Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Three years after buying Vauxhall, Sloan added the far larger German firm of Adam Opel to GM’s portfolio, making GM overnight the largest car maker in Germany. In 1937 Opel launched its first mass-produced small car, the Kadett (the equivalent of Vauxhall’s Light Six). From then on, both Vauxhall and Opel anchored their product lines on cheap and simple models; any thought of competing with the likes of Rolls-Royce and Mercedes had long since faded from memory.

  In his personal life, Sloan was not unlike Morris, Austin and Renault: a cold, reserved and isolated figure. He admitted to few friends, and even referred to himself as a ‘narrow man’. (In later years, though, he was curiously close to two larger-than-life figures whose extrovert personalities could not have been further removed from his own: rival car tycoon Walter Chrysler and design guru Harley Earl.) He did not associate with movie stars (nor starlets), did not own a yacht, and was not interested in motor racing. He was prudish and censorious; senior GM executive John J. Raskob, for example, was asked to leave the company after Sloan heard that he had been seen in Atlantic City in the company of a woman who was not his wife. He was remote: he never once appeared on a factory floor, and was simply not interested in the concerns or lives of most of his workers. And he could be surprisingly mean-spirited at times. Thus, while he was happy to be seen publicly with Durant when GM’s twenty-five millionth car was rolled out in 1940 – Sloan publicly took the aged Durant by the hand, declaring that ‘we often fail to recognize the creative spirit’ – he could not be bothered to attend Durant’s funeral seven years later, an absence that was widely noted both inside and outside the industry. The calculating magnate clearly did not want to be seen to be associated with failure.

  Nor was Sloan a misguided paternalist in the mould of Henry Ford or William Morris. He left the amenable William Knudsen – who, in 1937, became the company’s president – to sort out GM’s labour relations and strikes.1 Predictably, Sloan’s political leanings were definitely towards the right. A friend of the last Republican president of the interwar years, Herbert Hoover, Sloan loathed his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and (like Henry Ford) despised all that he stood for. Alongside Ford, he campaigned bitterly against the New Deal, and tried to prevent Roosevelt’s presidential nomination in 1936 via a hateful campaign run by the far-right American Liberty League. Even after the League issued a pamphlet carrying supposedly damning photographs – showing Eleanor Roosevelt in the company of African-Americans, shots that the League gleefully described as ‘nigger pictures’ – Sloan continued to bankroll its disgraceful activities. Sloan also supported an even more shadowy rightwing group, the Sentinels of the Republic, whose members’ anti-New Deal campaigns carried over into overt anti-Semitism (one Sentinel labelled the New Deal ‘Jewish communism’) and public demands for an ‘American Hitler’.

  Like Ford, Sloan, too, was at best agnostic about Adolf Hitler and the brutal Nazi regime. Hitler’s minister of production, Albert Speer, later said that the German army could not have invaded Poland in 1939 without GM’s technical help. As a result, Sloan has been branded by some historians as ‘Hitler’s car maker’. While this soubriquet may be a little unfair, he was certainly happy to appease the Nazis after 1933, acquiescing to the Nazification of Opel’s plants and management, with the anodyne comment that ‘politics should not be considered the business of the management of GM’. Sloan said nothing as the Nazis purged all the Jewish employees from his German factories and dealerships, and did not interfere as Opel’s new Brandenburg plant was forcibly converted to make military trucks. When the European war broke out in 1939, he famously declared that ‘we are too big to be inconvenienced by these pitiful international squabbles’. The following March, GM president William Knudsen admitted: ‘I have to report with some regret that Mr Hitler is the boss of our German factory.’

  By 1939 Alfred Sloan presided over the world’s largest corporation. GM not only sold more cars than any other company, it also built the majority of America’s buses and railway engines. It even controlled a major aircraft manufacturer, North American Aviation. For all its worldwide expertise and apparent knowledge of the German market, however, GM overlooked one of the most important cars of the century. The launch in 1939 of Ferdinand Porsche’s ‘Strength through Joy’ car caused barely a ripple of interest in Detroit. Six years later Sloan’s henchmen passed up the opportunity to acquire both the car and its factory. It was a mistake that GM would come profoundly to regret.

