The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

“Below and behind the seat was this new and queer kind of engine. For many months the inventor had it up on his work-bench, where he could tinker at it and add new parts. It had two cylinders, made out of gas pipe, two and a half inches in diameter. Each cylinder had a piston, closely fitted, and a device by which a drop of petrol was let inside and exploded by an electric spark. When the engine was started, it made a racket like what was known as a gattling-gun; it gave out a grey smoke of disagreeable odour, which caused the inventor to open the door of the barn in a hurry. The neighbours would hear it for a block in every direction, and would say: ‘There goes that crazy loon again. Some day he’s going to blow himself up.’”

This quotation describes Ford’s work creating an internal combustion engine. As the neighbors’ reactions, along with the unpleasant smoke, show, the engine is neither something people are widely familiar with nor something Ford has perfected. The first American combustion engine was built by John Stevens in 1798, and Ford had been exposed to internal combustion engines in his factory work in Detroit. Ford built his first working internal combustion engine in 1893.

“Every night he worked until late, apparently having no other interest in the world. On Saturday nights he worked until ungodly hours—a literal statement, since never before had this neighbourhood known of a man working at machinery on Sunday.”

This passage establishes Ford as a complex character: he is both industrious (which is considered a positive trait among Americans, embodying certain national virtues) and irreligious (a trait which is viewed with far more skepticism and disapproval in the United States). Ford’s un-Christian habits are particularly interesting, since later Ford will pay lip-service to Christian values, both through the Social Department’s oversight of workers and, in a more sinister fashion, through his insistence on a fundamental ideological and moral opposition between Jewish Americans and Christian Americans.

“They were poor, but far from hopeless; not only had they the certainty of a blessed state in the hereafter, but the children were all going to school, and the family shared the faith of all American families, that the young ones would rise in the world. America was the land of opportunity, and wonderful things were happening every day. The poorest boy had the right to become president; and besides this grand prize were innumerable smaller ones, senators, governors, judges, and all the kings, lords, and lesser nobility of industry. Life in this land was a sort of perpetual lottery; every mother who bore a child, even in a dingy slum, was putting her hand into a grab-bag, and might draw out a dazzling jewel.”

This passage clearly articulates the American dream and describes the basic ideology to which Abner Shutt adheres his whole life. This is the novel’s first passage to evoke the image of a feudal system, though it does so in a quite different way than later passages: after all, it mentions only “kings, lords, and lesser nobility” and leaves out the serfs and vassals without whom these exalted figures cannot exist. Of course, it is nobody’s dream to become a serf; in Sinclair’s imagining, Americans elide or omit the unpleasant truth that a king or lord needs serfs in order to rule.

Another interesting feature of this passage is the way it uses the phrase “grand prize” to imply that democratically-elected officials have the highest status in the country, and yet undermines this idea by referring to industrial magnates as hereditary nobility (whose power and very existence have been, in the US context, traditionally thought to undermine the workings of a democratic society).

“His face was leathery and wrinkled, and wore a patient, ox-like expression. He puffed meditatively on his pipe, full of blessed peace honestly earned.”

This portrait of the elder Tom Shutt compares him to a beast of burden, but in a way that suggests tiredness but not exhaustion. Later, Sinclair likens Abner Shutt to a beast of burden, as well, but under Ford’s increasingly mechanized and sped-up production methods Tom’s son has become a “patient and spavined old nag of industry” (133), a description that evokes pathos rather than peace.

“‘You’d out to be able to sell it,’ mused Tom. As a good American, he thought of the business side.”

This passage equates thinking like a businessman with being a good American, suggesting that Ford’s transformation into an exploitative employer is due less to any particular characteristics of his own than to the American national character and ideology.

“Then began a series of excitements; for the streets of Detroit were full of horses, which saw in this carriage their ultimate exterminator, and their one idea was to get as far from it as possible.”

This passage personifies the horses as having ideas; other passages have likened human workers to animals, and specifically to horses and oxen. The passage foreshadows both the replacement of horse-drawn carriages with automobiles and the literal death of workers, either in the course of tending Ford’s dangerously sped-up machinery or at the hands of Ford’s “police” and service department, in the workers’ demonstration that takes place late in the novel.

