The Flivver King Study Guide

Upton Sinclair was born in 1878 to Upton Sinclair, Sr. and Priscilla Sinclair. His mother’s family was very affluent while his father was an unsuccessful liquor salesman; this gave Sinclair insight as to how both the rich and the poor lived in the late 19th century. In 1888, the Sinclair family moved to Queens, New York, and Sinclair started at the City College of New York just before his 14th birthday. He wrote dime novels and magazine articles to move his parents into an apartment when he was 17 years old. He then attended Columbia University, where he majored in law but also studied writing. After graduating, Sinclair married Meta Fuller in 1900, and the pair had their first child, David, in 1901. Sinclair then pursued a writing career, devoting his work to criticizing the social and economic conditions of the early 20th century. He went undercover to write the political exposé The Jungle, which addressed concerns in Chicago’s meatpacking plant. Following the success of the book, he ran (unsuccessfully) as a Socialist candidate for Congress. In 1911, Sinclair and Fuller divorced, and in 1913, Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough. From 1913 to 1914, Sinclair made three trips to the coal fields of Colorado to write his book King Coal. He then helped to organize against Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company, and in 1927, he wrote Oil! Sinclair also made multiple attempts to run for Congress throughout the 1920s and ran for the governorship of California in 1934. Sinclair continued to write throughout the 1940s and 1950s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1943 for Dragon’s Teeth. Sinclair’s wife died in 1961, and he married for a third time, to Mary Elizabeth Willis. Following her death in 1967, Sinclair died a year later in 1968, in New Jersey.

The Flivver King spans from 1892 to 1936, covering many significant periods of United States and global history as well as specific historical events surrounding the development of cars and unions. Sinclair touches on the Panic of 1893, which was caused by the failure of a major Argentine bank and led to global economic uncertainty. The less confidence people held in the banking system, the more they removed their money from it, and the further stocks and the economy fell. The next major world event that Sinclair focuses on is World War I, which began in the summer of 1914 and ended in November of 1918 and primarily involved Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire (the Axis Powers) fighting against France, Britain, and Russia (the Allied Powers). At first, the U.S. government remained neutral in the conflict, but over time, as the munitions and banking industries became more involved in funding the Allied Powers, President Woodrow Wilson expanded the army and navy. Following Wilson’s reelection in 1916, the United States entered the conflict, and Henry Ford helped manufacture vehicles and other equipment for the war. The final period that Sinclair focuses on is the Great Depression, which began with the Stock Market crash of 1929 (Black Tuesday) and continued through the 1930s. As a result,  of the crash, the economy spiraled because of reduced spending, falling confidence, and lower production, and U.S. unemployment rose to 23 percent. This resulted in major political changes in the U.S.: in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected by a wide margin to enact a recovery plan called the New Deal. The New Deal instituted programs to provide relief for the unemployment, recover the economy, and reform the financial system to prevent another depression. At this time, the labor movement expanded greatly as well, which is also explored in The Flivver King. In 1933, most union members belonged to skilled craft unions, but F.D.R.’s National Industrial Recovery Act enabled collective bargaining among workers within a given industry, while the National Labor Relations Act required businesses to negotiate with any union supported by the majority of their employees. This is why Henry Ford was so intent on preventing his workers from unionizing and even resorted to violence to do so. While United Auto Workers of America (UAW) was founded in 1935, Ford would not agree to a collective bargaining agreement with them until 1941.

Upton Sinclair has written several other muckraking novels, including The Jungle, King Coal, and Oil!, which tackle the meatpacking, coal, and oil industries, respectively. Other muckraking books of the period include Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, which documents the squalid living conditions in New York City in the 1880s, Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities, which focuses on political corruption. Other books that focus on Henry Ford include his autobiography, My Life and Work, Steven Watts’s The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, and Sidney Olson’s Young Henry Ford: A Picture History of the First Forty Years.