The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

As World War I rages on in Europe, the British are determined to destroy the German fleet. The American economy benefits, and Wall Street experiences an extraordinary boom: “Everything that could be used in a world war was going up, and seventeen thousand new millionaires were being made in America” (72). Banking firms, as well as the newspapers and magazines that are their clients and subsidiaries, have a vested interest in the war and set out “to make a monkey of Henry Ford and a monkey-cage of his peace-ship, and the job was done with a thoroughness acquired by generations of training in cynicism and mendacity” (73).

The omniscient third-person narrator remarks that although a reasonable person could reasonably disagree with Ford’s antiwar position, or view Ford as unequal to the task he had set himself, in time “the historians would begin to ask whether Henry Ford and his ‘Ship of Fools’ did not show more sense than all the chancelleries of Europe and the British Empire” (73).

Abner views Ford’s aspiration to end the war as “most proper and sensible”; having “long ago decided that his employer was the greatest man in the world,” he finds the notion that “Mr.