The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

Now that the dealers are holding an oversupply of Ford cars, Ford closes the plant for a couple of weeks’ “reorganization.” The hard times Abner has always anticipated arrive; he uses the money in his and Milly’s savings account to cover expenses, which feels to both of them “like dying” (103). The couple worry about losing their house, which is only half paid off.

The period of unemployment lasts six weeks, during which Abner feels at a loose end, puts on weight, and worries. When he returns to the plant, he finds it changed: only essential employees have been retained and there are “no more statistics, no more welfare-work, no more frills and fads” (104). Before, fifteen men a day had worked on each car; now the number is only nine. Ford cuts overhead costs from $146 per car to $93 and saves $60 million a year. Several thousand men become unemployed.

Abner, who used to supervise five men, is put back to work on the line assembling chassis; he is one of twenty men overseen by one foreman: “Abner got the minimum of six dollars a day, and was grateful as a dog for his dinner” (105). His back begins to hurt and his arms grow tired quickly, but he is determined to keep up with the work because he is over forty and fears losing his job.

Ford owns the Dearborn, Michigan Independent, a small newspaper. He requires that all his dealership agents subscribe to the paper, and its circulation increases from 700 subscribers to 150,000.

The author who had come to visit Ford in California is working on a book about the “dishonesty of the American press” (106), and Ford promises him that he will make the Independent into a “national organ with a circulation of two or three million” (107) that “speak[s] for the people’s welfare” (106).

Ford is convinced that “there [is] some evil force at work, thwarting good capitalists like himself, who wanted to produce automobiles cheaply, and pay the workers high wages, so that they could buy automobiles and ride to their work of making more automobiles” (106). In his quest to find out who or what this force is, Ford accepts a meeting with Boris Brasol, a “former agent of the ‘Black Hundreds’” (106) who presents him with a ream of anti-Semitic propaganda (including the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) alleging that Jewish bankers, Communist revolutionaries, and munitions magnates are conspiring to take away Ford’s business.