  1 Only in 1958 was DuPont forced to sell its sizeable stake in the company, under pressure from Eisenhower’s administration.

  1 In 1974 Slough passed into Berkshire as part of the Heath government’s county boundary changes.

  2 A trip that, it must be admitted, also took in tea with King George V.

  1 The city was outraged by the frescoes’ overtly political content, but Edsel resolutely stood by Rivera.

  2 Briefly enticed back to the firm by Henry Ford II, Gregorie recognized that the Ford he had known from Edsel’s Lincoln division no longer existed. In 1946 he left Ford for good, aged only thirty-eight, and never designed another car.

  1 Fifteen thousand people subsequently turned out to mourn the four ‘Ford martyrs’.

  2 Reuther recovered to become president of the UAW in 1946. By the 1960s he had become a prominent civil rights activist and supporter of Martin Luther King.

  1 In 1955 the number of Chrysler brands was increased to five, as the top of the range Chrysler Imperial metamorphosed into the Imperial marque, designed to challenge Cadillac and Lincoln head-on.

  2 The Zephyr did surprisingly well and helped to revive the dormant Lincoln brand.

  1 In 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt lured Knudsen away from GM to head up America’s war production effort. Knudsen was later made a lieutenant general in the US Army for his wartime services – the only civilian to join at such a high rank. Sloan, who had persistently resisted government interference in GM’s wartime operations, received nothing.

  4

  The Age of Gasoline

  In 1916, while Europe was convulsed by the carnage of the First World War, Henri Deterding, the boss of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, prophetically announced: ‘This is a century of travel, and the restlessness which has been created by the war will make the desire for travel still greater.’ At the time, Deterding’s prediction may have seemed unduly optimistic. For until the 1920s – the era of the Model T and the Austin Seven – most people simply did not drive. It was just the pampered few who did, a wealthy minority who were hugely resented by everyone else. However, by 1930 Deterding had been proved right: the car was now within reach of the many, rather than just the few. The automobile had truly arrived.

  The cars produced by the pioneer auto makers before 1914 were, for all their promise and potential, initially just seen as rich men’s toys. In Britain, King Edward VII rode in Daimlers from Coventry; in Spain, motoring enthusiast King Alfonso XIII delighted in driving his own De Dion-Bouton. By the late 1920s Duesenbergs and Cadillacs in America and Rolls-Royces, Hispano-Suizas and Bugattis in Europe were de rigueur accessories for any pretentious plutocrat and bywords for excess, sophistication and opulence. In India the profligate and sadistic Maharaja of Alwah, Sir Jai Singh, commissioned a Lanchester Forty – a car that cost more than a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost – converted into a replica of the British royal coach, complete with postilion seats for two footmen and gold-leaf crowns on the doors.1

  Motorists’ societies, such as America’s Automobile Association of 1902 and the Automobile Club of Great Britain of 1897, were emphatically elite organizations. The latter earned a royal prefix from Edward VII in 1907, and used this as an excuse to build a pompous new headquarters on London’s fashionable Pall Mall.2 Even the more ostensibly egalitarian Automobile Association (AA) of 1905 was initially concerned with protecting its wealthy members from the pitfalls of legislation; the first AA men would cycle down the road looking for police speed traps and would then warn oncoming drive
rs where they were located. (Both RAC and AA representatives were also required to acknowledge passing members. As Eric Newby observed: ‘If they failed to salute, members were advised to stop them and ask the reason why.’) And in America, Britain and France, well-heeled motorists were provided with a luxury, 24-hour service of hire car facilities and chauffeurs, together with, on occasion, well-appointed bedrooms for the weary driver.

