Abner Shutt Character Analysis

They were poor, but far from hopeless; not only had they the certainty of a blessed state in the hereafter, but the children were all going to school, and the family shared the faith of all American families, that the young ones would rise in the world. America was the land of opportunity, and wonderful things were happening every day. The poorest boy had the right to become president; and beside this grand prize were innumerable smaller ones, senators, governors, judges, and all the kings, lords, and lesser nobility of industry. Life in this land was a sort of perpetual lottery; every mother who bore a child, even in a dingy slum, was putting her hand into a grab-bag, and might draw out a dazzling jewel.

All the nations had hard times, the newspapers assured him; it was a law of nature and there was no way to escape it. But now prosperity was coming back, and America remained the greatest country in the world, and the richest; if you worked hard, and lived a sober and God-fearing life, success was bound to come to you.

And while Abner and Milly were thus fulfilling their dream, Mr. Ford was occupied with his; to bring it about that when the little Shutts grew up—and likewise the little Smiths and Schultzes and Slupskys and Steins—they should find millions of little horseless carriages available at second-hand prices, to convey them to any place on the land-surface of the globe except a few mountain-tops.

In the year after the panic he produced 6,181 cars, a little over three per worker; but within three years he was managing to get thirty-five thousand cars out of six thousand workers.

Of course nobody ever showed these figures to Abner Shutt, and they wouldn’t have meant much to him anyhow. In that period, while learning to make twice as many cars for his employer, Abner was getting a fifteen percent increase in wages, and was considering himself one of the luckiest workers in America. And maybe he was, at that. There were breadlines in Detroit for two winters, reminding him of those dreadful years of his boyhood which had weakened him in body, mind, and soul.

Some persons would not have cared for this life, but Abner didn’t know any such persons, and had no contact with their ideas. He did not think of the Ford plant as an immense and glorified sweatshop; he thought of it as a place of both duty and opportunity, where he did what he was told and got his living in return. […] If you had asked him to tell you his ultimate dream of happiness on this earth, he would have answered that it was to have money enough to buy one of those cars—a bruised and battered one, any one so long as it would run, so that he could ride to work under shelter when it was raining, and on Sundays could pack Milly and the kids into it, and take them into the country, where his oldest brother worked for a farmer, and they could buy vegetables at half the price charged at the corner grocery.

It was the year of a presidential election. There was a college president by the name of Wilson running on the Democratic ticket, and he tried hard to win Abner away from his staunch Republican principles, making eloquent speeches about “the New Freedom.” Abner read some of his golden words in the newspapers; but also he read that hard times came when the Democratic party got in, and he was more afraid of hard times than of any tyrant.

It passed Abner’s comprehension how any man or woman could fail to be grateful for such divine compassion on the part of Mr. Ford. But human nature is notoriously perverse, and many of the men grumbled bitterly against having their private lives investigated, and they changed the name of the new department from “Social” to “Snooping.” Instead of complying loyally with the terms of the agreement, they set to work to circumvent it by diabolical schemes. […] Some of these tricks were caught up with, and the tricksters were fired, and there was not a little spying and tale-bearing and suspicion.

The matter was not stated thus crudely in the American newspapers; but their tone and contents began to change to meet this situation. Whereas in 1916 Abner and Henry had read about the horrors of war, in 1917 they read about the horrors of submarine war. Also they began to read about the glories of French civilization, and the humane ideals for which the British ruling classes had always stood. So presently Abner Shutt began to say to all his fellows in the shop, “By Heck, them Huns ought to be put down!” And in February the pacifist Henry Ford was telling a New York Times reporter about a bright idea he had for a “one-man submarine,” which he described as “a pill on a pole”—the pole being fastened in front of the submarine and the pill being a bomb.

He talked about the matter to the children, also, and warned them to have nothing to do with this evil race. It so happened that the boy who had led the gang of freight-car robbers had been named Levy, and of course that explained everything. It made Abner more inclined to mercy for his son, and Abner talked with him and got the names of men who were making money out of gambling, whiskey, and dope-selling in their home town. Some were Jewish names and some were not, but it was the Jews whom Abner fixed in his mind.

Such things do not seem much to outsiders, but they are what break the spirit of poor people who have always earned what they spent and kept themselves “respectable.” Abner had come now to the point where he had to forget that his second son was a bootlegger and a gangster, and let Milly take gratefully whatever money Hank brought.

So there was Henry Ford’s answer to Abner Shutt and the rest of his unemployed workers. Or rather, it was the answer of the billion dollars which had taken charge of Henry’s life. A score or two of men lay in hospitals with bullet-wounds, also with handcuffs on their wrists and chains fastening them to their beds; but not a single policeman or “service man” had a bullet-wound.

The Ford Model A had gone back to the old days when you could have only one color. It might be called Arabian sand, or Dawn grey, or Niagara blue, or Gun Metal blue—but it would always be Fresh Human Blood.