Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  As GM’s competitors began expanding their styling departments to keep up with him, they quickly found there weren’t enough trained designers and clay modelers to go around, which created a seller’s market for anyone with GM experience. Partly to stay ahead of the turnover in his staff, Harley directed company scholarship grants to two leading industrial-design schools, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Art Center School in Los Angeles, both of which added automobile design courses to their curriculum. He even started his own school, calling it the Detroit Institute of Automobile Styling, with a classroom in the General Motors building on Cass Avenue. Recruited through ads in Popular Mechanics and other magazines, prospective students had to submit work samples and references. If accepted, they were paid $75 a month to participate in a yearlong program that included training in sketching and clay modeling overseen by members of the Styling staff.

  Clare MacKichan had studied art and architecture and held a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan when he enrolled, along with nine others, in the first class at the institute. “I wanted to design; it was my sole interest,” he said. “I don’t think Harley ever came to the school, but, of course, we’d heard from him, because he was God, and occasionally we would see him on the street. I’ll tell you, there were some times when he looked to be about eight feet tall.”

  Upon graduation in 1940, MacKichan went to work in the Styling Section, earning $150 a month as a clay modeler’s helper in the Buick studio. “For the first time, I could see Harley Earl coming into the room and saying what he wanted,” he said, recalling an encounter with the legend late one night when he was working flat on his back under a clay model. “I heard this noise and heavy walking of feet and I looked out and there’s Harley dressed in his yachting costume, along with some of the Fisher brothers and some other notable people. And they were coming in from a party at the yacht club, I supposed, at 1:30 or 2:00 a.m., just to see how we were doing.” MacKichan didn’t speak to Harley “because I wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “A person in my position would never talk to the man.”

  MacKichan and his fellow graduates rotated through various positions as they learned Harley’s system. The five division studios were self-contained, each with its own layout tables, modeling platforms, clay ovens, staff, and chief designer. The design teams operated on a three-year cycle, creating an entirely new model in year one, freshening it up with a face-lift the following year, and then restyling the fenders, deck, and hood in the third year. As a result, every GM sedan, coupe, convertible, and station wagon looked new and different every year.

  But not too different. Alfred Sloan told Harley early on that he needed to stimulate the public’s appetite for new GM models without rendering the older models unpalatable in comparison. A delicate balance had to be maintained between the new and used car markets, he said, because most people depended on the trade-in value of their old car for the down payment on a new one.

  Having learned from the 1929 “pregnant Buick” debacle that the average American car buyer didn’t go for abrupt, radical styling changes, Harley developed an ingenious process for delivering gradual, carefully planned change. He introduced major styling innovations—suitcase fenders, for instance—in the Cadillac, then passed them down in succeeding years to the less expensive makes, first to Buick, then to Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and finally, in the fifth year, to the low-priced Chevrolet, where they became commonplace. The trickle-down styling scheme “played upon consumers’ desire not merely for progress, but also for social mobility,” according to automotive historian David Gartman. “Consumers of the lower makes were persuaded that their cars were getting better because they looked more like Cadillacs, and their lives were getting better as well.”

  No other styling department operated on such a sophisticated level or produced anywhere near the volume of new models, a point Harley dramatically drove home to the staff the day a young designer was passing around pirated photos of a competitor’s unfinished new model. “I don’t give a goddamn what they are doing,” Harley barked as he snatched the pictures away and tossed them into a wastebasket. “We are leading the industry; they follow us.”

  In fact, the Styling staff had a long tradition of spying on the competition. They called it “chasing,” according to Frank Hershey, who recalled the time in the early days of Art and Colour when he and a friend from GM’s photographic department decided “to go and find out what the latest Ford V-8 was going to look like.” They drove to Dearborn and parked on a side street, peeked over a shrub-covered fence, and saw old Henry Ford himself driving around in a new Model A V-8. They snapped off a quick round of pictures, jumped back in the car, and hightailed it for the office.

  “We got about a mile down the road, and here comes a huge Lincoln with about four guys in it,” Hershey told art historian C. Edson Armi. “They ran us off the road and turned us over in the ditch on our side. We climbed out of the car, and they took this big Graflex [camera] and took the film out. But we had hidden the original film under the seat, so they didn’t get anything. They smashed the camera, but we had put a new film in the camera to make it look good. They weren’t that smart.”

  Asked if he’d been frightened by the encounter with what had clearly been a squad of Harry Bennett’s goons, Hershey shrugged. “I was young and foolish, and besides, I was so automobile-crazy I’d do anything to see a competition car.”

  The occasional “chasing” adventures provided a welcome break from the daily chaos and frustration attendant to Harley’s creative process. He pushed his design teams relentlessly to come up with graceful new shapes and novel decorative treatments, while at the same time cautioning them not to cross over the line of what the consumer was prepared to accept. “Go all out and then pull back,” he’d say. He always seemed to know where that line was, but because he couldn’t draw it or describe it, his staff usually had to find it through trial and error, proffering as many as fifteen hundred renderings of a taillight or grille before he saw the right one.

