100 pages • 3 hours read
The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
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Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Chapters 13-15
Chapters 16-18
Chapters 19-21
Chapters 22-24
Chapters 25-27
Chapters 28-30
Chapters 31-33
Chapters 34-36
Chapters 37-39
Chapters 40-42
Chapters 43-45
Chapters 46-48
Chapters 49-51
Chapters 52-54
Chapters 55-57
Chapters 58-60
Chapters 61-63
Chapters 64-66
Chapters 67-69
Chapters 70-72
Chapters 73-75
Chapters 76-78
Chapters 79-81
Chapters 82-84
Chapters 85-92
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaChapters 61-63Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 61 Summary
In his eighteen years as a “model employer,” Ford has published four books and countless magazine articles and interviews advertising himself as “a guide and instructor to all other American employers” (158). Now, however, his workers hate him: when they read about “the ideal conditions in his plant” (158), they respond with disgust.
Although Ford has always maintained that machine tools do not put people out of work, each new machine at the River Rouge plant is putting nineteen out of twenty men out of work. However, the men are not openly laid off; instead, they are reassigned to new positions, whose foreman “rides” them, or are fired on the pretext of violating “a thousand petty regulations” (159) such as forgetting to wear one’s badge, staying too long in the toilet, or talking to the men on the next shift coming on. The company employs “spotters” to catch violations, and even men who have committed no violation can be fired if the “service department” accuses them.
Those who keep their jobs are not luckier: Ford drives them so hard that they work in a half-delirious state. With the new drive to work faster, accidents increase, and “there [is] a saying in the plant that it [takes] one life a day” (160).
Chapter 62 Summary
Ford is now almost seventy and the world’s richest man. Although he had dreamed of making “his life count for good,” he has become “something he had never dreamed of being” (160). Once enthusiastic to employ people, he now hires thugs to chase them away from his factory and is content to let them suffer in poverty after he lays them off.
While he once enjoyed an open relationship with his workers, Ford now lives surrounded by armed guards and “yes-men” (161), isolated from the people he employs. He leads a reclusive life and pointedly ignores the poverty around him even though many of the poor are unemployed Ford workers.
Detroit voters stop supporting the city administration that Ford finances, and vote in a new mayor, a former judge named Frank Murphy, whom Ford regards as a demagogue. Murphy creates an unemployment committee, which points out that Ford has laid off the fathers of 5,000 families and that the city is paying $720,000 a year to support unemployed Ford workers: “The implication would seem to be that the company [should] assume responsibility for those who had been recently employed” (163).
Chapter 63 Summary
After the war, Ford had bought 199 decommissioned cargo boats from the U.S. government purely for his own amusement: he enjoyed wrecking them. When he bought the boats, he also acquired their crews; “as each boat was wrecked, there was another group of men to be placed in the Ford empire” (163). One of these men, a Navy boxer called Harry Bennett, became the head of Ford’s “service department.”
Bennett’s job is:
to organize and train the thirty-six hundred private police who guard […] the gates of the plant, watch […] the work in every department, report[…] violations of many hundreds of regulations, and, as spies, mingle with the men, detecting grumblers and kickers, union organizers and ‘Red’ agitators’ (164).
The department functions as an intelligence bureau, following labor leaders into the community to find out who their associates are. The department also goes on the offensive often enough that Mayor Murphy describes Ford as “employ[ing] some of the worst gangsters in our city” (164).
Hank no longer makes as much money driving trucks of alcohol from Canada because the gangs have successfully cultivated contacts in federal law enforcement. The truck drivers’ work, no longer as risky, is no longer as well-compensated. However, one of Hank’s employer’s brothers works in Ford’s “service department” and recruits Hank as a Ford spy in the community. Hank earns a good deal of money for this work and shares it with his parents.
Chapters 61-63 Analysis
These chapters focus on the increasing brutality of conditions within the Ford plant and on the “service department” Ford employs to police his workers. Although the citizens of Detroit vote against the mayor Ford backs, voting does not affect what happens within the Ford Company, and that company has become something of a state within a state, complete with its own intelligence agency, its own law code, and its own police, overseen by Bennett and staffed by hardened criminals, including Hank.
With the addition of the “service department,” the Ford Company becomes something of a panopticon: not only are actual spies walking the factory floors and following suspected labor activists out into the city, but fear of being “ridden,” fired, or roughed up by Bennett’s thugs keeps the workers in a state of fearful silence and self-censoring. Only the most committed dares engage in labor organizing or even to voice his dissatisfaction aloud; the rest keep their heads down for fear of the consequences.
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