General Motors Gets Up To Speed

I talked about how WILLIAMS. C. Durant, founder of GM, acquired companies like Buick, Oldsmobile, Oakland, which was later known

as Pontiac and Cadillac. I explained that his acquisition DASH made his investors nervous, to say the least, and how they responded by removing Durant as head of GM in nineteen ten, and then how Durant went and co founded a new car company called cheval Lay, bought up shares of General Motors with his earnings, got the backing of the DuPont family as well, and eventually returned to GM in nineteen sixteen. So today we're going to learn a bit more about the early days of GM, and then

we'll cover some more of its evolution. Now, originally I had planned on just kind of covering a little bit more about the early history of GM and then skipping forward like nearly a century to talk about what led it to get into financial trouble in the two thousand's. But as it turns out, there's a lot more interesting history and important stuff in the automotive industry and the the labor movement as well that took place in the early decades of General Motors. So we're gonna be sticking

with a little longer than I had intended. Al Right, So one thing I won't be doing. I will not be covering every single car that was produced off of General Motors assembly lines. That would just be ludicrous. I might mention a couple of standouts, but I'm not going to go through each and every car making model. That

would just it would be ludicrous. Now, one thing I did not go into detail in the last episode was to talk about what was going on at GM between nineteen ten and nineteen sixteen during Durant's first exile when he was off founding you know, or co founding Chevrolet

and plotting his revenge, i mean return. Well, the banks helped keep the company afloat while the various acquired car companies were manufacturing automobiles, and even with all those acquisitions, General Motors was still well behind the Ford Motor Company when it came to the largest automakers in the United States. Ford was focused on producing one type of car, the Model T, and it would do so for another more than another decade. Now. A big thing to come out

during Durant's first exile was the trick starter. This was a huge development, and it helps if we go back to something I talked about in the previous GM episode. So in that episode I described the four stroke process with car engines, in which a piston in a cylinder draws in air and gasoline in a little mixture, compresses that mixture. Then a spark plug strikes a spark that ignites that mixture, which pushes the piston outward and provides

the energy needed to make the car move. And then the piston comes back up through the cylinder and pushes out the exhaust and the whole process starts again. But how does that process get started? I mean that once you get it going, it can sustain itself for as long as you have fuel and you're operating the engine. But how do you get it started in the first place. Well, these days, internal combustion engines have ignition starters that engage

an electric motor to turn a flywheel. That fly wheel is in turn connected to the c inank shaft of the engine, and that electric motor provides the force needed to turn the crank shaft and get those pistons moving, and that starts that process of pulling in air and fuel, assuming you've got the throttle open and you can get the combustion cycle going that way. But in the early

days that was not an option. So in the old old old days, the earliest automobiles had what was called a crank wheel, and the crank wheel connected to the crank shaft of the automobile, and the ones I've seen were horizontal wheels that were mounted on the engine, and the engine was typically mounted on the back of the vehicle. So giving the crank wheel a spin manually, as in, you know, actually gripping it with your hands and turning it in the correct direction would rotate the crank chaft.

This was not necessarily easy to do. By the way, the piston in the cylinder is typically a single cylinder engine connects to the crank shaft, so as the crank shaft turns, it provides the the energy needed, the force needed rather to move the piston up and down, because the piston is connected to the crank shaft and that rotation uh motion of the crank shaft gets converted into the reciprocal motion of a piston going up and down

inside the cylinder. So spinning the wheel at the right speed could get the crank shaft spinning and move the piston and start the process similar to what it described a second ago with the electric motor, except in this case you're doing it by hand. The piston begins to draw air into the cylinder, but that's obviously not enough for ignition. To ignite an engine, you also have to prime it a bit by allowing that mix of air

and fuel into the piston. It can't just be air, or it would be like striking a match in a normal room. You don't get explosions, assuming you're not filling that room with you know, explosive fumes or something. So in order to do that, you do have to have the throttle open just a little bit, not necessarily all the way open, but a little open to allow fuel to go into the piston as well as air. You also typically would have something called the choke that you

needed to open when. As the name suggests, the choke controls whether or not air can flow into the system through the carburetor. UH. These old vehicles had carburetors. This creates a mix that can then be ignited once you're ready to actually start the vehicle. So with the handbrake on, which is a very important step with these old cars,

you would engage the method for the spark plugs to spark. UH. Many early automobiles had a control kind of like a lever to advance the frequency of the spark plugs sparking, sometimes called a spark advance. Interesting thing is that because this was not an automated system, it wasn't all working together.

