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 58-60Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 58 Summary
In the Shutts’ area, 100,000 other families struggle to make ends meet. The poorest families beg, while the richest try to borrow money to save “a bank or an industry” (151). Abner and Milly do not understand the basic laws of supply and demand, and Milly frequently scolds Abner and Daisy for failing to fetch better prices for the things they sell or pawn.
The Shutts soon cannot afford to pay their property taxes. However, because Ford’s plant has moved to River Rouge and a large number of employees put their homes on the market at once, houses in Highland Park are worth very little. Moreover, because of the financial crisis, potential buyers cannot secure loans.
Abner and Milly decide to rent rooms out in order to make money, but the poor working-men who rent their rooms are unable to pay the rent and find ways to scheme the Shutts out of free food and lodging. The one lodger who has a job sexually harasses Daisy, and when she refuses him he takes revenge by cheating her family out of $15.
Tom Shutt, Abner’s father, dies during the Depression’s first winter, and Abner’s mother dies the next year. The family is unable to pay for her burial, and Abner and Milly must take any of the ill-gotten money Hank can spare. However, the bootlegging business is struggling, too. While Tommy has excelled as a football player, the university’s athletic committee refuses to support him any longer. Tommy decides that “since he had to do real work, he would do real studying too, and see what there was to be got out of a college education” (153).
Chapter 59 Summary
Johnny and Annabelle, “that prosperous and self-satisfied young couple” (153), occupy a two-story house along with their two children. They have a mortgage, a car payment, and furniture payments totaling $160 a month, and if they fail to pay off their house it will be repossessed.
Johnny is laid off, and the family panics. John, desperate, takes a much lower-paid job doing the same work in the same department that laid him off. He and Annabelle give up the house, the furniture, and the car, and move to a smaller home in a working-class neighbourhood “to which Annabelle couldn’t invite any of her friends” (155).
Instead of blaming the capitalist system, Annabelle grows angry with John and devotes herself to making sure he doesn’t give any more money to his family. She also turns against Ford, considering John’s layoff as “a dirty trick to reduce his pay without admitting it” (155), and eventually learns from her father (a Ford department head) that she is right: the layoffs are a scheme to reduce pay. Annabelle is also surprised to learn that Hank, who has been arrested for intimidating voters, was working for the candidate Ford backed and supported financially.
Chapter 60 Summary
Ford has made the most profits of any American industrialist, and now he has lost more money than anyone else: from 1924-26 he made over $100 million in net profit each year. After a series of losses and gains, in 1931 and 1932, respectively, he loses $53 million and $75 million. Car sales are down to nearly half a million a year.
Ford wants people to feel confident that the economy will soon improve, since this confidence will encourage them to buy cars. To build this confidence, he publishes a false story in the newspapers that he is hiring 10-20,000 new workers. In response to the story, thousands of unemployed people come to the River Rouge plant, only to find armed gangsters who drive them away and even hose them with icy water in the bitter cold. Detroiters turn “bitterly” (157) against Ford for his hypocrisy: Ford presents himself as a philanthropist in public but operates as a businessman motivated by profit.
Chapters 58-60 Analysis
These chapters vividly portray the suffering of ordinary people during the Depression. Abner and Milly’s suffering is acute; they represent the poorer segments of the lower-middle class, and their inability even to bury Abner’s mother when she dies shows that they are so destitute as to have lost some of their dignity.
Although we have seen in previous chapters that Johnny’s success has elevated him to a different class than his parents, and has to some extent alienated them from him (since they feel that their car is too shabby even to enter his neighborhood), even he and Annabelle are not insulated against the deprivations and anxiety of the Depression. In fact, like their fancy-looking but poorly-built house, their new social status is more appearance than reality. In fact, they have attempted to buy their way into the upper-middle classes by buying a house on credit; when they can no longer pay the mortgage, the bank will profit by repossessing the house and John and Annabelle must start over.
While Ford has lost more money in the Depression than anyone else, his losses are of a quite different sort than the Shutts’. While the Shutts struggle to maintain ownership of their homes, to eat enough to survive, and to bury their dead, Ford does not have to worry about his very survival. His treatment of the workers who respond to his announcement that he is hiring (hosing malnourished and weakened people with cold water in the middle of winter could well kill some of them) shows his callousness and suggests that he does not value the human beings who work for him, but rather sees them as an expendable resource.
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