100 pages • 3 hours read
Upton SinclairThe Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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
BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Ford Companies as a Feudal Empire
Sinclair compares Ford’s network of companies to an empire or a feudal system several times. Sometimes the purpose of this comparison is to emphasize the existence of a rigid class system in which each group serves and attempts to ingratiate itself with those who are higher in the hierarchy (at the top of which is, of course, Ford himself):
[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 (144).
Other times the comparison is meant to draw attention to the totalizing nature of the Ford companies, which create an intricate internal social and political economy within the “empire”, whose highest value is money:
A great empire like Ford’s [...] develops its own needs, and its own loyalties to meet them. Its courtiers and servitors may quarrel furiously among themselves, but they must accept the basic standards upon which the great structure rests. If it is a commercial empire, they must believe in money, and the symbols of money, its codes of excellence and elegance. The Flivver King himself had handed down the law, from the high mountain where he dwelt: ‘Men work for money’ (202).
For example, in order to protect its profit margin, the Ford empire develops a need for thugs to keep organizing workers in check. It fills this need by hiring men like Hank and Bennett and in so doing redefines what counts as socially acceptable behavior within the empire.
The needs and loyalties associated with the Ford empire are not only practical ones; they are ideological as well:
The Ford empire was not a metaphor but a fact, not a sneer but a sociological analysis. Henry was more than any feudal lord had been, because he had not merely the power of the purse, but those of the press and the radio; he could make himself omnipresent to his vassals, he was master not merely of their bread and butter but of their thoughts and ideals (144).
The darkest and most striking example of this power is, of course, Ford’s circulation of anti-Semitic propaganda and Abner’s joining the Ku Klux Klan as a result. However, subtler manifestations of this power can be seen, too. Some examples are the wide support Ford gains, despite lacking a platform or party affiliation, in his abortive bid for the presidency; and the effectiveness with which he manages to repress his employees’ political expression.
Criminal versus Legitimate Activities
In The Flivver King, Ford uses his money and power to redefine the meaning of “criminal” and “legitimate.” That is, by choosing to finance certain criminal activities, he renders them morally and socially acceptable, at least within his own companies and the towns they dominate; by treating certain legal, ordinary, or morally decent activities as if they were criminal offenses, he transforms such activities as workers’ discussions of their working conditions into something dangerous and subject to harsh, even violent punishment:
That was the way matters stood in all the automobile towns, the steel and rubber and oil towns of this land of the free and home of the brave; the effort of men to meet and discuss their grievances among themselves was a semi-criminal activity, in which one engaged not merely at peril of his job, but of his life and limb (207).
Ford also transforms honest men into crooks and crooked men into “respectable” (again, at least within the Ford universe) ones. For example, he hires criminals and thugs like Hank to work in his service department, thus giving them legitimate jobs at a major company. The ex-Navy man Harry Bennett is “hard of face and of fist” (163) when Ford hires him, but Sinclair does not mention Bennett’s involvement in any illegal activities; however, Bennett does become a thug when he goes to work for Ford. Some of the Detroit police appear to flout Mayor Murphy’s orders to support the workers in their march, and choose, instead, to join Ford’s private police in attacking the unarmed workers; this is an illegal action that makes the police criminals in the eyes of the law.
Driving a Car to the Countryside to Buy Cheap Vegetables
Abner’s desire to own his own car in order to drive Milly and the children to the countryside on the weekend and buy cheap vegetables is a recurring motif in The Flivver King. It contains typical elements of the American Dream, car ownership and the aspiration toward a harmonious nuclear family.
However, the aspects of the countryside and the cheap vegetables make it more specific to Abner. His desire to escape at weekends suggests a need for relief from work, and at the same time a fundamental acceptance of working conditions (Abner does not daydream, for example, about skipping work or about securing a shorter work day; he imagines taking his rest in the free time that is already given him by the company).
That his chosen escape destination is the countryside suggests that there is something stressful or unwholesome about the city, or perhaps simply that, for Abner, the reality of everyday life is synonymous with the industrial cities in which the entirety of The Flivver King takes place. The countryside, though it is not far away, is like another world entirely.
That Abner’s dream includes buying vegetables cheaply suggests several things: first, that meeting the basic nutritional needs of their family is beyond the Shutts’ financial means; second, that Abner attempts, through hard work and thrift, to accommodate himself to exploitative conditions, rather than to change the conditions themselves; and, third, because the dream is never fulfilled, the desire to buy the vegetables cheaply illustrates the way in which even humble aspirations can be frustrated in the brutal industrial economy the novel portrays.
