Harley’s plan was for the Y-job to make its official debut during the 1939 New York Auto Show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The event coincided with a GM publicity push to introduce the work of the Styling Section to the automotive press. As part of that PR campaign, the company published a remarkable thirty-two-page booklet, Modes and Motors, illustrated in the art deco style, which traced the evolution of art through human history—from the first cave painting in Spain to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans, Chinese and Moors, from the Dark Ages to the Italian Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. The introductory passage reads like something Steve Jobs might have written more than half a century later: “Art in industry is entirely new. Only in recent years has the interest of manufacturer and user alike been expanded from the mere question of ‘does it work?’ to include ‘how should it look?’ and ‘why should it look that way?’ Appearance and style have assumed equal importance with utility, price and operation.”
Harley didn’t write the text, but his personal experience at General Motors clearly drove the booklet’s allegorical narrative, which told of the “artist” who once regarded manufacturers with “thinly-concealed contempt” and thought of them as “rough coarse men whose sole purpose in life was to make money” and who did not “feel the need to have an artist tell them how to design their products.”
According to the narrative, “The job of the designer [is] to bring together the science of the engineer and the skill of the artist,” noting that finally “the artist and the engineer have joined hands to the end that articles of everyday use may be beautiful as well as useful. Probably in no field have the results of the application of art to the products of industry been more apparent than that of the automobile.”
As for the future, Modes and Motors concluded, “Certain it is that out of the merger of art, science and industry have come new techniques that have within themselves the ability to create an entirely new pattern and setting for the life of the world.”
The Y-job was exhibited at the New York Auto Show, but its debut turned out to be its swan song as well. After the show, Harley shipped the car to his home in Grosse Pointe and began driving it to and from work every day. It was the ultimate vanity vehicle, outclassing anything in Edsel Ford’s garage and never failing to draw admiring stares as Harley cruised along Lake Shore Drive, usually with the top down. “His head would stick up above the windshield and he had to duck when he put the top up,” said Clare MacKichan. “We’d often see him come in on a morning with a light sprinkle of rain, but the top would be down.”
Despite that drawback, Harley loved the car and drove it for years. The national tour of auto shows never materialized, however, due to the ominous turn of events in Europe.
9
Helping Make Germany Great Again
Adolf Hitler never learned to drive, but he was an ardent admirer of the American auto industry and its founding father. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” he famously told the Detroit News in a 1931 interview. “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany.”
His admiration bordered on hero worship. As early as 1922, the New York Times reported that the future Führer proudly displayed a life-size portrait of Ford in his office at the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, where visitors could pick up copies of Ford’s anti-Semitic screed The International Jew, which was a compilation of articles from his racist newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
To Hitler, Ford was the world’s most successful and stalwart anti-Semite. “It is Jews who govern the Stock Exchange forces of the American union,” Hitler wrote in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.
When Hitler read Ford’s 1922 autobiography, My Life and Work, he had an epiphany. Germany’s automakers were years behind the Americans, still building mostly expensive cars for the upper classes. Only one in a hundred Germans owned an automobile, compared to one in five Americans. But if the German auto industry applied Ford’s mass-manufacturing techniques to the production of a car the common people could afford, like the Model T, Hitler figured, then perhaps it could be the key to rebuilding Germany’s devastated economy and financing his dreams of European expansion.
As he amassed power over the next few years, Hitler talked constantly about his idea for a volkswagen, or “people’s car.” A former art student and still a frustrated artist, he supposedly dashed off a sketch of how he thought the car should look while eating lunch one day at a Munich restaurant, and gave it to Jakob Werlin, the head of Daimler-Benz. Shortly after becoming German chancellor, Hitler said in a speech at the 1934 Berlin International Automobile and Motor Cycle Show, “It can only be said with profound sadness that, in the present age of civilization, the ordinary hard-working citizen is still unable to afford a car, a means of up-to-date transport and a source of enjoyment in the leisure hours.” He broached the subject again two months later during a meeting in his chancellery office with James Mooney, president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation. “The German People have precisely the same desire to use a car as, for example, the American People,” Hitler said. “If I hope to increase the number of cars in Germany to three or four million, the price and the maintenance costs of these cars must be compatible with the income of the three or four million potential buyers.” He told Mooney he thought the car should be priced at approximately 900 marks (or about $300).
In addition to acquiring all of Opel, GM built a truck-manufacturing plant in the state of Brandenburg in 1935. Meanwhile, Ford established a German subsidiary, Ford Germany Company, in 1931 (it was later renamed Ford-Werke to sound more German) and built a factory in Cologne. Both American car giants were interested in making the volkswagen, but Hitler wanted a purely German company to build the inexpensive little car that could, he believed, make Germany great again. So he gave the job to his friend, automotive engineer Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the firm that bore his name. Porsche then teamed up with Jakob Werlin and Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front, to form Volkswagenwerk.
