The Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy (review)

The Dodge brothers, John and Horace, were the odd couple of the auto industry. John, the more gregarious, well-met, and public of the two, teamed with his younger brother, who was gifted with mechanical abilities, for their entire careers. Hard-drinking, self-made millionaires who were always uneasy in the clubby automakers' social milieu, they left their mark on the early auto industry and the nation.

Neither man was marked for greatness early. They trained as machinists as the family knocked around Niles, Battle Creek, and Port Huron, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Along the way, Horace invented an improved bicycle ball bearing that brought him some fame. The brothers, like many early automakers, entered the booming bicycle business. By the late 1890s, however, the industry was consolidating into national firms, and they sold their company. In 1900 they opened up their own machine shop in Detroit.

The turning point in their careers came when Ransom E. Olds contracted with their firm in 1901 to manufacture engines for his new curved-dash automobile. The brothers were soon making thousands of engines and transmissions for Olds. After building a new factory in 1902, they linked up with Henry Ford, making engines for him. When Ford was unable to pay the brothers in the summer of 1903, they accepted 10 percent of the Ford Motor Company in lieu of only $7,000 in overdue payments. From then until 1914 the brothers became a major parts supplier for Ford and shared in its burgeoning profits. When they sold their Ford stock in 1919 they had made around thirty-two million dollars from the deal.

For all their mechanical talents, the brothers were not technological trendsetters. They were not even the best machinists in Detroit. Henry Leland's Olds engines were built with closer tolerances and produced more horsepower than the Dodge brothers' engines. The brothers excelled, however, at designing sophisticated machine tools, adapting them to the production process and working out materials-handling configurations to make their factories more efficient. Their products, including their own Dodge automobiles after 1914, were always durable and dependable, never flashy, and rarely innovative. Their biggest contribution was their introduction of all-steel bodies in 1922, which led to the first unit bodies in 1928, two years after the brothers' deaths.

Charles K. Hyde has written an engaging study of the two men, their personal and professional relationships, and the factors that made them leading auto builders and multimillionaires. He is especially successful in pointing up how two ambitious and talented men could rise from the shop floor to head their own companies in a new and brawling business. He also explains how the brothers sold their machinist skills to the banking world to raise millions of dollars to develop new machinery and expand their plants. They employed thousands of men and women in Detroit, they were one of the few automakers to hire African Americans, they resisted unions, and they maintained a paternalistic attitude toward their workers. They even paid for life insurance policies for everyone in their factories. They changed the nation's culture by helping to manufacture millions of Oldsmobiles, Model Ts, and Dodges. Henry Ford may have put the nation on wheels, but Dodge components made all those motoring Americans go.

Although well-written, this book needed more careful editing. Repetitions abound; it sometimes reads as if a separate author wrote each chapter and the editor never brought them all together. Moreover, the organization is strange. Hyde kills the brothers off in chapter 5 and then discusses their philanthropic and political activities. In the following chapter, he examines their company, its management, and finances for the last six years of their lives.

Aside from these relatively minor quibbles, Hyde has packed a great deal of information on the Dodge brothers and their technical contributions to the early auto industry into a book of modest length and price.