Billy Durant: Creator of General Motors

Prologue

Prologue The new reporter in town, assigned to Detroit by a major magazine, looked out of his office window toward the huge gray bulk of the General Motors Building across the street. He noticed small decorative stones in the walls near the roof and then caught a detail-the letter "D" inscribed in some of the stonework. He telephoned one of the offices in the half-century -old building. What does the "D" stand for? The secretary didn't know, but she would find out. A few minutes later she returned to the phone. Durant, she said. The initial stands for W. C. Durant. Those carved stones are about the only public reminder at General Motors of the man who created GM-the largest industrial corporation in the history of the world. It is not surprising that the new reporter was puzzled. William Crapo Durant is no longer exactly a household name; he is seldom mentioned in the same breath with Henry Ford, Walter P. Chrysler, or Alfred P. Sloan. Yet of all the colorful men who propelled the United States of America into the automobile age, W. C. Durant was perhaps the most unusual-and from an organizational standpoint in the pioneering era, the most important. If Durant had not appeared on the stage in the auto industry's formative years, General Motors would not exist. Neither would the largest-selling automobile , Chevrolet. Quite probably there would be no Buick or Oldsmobile today, and possibly no Pontiac or Cadillac. Charles 14 Prologue W. Nash would not have had the chance to form his own automobile company. Walter P. Chrysler might have stayed in railroads. Alfred P. Sloan's career would have been far different. The list goes on and on. Certainly there would have been a giant automobile industry today had Durant not been involved. But just as certainly it would have had a far different structure. Durant had a hand, directly or indirectly, in shaping the beginnings of three of the four major American automobile manufacturing corporations that exist today. He founded General Motors and greatly influenced the careers of both Nash, one of the founders of what has become the American Motors Corporation, and, to a lesser extent, Chrysler, founder of the Chrysler Corporation. Of the major U.S. auto manufacturers that survive, only Ford was not significantly influenced by Durant. And at one time Durant came close to controlling Ford, losing out only because banking institutions did not share his faith in the future of the automobile. Unlike most of the pioneer automotive giants, Durant was not a back-shop tinkerer. While other men put automobiles together, he put organizations together, and he did it with dramatic flair. He was an extremely complex and paradoxical personality, a supersalesman who spoke in a soft voice, a builder of fortunes who cared very little about money and who ultimately died without leaving any. He dreamed great dreams and made them come true because he had unparalleled vision and courage, an iron will, and a legendary charm that made him an adored leader of thousands. Even those who did not always agree with his methods called him a genius, though they also sometimes called him a dictator and a gambler. He was all three. Even his most loyal followers did not understand him and could not predict his next move. He was too far ahead of them. He was capable of fantastic successes and equally fantastic failures. At times he seemed childlike in his business dealings; at other times he outsmarted the sharpest leaders of finance. He plunged headlong into catastrophes that an average man might easily have seen coming. But that same overriding optimism permitted him to create great organizations. He had an attitude not common among men of big moneyhe tried to protect the people who invested with him, even if 15 Prologue this protection would break him. Finally it did. And when at last he was unable to save the dollars of his supporters, he himself plunged from multimillionaire to bankruptcy. By 1940 Durant was back where he had started, working hard in Flint, Michigan, and planning great business expansions. Except that by then he was seventy-eight years old and no longer wealthy, and his business was bowling, not automobiles. He was operating a bowling alley almost in the shadow of the Buick manufacturing complex he had created. Still he had great dreams...