Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  Most of the women had never held a legitimate job and were largely illiterate. Dreystadt didn’t have time to teach them how to read, so he “went to the workbench himself and machined a dozen of the bombsights,” Drucker wrote. “When he knew how to do it, he had a movie camera take a film of the process. He mounted the film frames separately on a projector and synchronized them with a flow diagram in which a red light went on to show the operator what she had already done, a green light for what she had to do next, and a yellow light to show what to make sure of before taking the next step.” In a matter of a few weeks, the women were turning out better work and in larger quantities than skilled machinists had before them.

  For his efforts, Dreystadt was called a “whoremonger” and a “nigger lover” to his face and behind his back and subjected to constant cracks about Cadillac’s “red light district.”

  “These women are my fellow workers, and yours,” he would respond angrily. “They do a good job and respect their work. Whatever their past, they are entitled to the same respect as any one of our associates.”

  He pleaded with leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW) to keep at least some of the women on after the war. “For the first time in their lives, these poor wretches are paid decently, work in decent conditions, and have some rights,” he said. “And for the first time they have some dignity and self-respect. It’s our duty to save them from being again rejected and despised.”

  But the union’s white, largely fundamentalist Christian membership didn’t like the idea of working next to women of any color, much less black prostitutes. So as the young men began returning home from the European conflict, one by one Dreystadt’s Black Bottom recruits were let go. Rather than return to their former profession, “many tried to commit suicide and quite a few succeeded,” according to Drucker, who described a devastated Dreystadt sitting in his office with his face buried in his hands, sobbing, “God forgive me; I have failed these poor souls.”

  * * *

  At the same time as the riots, another long-simmering conflict bubbled over in a different part of town; author A. J. Baime dubbed it “the battle of Dearborn.”

  Edsel Ford knew he was racing against time to get the Willow Run plant up to its promised goal of producing one B-24 bomber per hour, or about 700 a month. However, only fifty-six planes had been built, which alarmed William Knudsen and President Roosevelt because the military was counting on thousands of them to pound the Germans in North Africa and Europe. Newspaper editorials characterized the Willow Run situation as a national embarrassment and began referring to the plant as “Will It Run.”

  Part of the problem was that Edsel had not foreseen the government’s gas rationing and driving restrictions when he picked the site of the plant, mandates that made it impossible for employees to commute daily between Detroit and the town of Ypsilanti, twenty-seven miles away. Which meant that at least forty thousand plant workers would need to find housing in a small farming community that had none available. So before the plant could become fully operational, Ford and the government had to build a camplike community that dwarfed the neighboring town. “Bomber City” (later changed to Willow Village) took a year to complete and cost an estimated $100 million.

  Another problem was Henry Ford. The increasingly erratic company chairman and majority shareholder continued to allow his thuggish factotum, Harry Bennett, to fire experienced executives according to whim and run roughshod over plant employees, to the point of sparking fistfights and wildcat work stoppages. At one point Edsel received information that Bennett was overseeing the organized theft of as much as $12,000 worth of military equipment a day from the Rouge River plant and was selling it to an outside fencing ring. He turned the information over to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who placed an agent from the bureau’s Detroit office inside the company to conduct an investigation.

  Under the pressure of trying to counter the machinations of his father and hit a production goal that many considered unattainable, Edsel grew gaunt and began experiencing severe abdominal pains. His colleagues and friends worried that he was working himself to death, but when they urged him to slow down or take time off, he responded, “The war can’t wait.” He reached a breaking point in early April 1943, when the company’s head of purchasing, a trusted thirty-year employee, told him that Bennett had allowed a local mob boss to obtain the lucrative fruit concession at the Rouge plant and gain an ownership interest in a Ford dealership. “There were people that we were asked to put on the payroll for no apparent reason except to pay a debt of some kind,” the man said, “people that had to be paid for something they never did.” After Edsel angrily confronted Bennett, his father decided the best thing to do was fire the purchasing manager.

  After that incident, one of Edsel’s closest associates found him slumped on the couch in his office, worn down and in tears. “The best thing for me to do is resign,” he said. “My health won’t permit me to go on.”

  As his friends had feared, Edsel was indeed dying, but not from stress. Six months earlier, he had undergone surgery for what his doctors thought was ulcers but turned out to be cancer. They removed half of his stomach. He quickly returned to work, getting through the days with painkillers and the nights with sedatives while telling people he was “making fine progress” in his recovery. Neither his father nor his children knew the seriousness of his illness. But a subsequent procedure revealed that the cancer had spread to his liver, and the doctors told the family there was nothing more they could do. Henry refused to believe it and angrily ordered them to return his son to health “because that’s what you’re here for.” Upon hearing the grim prognosis, Edsel’s second oldest son, Benson, declared, “Grandfather is responsible for Father’s sickness, and I’m through with him!”

  A few weeks later, Edsel left work early, went home to his Grosse Pointe estate, and never left. He died there in a makeshift infirmary on May 26, 1943, sixteen years to the day after he and his father had driven the last Model T off the assembly line. He was forty-nine.

