The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

The police release Tom Shutt. However, Henry Ford remains forever imprisoned by his wealth in the belief that he is “the object of deadly mass hatred” (213). Ford has become the worst employer in the automotive industry: he pays the lowest wages, submits his workers to brutal speed-ups, and fires anyone who mentions the subject of a union.

“Morose and bitter,” Ford lives in near-isolation, “watching his guards to make sure that they watched him” (214). He is haunted by his similarity to Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, a billionaire who had done the same thing as Henry—gunned down workers seeking an audience with him—and was assassinated, along with his wife and children, thirteen years later.

Ford believes that he is the father of a great dynasty with the potential to last generations. However, he feels threatened by “persons with names such as Trotsky and Zinoviev and Bela Kun and Radek and Liebknecht and Luxemburg and Jaurès and Blum” (215); that is, by revolutionaries, especially Jewish revolutionaries. Ford remains as convinced as ever that there is a vast international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to take away his billion dollars and destroy American society. He publishes several anti-Semitic statements accusing American labor organizers of carrying out a Communist plot.