“It was the fate of little Abner Shutt to be fourteen years old in a time of ‘trade depression,’ so he did not get quite enough to eat, and his growth was stunted, and he had to leave school and go out on the streets to earn a few pennies selling newspapers. Every corner was occupied by boys who considered they had a right to it, so Abner was chased from place to place and beaten, and had his papers torn up. The merciless winds of winter lashed his frail ill-clad figure, and his fingers were so stiff with cold that he could hardly make change when he was able to find a customer. Once his fingers froze, and one of them began to turn dark, and the boy, screaming with pain, had to be taken to a hospital, where a doctor cut it off. So Abner had a souvenir of ‘hard times’ to carry through life.”

This passage describes one of the most formative experiences of Abner’s life, second only to his early idolatry of Henry Ford. Abner’s fear of hard times never leaves him, and he attempts to teach it to his children. It gives rise to his humble dream of buying cheap vegetables at weekends, and it makes him vulnerable both to Ford’s exploitation (since he dares not enter into conflict with his employer, lest he lose his job) and to the anti-Semitic propaganda Ford distributes.

“He was going to do the thinking, not merely for himself, but for Abner— and this was something which suited Abner perfectly. His powers of thinking were limited, and those he possessed had never been trained. If he had had to look around this crowded busy shop and find something to do, he would have been extremely unhappy. But the foreman took him and showed him exactly what to do, and Abner was grateful; all he asked was time to get the hang of it, and after that he would go on doing it, and the less he had to change, the better it would suit him. The new general manager had made a good guess when he acquired this twenty-four-year-old member of the Original Believers’ Church.”

In this passage, Abner finds Ford’s and the foreman’s paternalism a welcome relief from having to think for himself. There will be many other instances in which Ford thinks for his employees (e.g. in deciding that it is best for them not to take an interest in politics) or aims to shape their thinking (e.g. by means of the anti-Semitic propaganda); though Abner might be perfectly happy with this arrangement, it ultimately works against Abner’s own interests.

 “‘Well, the spindle-nuts come all mixed up, the rights and the lefts. I ain’t never spoiled one yet, but somebody will. An’ I have to go to the shed for the wheels—they had ought to be brought to me, because screwin’ ‘em on is skilled work, sorter, an’ I could do a lot more of it if I could stay at it. I’m doin’ all one man can do, an’ if you keep on growin’, you’ll have to have a man fer the rights and one fer the lefts. It’ll be a job by itself, Mr. Ford, puttin’ on wheels, an’ it ought to be run by a feller that knows, and not jest leave it to guess.’”

In this passage, Abner gives Ford the idea of breaking the task of building cars into extremely small, specialized discrete tasks, then having each man complete only one such task; in other words, Sinclair puts Ford’s crucial insight into making production more efficient into Abner’s mouth. Ford takes up Abner’s idea, with the ironic result that once the assembly-line and speed-ups are introduced, Abner’s working conditions become significantly worse.

“Milly Crock had been, when Abner invited her to marry him, a pretty thing to look at, with bright complexion, laughing blue eyes, and fair hair which needed no curling-tongs. But five years of waiting, followed by six of child-bearing and housekeeping, caused these charms to fade. She had many pains, the cause of which was obscure; and having four children in the house all the time was a strain upon her disposition. Her fifth child was puny, and the doctor told her she had better not have any more; but […] did not tell her now to arrange this—in those days it was not supposed to be ethical. Soon after this the fifth child died, a sixth was born, of a dark blue colour, and the mother never saw it. After that Milly began to exhibit an aversion from her husband, and concentrated all her attention upon her little ones. That was hard upon Abner, who had been a good man according to his lights.”

Sinclair calls attention to the effects upon Milly of domestic labor, which is unpaid but necessary. In poor families such as the Shutts’, there would have been no alternative to Milly’s doing so much housework and having the children at home all the time: the Shutts can afford neither a nanny, nor a kindergarten, nor the lessons and extracurricular activities to which a wealthier family might have access. Both Milly’s health and her relationship with her husband suffer as a result of overwork. Sinclair appears to be concerned with the welfare of all laborers, not only industrial workers who are paid for their work.

“Never had there been such a device for speeding up labour. You simply moved a switch, and a thousand men jumped more quickly. It was an invisible tax, like that tariff, which the consumer pays without being aware of it. The worker cannot hold a stop-watch, and count the number of cars which come to him in an hour. Even if he learns about it from the man who sets the speed of the belt—again it is like the tariff in that he can do nothing about it. If he is a weakling, there are a dozen strong men waiting outside to take his place. Shut your mouth and do what you’re told!”

This passage introduces the infamous “speed-ups”, which eventually make working conditions in the Ford plants so unbearable that even Abner joins a march on the factory to ask for better conditions.