  As a symbol of wealth and sophistication, in its earliest years the car was seen by many less privileged citizens as a particularly pernicious weapon in the class war. Rural communities often threw glass or tacks over country roads to stop passing traffic, and in some instances even barbed wire was strung from tree to tree. Any driver hitting an animal, let alone a small child, was liable to be set upon by a howling mob of locals. Compensation litigation, dealing with cars that had frightened horses and caused accidents and injuries, was soon common across Europe and North America. The first motorist to drive up New York’s Broadway, Philip Hagel, had to pay $48,000 in damages to the owners of horses terrified by the sight of his stately De Dion-Bouton.

  As cars got faster and faster, public opinion became increasingly concerned about road safety – more worried, it has to be said, about the danger to pedestrians than any risk to the car’s invariably affluent occupants. In 1896 the national speed limit in Britain was raised from 4 to 14 mph, and thirty-three drivers celebrated with an ‘emancipation day’ drive on 14 November from London to Brighton. The same year, however, also saw the first British motor accident, when a woman pedestrian was run down and killed while walking in the grounds of the Crystal Palace in south London. Three years later came the first American road death, as H. H. Bliss was struck by an automobile after alighting from a New York City trolley car. By 1902, the year in which the Society for the Protection of Pedestrians (SPP) was founded in Britain, the reputation of the car had been firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic as a rich man’s plaything which posed a serious hazard to working families. The death in 1905 of a small boy in Markyate, Hertfordshire, run over by a chaufffeured car which simply sped off, turned into a national crusade, and the influential Daily Mail offered a £100 reward for catching the ‘motor criminals’ responsible. (With delicious irony, the perpetrator of the accident turned out to be a vehicle owned by Hildebrand Harmsworth, the brother of the Mail’s proprietor.) The following year, as the Royal Commission on the Motor Car confirmed the suspicion that many local communities were sabotaging roads against the speeding rich, the case of the Duchess of Connaught (born Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia), whose chauffeured car had hit and killed a small boy who had run heedlessly across the road, received considerable publicity. Neither the duchess nor her driver was ever prosecuted – the former was, of course, a member of the British royal family – but the incident did nothing to cool passions. Shortly after this tragedy the novelist Kenneth Grahame made his famous The Wind in the Willows character Mr Toad into a faddish, prosperous, yet terminally irresponsible motorist, a ‘Terror of the Highway’ who was, unlike the Duchess of Connaught’s chauffeur, both arrested and imprisoned.

  Early apologists for the automobile were quick to advertise the health benefits of the car over the horse. Cars, they pointed out, did not spread the diseases or foul smells that emanated from horse dung, stables or the dead horses that frequently littered the roads. And runaway horses, it was alleged, actually caused more accidents than did the first cars. (One British writer has estimated that the number of people seriously injured in road accidents in London was the same in 1872 as it was in 1972.) In the event, it was the motoring lobby that triumphed. In Britain, despite protests from organizations such as the SPP, the Motor Car Act of 1903 raised the national speed limit to 20 mph – a threshold that, surprisingly, remained in force until 1930.1

  The wealthy motorists of the Edwardian era were often attracted to the bewildering array of city-to-city contests that proliferated in Europe after the groundbreaking Paris–Bordeaux race of 1895. (Most of the grand international races of this period either started or ended in Paris, a tacit acknowledgement of France’s status as the world’s leading car maker.2) Yet many of these less-than-idle rich suffered injury or even death as a result of their participation. The 1903 Paris–Madrid race claimed not just the life of Louis Renault’s brother, Marcel; altogether the race claimed eight dead (three drivers and five spectators), with many more spectators injured – a casualty rate that prompted the French government to shut down the race when it reached Bordeaux. Yet the carnage of 1903 failed to prevent more rich young men risking their lives at the wheel.

