The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

Abner rides home on the streetcar, thinking about what he has seen: “he had been shot at; he had seen a man killed, the first intentional killing he had ever witnessed. [...] ‘I hadn’t oughter been there!’” (173). Abner is convinced that if only Ford had known the men were coming, he would have talked with them.

The evening paper denounces the leaders of the march as “the worst Red agitators there were in the Detroit area” and Abner is horrified and embarrassed to realize that he, “the most loyal of hundred per cent Americans, a former clansman” has been lured into a Bolshevik trap: “Why, his own son John might have been up there on that bridge, helping to defend the plant against those Communists! His son Hank might have been in the crowd, spotting the enemies of the Ford Motor Company!” (174).

Abner decides to tell his family not that he joined the march, but rather that he simply followed it to see what happened. Milly and Daisy express alarm: after all, Abner might have gotten himself shot, or John and Daisy’s husband fired (after all, “they even fired men who raised money for the funerals of those dead marchers!” (174).