“On the first day there were ten thousand in front of the gates, and by the end of the week, when the plan was to go into effect, there was an army. Streams of icy water were turned on them, and police reserves fought for two hours to drive them back from the gates. Stones were thrown and windows smashed—a painful end of a perfect day. The half-frozen workers went away with rage against Henry in their hearts; but those fortunate ones like Abner Shutt, who were inside, didn’t lose much sleep about it. This was a hard world, and a fellow who had something had to hold on to it.”

This passage describes the hopeful workers who respond to Ford’s announcement of a five-dollar minimum wage as an “army,” but the description must refer to their numbers, as the workers are unarmed. This is the first of several incidents in which Ford orders that peaceful, unarmed workers be attacked. He will use cold water once again, and then resort to guns. Abner’s fear of “hard times” is responsible for his lack of solidarity with the workers and his more general quietism with regard to working conditions inside the Ford plant.

“If only Abner could have bought before the announcement was made! If only he had a tip! Some of Mr. Ford’s associates had known, and hastened to buy land—and now they were ‘holding it’ at such and such a high price, and making it nearly as hard for the Shutt family as if there hadn’t been any bonus!”

Sinclair’s aim in this passage, set shortly after Ford has announced his bonus system, is to demonstrate how little the bonus actually does to raise the workers’ living standard. Abner and Milly’s gains are modest, but Ford and other already-wealthy people, such as his “associates,” make a great deal of money. Ford’s reputation improves after he announces the bonus, and because of the great supply of workers who show up eager to work for the Ford Company, he also has the luxury of choosing the best workers and thereby improving productivity; the speculators make money simply by exploiting their knowledge that the announcement of the bonus will increase demand for land and housing.

“During the first year of the war Henry sold more than three hundred thousand cars, during the second year he sold more than half a million, and during the third year he sold more than three-quarters of a million. But the increase may have been because other motor-manufacturers, supplying the warring nations, left a larger share of the American market to Henry.”

This passage illustrates the idea that the capitalist system, for which the Ford “empire” is a metonymy, has an agency of its own to which the actions, desires, and values of individual human beings is subordinate. Although Ford is morally opposed to the war and even refuses to sell his products to its combatants, he still ends up profiting. There is no such thing as “clean” money during wartime.

“[...] an old dream began to stir in Abner’s soul. [...] Many of the men had got second-hand cars [...] The families of these lucky ones got an outing on Sundays; they could go and see the old folks, or drive out into the country and buy vegetables and fruit and eggs at less than city prices. Why shouldn’t the Shutt family enjoy such pleasures?”

This passage mentions Abner’s version of the American Dream, which includes cheap vegetables from the countryside—one of the novel’s major motifs.

“Graft to him was the very nature of politics; also waste and incompetence. He insisted that he could run the post office as a private enterprise, better than the government was running it. He would not even admit that the Altadena fire-department was a thing to be publicly owned. Let some competent business man attend to putting out fires.”

Henry Ford, despite feeling sympathetic to some of the things the California writer says, is literally unable to conceive of a publicly-owned utility that is efficiently, honestly, and competently run. His insistence that everything should be privatized is an article of faith, an ideology from which he will never be separated. Similarly to Abner, he is simply unmovable where certain ideas about society are concerned.

“In your own plant, Mr. Ford, you have order, you tolerate no waste. But in the outside world you have chaos and anarchy, and you defend it, and call your defence ‘optimism’!”

The California writer suggests that what works on the individual level—in this case, Ford’s efficiently-run factories—does not always work on the systemic level. Distinguishing between these two levels is one of the major tasks Sinclair has set himself in The Flivver King.

“Some forty-five thousand different machines were now used in the making of Ford cars, in sixty establishments scattered over the United States. The various parts were carried in Henry’s own ships to assembly plants in twenty-eight foreign countries. The Ford Model T would be put together in Yokohama or Buenos Aires, and its parts would be interchangeable; wherever you drove it, into the passes of the Himalayas or the jungles of the Chaco, you would find somebody who had learned to service and repair it. Henry was remaking the roads of America, and in the end he would remake the roads of the world—and line them all with filling stations and hot-dog stands of the American pattern.”

Ford’s “empire” is an early harbinger of globalization, and “empire” is indeed the appropriate term for it, since Ford envisions not only outsourcing labor and exporting automobiles, but also introducing American culture to places throughout the world.