  “Earl’s real talent lay in his critical eye . . . which was always focused firmly on the bottom line,” said David Gartman. “He was an uncanny commercial critic with an extraordinary ability to anticipate the sales success of a design.”

  In reminiscing about their experiences, several of Harley’s designers offered versions of the same incident as an example of his unique style of criticism. It began with a phone call to the Pontiac studio warning that “the old man” was on his way down to check the progress on a clay model. The Pontiac design chief, Bob Lauer, and his assistant had just enough time to position themselves at the door to greet him as Harley let himself in with his key. Across the room, the model had been slicked with water so it glistened. Several modelers stood by ready to make any changes he might order. The designers were all heads-down busy-looking at their drawing boards, but they tracked Harley carefully out of the corner of their eyes as he walked over to the model and circled it slowly, stopping to scrutinize the front, rear, and sides, saying nothing. You could have heard a pencil eraser drop.

  “No, Bob,” he said, finally. “It’s two or three years from now and you are out in Pasadena, and a little old lady comes into the showroom and she’s standing about the same distance from the car and she will look it over, and do you know what she will say?”

  “No, Mistearl, I don’t,” Lauer supposedly said.

  “She’ll say, ‘I wouldn’t buy that sonofabitch,’” Harley responded. Then he turned on his heel and strode toward the door, saying over his shoulder as he left, “I’ll come back.”

  When he did, so the story goes, the model had been reshaped to his satisfaction.

  “You had to have someone at the head of this who would not be satisfied with anything but the best,” said Clare MacKichan. “And you didn’t know what was best until you tried a hundred things, a thousand things. How do you know what’s best until you see all of them? That’s why we had the large group we had.”

&
nbsp; “It was still small enough that it was a family,” he added. “And we used to have big annual picnics, which were really great fun and lasted into the wee hours. Harley knew that we worked long, hard hours so he would do things to make up for it. I guess our wives didn’t agree with these things making up for it.”

  The wives certainly wouldn’t have agreed with how some of their husbands dealt with pressure during the workday. “There was a group of designers that participated in what was often described as ‘nooners,’” said Strother MacMinn. “This means taking off for lunch and going to a place of physical release, shall we say, and maybe coming back around 2:00 p.m., and you’d probably had a good martini lunch in the process as well, so you’d come back fully relaxed, theoretically. But it was a desperate move for a lot of designers.”

  The pressure they felt wasn’t just from Harley. As they worked on what were to be the 1942 models, everyone on the staff was keenly aware they were racing against world events. During the spring of 1940, Hitler’s army had swept into Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, forcing their soldiers to surrender or flee the Continent by boat; a German invasion of Great Britain seemed imminent. The United States was not yet directly involved in war, but all signs said it was just a matter of time. On May 26 President Roosevelt announced in a Sunday-night radio broadcast that he was asking the leaders of American industry to convert part of their production capacity to making aircraft and munitions for the beleaguered British and to build up America’s own defense arsenal. He said there was an urgent need for 50,000 warplanes, both fighters and bombers.

  Three days later, Roosevelt called William Knudsen and asked him to come to Washington to head up a new National Defense Advisory Commission aimed at enlisting the nation’s largest manufacturers in the armament effort. Knudsen seemed an inspired choice for the job. His combined twenty-nine years at Ford and GM made him arguably the world’s foremost expert on mass production and perhaps the most respected executive in the auto industry. If anyone could persuade a bunch of filthy rich, highly competitive industrial titans to cooperate, it would be Big Bill.

  Knudsen would have to resign from GM to take the new position, which paid one dollar a year, or about $400,000 less than he was making at GM. “This country has been good to me and I want to pay it back,” the Danish immigrant explained to his daughter, though Germany’s invasion of his beloved Denmark, where his three sisters still lived, surely was a motivating factor in his accepting the job.

  The President’s advisors, including the First Lady, Eleanor, wanted him to set up a centrally directed New Deal–style rearmament effort with a “single commanding figure in charge,” a war production czar in today’s parlance. Knudsen disagreed with that approach. He was cut from the same conservative Republican cloth as Alfred Sloan, who believed that any government intervention in the economy or interference with the affairs of private business was anathema. “If we get into war, the winning of it will be purely a question of material and production,” he told Roosevelt at the outset. The best way to harness the energy of American industry, he argued, “was to clear away anti-business tax laws and regulations” that had held back economic progress during the New Deal, and to allow companies to deal directly with the military services, deciding for themselves which war matériel they were best suited to bid on, and how to produce it. The point, he said, was to reduce Washington’s interference in the production process to a minimum. To the surprise and irritation of his advisors, Roosevelt went with Knudsen’s vision of a voluntary, decentralized production effort, and the seeds of the modern military-industrial complex were sown.