You had to manually changed the spark advance. So once you've got an engine running, you would actually need to move the spark advance a bit to kind of find a sweet spot where the spark frequency is hitting it just the right point in the four stroke process. And you could tell you could just hear it in the engine when it hit that that sweet spot, because otherwise it was kind of chugging along and it did mean that you were actually manually adjusting how frequently the spark

plugs were sparking. But where did the electricity come from to create those sparks. Well, again, in the early days, you were typically talking about a magneto, which isn't just a villainous mutant in the Marvel universe, although it's that too. A magneto works on the principles of electro magnetic interactions, something I've talked about a lot on episodes of tech Stuff. A magneto is kind of like an electro magnet in reverse.

But here's the gist. Let's say you take a conduct of material, typically we're talking about copper wire, and you wrap that copper wire around an iron core, and then you pass that copper wire around the core through a magnetic field. Well, passing it through that magnetic field would mean that the field would induce a current to flow through the copper wire, but this would only last a moment as the copper wire encountered this magnetic field, as

long as there was some sort of fluctuation there. If you put copper wire into a magnetic field and then just let it stay, you sit in the stable magnetic field that flow of current would stop. You would have a kind of equilibrium. But if you were to change the magnetic field, if you were to create a fluctuating field, you could continue to induce current to flow in the copper wire and make it even change direction. Now, changing

the magnetic field is not actually that hard. If you flip a magnet so that the north and south poles of the magnet change position over and over and over again, that's enough to do the trick. So if you have a spinning permanent magnet and you put that spinning permanent magnet next to a coil of copper wire wrapped around an iron core, you're going to induce an electric current

to flow through that copper wire. So if you set up a system in which you either rotate a coil of wire between the poles of a permanent magnet, or you rotate magnets around a stationary coil of wire. There are systems that use one of the two ways and others that use the other way. But the system will subject that coil to a fluctuating magnetic field when the apparatus is in motion, and that induces current to flow

through it. Now, ignition magnetos and early automobiles were a bit more complicated than this, just as a you know, kind of reverse electro magnet. That's because to create a spark you need a really high voltage. So the analogy everyone uses when they talk about voltage is with plumbing. Voltage is kind of like water press. Sure, a spark plug is essentially a pair of electrodes that are separated

from one another with a little air gap in between them. Now, the voltage in a spark plug is high enough, meaning the electric potential between those two electrodes becomes great enough, there will be a brief electric arc connecting those two electrodes. That's the spark. So it's electricity that can travel a short distance through the air. You know, the air is not a really good conductor of electricity, which is honestly a pretty good thing. At least the air down where

we live is not a good conductor of electricity. If you go out to the ionosphere, it's a different story. So you have to get the voltage high enough to allow this to happen. But if it's not high enough, then you don't get any spark. So your standard magneto actually doesn't produce enough voltage to do this all on its own. So to manage this, the ignition magneto first

uses two coils of copper wiring. The first coil, or a primary coil, tends to be thicker copper wire wrapped around an iron core a certain number of times or turns. We call it turns of copper wire. So let's say it has just for the sake of argument, it's got ten turns, and the secondary coil is typically thinner copper wire that's wound many many many more times than the primary coil. So for the sake of this example, let's

say it's got a thousand turns. So you have ten of the thicker copper wire and a thousand of the thinner one. Now, if you know about transformers, not the robots in disguise, but electrical transformers, this is all going to start to sound really familiar, because if you induce current to flow through one coil of a conductive wire wrapped around an iron core, you also create a magnetic field.