“Did Henry Ford know about these conditions? Abner Shutt, faithful devotee, was sure that he couldn’t know. Abner could read in the papers what the Flivver King was doing. He was travelling in Europe, inspecting his vast empire, and telling the people over there how to Americanize themselves. He was in Georgia, experimenting with fifteen thousand acres of goldenrod from which he expected to get rubber. He was on his huge farm in Michigan, growing soya-beans, and watching his laboratory people making steering-wheels out of them. He was compiling his dance-book and collecting antiques for his museum. He was studying the thousands of birds for which he had provided air-conditioned homes. He was going everywhere and doing everything except watching the assembly-lines of his huge factory, with two hundred thousand slaves making themselves part of machines—pick-up, push-in, turn, reverse—pick-up, push-in, turn, reverse, pickuppushinturnreverse, pickuppushinturnreverse—a man would go mad if he stopped to think about it.”

Sinclair contrasts the vast range of interesting, elevating, and enjoyable activities Ford undertakes in a variety of far-flung places with the maddeningly repetitive life of a worker in the Ford factory. While Abner hates the speed-ups of the repetitive work as much as any other man, he is incapable of believing that Ford knows full well how the workers suffer.

“[John and Annabelle] had been raised under a system of industrial feudalism. If anybody had said that to them, they would have taken it as an affront; but the fact was that their minds were shaped to a set of ideas, as rigidly and inevitably as the steel parts which the plants were turning out by the million. It was a hierarchy of rank based upon income. Annabelle associated with wives of her own level, carefully avoided those of lower levels, and crudely and persistently sought access to those of higher levels. Below her were the serfs of industry, the hordes of wage-earners; above her were higher executives, and at the top the owners, the ineffable, godlike ones about whom everybody talked incessantly, gleaning scraps of gossip and cherishing them as jewels.”

To Abner and Milly, John and Annabelle seem like successful members of the upper middle class; after all, they live in a neighborhood so fancy that John’s parents are embarrassed to drive their old car into it. However, this passage illustrates the anxiety that John and Annabelle feel about their social status.

“The American people had been told, over a period of many years, that the charitable Mr. Ford made a specialty of giving ex-convicts a chance to rehabilitate themselves; the American people had thought that was a worthy and noble work. But gradually the practices of the Ford Motor Company had changed, until ex-criminals were being hired, not to learn new ways of life, but to go on practicing old ones. This was something of which the American people had yet to learn.”

This passage illustrates the way in which Ford gradually comes to tolerate, and even to encourage and instigate, violent criminality in an attempt to quash the burgeoning labor movement that threatens his profits. While Ford initially seemed to uphold conventional morality via his Social Department, the Service Department’s only value is money. Its thugs have no compunctions about threatening, beating, and even killing workers who organize and labor activists.

“The billion dollars surrounded its captive with Nazi agents and Fascist whisperers. They had begun upon him early, when Hitler’s movement was young; they had got forty thousand dollars from him to reprint the anti-Jewish pamphlets in German translations, the names of Hitler and Ford appearing jointly in the advertising. Later on a grandson of the ex-Kaiser had come to Ford’s and got a job, and had been the agent through whom three hundred thousand dollars had been forwarded to the Nazi party treasury. Henry had big factories in Germany, and it was no utopian idealism for him to have strikes prevented in that country.”

This passage, which reports confirmed historical facts about Ford’s financial and moral support of the Nazis, implies that Ford benefited from the Nazi regime, which assisted in putting down nascent strikes at Ford factories in Germany. Sinclair makes “the billion dollars” the agent here, and Ford simply their instrument; one might argue that Sinclair is relieving Ford of his personal responsibility for his decisions, but Sinclair would likely respond that he is instead illustrating the idea that money, rather than individuals, is the main agent of history in a capitalist nation.

“Henry beamed; for these were people who counted, what they said had weight.”

Henry Ford is thinking of the old Detroit family, at whose dinner party he has just taught several guests to dance some old-fashioned American dances. Although Ford is richer than they, they represent old Detroit wealth and have more social and cultural capital than the uneducated, unrefined Ford. This passage suggests that even Ford is not at the top of the social hierarchy, at least not in all situations: even he must scramble to impress the right people.

“Dell had come upon the body of her husband, still unconscious. She started screaming and sobbing, but soon realized that wouldn’t help. He felt cold, but not so cold as the rain and the mud. His face was upturned and his mouth open; she managed to turn him onto his side, fearing that he might choke and be drowned.”

In this passage, Tom Shutt is still alive, as Dell’s fear that he could drown indicates. However, the comparison of his body temperature with the temperature of his surroundings (he is cold, but not yet as cold as they) suggests that he hovers between life and death. The story ends without revealing whether Tom lives or dies.