FORD TURNED JUGGERNAUT

Radio Record, 6 May 1938, Page 31

FORD TURNED JUGGERNAUT

Money Changes Well-meaning "Crank" into Pitiless Racketeer of Industry.

Special Review by

O.E.

W.

AST week I read two books, both novels, dealing with a problem that has begun to hurt American civilisation (if we are to believe the newspapers) only within the last generation-the problem of relationship between capital and labour, The first is a modest book, Goetze Jeter’s "The Strikers," published by Methuen. The second is much more ambitions-Upton Sinclair’s "The Flivver King," published by T. Werner . Laurie, Both are as worth reading as any recent novel, INCLAIR’S pen has lost nothing of its corroding bitterness since he wrote "The Jungle." I am inclined to think his libellous and probably justified attack on Billionaire Ford is as great a book as his expose of the Chicago Stockyard horrors. But the world-and the American world in particular-can no longer reel before exposures. It is far too well used to them, "The Flivver King" will not, alas, set the Hudson on fire, much Jess the Thames; but if it ever falls into the hands of Ford, it should make him wriggle more unhappily than anything since the memorable day he had to admit before the Superior Court of Michigan that he was not quite certain of the difference between Arnold Bennett and Benedict Arnold! Fortunately for pigmy Sinclair, a thousand-million-dollar fortune does not to stop to squash a writing worm, however menacingly it has turned... . "The Flivver King" employs a very simple and unartistie device to tell] its story. Coincidentally it discloses the rise and fall of Ford with the rise and fall of the family of one of his spindle-nut-screwer suhb-foremen. ‘The reader follows, sympathetically. the career of the little ‘"erank" who perfected a horseless carriage in a sidestreet in Detroit, side by side with the career of the apologetic little bucktoothed workman who went to him for a job in the first motor works. One reads with hope how mass production made the workman content, how it raised his wages and shortened his working hours, gave him a home of his own and eventually even his own "flivver." With that and promise of more good things, one learns tolerantly of Ford earning his first paltry five million, of his silly "Peace Ship" in 1915, of his well-meaning and often defrauded social department-which was estab-

lished to see profits were shared only by those among his workmen who lived nice, clean, Christian lives! HEN, when everything in the American industrial garden is as lovely as ean be, with a growing sense of terror we see the money machine giving poor, well-meaning Henry. his first licking. We see him pass on the buck to the avorkmen whom he had tried so nicely to help, We see the ruthless system of speeding up, the dry rot of production eat into the foundations of Ford’s concept of social security. At last the machine conquers the man, Obsessed with keeping his hundred millions safe, Ford weathers the depression, sailing triumphantly across seas studded with drowning, worn-out workers. He dare not float one dollar bill for the oldest and hungriest of them to clutch and be saved. The end? Since the depression did not abolish motor cars, Ford and most of his workers sutviye. "Things" get back to ‘"nor-mal’-except that for all time the faith of the working people in God Ford is shattered. They hate him worse than any other man in all the world. So the son of the spindle-nut-screw-er foreman turns labour organiser and, one night, while the silver-haired and benevolent master of a billion dollars is enjoying ceremonia] dinner, his gangster hirelings are busy kicking that young man in the groins and loosening up his kidneys to make quite sure the evil of organised labour won’t be perpetuated in another generation. "INAH Flivver King’ is Upton Sinclair cussing and damning in his finest style. Everyone knows it is a pretty rotten old world, but Sinclair ean show you its rottenness as painfully as any writer I know. N contemplation of Henry Ford’s helplessness under the thumb of the Money God I had almost forgo‘ten that other book, "The Strikers." As literature it is streets ahead of "The Flivver King," but as a social document it is out of co0-ee. Tt tells the intimate, human story of a little shoe-manufacturing town in the Middle West-and of what happens to its people when a labour boss makes trouble, The terribly depressing thing ahont those two books, "leftist" and "rightist," is that they are both tragically true, ,