100 pages • 3 hours read
The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
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Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Chapters 13-15
Chapters 16-18
Chapters 19-21
Chapters 22-24
Chapters 25-27
Chapters 28-30
Chapters 31-33
Chapters 34-36
Chapters 37-39
Chapters 40-42
Chapters 43-45
Chapters 46-48
Chapters 49-51
Chapters 52-54
Chapters 55-57
Chapters 58-60
Chapters 61-63
Chapters 64-66
Chapters 67-69
Chapters 70-72
Chapters 73-75
Chapters 76-78
Chapters 79-81
Chapters 82-84
Chapters 85-92
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
A Detroit child, Abner Shutt, tells his mother about a neighbor, Henry Ford’s, attempts to build an automobile: “Mom, there’s a feller down the street says he’s goin’ to make a wagon that’ll run without a hoss” (1). Abner’s mother responds that Ford sounds like a “crank” (1).
All the neighborhood boys make regular visits to Ford, who works at the electric company during the day and tinkers with his project in his shed until late at night. The neighborhood adults are surprised that Ford even works on Sunday, the “Lord’s day” (3), but eventually grow accustomed to his habits. However, only the children believe that the car will ever run.
Ford’s car resembles an oversized baby carriage built for twins, with four bicycle wheels and a handle for steering. Ford explains the principles of the engine he is attempting to build to the children and says that attaching it to the axles should allow it to move the car. However, something usually goes wrong and the car does not run. The rudimentary two-cylinder combustion engine makes a loud noise and emits “a grey smoke of disagreeable odor” (2) that startle both the neighbors and Ford himself.
Chapter 2 Summary
Abner’s father, Tom Shutt, works in a factory that makes freight cars for the railway. His work is well-paid but physically exhausting, and Shutt works ten-hour days to support his family. The family—Shutt, his wife, their daughter, and their four sons—lives in poverty in one side of a duplex next door to the drunken, abusive Mr. O’Rourke, his wife, and their nine children. The Shutts are an industrious, optimistic family who believe that hard work will yield social and financial success. Followers of the Original Believers sect, they practice abstinence from alcohol.
One night, Abner invites his father to visit Ford and take a look at the “horseless wagon” (6). Shutt’s curiosity is piqued and he takes his child to visit the inventor. The two observe as Ford tests the steering on the vehicle, and then Abner introduces his father to Ford. Shutt remarks that if Ford can make the invention work he will surely be able to sell it to rich people; Ford responds that he intends to mass-produce his invention in order to sell it not only to the rich, but also to common people like the Shutts, who he claims can afford it:
Did you ever stop to think how much it costs to get to your work? Suppose it’s ten cents a day, that’s thirty dollars a year—and for one person. There’s no reason a wagon like this shouldn’t be built to carry four people at once (7).
Chapter 3 Summary
In this chapter we learn that 28-year-old Henry Ford, who earns a modest wage as a machinist and runs a sawmill, has devoted himself to learning as much as possible about machinery, and that he invents various devices for his own personal use.
Ford has spent all his spare time and money on his invention, but so far, the horseless carriage has been beset by a series of problems. One evening in April 1892, after two days of continuous work, Ford announces to his wife that the invention is complete. He starts the car and drives off in a rainstorm. When he returns a long time later, his wife learns that the horseless carriage did in fact run, and that Ford drove as far as he had intended to drive; however, the carriage’s shaking had loosened a nut, so Ford had to push the car back home. Still, Ford is jubilant that his invention works.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These first three chapters introduce us to the novel’s main characters, Abner Shutt and Henry Ford, whose lives and fates will be intertwined and contrasted throughout the book.
Abner is an American everyman, humble and hardworking; in these chapters, as a child, he is also more open to new ideas than the adults around him and represents the forward-looking, optimistic, and innovation-loving character of the American people.
In these chapters, Ford, too, is presented as a sympathetic character. He is optimistic, hardworking, and willing to put all of his time and energy into learning new skills and using them to create an invention that will better the lives of others. In this respect, he is a more creative and enterprising version of the American everyman. Like his young nation as a whole, and like the child Abner, he has not lost his sense of the boundless potential to change the status quo, and Sinclair presents this as a positive quality.
However, Ford’s willingness to work on Sundays (“the Lord’s Day”) suggests that he, unlike his neighbors, considers himself above or exempt from certain requirements of piety and custom. As the novel progresses, Ford’s hubris and callousness toward others increases, suggesting that he not only considers himself exempt not only from the requirements of piety, but also from those of common decency.
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