Information and the news are crucial aspects of The Flivver King. Early on, Henry Ford recognizes the power of controlling the narrative around his business and his personal life. Many characters in the novel rely solely on the press to help them understand economic and political issues. As such, Ford tries to shape the news, taking over a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. However, Sinclair exposes the press’s dishonesty and bias, and how it leads many people—including Abner, one of Ford’s workers—to latch onto conspiracy theories and become involved in violent organizations. In this way, Sinclair suggests that media bias and misinformation are powerful forces that can dangerously affect people’s political ideologies—and their lives more broadly.
Abner and Ford’s initial attitudes toward the media demonstrate how powerfully it affects people’s ideologies, opinions, and actions. Leading up to the 1912 presidential election between Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican William Howard Taft, Abner reads about the candidates in the newspaper. He likes some of the ideas that Wilson has, but he also reads that “hard times [come] when the Democratic party [gets] in,” and so he decides to vote Republican. This illustrates how even a single assertion in the newspapers can have a great effect on its readers, as the analysis can have more of an effect than the candidate’s words themselves on how people vote. At the beginning of World War I, newspapers advocate for the United States to remain peaceful and neutral, and Abner and Ford both adhere to this view. But as the munitions and banking industries realize that if the Allies lose, they will lose their business, the newspapers in turn begin to change their tone, spurred by the influence of these industries. Sinclair describes how, in 1916, newspapers tell of “the horrors of war”—yet in 1917, they begin to report on the “glories of French civilization” and the “humane ideals for which the British ruling classes had always stood.” In turn, Ford and Abner both start to change their minds about America getting involved in the war. This is particularly crucial for Ford, who decides to design a one-man submarine with a bomb and starts selling cars to the Allies. These changes demonstrate how the slant of the news can change global events and public support for them. The same is true of Abner’s view of the labor movement: when Abner attends a march to protest Ford’s treatment of workers, he likes one of the speaker’s “workers’ talk” about organizing. But later, Abner is completely convinced by the newspaper that the speakers were “Red agitators” and that he shouldn’t have been at the march or listened to the speakers. Even though he liked the movement, the paper’s association of those ideas with communism, and its negative bias against communism, undermines Abner’s support for unionization.
Acknowledging the newspapers’ impact, Ford decides to start a newspaper himself—but he is equally susceptible to misinformation and prints anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, illustrating how easily news organizations can become biased and misinformed. Ford helps a friend in debt by buying the Dearborn Independent, a local newspaper in the Detroit area. He wants a journal that would “speak for the people’s welfare” and “have the courage to give them the truth about what was going on.” Even in buying the Dearborn, Ford acknowledges the problems with the existing press and the need for clear, accountable journalism. However, Ford’s paper also begins to deal in misinformation. A Russian journalist investigating the “wicked forces” trying to wreck Europe meets with Ford and tells him that all of the troubles in the world are due to a conspiracy led by Jewish people who are “plotting to seize the mastery of the world.” Terrified by his story, Ford publishes a three-year-long series of anti-Semitic articles—and the American people, trusting Ford, take his words for truth. Ford’s newspaper is susceptible to bias even though he bought the paper with the intention of giving people “the truth”— he even begins to deal in harmful and discriminatory misinformation, despite his honest intentions.
Abner joins the Ku Klux Klan in response to the information he reads in the Dearborn Independent, which illustrates how misinformation can manipulate the ideas and actions of those who read it. Abner subscribes faithfully to Ford’s newspaper out of loyalty to his employer. He gradually starts to believe its ideas, particularly because he uneducated, and he becomes skeptical of those who try to discredit Ford’s ideas. Abner begins avoiding stores with Jewish names on them and warns his children about this “evil race.” Thus, Ford’s newspaper not only makes false claims, but in doing so, it spreads a dangerous anti-Semitic ideology. The danger of spreading this ideology becomes even clearer when the KKK obtains the subscription list of the Dearborn Independent and contacts the people who receive it, including Abner. Coming to Abner’s home, KKK members explain that the organization is being revived to put down “Jews, Catholics, Reds, and other alien enemies.” This convinces Abner to join the KKK: he starts burning crosses on the lawns of these “culprits,” feeling assured that he is protecting “Protestant Gentile American civilization.” Thus, the press not only changes Abner’s ideology, but it also leads him to join a hate group and incites him to violence, illustrating the dangerous path that misinformation and media bias can lead people down.
The only way to respond to misinformation, it seems, is through education. Tom Jr., Abner’s youngest son, goes to college and takes up the workers’ movement. He acknowledges that the newspapers will likely call him a “Red” (meaning a communist), but he says, “Long before I went to college I'd made up my mind that labor was getting a crooked deal, and what I've got out of my four years' study are the facts and figures to prove it.” Tom hopes that educating the workers with facts about their situation will spur them to organize—just as Sinclair hopes that The Flivver King, his own exposé on the automobile industry, will inspire people to organize as well.
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Misinformation, Media Bias, and Ignorance 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The Ford empire was not a metaphor but a fact, not a sneer but a sociological analysis. Henry was more than any feudal lord had been, because he had not merely the power of the purse, but those of the press and the radio; he could make himself omnipresent to his vassals, he was master not merely of their bread and butter but of their thoughts and ideals.
I am greatness, I am power, I am pride, pomp, and dominion, said the fortune of Henry Ford; I am a dynasty, surviving into the distant future, making history which will not be “bunk,” carrying the name of Ford and the glory of Ford to billions of unborn people. But there are evil men, devils in human form loose in the world, who plot to take that glory from me; who desire that the world shall talk, not about Henry and Edsel, and Henry II, and Benson, and Josephine Clay, and William Ford, now fully grown and ready for their share of glory, but about persons with names such as Trotsky and Zinoviev and Bela Kun and Radek and Liebknecht and Luxemburg and Jaurès and Blum.
