The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

Dell Brace, Tom’s fellow student with the glasses, stooped shoulders and interest in the economics of labor, comes to Detroit and goes to work in the city welfare department. She chooses the city partly to escape her reactionary Republican family in Iowa and partly because she and Tom plan to marry.

Tom refuses to marry Dell until he finds a new job, and Dell accuses him of having turned “bourgeois” and of viewing her as less than his equal: “if a woman was the equal of a man, why shouldn’t she be as free to support him as to be supported by him?” (208). Tom gives in because he cannot bear to see her cry, and the two enter a civil marriage that day.

Tom introduces Dell to his family. Daisy finds their marriage romantic, and because she has seen “so much of workers’ troubles through the depression years [...] she was ready to be told that a labour organizer was not what he was painted by the newspapers” (208). Dell is friendly toward Daisy and gives her advice about proper, inexpensive nutrition for Daisy’s sickly four-year-old child.

Abner is somewhat perplexed by Dell, who is “so obviously refined in spite of being plainly dressed,” and has no idea that she idealizes his “horny hand, the one finger gone and so many knobs and scars on the others, as symbols of honourable toil, the medals of a soldier of industry” (209). However, he perceives that she is kind and considers his son lucky. Abner realizes that Dell shares Tom’s political views but is able to think of labor activists as “dangerous and wicked,” and simultaneously to “talk with two of them and not disagree with anything they said” (209).

The union movement spreads quickly throughout the U.S. The miners’ and clothing workers’ unions, which are already organized by industry rather than trade, provide policy and tactics for the other unions to use. Soon, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) is formed and “assume[s] magical significance to millions of toilers who couldn’t have told exactly what they stood for” (210). Established unions provide funding for organizers to enter the field, and Tom Shutt secures a modestly-paid, dangerous position.

Tom’s job is to visit Ford workers in their homes and elsewhere in Detroit. Soon he is arrested by police, who demand the names of his associates. When Tom refuses, they threaten him with a severe beating, imprison him illegally in a filthy, solitary cell, and torture him by beating him periodically with rubber hoses.

The union is prepared for such things, notices that Tom has gone missing, and begins to search for him. They recruit women from union families to phone the police station demanding Tom’s release. The women flood the station with calls. When this does not secure his release, they call the Ford Company from a public phone, demanding Tom Shutt’s release. When the president’s secretary claims not to know who Shutt is, the activists tell him to find out and warn him that his phone will be out of order until Tom is released.

Next, the activist:

would insert a tiny piece of match-stick under the lever supporting the telephone receiver. This kept the receiver from coming down all the way; and since the calling station controls the one called, the Ford Company’s line would be ‘busy’ until the telephone company sent a man to remedy the trouble. Meantime the caller had moved on to the next pay station and repeated the performance. [...] High-salaried executives trying to get New York or Chicago to conclude million-dollar contracts would have to hop into their cars and drive somewhere else to place the calls. ‘Tom Shutt? Who is Tom Shutt?’ everybody in the place would be asking, and thousands of white-collar workers would whisper: ‘It’s the union! They’re trying to get a union at Ford’s!’ (213)