  President Roosevelt sent a condolence note to Edsel’s widow, Eleanor, the same day. “A powerful force has been lost to the war effort,” he wrote. “He had devoted his superb abilities wholeheartedly to the defeat of the Axis powers and his passing in this critical time in our history is a grievous loss to his country’s effort and to the cause of the United Nations. My heart goes out to you and to all of the family in deepest sympathy.”

  Calling Edsel “one of the most tragic figures in American business history,” historian David L. Lewis eulogized, “He was more than talented; he was creative. He was more than hardworking; he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility to his company and community. He was an excellent administrator, and he commanded the affection, respect, and loyalty of his associates. Unfortunately, his father, far from rejoicing in and making constructive use of these qualities, restricted and nullified them in his unceasing effort to remold his son into a tough, hard-hitting executive.”

  A few days after Edsel’s death, at a board meeting with his widow, Eleanor, present in his place, Henry made the stunning announcement that he would be stepping back into the role of chief executive, a position he had not held in twenty-four years. Incensed at the old man’s timing and tactlessness, Eleanor reportedly shocked the room by blurting out, “You, Mr. Ford, you’re the one who killed your son,” a sentiment shared by the entire family, including Henry’s wife, Clara.

  With Edsel gone and an often addled Henry back in charge of daily operations, Franklin Roosevelt entertained the idea of nationalizing the company to ensure the flow of critical equipment to the military. But he held off in the hope that Edsel’s eldest son, Henry Ford II, could wrest the reins of the company away from his grandfather and gain control of the dangerously dysfunctional company. First, however, the twenty-five-year-old navy ensign had to be granted an early discharge. On July 26, two months after his father’s death, Henry II received a letter from the secretary of the navy relievi
ng him of any further obligations to the military. “The services you will render as a private individual will surpass any work you could possibly do in your present situation.”

  As the newly installed executive vice president of the company, Henry II tried to get his arms around its myriad problems, but by the spring of 1944 he’d become so frustrated with the constant sabotage by his grandfather and Harry Bennett that he was threatening to resign, sell his stock, and advise Ford dealers all over the country to jump ship. “This thing killed my father, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it kill me,” he reportedly told a close associate. “I’m going to get out before it does.” Instead, his mother and grandmother joined together to get the old man out.

  Eleanor conspired with Clara to arrange a closed-door confrontation with Henry at the couple’s Fair Lane estate. With Clara present, Eleanor gave her father-in-law an ultimatum—either he turned the company over to Henry II, or she would sell all of her and Edsel’s shares of Ford stock and his relations with his grandchildren would cease. Frail, experiencing intermittent episodes of dementia, and engulfed by grief and guilt over Edsel’s death, the seventy-nine-year-old patriarch gave in and officially resigned from the company.

  A month after D-day, in July 1944, Willow Run hit its bomber-an-hour production goal, and by war’s end it had provided the military with nearly nine thousand B-24 Liberators.

  12

  The Birth of Fins

  Navy lieutenant Frank Hershey received a medical discharge in the fall of 1944 and became the first of Harley’s senior designers to return from the war. The reunion must have been emotional, given their long mentor-protégé relationship, but it’s unlikely either man let on. Harley’s display of affection consisted of naming Hershey chief of the Cadillac studio until Bill Mitchell completed his tour of duty as a naval officer.

  Harley began gathering up other staffers who had been dispersed to various projects scattered among different GM divisions, including a small group of designers the company had interred in somewhat shabby quarters at 40 West Milwaukee Avenue because their age or national heritage disqualified them, in the eyes of the government, from involvement in defense work. In a wry reference to the military classification that deems a person unfit to serve, they had taken to calling themselves the “4-F Club.”

  Fierce fighting continued in Europe and the Pacific, but the momentum of the war had shifted in favor of the Allies and the mood on the home front was optimistic. People were starting to talk about what life would be like in “the coming peace,” and automobiles were no small part of the conversation.

  Nearly three years into the production shutdown, cars had become a precious commodity. Half of the 26 million passenger vehicles that had been on the road in 1941 now were more than seven years old. Wrecked and worn-out cars were being scrapped at the rate of 4,000 a day. Of the approximately 500,000 1942 models the government had ordered set aside for the military and essential civilian personnel, only 47,000 remained. And the shortage would only worsen with the war’s end, when as many as 10 million servicemen and -women returned to civilian life en masse, a vast horde seeking jobs, housing, and America’s preferred means of transportation.

  In an article titled “Your Car After the War,” the Saturday Evening Post quoted Harley as boldly predicting that the number of automobiles in America would reach 50 million by 1952. “The car of the future will be functionally designed and so is likely to change greatly in overall appearance,” he said. “The thing we have all been trying to do for years is to erase the static look of cars. We are convinced the public wants low, racy styles.” He scoffed at the notion that postwar automobile design would mimic that of aircraft design, stating flatly, “The only thing the car and the plane have in common is the principles of aerodynamics.” He also declared that “comfort will be demanded at all times and will have to be provided at a lower cost per car pound,” and said he doubted that postwar economics would move Detroit to start building smaller cars, explaining in his inimitable fashion, “They don’t make chairs or beds smaller during depressions. Then why shrink the car?”

