100 pages • 3 hours read
Upton SinclairThe Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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 31-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary
Back in Highland Park, Abner faces an increasingly scarce, as well as “lazy and shiftless” (78), labor force. His elderly parents have also moved in after his father was fired from his job. The children appear to prefer their “gentle and kind” grandmother over their “peevish” mother, which leads to conflicts between Milly and her mother-in-law, especially over Hank, who is now 11 and “beginning to display the uncontrolled nature which was to cause unhappiness to himself and his parents” (79).
Abner decides that it is normal both for women to quarrel and for boys to be disobedient, and decides not to worry. His wages have increased again, but so have consumer prices. Although the family now owns a car, Abner has been unable to fulfill his dream of buying inexpensive vegetables in the countryside at the weekend, as the farmers have raised their prices, too. The children, who have never experienced hunger and do not have to work, are accustomed to material comfort, but Abner feels that hard times could come again.
Chapter 32 Summary
Ford’s factory is flourishing, making a new Model T every 25 seconds, and he has expanded into a wide variety of industries, gaining control of raw materials and manufacturing his own steel, iron ore, coal, glass, rubber and cement.
Both Abner and Ford, who had initially opposed the war, have begun to support it. Because Germany has sold so many goods and lent so much money to the Allies, if the Allies lose the war, American industry will fail. The press, which initially wrote about “the horrors of war” (81), has gradually begun to write favorably about the cultures of the Allied nations and to focus on the horrors of submarine war (that is, on the horrors perpetrated by Germans).
The U.S. joins the war. Abner earnestly heeds the papers’ warnings about German spies’ intentions to infiltrate American factories, and Ford begins to make military vehicles, soldiers’ helmets, armor, and listening devices.
Chapter 33 Summary
For the next two years, Abner has plenty of work and earns a good wage. Making his house payments has become easy. When Ford runs for the Senate, Abner and the other workers become momentarily interested in politics. Ford loses, but later successfully proves that his opponent is guilty of buying votes.
The Allies win the war, but soon Americans fear a new political enemy: the Bolsheviks. The newspapers claim that many of them are infiltrating the U.S., and that labor agitators in factories are paid by Moscow. Abner thinks that the agitators seem the same as they always did, “tired and overstrained workers” (84), but does not question the idea that they are Bolsheviks.
Chapters 31-33 Analysis
Chapter 31 is an early moment in the novel’s understated depiction of the unravelling of the American Dream. Over the course of the novel, the Shutts achieve success that gradually erodes.
The Shutt family’s first seeds of discord appear as Milly and her mother-in-law argue; however, Abner’s assumption that women are wont to quarrel, together with widely accepted cultural stereotypes surrounding mothers-in-law, make their disagreements more a foreshadowing of future family tensions than a significant concern in themselves.
Abner’s inability to fulfill his dream of driving the family to the countryside to buy cheap vegetables is far more significant. In The Flivver King, the car represents mobility, both literal (it allows the driver to visit faraway places) and figurative (Ford achieves his wealth by making cars, and the upwardly-mobile middle classes buy cars as status symbols that advertise their success). For Abner, the car itself is important, but using the car to visit the countryside (a pure, relaxing place) and buy inexpensive produce (healthy, affordable food that will stave off hunger both by filling the family’s bellies and by saving money for future purchases) is his true dream. Fulfilling this dream would, for Abner, signify having achieved enough safety and stability to have “made it.”
The farmers’ rising prices indicate that there is no place or sector in America whose economy is untouched by larger economic forces; the purity and safety that Abner seeks simply does not exist within the capitalist system.
Similarly, Abner’s and Ford’s new pro-war stance, and the implied reason for it (that losing the war will destroy the American economy) suggests that morals, too, are unavoidably contaminated by the capitalist system. Because of their vested interests in the economy (Ford wants to continue acquiring wealth, and Abner is anxious for his family’s security), neither of the two men can maintain his anti-war position.
These chapters also introduce Communism and the fear that US labor activists are Bolshevik or Russian agents; this fear will come to dominate both Ford’s mind and the events of the second half of the novel.
