Initially, the main characters in The Flivver King are idealistic. Henry Ford is an optimistic engineer who wants to improve Americans’ lives by providing people with a more efficient means of transportation, paying his workers well, and protecting American values like freedom, opportunity, and the idea that hard work can earn prosperity. Abner Shutt, meanwhile, is a loyal worker who wants to achieve the American Dream of working hard to provide greater opportunity and a better quality of life for his children. But over the course of the novel, corruption is laid bare in many of America’s institutions, and the hopes, dreams, and morals of most of the characters are completely eroded. By charting the journey of the character’s idealism to their disillusion with American life, Sinclair suggests that traditional American ideals—equal opportunity, success through honest work, and a peaceful family life—are essentially unattainable without compromising one’s values.
At first, Ford is idealistic and firmly believes in the American Dream. Ford’s belief in American values is what causes him to invent a car in the first place: he wants people to have greater mobility around the country. Sinclair describes him as an “idealist” who believes in “making people happy.” Ford also wants to be able to pay his workers a high wage, so that they will be happy working for him. This optimism is rooted firmly in the traditional American values of freedom, opportunity, and the ability to work hard and make a living. At first, Ford’s optimism and morals even supersede his desire for power on a global stage. During World War I, Ford refuses to sell his cars for use in the war. Sinclair writes, “he was a sincere idealist, priding himself upon the fact that he had created a ‘clean’ fortune, earned by producing useful things and not by robbing or oppressing anybody. […] He loathed war as a stupid, irrational, and altogether hideous thing.” In this way, Ford has faith in his ability to make money through honest work, without resorting to criminality or profiting off of warmongering.
Yet, as Ford pursues his automobile empire, it comes at the expense of his ideals, suggesting that it’s much easier to attain the American Dream by abandoning one’s morals. When America gets involved in World War I, Ford openly sells his cars for war because he recognizes how much he can profit from it, despite his previously held conviction to keeping his fortune “clean.” In addition, although Ford says that he will return the war profits he makes, he never does so, keeping the $29 million he makes on the war. Rather than maintaining his ideals, he discards them in favor of profit. Ford also allows inequality in how his employees are paid and promoted. The man leading the department that oversees these promotions “[sees] injustice done, and trie[s] to intervene, and discover[s] that Ford [is] pretending not to know anything about actions which had been taken upon his express orders.” The man realizes that “the period of idealism [is] past, and that there [is] no longer any place for a Christian gentleman in the Ford business machine.” This demonstrates how Ford’s empire has put him at odds with morality and idealism.
Like Ford, Abner initially believes in the American Dream, but his children’s fates illustrate how this goal is unattainable without abandoning one’s morals. Sinclair describes how growing up, Abner “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.” Abner, too, believes in the American Dream—particularly when it comes to making sure that his children can have a better life than he had. Abner’s oldest son, John, receives technical training as a welder and quickly rises through the ranks of the Ford company—to the point that he is promoted to “the class which receives a monthly salary.” He gets married and buys an elegant home. But when the Great Depression hits, John and his wife, Annabelle, are forced to sell their home, and “John [is] right back where he had been born—one generation from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves!” This illustrates that the American Dream is fickle—and particularly during an economic crisis, even someone with better education and a good work ethic may not have greater opportunity than his father. Meanwhile, Abner’s second son, Hank, gets a lucrative but illegal job smuggling alcohol from Canada into Prohibition-era Detroit. During the Great Depression, Ford hires Hank and other criminals to keep an eye on the workers and stop any insurrections or talk of unionizing. Because so many members of the Shutt family are out of work during the Great Depression, Hank often gives them money. It is a perversion of the American Dream that the only child whose life is an improvement over his father’s is a criminal. The contrast between John and Hank demonstrates the overarching disillusionment with American idealism. John and Annabelle are disgusted with Ford’s greed and frustrated that Hank makes a better living as a criminal than they do as honest, hard-working people. Because characters who give up their morality, like Ford and Hank, are much more able to find success and security, Sinclair suggests that the American Dream is only attainable by abandoning one’s idealism.
Related Themes from Other Texts
American Idealism and Disillusionment ThemeTracker
American Idealism and Disillusionment Quotes in The Flivver King
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.
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.
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.
Dean Marquis had been a wise counsellor during the five years he was in Henry’s employ. But now in several cases he saw injustice done, and tried to intervene, and discovered that Henry was pretending not to know anything about actions which had been taken upon his express orders; he promised to investigate, but did nothing; and so, reluctantly, Dean Marquis realized that the period of idealism was past, and that there was no longer any place for a Christian gentleman in the Ford business machine.
He showed how Jews, controlling stage and screen, were depraving American morals; they were doing this, not because it paid, but as a deliberate plot to break down American civilization. Drunkenness was spreading, and it was not because the Jews were making money out of liquor, but because they wanted America drunk. Jews controlled the clothing trade, and so American girls were wearing short skirts. Jews controlled music, and so the American people listened to jazz and danced themselves crazy.
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.
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.
“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.”