This is an electro magnet. If you ever made one of these in school, I remember wrapping a piece of copper wire around uh an iron nail, for example, and then connecting the copper wire to a battery and then using the nail to pick up like iron filings and stuff. That's your basic electro magnets. So, in other words, just as a magnetic field induces current to flow through a conductor,

current flowing through a conductor produces a magnetic field. So let's say you're using alternating current, being the direction of the current changes many times a second through a coil of copper wire wrapped around an iron core. The changing direction of the current also means the polls of the magnetic field are switching many times a second as well, So you're creating a fluctuating magnetic field by using alternating

current through a coil of wire. If you were to bring a second coil of copper wire within that fluctuating magnetic field that was generated by current flowing through the primary coil of copper wire, then that magnetic field will induce electric current to flow through the secondary coil. There doesn't need to be any connection between the two copper wires in this case, so you've got electric current flowing

through primary coil or coil number one. You bring coil number two close enough to be within the magnetic field that's generated as a result, Now you're going to have a current flowing through coil number two because of induction. What's more, the ratio of the number of turns or coils between the primary and the secondary coil determines the change in voltage from one to the other. The thickness of the conductor wire also matters, but we're just gonna

focus on turns for now. So if the secondary coil has more turns than the primary coil, the voltage in that secondary coil will be stepped up compared to the primary coil, So you can increase the voltage this way. That's what transformers do. They change the voltage of transmission by using these different coils. But if the secondary coil has fewer turns than the primary coil does, the voltage

gets stepped down. So trans rumors are why the world adapted to alternating current for the purposes of transmitting electricity great distances. You could use a transformer to boost the voltage way up and thus push the electricity much further out from the point of generation, and then once it got to where it needed to be, you could step down the voltage using another transformer and then feed that

electricity into homes. And businesses. But I'm getting off track and I know it, and I'm sorry for our purposes. This pairing of windings meant that there was a step up effect going on with ignition magnetos. But there are also a couple of other components at play, with a control unit that consists of a breaker and a capacitor. That's the job of this control unit to disrupt the magnetic field and to channel the electric current from the magneto to the spark plug. The capacitor is kind of

like a temporary storage for electric charge. It releases an electric charge all at once, unlike a battery, which is a constant, steady source of electric charge as long as the battery still has you know, electrochemicals reactions going on inside of it. Capacitors are used for all sorts of purposes, like the flash bulb and a classic camera flash. Also, I should mention that capacitors can hold onto electric charge even if the device that they're part of isn't attached

to a battery or plugged in or whatever. That's why you should never just bust up an old CRT television set. You could get a serious shock because of capacitors in there. Now to get the whole operation of spark plugs and magnetos would really take a long time for me to describe in detail. It's complicated by the fact that this is obviously an audio podcast. I can't really illustrate what

I'm talking about. But the important thing to remember is that with this system there wasn't necessarily a need for a battery, although many early cars would also have batteries. The magneto ignition is used in lots of stuff today, including power and lawnmowers, so it's not like it's an

obsolete technology now. A rotor connected to the engine provided the rotational force to operate the magneto, so turning a crank wheel or a crank handle would mean the magneto would spin as well as you know the piston going up and down. So with enough voltage built up and the engine primed, the spark plugs could spark and get things going. Later vehicles replaced the crank wheel with a hand crank that one would insert into the vehicle, typically

near the front of the automobile. It engaged with the crankshaft and served the same purpose as the older crank wheels. Both types of manual starters had major drawbacks. For one, they required a good deal work and could be pretty exhausting for those who weren't, you know, all musk lely and stuff. If you've ever tried to start a stubborn poll start lawnmower, you kind of know the feeling of trying to get one of those to turn over and engage.

For another, Sometimes engines kick back, and that kind of means that the rank shaft immediately turns in the opposite direction with a very sudden and powerful motion. This could happen if the fuel mixture in the cylinder ignited before the piston had reached the top of its stroke, which is a classic backfire situation. The piston goes down and reverses the rotational direction of the crank shaft. It's like

it suddenly got thrown into reverse. And that would mean that suddenly that very heavy hand crank that someone had been turning a particular direction changes direction and could potentially injure the person doing the cranking, like you could break a risk that way. Another drawback was that until engineers started building in systems that would disconnect the crank from the crank shaft upon ignition, started engine might start spinning that hand crank pretty darn quickly once things got going.

