-
Walter P. Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius (review)
- Technology and Culture
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 43, Number 1, January 2002
- pp. 181-183
- 10.1353/tech.2002.0023
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Technology and Culture 43.1 (2002) 181-183
[Access article in PDF]
Book Review
Walter P. Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius
Walter P. Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius. By Vincent Curcio. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+699. $35.
Vincent Curcio has made an important contribution to the history of the early automobile industry. Prior to this work, the only account of Walter P. Chrysler's life was a serialized autobiography published in 1937. Curcio has written a book aimed at a popular audience; the text is unburdened with documentation, and few references will permit the curious reader to trace a passage back to a source in the bibliography. Nonetheless, Walter P. Chrysler is well-researched, relying on information gathered from Chrysler family sources and other archives.
Curcio covers the orthodox history of mass production, the evolution of self-propelled vehicles, the development of the automobile industry, and other subjects that find their way into the life of Walter Chrysler--streamlining, skyscrapers, labor relations, self-lubricating bearings, and so on. Often he digresses into detailed biographies of such characters as Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, William Durant, John L. Lewis, and many others. This is well and good for a lay audience that may gain entry to the history of [End Page 181] technology through this text and will be well served by it. But for the practicing student, Curcio offers few new insights and encumbers the reader with hundreds of superfluous pages.
In its barest essentials, Curcio's narrative explains the rise of Walter Chrysler as a personality who discovered how to get along well with others and elicit their best productive efforts. His leadership qualities were developed during a long career in railroading. Starting as a machinist's apprentice, Chrysler acquired a reputation for making difficult repairs in record time. He quickly mastered such new technologies as the Westinghouse air brake, steam car heating, and electrical signaling. Gaining notoriety among foremen and managers, he soon moved up through the management hierarchy, eventually becoming road master mechanic for the Chicago Great Western. Along the way, Chrysler increasingly associated with higher management and financiers who, because of his personableness and competence, opened for him new opportunities.
Curcio explains that it was the personal relationships Chrysler built as much as his competence as a machinist and production supervisor that moved him forward. One of these relationships was with Ralph Van Vechten, a banker who provided Chrysler with a loan to purchase a 1905 Locomobile. With a change in ownership of the Chicago Great Western, Chrysler moved into manufacturing, becoming the superintendent of American Locomotive Company's Allegheny works, a facility that had been draining Alco's corporate finances and was badly in need of rationalization. Chrysler turned the Allegheny works around in part through the introduction of moving assembly practices. This accomplishment caught the attention of Van Vechten and other financiers who in 1910 were reorganizing General Motors after the risky adventures of William Durant. As president of GM's Buick division, Chrysler turned it into the leading U.S. car manufacturer and soon developed a reputation as a troubleshooter. Following World War I, Van Vechten asked him to take over the troubled Willys company.
At Willys, he met automotive engineers Carl Breer, Fred Zeder, and Owen Skelton, who designed a next-generation car with a six-cylinder, high-compression engine. Following Willys, another banking syndicate asked Chrysler to take over yet another troubled automobile concern, Maxwell. Sensing that this was his opportunity to become an auto manufacturer in his own right, Chrysler called upon people he had come to know over the years--salesmen, marketers, financiers, designers, and production managers, all of whom had both respect for and loyalty to Chrysler. Among them were Zeder, Skelton, and Breer, whom Chrysler entrusted with the design of a low-cost, high-value vehicle. This turned out to be Walter Chrysler's key insight: the marketability of luxury features and convenience in an inexpensive car. The Chrysler Division of Maxwell soon devoured its parent...