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
Tools
BetaChapters 82-84Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 82 Summary
The police release Tom Shutt. However, Henry Ford remains forever imprisoned by his wealth in the belief that he is “the object of deadly mass hatred” (213). Ford has become the worst employer in the automotive industry: he pays the lowest wages, submits his workers to brutal speed-ups, and fires anyone who mentions the subject of a union.
“Morose and bitter,” Ford lives in near-isolation, “watching his guards to make sure that they watched him” (214). He is haunted by his similarity to Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, a billionaire who had done the same thing as Henry—gunned down workers seeking an audience with him—and was assassinated, along with his wife and children, thirteen years later.
Ford believes that he is the father of a great dynasty with the potential to last generations. However, he feels threatened by “persons with names such as Trotsky and Zinoviev and Bela Kun and Radek and Liebknecht and Luxemburg and Jaurès and Blum” (215); that is, by revolutionaries, especially Jewish revolutionaries. Ford remains as convinced as ever that there is a vast international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to take away his billion dollars and destroy American society. He publishes several anti-Semitic statements accusing American labor organizers of carrying out a Communist plot.
The former editor of the Independent, William J. Cameron, is now Ford’s personal secretary. Cameron maintains ties between Ford and anti-Semitic groups.
Chapter 83 Summary
Ford, influenced by the billion dollars “at his ear, whispering like Mephistopheles into the ear of Faust” (216), surrounds himself with Fascist and Nazi agents. Ford has supported Hitler’s movement from the beginning with large donations, his name appearing alongside Hitler’s in German translations of the anti-Semitic pamphlets Ford had circulated years earlier. Ford has large factories in Germany and relies on Nazi support to quell potential strikes.
Fritz Kuhn, Hitler’s top organizer in the US and head of the German-American Bund, moves his headquarters to Detroit and goes to work for Ford as a chemist. Ford and Kuhn begin a new anti-Semitic campaign, supported by Nazis who ask Ford for 1% of his fortune to create “a pure, native, hundred per cent American movement, combining all the others—the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, the Crusader Whiteshirts, the American Liberty League, the Anglo-Saxon Federation” (217) that will put an end to the labor movement. This movement would also force the president out of office, and “make it a shooting offence to talk Communism or call a strike” in order to “protect the property interests of this country” (217).
Ford considers this proposal a good one and agrees.
Chapter 84 Summary
One spring evening, Henry Ford is preparing, reluctantly, to attend a formal dinner party at the home of a respected old Detroit family. At the same time, Tom Shutt is preparing to speak at a meeting, and Dell, terrified for his safety because of the recent murders of other labor organizers, is at his side.
Henry and his wife take their limousine to Grosse Pointe, while Tom and Dell (followed by two friends in a second car, for protection) arrive at the meeting, which is attended almost exclusively by Ford workers. The workers meet in secret, in the dark, with their faces covered. Some of them are the same workers whom Henry had told, years earlier, that they were welcome to start a union.
Chapters 82-84 Analysis
Sinclair aims to reveal the systemic, and not merely individual, forces behind wealth, poverty, the exploitation of labor, and such historical events as the Great Depression. Accordingly, in these chapters he presents money itself as the agent truly responsible for the events that follow. Ford’s billion dollars distort the way he sees the world: “there were [...] chains upon his mind, so that he would think no thought of which the billion dollars did not approve” (213). Thus, The Flivver King can be thought of as essentially Marxist in orientation: it is not individuals like Ford who make history, but rather historical forces (in the case of the above quotation, it is capital).
Ford’s capital, which controls his thought process, makes him vulnerable to the same anti-Semitic lies that he published and then disingenuously disavowed years earlier. His support of Hitler, as portrayed in Chapter 83, is perhaps the most shocking element of The Flivver King, since many readers may be unaware that Ford was a Nazi sympathizer. The dark revelation of Ford’s large financial contribution to, and inner sympathy toward, the Nazi regime serves as a segue into the final, dark chapters of the novel, which focus on the contrast between the lives and fates of two couples: Henry Ford and his wife, on the one hand, and Tom and Dell Shutt, on the other.
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