  Sloan was furious at Roosevelt for poaching his chief operating officer and at Knudsen for agreeing to it. “They’ll make a monkey out of you down there in Washington,” Sloan warned his longtime friend and colleague, at the same time letting Knudsen know that if he went to work for the President there was no coming back to GM.

  The day Knudsen left GM to assume his new responsibilities in Washington, D.C., a reporter asked him, “Can you build those fifty thousand planes the President is asking for?” Knudsen responded, “I can’t, but America can.” His reputation in Detroit was such that in a matter of weeks he personally enlisted the cooperation of every significant automotive manufacturer, most notably Ford president Edsel Ford, who committed his company to building six thousand Rolls-Royce engines for Britain’s Royal Air Force and three thousand for the U.S. Army Air Corps. The agreement was announced with great fanfare in America and greeted with jubilation in the United Kingdom. Three days after approving it, however, Edsel’s father, Henry, changed his mind and reneged on the RAF engines, believing that Roosevelt was deceitfully attempting to move the country into a foreign war that he believed could be avoided.

  Flabbergasted, Knudsen hurried to Dearborn to reason with his old boss. “Mr. Ford, this is terrible about those motors,” he began. Ford cut him off. “You are mixed up with some bad people in Washington,” he said. “I won’t make motors for the British government. For the American government, yes; for the British government, no.”

  “But, Mr. Ford, we have your word that you would make them,” Knudsen sputtered, his face reddening with rage. “I told the President your decisions and he was very happy about it.” The thought of disappointing the President he loathed apparently moved Ford to repudiate the entire agreement. “We won’t build the engines at all,” he snapped. “Withdraw the whole order. Take it to someone else.”

  On September 7, 1940, Germany commenced a terrorizing two-month aerial bombardment of London. With the population huddled nightly in makeshift basement bomb shelters and RAF Spitfire fighter planes locked in a desperate battle with the Luftwaffe in the sky over the city, Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to Roosevelt pleading for more planes to defend his country.

  The ongoing London Blitz was at the top of Knudsen’s mind on October 15, when he delivered a speech at the New York Auto Show. Speaking to five hundred auto executives gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he said that between building up its own defenses and providing military aid to Great Britain, the United States faced “the greatest production problem of any country in modern times.”

  He talked about America becoming “the arsenal of democracy,” a term FDR promptly appropriated, and ticked off what was needed in addition to the 50,000 warplanes: 130,000 engines, 9,200 tanks, 300,000 machine guns, 400,000 automatic rifles, 1.3 million regular rifles, 380 navy ships, 33 million shells, clothing, and other equipment for 1.2 million soldiers. He said the task would require eighteen billion man-hours, and starting that month Washington was going to push through defense contracts at a rate of $600 million a week. “Talk to your men. Make them feel that it is their responsibility as well as yours. Ask them what they think of a civilization that drives women and children to live in cold and wet holes in the ground.

  “The first half of 1941 is crucial,” Knudsen said in closing. “Gentlemen, we must out-build Hitler.”

  Within six months, automotive manufacturers had entered into military production contracts with the United States, Great Britain, and Canada totaling more than $3.5 billion. Despite Alfred Sloan’s misgivings, GM led the pack with over $500 million in defense contracts, including one for its Indianapolis-based Allison division to provide engines for a top-secret new fighter plane called the P-38 Lightning.

  In the spring of 1941, Harley heard through the GM grapevine that one of the P-38 test planes was being housed at Selfridge Field, an army air base thirty miles north of Detroit. So he pulled some strings, possibly with Knudsen, and took several of his top designers, including Frank Hershey and Bill Mitchell, on a field trip to check it out, thinking the plane’s supposedly radical design might provide some styling inspiration for the staff.

  Because of the plane’s top-secret classification, they weren’t allowed to walk up to it or photograph it; they could only view it from a distance of thirty or so feet. But that was close enough to get the idea. None o
f them had ever seen an aircraft like the P-38. With an unusually wide 52-foot wingspan, it didn’t have a conventional single fuselage but rather twin booms that flanked a small bullet-shaped, glass-domed pilot’s compartment, called a nacelle. Each boom housed a 12-cylinder, 1,100-horsepower Allison engine, and tapered from a shark-snout front end into a rounded vertical rudder in the rear. The effect was that of a sleek, aerodynamic insect, like a flying spider.

  Frank Hershey was particularly taken with the plane’s twin tail rudders. He thought about them all during the drive back to the city and immediately began sketching them on his drawing board at the studio.

  “I fell in love with those tail fins,” he told Harley’s granddaughter fifty years later. He was trying to incorporate them into a rear fender design when the time for thinking about such things ran out.

  11

  Detroit’s War

  It all happened quickly.

  At 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, more than three hundred Japanese warplanes, launched from four aircraft carriers that had sailed unseen across 3,800 miles of ocean, swooped down on Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu and laid waste to America’s Pacific fleet, destroying or damaging nineteen navy ships, including eight battleships, and more than 300 planes, while killing 2,403 servicemen and civilians. The attack lasted seventy-five minutes.