Rand's plots benefitted. 

      Click here for part 21.

The Cinder Buggy - part 19 - Chapters XXXI and XXXII; Sir John Edward Millais; Daguerreotype

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.

The mystery from Chapter XXX appears to deepen in Chapter XXXI.  Certain questions are answered, while other questions may never be answered. 

Garrett uses (in Chapter XXXI) the concept of the gatekeeper (without using that term). He describes an employee that manages to separate her boss from his other employees - thus exercising increased control over his affairs.

The term "daguerreotype" (p. 274)  refers to an old style of photography, the use of which is consistent with the timeline for the earlier chapters of the book. 

Chapter XXXII provides the escalation of the Thane-Agnes relationship.  Garrett describes this escalation in a way that was very reminiscent of the relationships in Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The similarity is based on the fact that the relationship escalated as a result of industrial activity.  One needs to read the actual passages to appreciate the meaning of my explanation. 

Garrett supplements his descriptions with the following wisdom:

In his power with ideas man is dimly admirable to woman; in his power over circumstances he inspires her with trust; in his power over people he satisfies her taste for grandeur; but in his power over elements,  - in that aspect he wrecks her completely, for she is herself an element.  In that moment he is god-like; she cannot comprehend him.

(p. 280).

Garrett writes that a pencil sketch by Sir John Everett Millais caught the spirit of the moment - "Marrying and Giving in Marriage at the Deluge."  (p. 280).  Millais was a 19th century illustrator.  I could not find more information about that particular sketch.  One of Millais' paintings was entitled "Esther," thus indicating that Millais' influence upon Garrett extended beyond a single drawing.

Click here for Part 20.

The Cinder Buggy - part 18 - Chapters XXVIII, XXIX, XXX; the conflict appears to end.

Click here for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 of my review of The Cinder Buggy.


In Chapters XXVIII through XXX, Cinder Buggy increases in intensity. 

Chapter XXVIII, Garrett continues the story of the dawn of the steel age, as the main characters grow their business:

Steel wire was indispensable to the steel age.  There were bridges  to be cast in the air like cobwebs, chasms to be spanned, a thousand giants to be snared in their sleep with threads of steel wire, single, double, or twisted by hundreds into cables.  Enough of them would make a rope strong enough to halt the world in its flight if one end could be made fast in space.  There could never have been a steel age without steel wire.  But the steele age required first of all steel rails to run on . . . . [p. 244]. 

When other people were thinking railroad building had been overdone he said it had not really begun.  He imagined the possibility that the locomotive would double in size.

It did. Then it doubled again.  It could not have done so without steel rails under its feet, and if it had not doubled and then doubled again this now would be a German world.  Democracy even then was shaping its weapons for Armageddon through men who knew nothing about it.  They were free egoists, seeking profit, power, personal success,  everyone attending to his own greatness.  Never before in the world had the practise of individualism been so reckless, so purely dynamic, so heedless of the Devil's harvest.  Yet it happened, - it precisely happened, - that they forged the right weapons.  It seems sometimes to matter very little what men think.  They very often do the right thing for wrong reasons.  It seems to matter even less why they work.  All that the great law of becoming requires is that men shall work.  They cannot go wrong really.  They cannot make wrong things.  The pattern is foreordained.  [pp. 245-246].

Garrett writes metaphorically and with an eye on the long arc of history. In these two sections covering parts of 3 pages, Garrett helps the reader to see the entire Earth and a fifty year historical timeline.  In these few lines, Garrett imagines possibilities that never occurred and consequences that were never imagined. 

The essays that Garrett inserts into his stories are the most thought provoking portions of his books.   When he returns to the specifics of his plot, the plot remains fixed on the action and does not provide much detail to explore the eloquont metaphors and prose of the essay portion of Chapter XXVIII.  Cinder Buggy, like Garrett's other novels, was written before the New Deal.  There was less of an urgent need for Garrett to focus his essays into a spirited advocacy of individualism and freedom or to explore these themes by integrating the plot to a degree that later appears in the Randian novels. 

Chapter XXVIII also features another discussion of how the characters financed a corporation in such a way that would bore the writiers (and possibly readers or viewers) of modern business based fiction.  But the discussion works, advances the plot and is interesting in the context of the plot.

Chapters XXIX and XXX see the return of the main characters to New Damascus.

The mystery of the Thane-Agnes marriage is revealed.  Garrett often presented plot points with narrative explanation instead of with dialogue.  Reading the dialogue in the Randian novels gives us an idea of the true potential of the Garrett novels.  Integrating more dialogue between Agnes and Thane might have provided for a more thorough exploration of their story.

I will be vague here so as to avoid plot spoilers.  The main conflict of Cinder Buggy appears to come to an end in Chapters XXVIII - XXX.  While one mystery appears to be resolved, another one appears to begin in Chapter XXX.  Regardless of how far the new potential mystery goes, the discussion in this Chapter fosters a deeper appreciation of factories and their importance to all of our lives.  I cannot be more specific without spoiling one aspect of the plot.

Click here for part 19.