100 pages • 3 hours read
Upton SinclairA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Chapters 13-15
Chapters 16-18
Chapters 19-21
Chapters 22-24
Chapters 25-27
Chapters 28-30
Chapters 31-33
Chapters 34-36
Chapters 37-39
Chapters 40-42
Chapters 43-45
Chapters 46-48
Chapters 49-51
Chapters 52-54
Chapters 55-57
Chapters 58-60
Chapters 61-63
Chapters 64-66
Chapters 67-69
Chapters 70-72
Chapters 73-75
Chapters 76-78
Chapters 79-81
Chapters 82-84
Chapters 85-92
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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.