The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

American industry, which has adopted Ford’s strategy of mass production and low prices, is flourishing. Ford is involved in 53 industries and employs over 200,000 men. The Shutts are now a “two-car family” (119), since Johnny, who has finished school and started work as a welder, now works as a sub-foreman and owns his own car.

Although Hank does not have a job title, he too is prospering. It is the era of Prohibition, and he works for bootleggers bringing liquor across the river from Canada. Only Hank’s sister, Daisy, who studies at a business college and hopes to become a stenographer, knows about his work.

Tommy, still in high school, is a quarterback on his school’s football team and is offered a football scholarship to the University of Michigan.

Ford is nearing his goal of producing two million cars a year. He owns 60 plants in the US and several more plants in 28 foreign countries, which assemble Ford cars using 45,000 different machines.

Despite his success, Ford is “losing his blithe optimism, and becoming glum and bitter” (123). He disapproves of short skirts and jazz, and is upset that people criticize his Model T, which they find “lack[s] beauty and grace” (124) and which only comes in black.

Ford decides that “what America need[s] [is] to be led back to its past” (124). He starts a “vast museum of old-time America” (124), including whole houses and even villages and a wide variety of “all the junk you had in your attic, provided it was old enough to be called ‘antiques’” (125). Although Ford is “doing more than any man now alive to root out and destroy this old America” (125), he hopes to revive old ways of thinking. Antique-hunting becomes a popular pastime for the well-to-do.

A salesman convinces Ford to buy a white cottage that he claims is the birthplace of the songwriter Stephen C. Foster. However, once Ford has made the purchase, Foster’s niece and nephew inform him that the cottage is not actually their uncle’s birthplace; the real birthplace has already been torn down. Ford, who cannot stand being wrong, visits Foster’s elderly and demented daughter, eventually convincing her to make an official statement confirming that the cottage is her father’s birthplace. Eventually, however, a mass of evidence showing that the house is not Foster’s birthplace forces Ford to withdraw his claim that the house is “the actual little white cottage in which Stephen C. Foster was born” (126). Ford continues to refer to the house as the “Stephen Foster House” even though “neither Foster nor any other member of the family had ever lived in that house” (126).