  The most ambitious, daring and expensive competition of all was the Peking–Paris race in 1907. Organized by the French daily newspaper Le Matin, it was won by that paradigm of the aristocratic motorist, Prince Luigi Marcantonio Francesco Rodolfo Scipione Borghese. The prince drove a Turin-made Italia, which was powered by a huge 7.4 litre engine. With his erect bearing, calm demeanour, aloof manner and pith helmet, he looked every inch the epitome of Edwardian sangfroid and the patrician auto pioneer – even though his chauffeur, Ettore Guizardi, actually did most of the driving, while a gang of Chinese coolies was hired to carry the car across rivers and up and down mountains. Prince Borghese was also unusual in that he survived his many races; having published a book on his Peking–Paris triumph, he joined Italy’s Radical Party as an MP and, after 1915, added a distinguished war record to his already impressive career.

  While aristocrats like Prince Borghese were content to drive faster and faster, the spread of car ownership across all classes of society gradually made road safety more of a civic priority. A manually operated, gas-powered traffic signal, using red and green lanterns, had been sited outside London’s Palace of Westminster since 1868 – although in 1869 the gaslight assembly blew up, injuring the duty constable. The earliest electric two-colour (red and green) traffic lights were erected at the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, in the fateful month of August 1914.1 Three-colour lights were introduced, appropriately enough, in the Motor City itself, Detroit, in 1920. Two years later the first automated, interconnected traffic light system appeared, in Houston, Texas. Yet the first European traffic lights – supplemented by a gong that was operated by a traffic gendarme to alert dozy motorists – did not appear until 1923, when they were installed in Paris. By that time, traffic light systems were common across the USA, one of the most successful patents being that taken out by the remarkable African-American inventor and entrepreneur Garrett Morgan, who in 1923 installed three-colour sets, arranged on T-shaped poles, in downtown Detroit.

  Where America pioneered traffic lights, Britain led the way with foot junctions. The ‘zebra’ pedestrian crossing – originally comprising blue and yellow stripes; the famous black and white pattern came later – first appeared in the early 1920s and was mentioned in the National ‘Safety First’ Association’s Safety Hints for all Motorists (the ancestor of today’s Highway Code) in 1924. This crossing type was formalized in 1935, when the Ministry of Transport added amber beacons at each end of the crossing (at the same time introducing a formal driving test).1 These globes, first installed at Wigan in Lancashire, were soon dubbed Belisha beacons, after the current transport minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha.2 It was not until 1951, however, that zebra crossings with lit Belisha beacons were given the force of law.

  By the time Hore-Belisha’s beacons appeared, the role and status of the motor car had changed enormously since the pioneer days of motoring before the First World War. By the mid-1920s the car had become the transport of the middle-class family and the working man, not just the preserve of the idle rich. As the Lexington Motor Company claimed in 1920: ‘The Motor Car is the Magic Carpet of Modern Times.’ In 1900 there were eight thousand car owners in America; this had grown to 912,000 by 1912, 3.4 million by 1916, 23.1 million by 1930, and 32 million by 1940. In 1929 the US made 5.3 million cars, ten times the output of the rest of the world put together. Cars were a
lso being driven ever further; a yearly average mileage per car of 4,500 miles in 1919 had grown to 7,500 by 1929. Anyone, it seemed, could afford a motor car. America’s Hire Purchase Act, designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous salesman who hid their vast profits behind complicated hire purchase deals, specifically exempted the automobile from its controls.

  In 1929 Frederick Lewis Allen wrote that ‘the age of steam was yielding to the age of gasoline’:

  Villages that had once prospered because they were ‘on the railroad’ languished with economic anemia; villages on Route 61 blossomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists’ rests, camping sites and affluence. The interurban trolley perished … By the end of the decade … red and green lights, blinkers, one-way streets … parking ordinances, and still a shining flow of traffic that backed up for blocks along Main Street every Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

  Doctors particularly prized their cars, which speeded up their home visits no end. Libraries found they could now take their books out to communities. Mail services improved immeasurably, and mail-order businesses boomed. Smaller schools closed as parents found they could bus or drive their children to alternative sites. Agricultural workers, particularly during the Depression of the early 1930s, deserted the countryside for the growing cities, whole families moving in cars or small trucks. And the hire car business had taken off: Hertz was founded in Chicago in 1923 (when it absorbed a car hire business of 1918), while Godfrey Davis was founded in Britain in 1925.