1929 - 1945 The Glamor Years Jump to:
1929 - 1945 The Glamor Years Jump to:
 |
4 Modern Industrial Buildings, Automotive Giants
|
||
The Chicago Century of Progress fair, in 1933, introduced many novel schemes of construction, most of which were too bizarre to be practical. The chief advantage to be gained from a study of this Chicago fair lay in the use of color in architecture and in the development of lighting effects, which began to play an increasingly extensive role in the design of buildings after 1930. The New York World of Tomorrow fair of 1939-1940 showed increasing skill in functional design and a renewed interest in group planning. The model city exhibit in the Perisphere unites the best of the practical suggestions resulting from the last fifty years of city planning. The contemporaneous Golden Gate Exposition at San Francisco, on the other hand, stressed highly decorated Pacific aboriginal and Indian styles.
With the return of prosperity in the early 1920's, the American automobile industry came into its own as the nation's largest manufacturing enterprise. Production of motor vehicles climbed from 2,227,349 in 1920 to a phenomenal high of 5,337,687 in 1929, a figure not surpassed for another 20 years. By 1929, there was one automobile on the highway for every six people in the United States, and Herbert Hoover's campaign slogan of "two cars in every garage" was by no means as ridiculous as it was made out to be by subsequent critics.
Much of the economic expansion of the period, in fact, was a direct consequence of the rise of the motor vehicle. The production and the operation of automobiles absorbed 20% of the country's annual steel output, 90% of its gasoline, 80% of its rubber, and 75% of its plate glass. Moreover, as millions of Americans became automobile owners, they demanded better roads. The Federal Highways Act of 1921 and the dedication of the Zero milestone in Washington a year later, a ceremony at which Roy D. Chapin was appropriately one of the principal speakers, signaled the launching of a vast program of road building by both Federal and state authorities. The automobile also brought with it a substantial new area of service occupations: dealers and repair shops, filling stations and tourist camps.
Expansion, of course, had its problems. For both the manufacturer and the dealer, the most serious was the fast-growing number of serviceable used cars. The trade journals of the decade contain a variety of proposals for taking second-hand cars out of circulation; quite clearly, none of them worked. Associated with the used-car difficulty was the unbelievable fact that after just a quarter of a century, automobile ownership in the United States had become so widespread that for the time being new cars would be bought predominantly for replacement rather than by purchasers who had not previously owned an automobile. This situation gradually achieved a reluctant recognition within the industry. As early as the end of 1925 there were warnings of the danger of overproduction and of excessive liberality in retail financing. The continued upsurge of business made this note of caution appear needless at the time, although at the peak of the boom in 1928 Alfred P. Sloan was advising that the automobile industry was thinking too much of volume production and not enough of net profits, while James D. Mooney, president of the General Motors Export Corporation, was suggesting that the executive who thought in terms of production for its own sake was now outmoded. These, however, were minority opinions, noteworthy because it was the engineer-executives who were looking critically at the demand side of the picture while practically everyone else was hypnotized by the bull market ( Mooney was a graduate of Case who had worked for Westinghouse and B. F. Goodrich before entering General Motors via the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company).
On the technological side, there were few major changes in the cars themselves. Essentially the automobile of the 1920's was the same as its predecessor of the previous decade, with refinements in the form of more efficient and more powerful engines, better lighting systems, and more graceful body styling. The most conspicuous innovation of commercial significance was Roy D. Chapin's offering of both Hudson and Essex closed cars in 1922 at prices only $100, above the comparable touring car.
The gradual decline of the cross-licensing arrangement was directly related to the advance of concentration in the industry. As the larger comparties developed their own research programs, they came increasingly to feel that they should be reimbursed for what they were spending in this way before they gave their competitors access to their discoveries. On their side, the smaller concerns were at some disadvantage because patents taken out by parts manufacturers, even if they were subsidiaries of the big automobile companies, were excluded from the agreement. Nevertheless, the tradition of cross-licensing had become so ingrained in the automobile industry that, in 1953, Alfred Reeves was able to boast that there had not been a patent suit between members of the Automobile Manufacturers Association in 37 years.
The principal beneficiaries of the automobile industry's expansion were the big companies. Mass production and mass marketing gave a tremendous advantage to large-scale operation. This feature of automobile manufacturing had, as we have seen, been emerging for some time, but without a definite indication of how many giants the industry would support or which firms would make the grade. To be sure, Ford and General Motors appeared to be secure once they had weathered their respective crises in 1920, but beyond these two it was anybody's guess. Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Willys-Overland, Maxwell--all were prospective candidates for the top rank.
The boom period of the 1920's saw the pattern of bigness crystallize. Ford and General Motors remained well in the lead but changed places, so that General Motors became the nation's and the world's largest manufacturer of motor vehicles. Meanwhile, Walter Chrysler was putting together another behemoth, and these three completely outstripped and overshadowed the rest of the field.
4 Next Page: Living with Advanced Technology
|
|||
In this chapter: 
