The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

At the beginning of the novel, Ford is “a lean, thin-faced man of twenty-eight,

with wavy brown hair and an alert expression” (6). He is hardworking and enthusiastic. He spends his work days at the electric company and all his other time in his Detroit garage, tinkering with his invention. As he grows wealthier and more powerful, Ford becomes increasingly callous toward his workers and isolated from other people. After a flirtation with pacifism that goes awry, he becomes a hard-headed businessman.

At 55, Ford is:

slender, grey-haired, with sensitive features and a quick, nervous manner. His long, thin hands were never still, but always playing with something. He was a kind man, unassuming, not changed by his great success. Having had less than a grammar-school education, his speech was full of the peculiarities of the plain folk of the middle west. He had never learned to deal with theories, and when confronted with one, he would scuttle back to the facts like a rabbit to its hole. What he knew, he had learned by experience, and if he learned more, it would be in the same manner (86).

Ford believes in the merits of the capitalist system with an almost religious fervor. Toward the end of his life, Ford is “helpless in the grip of a billion dollars” (160):

He had once been simple and democratic; but his billion dollars now decreed that he should live like an Oriental despot, shut off by himself, surrounded by watchmen and guards. He who had liked to chat with his men and show them the work now would not dare to walk past his own assembly-line without the protection of secret service men. He who had been so talkative had now grown morose and moody. His only associates were ‘yes-men,’ those who agreed with everything he said (161).

Milly, Abner’s wife, is the daughter of working-class people who belong, like the Shutts, to the Original Believers’ Church. She is “fair-haired with lovely bright blue eyes; she was somewhat frail, but Abner didn’t know it; to him she seemed the most wonderful of created things, and very much too good for an ugly, graceless fellow like himself” (20). Their happiness does not last long; Milly’s good nature and beauty are soon exhausted by grinding poverty and the hard work of child-rearing and housekeeping. Still, she maintains her loyalty to Ford even as he exploits her husband and other workers: “Abner and Milly were the most abject of serfs, having pictures of their liege cut from Sunday supplements and pasted on the wall, serving the same purpose as Russian ikons” (145).

John, the eldest of the Shutt children, is a dedicated social climber and loyal Ford worker. He is:

round-faced, rosy, contented and shiny with prosperity. He was married to a fashionable young lady who had been through high school, belonging to a secret society which had secured her from contact with undesirable classmates. The young couple had bought a home in a tract having restrictions which protected them from meeting persons who could not pay eight thousand dollars for a residence (143).

Although Johnny experiences hard times during the Depression, his response to this hardship is not to turn critical of Ford, but rather to invest himself even more wholly in achieving and holding onto his upper-middle-class status.

Annabelle, John’s wife, is “a fashionable young lady who had been through high school, belonging to a secret society which had secured her from contact with undesirable classmates” (143). A status-conscious social climber from the very beginning, she “associated with wives of her own level, carefully avoided those of lower levels, and crudely and persistently sought access to those of higher levels” (143). During the Great Depression, she becomes angry and bitter toward her husband because she suspects him of helping his poor parents financially.

After suffering through the Depression, Annabelle only becomes more determined to grab a piece of the pie and oppose the labor movement. She becomes:

a tight-lipped and sharp-spoken young matron, who managed her two children firmly, stood no nonsense from her maid, and carried the same martinet attitude into her utterances on political and social questions. She wanted labour agitation put down promptly, before it got out of hand, and she took its continuance as a personal affront to herself (201).

Daisy is “a sweet and gentle child, who already at the age of eight knew how to do housework and liked it” (64). She takes pleasure in taking care of baby animals.

Later, as a young girl, she dreams of elegance and luxury, and her highest ambition is to work in an office and wear nice clothes: “Pretty little Daisy had her heart set on studying in a business college; she would be a fine lady stenographer, with plenty of silk stockings” (104). Throughout her life, the agreeable Daisy remains on good terms with all the members of her family, even when they are not on good terms with one another. She even stays close to difficult Hank, of whose activities she does not approve: “The only member of the family who knew about Hank’s affairs was his sister Daisy, who stuck to him loyally, gave him wise advice, and tried to keep him out of the worst of his scrapes” (121). Daisy is also the only member of the family who attends Tom’s college graduation.

Daisy seems to have achieved her ambitions: “She had obtained a position in the office of a concern which made cushions for Ford cars. She was getting twenty-three fifty a week, and she learned her job, and made her employer’s interests her own according to the best copy-book maxims” (138). She soon marries “a promising young book-keeper in Henry’s administration building” (145).

However, the Great Depression soon hits and her husband, Joe Baggs, finds his hours dramatically reduced. By the end of the novel, Daisy becomes “the household drudge, taking her mother’s place. She had lost the bit of looks she once had; she was lean and scrawny, and her hair had lost its gloss and was seldom curled” (208). However, she retains some of her youthful romanticism and is quietly sympathetic to Tom and Dell: “But romance was still in her heart, nourished by the ‘pulps,’ and what could be more romantic than this runaway match of two young labour agitators just out of college?” (208).

Hank is Abner and Milly’s “problem child,” rebellious and disposed to get into trouble and tell lies from earliest childhood:

He resented every Kind of restraint, and would not even let his older brother hold his hand when they were crossing the street. He thought of a fence as something to be climbed over, and he was always on the wrong side of it, breaking a window with a baseball, or getting into other mischief with the ‘gang’ (63).

Hank finds his way into organized crime, driving alcohol across the river from Canada for a gang of bootleggers. After one shootout, he stands accused of manslaughter but is acquitted after his gangster friends find “witnesses” to lie on his behalf.

Hank eventually finds work as one of Ford’s “service department” spies. Although he is a tough, thuggish young man, he still does not want to inform on his brother Tom, which suggests that he feels a sense of family loyalty: “‘I don’t like these melodrama stunts, it takes too damn much explainin’.’ After a moment he added:

‘And besides, I don’t like to hurt the kid.’” (205).

Tom, the Shutts’ youngest child, is bossy from the very beginning:

in spite of being the youngest, he always wanted to tell the others what to do, and when he could not manage boys he managed girls. He was a pretty little fellow, eager and excitable, and with a keen sense of justice which was going to cause him a lot of trouble in the world (64).

When Tom graduates from college and returns to the Detroit area, he is “a young man with no illusions, except possibly as to his own strength and determination; he was going into life with his teeth set in a mood of battle” (192). He is hardworking, well-intentioned, and likable, as well as determined: “Long before [he’d gone] to college [he’d] made up [his] mind that labour was getting a crooked deal, and what [he] got out of [his] four years’ study [is] the facts and figures to prove it” (193).