On May 26, 1938, Hitler laid the cornerstone of the Volkswagenwerk factory in Fallersleben, Germany. The immense facility was modeled after Ford’s Rouge River plant and partly staffed with Ford engineers. The Nazi Party promised it would be “the biggest automobile factory in the world,” capable of turning out 1.5 million cars a year. Seventy thousand people cheered as the Führer was driven around in a test car that most Americans today would recognize as a classic Volkswagen Beetle. In his accompanying speech, Hitler dubbed it the KdF Wagen after the Nazi Party slogan “Kraft durch Freude” (“Strength through Joy”).
Calling the undertaking “something only possible in Hitler’s Germany,” Nazi propagandists predicted that “hundreds of thousands of people’s comrades, above all those who live in big cities and in drab industrial areas and who lead a joyless, colorless life, will now be able to reach the beauties of nature on weekends or after work with their families. They will find pleasure and relaxation. They will feel more like free and independent people. To own a car means to live twice as much!”
(As it turned out, only fifty-four KdF Wagens were built before the factory was converted to military production in 1940. Hitler received one of the cars for his forty-ninth birthday, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito got one, and the rest were distributed among Nazi Party officials.)
Henry Ford’s contribution wasn’t mentioned on that day in the spring of 1938, but two months later, on Ford’s seventy-fifth birthday, Hitler sent two German diplomats to Ford’s Dearborn office to present him with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the highest honor Nazi Germany bestowed on foreigners. The previous year’s honoree was Benito Mussolini. Ford seemed delighted as he posed for pictures with the diplomats, who told him the award represented Hitler’s “personal admiration and indebtedness” to him.
Despite the Führer’s affinity for Ford, General Motors seems to have profited more from its investment in the German auto industr
y. Under GM’s ownership, Opel became the country’s largest manufacturer of automobiles and trucks—three times the size of Daimler-Benz, quadruple that of Ford-Werke. By 1938, Opel was producing 40 percent of the vehicles in Germany and about 65 percent of its exports. Its biggest customer was the German military, which purchased six thousand of the company’s Blitz trucks that year alone, vehicles that would be used to carry troops, ammunition, and supplies when Hitler launched his blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) invasion of Poland the following year. Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army.
Hitler’s thoughts upon reading Henry Ford’s autobiography proved out. Auto manufacturing had sparked an economic recovery, eliminating the mass unemployment that had afflicted the country in the wake of World War I and boosting the popularity of the Nazi Party. He could not have done it without the help of Ford and GM.
In the run-up to the war in Europe, GM maintained publicly that its involvement with Opel was purely passive, not operational. But even the Styling Section was involved in the day-to-day operations at Opel. Harley sent Frank Hershey and several others to Opel headquarters in Russelsheim in 1937 to supervise the restyling of Opel’s small family car, the Kadett, and its new larger “executive” sedan, the Kapitan. As Hershey prepared to leave for Europe, Harley impressed on him the importance and prestige of the posting. “Are you sure your wife has the proper clothes?” he asked. “You have to have two tuxes. Here’s two thousand dollars.”
Harley went to Germany a number of times to check on the team’s progress. At the conclusion of his first trip he asked Hershey to drive him to the airport in a Kadett.
“You can’t get in a Kadett; you’re six foot six,” Hershey said, exaggerating Harley’s height by an inch. “You can’t sit in that.” Harley was traveling with four or five large bags to accommodate his wardrobe. Still, he insisted, “Get me a Kadett.”
Their journey to the airport was highlighted by a shouting match between Harley, who didn’t speak German, and two German baggage handlers, who apparently didn’t know the meaning of “goddamn sonofabitch,” as well as a male bonding moment in the men’s room that Hershey would never forget.
“You had to step up onto a platform and stand in front of the urinals,” he recalled years later. “So there I am standing next to God. I thought, ‘My god, if the guys at home could only see me now they wouldn’t believe it.’” Hershey was so nervous he couldn’t pee, so he gave up and stepped down from the platform, and just as he passed behind Harley, “he broke wind right in my face, and then he turned and said, ‘Did I get you, Frank?’ I couldn’t believe it. I saw him like nobody else ever saw him, as just an ordinary guy, not the king of General Motors, ‘Mistearl.’ I could have called him Harley at that moment and gotten away with it. And no one ever believed that story.”
During one of Harley’s trips to Germany, he spent a festive evening with William Knudsen, James Mooney, and several other GM executives celebrating Knudsen’s birthday at Hitler’s favorite restaurant, Osteria Bavaria, a popular artists’ hangout in Munich. Such public displays of conviviality became increasingly uncomfortable for GM employees, however, as the Nazis tightened their grip on all aspects of German life.
Swastikas began appearing inside the Opel plant and some of Hitler’s most hateful and militarily bellicose speeches could be heard on the public address system. A growing number of employees were disappearing from work without any explanation.
At the end of what turned out to be Harley’s last visit to Russelsheim, he took Hershey aside and asked, “Frank, if anything happens, have you got enough money to get out and get home?” Hershey said he didn’t. “Well, look, I’ll send you some,” Harley said. “Where do I send it?”
“You can’t send it to Germany because [the Nazis] won’t give it to me,” Hershey told him. “They will confiscate it.” They decided that Harley would wire the money to the Bank of Arnhem just across the border in Holland and have the bank notify Hershey with a telegram saying, “Your grandmother has arrived.”