  GM president Charles E. Wilson proposed to do exactly that, however. Having assumed the chief executive position with Chairman Alfred Sloan’s blessing at the beginning of the war, Wilson announced on May 15, 1945—two weeks after Hitler blew his brains out in his Berlin bunker—that Chevrolet was developing a smaller, lower-cost car, which, he believed, would stimulate the postwar car market. “The higher the prices of automobiles, the fewer will be sold,” he explained to the New York Times. “If people cannot raise the money or credit for new cars, they will simply get along with their old ones. They proved they could do it during the war.”

  As envisioned, the new car would be a four-passenger sedan, eight inches shorter and $50 to $100 cheaper than a standard Chevrolet, with a sticker price under $1,000, not unlike Hitler’s prewar KdF Wagen. Dubbed the Cadet, it was still in “the idea stage,” Wilson said, and would not go into production “until a considerable period of time after the close of the war with Japan.”

  Even with the chief executive’s enthusiastic backing, the Cadet was a long shot, however, because most members of the executive committee opposed it. Harlow Curtice was among those who shared the industry’s long-standing bias against so-called European-style small cars. He believed that size mattered to the American motorist and few would be persuaded to sacrifice hip room and horsepower for the sake of a small price cut from a full-size sedan. Sloan thought the project made no economic sense. With experts predicting a pent-up demand for at least 12 million new cars in the first two years after the war, a number that far exceeded any previous annual output, the market probably wouldn’t need stimulation; buyers likely would be standing in line to snap up whatever came out of the factory. In which case, every Cadet the company made instead of a full-size Chevy would represent a $50 to $100 loss. The project proceeded anyway, primarily because Chevrolet general manager M. E. Coyne backed it and GM’s decentralized system gave division heads unfettered authority to develop new products up to the point of setting up an assembly line, which required executive committee approval. Harley assigned a design team to help Chevrolet engineers create a Cadet prototype, and the company provided them with studio space in a dreary downtown building they nicknamed “Cockroach Canyon.” He was just happy to have his men back and working on a car.

  Bill Mitchell rejoined the Styling staff in late August 1945, soon after Japan’s surrender. He’d barely settled back in as chief of the Cadillac studio when the UAW shut the company down with a nationwide strike; nearly 200,000 GM plant employees walked off the job demanding a 30 percent pay increase. Union leaders had forsworn such actions during the war “for the good of the country,” lest they impede the military production effort. But now they moved quickly to make sure their members got a slice of the postwar American pie. Nearly 3 million hourly wage earners—electrical, oil, steel, and railroad workers; lumbermen, coal miners, meat packers, teamsters, and longshoremen—staged walkouts during the first six months of 1946, in what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics called “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.”

  The GM strike differed from those of the 1930s, when the economic desperation of the Depression frequently erupted into violent clashes on the picket lines. This was a peaceful “stay-at-home” strike, enforced only by skeleton-crew picket lines that the company made no attempt to breach. After nearly five years of full employment, relative labor peace, and government-guaranteed profits on military production, GM could well afford to meet the UAW’s wage demand, and the union had ample funds set aside to help its members weather a protracted work stoppage. Negotiations dragged on for 113 days and sometimes veered into broader socioeconomic issues. During one bargaining session, for example, UAW president Walter Reuther argued that without the pay increase autoworkers would not be able to buy the cars they’re making, which would spell trouble not only for the company bu
t for the country as well. “Unless we get a more realistic distribution of America’s wealth, we don’t get enough to keep this [industrial] machine going,” he said.

  GM’s assistant personnel director shot back, “You can’t talk about this thing without exposing your socialist desires.”

  “If fighting for a more equal and equitable distribution of the wealth of this country is socialistic,” Reuther replied, “I stand guilty of being a socialist.”

  The strike locked the Styling staff out of their studios for the duration, but some of them managed to keep working nonetheless. Frank Hershey had a sixty-acre farm called Winkler Mill in Rochester, Michigan, thirty miles north of Detroit, and he invited the Cadillac design team out to help him on a project. He was now chief of the Special Car Design Studio, considered a plum assignment because it wasn’t dedicated to a specific auto division, which meant less meddling by management, or, as Hershey put it, “Nobody stops you from doing what you are doing.”

  He’d been working on the rear fender design idea that had first come to him before the war, when Harley led the field trip to Selfridge air base to see the P-38 fighter. Looking at the plane’s twin tail rudders that day, Hershey immediately thought of fins on sea creatures—slicing through the water’s surface as a shark moved in on its prey, flashing silver-blue in the sun when a sailfish rose out of the ocean in full flight, waving a languid goodbye just before a whale disappeared into the deep—heart-stopping images long embedded in his imagination. It struck him that fins were wondrous creations of nature—beautiful, sleek, and shiny, streamlined and symmetrical, the embodiment of power, speed, maneuverability, and stability, everything that a modern automobile should be. And yet no one had designed them into the body of a car, until now.