It’s 1892 in Detroit, Michigan, and Henry Ford has finally completed the first model of his “horseless carriage,” which runs on a gasoline powered engine. Though many of the neighbors are skeptical that Ford’s invention will amount to anything, Ford insists that he’s going to revolutionize transportation for the masses. Young Abner Shutt admires Ford’s invention. He often watches Ford work and helps push Ford’s car home when it occasionally breaks down.
At first, Ford has a difficult time getting investors, but after 12 years of tinkering with his invention, he holds a race against another car and wins. Buoyed by the results, Ford raises $28,000 to start a company. When Ford sets up shop, Abner, who is now 24, asks him for a job, and Ford agrees to hire him. Abner works on screwing spindle-nuts onto the axle of the car to secure the wheel in place.
While Ford’s investors want to market the car only to rich people and make new models every year, Ford wants to mass produce a cheap car that everyone will want and ultimately be able to afford. Ford’s strategy proves successful, and he quickly earns millions of dollars selling the Ford Model T. As he expands his business, he hires more workers and divides the labor so that each man is doing a small task. When the time comes for someone to oversee some of the assembly because there are so many men working, Ford promotes Abner to sub-foreman, and he makes $2.75 a day. Abner is thrilled, and considers himself to be one of the luckiest men alive. After Abner is promoted, Ford also implements a new device called the assembly line, which allows men to assemble the car along a belt so that they don’t have to move. Dividing the labor further, the belt reduces the time for assembling a car from 12 hours and 33 minutes to 93 minutes. After implementing the belt, Ford periodically speeds it up without the men knowing, and if the men can’t keep pace, they’re fired.
While Ford expands his business, Abner expands his family: he marries a girl named Milly and has four children: John, Hank, Daisy, and Tom Jr. Ford and Abner both feel successful and like they are achieving their own versions of the American Dream. Ford pays his workers well, figuring that employees will want to buy a car eventually and he will earn the money back. But as wages go up, so do prices of consumer goods and real estate, and Abner feels as poor as he has always been.
When World War I begins in 1917, Ford is initially opposed to it, and Abner follows suit because he looks up to his employer. As the war drags on, however, Ford recognizes the profit in making trucks and ambulances for the U.S. government and the Allies, so he puts his personal opposition aside and makes $29 million dollars doing war work. Though he says that he is going to return the profits to the government, he never does so.
After the war, Ford buys a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. When a Russian man named Boris Brasol tells him that the world’s problems are due to a conspiracy of the Jews, Ford begins printing anti-Semitic articles in the paper. Abner reads the paper and starts absorbing these viewpoints. Then, one day, a man from the Ku Klux Klan asks Abner to join the organization; he got Abner’s name and address from the paper’s subscription list. Abner joins and learns more about the “evil race” of the Jews and starts burning crosses on the lawns of Jews, Catholics, communists, and other people whom they view as a threat to “Protestant Gentile America.”
Abner’s children grow up and start to find their own success: John goes to Ford’s trade school and becomes a welder in Ford’s factories; he eventually rises through the ranks and is able to marry a girl named Annabelle and buy an elegant home. Hank gets involved in smuggling alcohol from Canada to Detroit, but Abner ignores this business and is happy when Hank turns up with money for him and Milly. Daisy studies at a business college and ultimately works in the office of a company that makes cushions for Ford, while Tom Jr. is recruited at Michigan State for football and starts to learn about the labor movement there.
The 1920s are a time of relative prosperity for Ford and the Shutts, though at times Ford “reorganizes” his factories and his employees are out of work for months with no benefits while Ford updates his machinery. When this happens, Abner depletes his savings and looks for lower-paying jobs. But as soon as he is back working, he forgets all his grievances and is grateful for the money flowing in—he knows that if he complains, he will be fired and replaced with a younger, better worker.
In 1929, the Great Depression hits. Abner and hundreds of thousands of other workers are laid off from Ford’s and have no benefits. The only member of the Shutt family who keeps their job is Hank, and the money he brings home is lifesaving. As the depression wears on, both Abner’s father (Tom Sr.) and mother die, and Abner’s heart breaks when he is too poor to afford a proper burial for his mother. Ford, meanwhile, loses hundreds of millions of dollars and has to hire a security team to protect himself from angry workers. Inside the plant, he also uses his security to make sure that workers aren’t conspiring to unionize.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president and begins enacting New Deal policies like providing relief to the poor and unemployed, and the economy starts to pick up again. However, profits pick up far more quickly than wages; many people are still unemployed, and the conditions in the plant are worse than ever. And even though Ford is the wealthiest man in the world, he is isolated, paranoid, and feels completely at the mercy of his billion dollar fortune.
After Tom Jr. graduates, he returns home with the intention of getting a job at Ford’s and trying to organize the workers into a union so that they can have a decent living wage. At first, Tom is successful, but when Ford’s spies discover that Tom is trying to start a union movement, the company fires him.
The book’s final chapters are split between Tom and Ford over the course of a single evening; Tom is speaking at a labor meeting, while Ford attends a lavish party at the home of a wealthy friend. Tom speaks passionately about how the workers need to unionize and demand their share of Ford’s profits so that they never again have to experience the destitution of the Great Depression. Ford, meanwhile, eats decadent food and dances in the old American style; he is akin to a king. After the meeting, five men drive Tom off the road as he is going home and mercilessly beat him and his wife, Dell. As Ford heads home from the party in a limousine along the same road, Dell tries to call out to the limousine for help, but Ford’s driver simply swerves to avoid her, and Ford doesn’t notice her.