Three weeks later, Hershey heard from the bank and headed for Holland, driving an Oldsmobile. Stopping to spend the night at a hotel in Bonn, he heard movement in the trunk, where he discovered a sixteen-year-old boy he recognized from the office. “He worked in the blueprint room in the foreman’s office and he was always smiling and giving me a ‘how do you do.’” Hershey didn’t know how the boy found out he was going to Holland or what car he would be driving, “but he wanted me to take him over the border,” he said. “If [the Nazis] had caught me, they’d have shot me at sunrise. I was scared stiff. I took him in and made him stay the night. And then I bought him a suitcase and something [to wear] that made him look legit, and put him on a train back.”
Still sounding uncomfortable with his decision decades later, Hershey told the interviewer that Jews “were trying every kind of way to get out. I think he thought I was the best way to do it.”
Hershey returned from Holland with the four thousand dollars that Harley had sent, but it was only a matter of weeks before he was on his way back, this time fleeing with other GM employees in a caravan of twelve Cadillacs, a Buick, and a Pontiac. “We got the call in the morning and we evacuated,” Hershey said. The German army was poised to invade Czechoslovakia to enforce Hitler’s claim to an area known as Sudetenland, where three million ethnic Germans lived. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier were on their way to Munich to meet with Hitler and Mussolini to try to negotiate a peaceful solution, but all of Europe was bracing for war at any moment.
“We got to the Dutch border just as they were putting up the last roadblock. But we finally got out, and we stayed a week in Holland.”
The invasion was averted when the Munich Conference ended with an agreement that ceded the Czechoslovakian territory to Germany in exchange for Hitler’s promise not to invade the rest of the country. Chamberlain returned to England claiming they had negotiated “peace in our time.” To which Winston Churchill famously replied in a speech to the House of Commons, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”
Hershey and the other GM refugees returned to Russelsheim, where “all the Germans made fun of us for being scaredy-cats.”
A year later, on September 1, 1939, they fled Germany for good when the German army and all those GM-made Opel trucks rolled across the border into Poland, touching off World War II. They escaped across France, where they boarded a ferry in the port of Dunkirk and crossed the English Channel to Dover, dodging floating mines along the way.
When Hershey finally made it back to Detroit, he went up to Harley’s office and found that some things hadn’t changed.
“I’ve got $3,800 of the company’s money,” he said. “What’ll I do with it?”
Harley looked at him and replied, “I don’t have the slightest idea of what you are talking about.”
“It’s the money you sent me.”
“The money I sent you?”
“Yes, you sent it to the Arnhem Bank.”
“Look, I’m busy as hell,” Harley said. “Would you get out of this office? And don’t ever mention that goddamned money to me again.”
Knowing better than to argue with the boss, Hershey and his wife used the leftover money to buy a house.
10
“I Wouldn’t Buy That Sonofabitch”
As Harley Earl approached his forty-seventh birthday in the fall of 1940, GM’s executive committee voted to make him a vice president.
The promotion marked the first time a designer had reached that rank in the auto industry, or any industry, and it served as a long-overdue public acknowledgment of his pivotal role in the company’s phenomenal rise. He had succeeded beyond Alfred Sloan’s expectations, revolutionizing the way cars were designed, marketed, and even imagined. Full-size clay modeling was now standard practice throughout the industry.
As America’s first and only c
orporate vice president of styling, he was accorded a new level of respect wherever he went. “When he walked into a room, everything went silent,” said Frank Hershey. “They all wanted to hear what he wanted to say.” His name was starting to be mentioned in the same breath as Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes, the two most celebrated figures in the burgeoning field of industrial design. Loewy made a fortune designing everything from refrigerators for Sears, Roebuck, and soda fountain dispensers for Coca-Cola to vacuum cleaners for Electrolux and locomotives for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Bel Geddes, a onetime movie set designer, created the most popular attraction at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, GM’s “Futurama” exhibit, which cost $7 million to build (the equivalent of $120 million today) and offered fairgoers a simulated eighteen-minute flight over an imagined 1960 American landscape with farmland, forests, small towns, and cities connected by a ribbon of multilevel automated superhighways. With unheralded help from the Styling staff, Bel Geddes had built a one-acre scale-model diorama that boasted nearly fifty thousand miniature buildings, a hundred thousand individual trees—of thirteen different species—and five thousand futuristic vehicles. It drew tens of thousands of people a day to GM’s Highways and Horizons pavilion, which recorded 25 million visitors over the fair’s two-year run.
Bel Geddes and Loewy had been dabbling in auto design for nearly a decade through consulting deals with Chrysler and Studebaker, respectively, but neither had yet designed a commercially successful automobile, perhaps because they weren’t real car professionals and therefore lacked a requisite ingredient, what Bill Mitchell and Harley called “gasoline in the veins.” By that metaphor, Harley’s vascular system pulsed with pure petrol. The carriage maker’s son not only “loved cars more than anything in the world,” according to Mitchell, he also seemed to have an unparalleled understanding of the space they occupied in the American psyche. “Your automobile,” he’d say, “is the only possession that you can get into a discussion about with a stranger in a bar.”
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