Upton Sinclair's The Flivver King: A Story Of Ford-America

Upton Sinclair authored “The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America” in 1937 to summon the auto manufacturing industry to join worker’s unions. He chronicled Ford’s accomplishments in the early 20th century as it relates to the history of his production of the Ford vehicles. He inserts a pivotal fictional character, Abner Shutt, as well as Abner’s fictional family members to advance his ideologies. The publication does an excellent job of relating Henry Ford’s story from the beginning of his career to the end, but I found myself confused at times due to the fictional characters adopted by Sinclair. Flivver King generally was a well-written book that engages in superfluous granularity of how Henry Ford started his successful automobile business,

The storyline took place on Bagley Street in the city of Detroit. The book began with the fictional character, Abner Shutt, running to his mother hollering, “There’s a feller down the street says he’s goin’ to make a wagon that’ll run without a hoss” (3).” Everyone in town thought Ford was crazy; with the exception of a handful of little children and Abner Shutt. In the publication, Abner Shutt articulates how Ford’s Company progresses through the years, how Ford deals with the problems in the world, and how Ford navigates within his own company. The company had invaluable successes that dramatically increased the production of cars. One such innovation was the idea and implementation of the conveyor

“There came another panic in the fall of 1907, which filled the city with idle and starving men, and taught humility to those who kept their jobs” (20-21). But, Ford was able to make it out of most of the situations and was still selling his cars. At times reading the book I was confused with where we were in the world, what wars were going on, and how close in time they were. I would have preferred that the book would have focused less on the fictional character, and to have told the story through Henry Ford’s eyes. I feel that there would have been less confusion as to what was going on in the world during his