Cars—or flivvers, as they are sometimes called in the book—initially symbolize the idea that the American Dream is accessible for the masses. When Ford first invents his car, he is an idealist who simply wants to create “a useful article for everybody,” not just for the rich. The car is a new kind of technology that affords the masses greater freedom, opportunity, and prosperity, instantly setting up the car as a representation of the American Dream. Even Abner is able to buy a car after working at Ford’s, suggesting initially that anyone can achieve the American Dream by working hard.
However, as Ford pushes for greater productivity and profit in his factories, the cars take on a more sinister quality, coming to symbolize the way that capitalism can corrupt a person’s idealism. Ford sells cars to be used in World War I despite his personal pacifist stance, indicating how he is foregoing his morals in order to pursue a profit. The sheer number of cars he makes also demonstrates that he cares more about productivity than anything else—in 1927, he makes a million cars in six months and does not increase wages to keep up with those profits. Additionally, when Ford’s security guards kill 4 men and wound 50 others who are marching for union rights, Sinclair notes that Ford’s cars have become the color of “Fresh Human Blood,” suggesting that the cars’ profitability now come at the cost of human life. By the end of the book, Ford is referred to as the “Flivver King,” indicating that the cars’ success has created a power-hungry tyrant, corrupted by greed.
Cars (or “Flivvers”) Quotes in The Flivver King
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.
He loathed war as a stupid, irrational, and altogether hideous thing. He began to give less and less of his time to planning new forges and presses, and more and more to writing, or at any rate having written, statements, interviews, and articles denouncing the war and demanding its end. To other business men, who believed in making all the money you could, and in whatever way you could, this propaganda seemed most unpatriotic; the more so as many of them were actively working to get America into the conflict, and multiply their for- tunes overnight.
Henry Ford was doing more than any man now alive to root out and destroy this old America; but he hadn’t meant to do it, he had thought that men could have the machinery and comforts of a new world, while keeping the ideas of the old. He wanted to go back to his childhood, and he caused millions of other souls to have the same longing.
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. He met few strangers, because everybody was trying to get some of his money, and he was sick of being asked. His secretaries helped to keep him alone, because he had made a fool of himself so many times, they could never be sure what he would say next.
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.
“You should let yourself be happier, dear,” the wife was saying. “You have done a great deal of good in the world.”
“Have I?” said the Flivver King. “Sometimes I wonder, can anybody do any good. If anybody knows where this world is heading, he knows a lot more than me.”
Cars (or “Flivvers”) Symbol Timeline in The Flivver King
