Who Is John Galt?

One Sunday, while driving on I-5 heading back to San Francisco from the Sierra Nevada, I saw a bumper sticker “Ask me, who is John Galt?” The request puzzled me since I wondered why someone in California’s Central Valley would ask me if I knew about a 19th century Scottish novelist.

Only later did I discover about the appropriation of John Galt’s name by Ayn Rand in her novel “Atlas Shrugged.” Indeed that appropriation is so deep that the Wikipedia entry for John Galt is under the name “John Galt (novelist)” while the fictional character is bestowed an entry under the simple “John Galt.”

The real John Galt was born in Irvine, Scotland in 1779, a few miles north of Alloway where Robert Burns (of Auld Lang Syne fame) had been born two decades earlier. Following the route of many a Scotsman on the make of that era Galt headed to the colonies, where he became Secretary to the Canada Company and founded the city of Guelph, Ontario. He eventually returned to Scotland where he died in 1839.

Galt wrote “theoretical histories” about provincial Scotland as well as political satires. He preferred the phrase “theoretical history” since these books were related short stories that lacked the structure of a novel.

Among the theoretical histories, Galt wrote in “The Provost” of the local politics of a small town. In “Annals of the Parish,” he wrote about the life and times of a minister in a rural parish just as the industrial revolution arrived. In the political satires, “The Member” and “The Radical,” Galt wrote about the comings and goings at Westminster as the Reform Act of 1832 was being passed.

Galt was writing at a time when subtlety of characterization could be subsumed into character names like “Mr. Gabblon,” “Nathan Butt,” “Colonel Armor,” and “Rev. Dr Swapkirk.” No need then for the subtlety of a “Winston Smith” or a “Frank Underwood.”

So the next time someone asks “Who Is John Galt?” tell them that the real John Galt is a Scottish novelist.