Engineers did develop safety systems to disengage the handle from the crank shaft upon starting an engine. But the development of an electric starter, where all this work shifted over to an electric mode her made the hand crank stuff moot over time, but did take a while. A lot of early cars actually had both an electric starter and a backup hand crank system in case the electric starter

wasn't working. Also, I should mention that while GM began introducing cars with electric starters in nineteen twelve, the invention of the electric starter predated GM's use of it. Still, the design GM created would lead to a second Dwar trophy for pushing the automotive industry forward. If you listen to my first episode, you know the company had previously earned one for having interchangeable parts. Now, that's a lot

about starters, and we've only just begun. When we come back, we'll talk a bit more about what happened as William Durant made his return to General Motors. But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're back, So, as I mentioned in the previous GM episode, William Durant's investor didn't like how Durant was spending truckloads of cash buying up various car companies to become part of GM, and thus amassing a huge amount of debt in the process.

Depending on the source. GMS holding company ended up bringing in between twenty and thirty companies in just those first two years. But buying stuff costs money, and Durant was spending cash he didn't actually have then, not for the first time. His pre automobile carriage business kind of started out the same way, so he had a method, is

what I'm saying. The company had accrued somewhere around a million dollars of debt in nineteen ten, which would be closer to about twenty eight million dollars of debt in today's money once we had just for inflation. So he gets the boot. The banks essentially take over GM for the time being. And I talked about last time about how Durant co founded the Chevrolet car company. He used that wealth that he built up to buy shares of General Motors, and he essentially bought his way back into

the company around nineteen fifteen or nineteen six exteen. Now I get wishy washy with the dates, because different sources have slightly different accounts of this, and I have no magical way of deciding which one is the most accurate, so I like to give ranges. In that case, the company reorganized and reincorporated. It became General Motors Corporation. At

that point. Durant oversaw the acquisition of Chevrolet into General Motors a couple of years later, and sure enough it was right back into acquisitions for Durant, which meant accruing more debt again. See William C. Durant was a man who could really learn from his mistakes because he could repeat them almost exactly. I stole that joke, by the way, from Peter Cook. In nineteen seventeen, the United States entered World War One. Of course, back then people didn't call

it World War One. They called it the Great War, because to name something part one before there's a part two is a bit fatalistic, though accurate. In this case, GM, like many companies in the States, began to produce material for war efforts, so they were supporting the war effort for the United States. Now, according to the Encyclopedia of Detroit, around of all of GM's truck production was dedicated to wartime production. Despite this guaranteed revenue, things weren't going so

great over at General Motors. Durant, as I had mentioned, received support from the DuPont family and his efforts to regain control of General Motors. The DuPonts made their fortune a century earlier in the gunpowder business, which was really booming, had explosive growth thanks to the Civil War. Yeah, those

those were gunpowder punts. But by nine this support from the DuPonts had waned, and I assumed they had come to the same conclusion as Durant's previous investors, that Durant was overreaching his capabilities and the capabilities of the company with these various acquisitions, and that maybe he was not the responsible type that should oversee the operations of a company. And so in nineteen twenty Durant was kicked out of General Motors again. So the guy who founded the company

got removed from it twice. Now we'll stick with Durant just a bit longer. His story is an interesting one. He went on to found a new company. Some sources say he did it the day after he got the boot from GM, but others give a little bit more time between his getting sacked and him picking himself back up again. The new company was called Durant Motors. While he was able to clause way back with the success of Chevrolet earlier, the same could not be said of

Durant Motors. He had some initial interest because he had really built a name for himself in the automotive industry. But while Durant Motors produced several cars, I don't think you would call any of them a household name today. There was the Flint, the Star, which was also known as the Rugby, and the Durant, as well as a couple of others that Durant's engineers kind of design but

never actually put into production. The company did manufacture cars, it wasn't just a company on paper, and there are collectors out there who owned some of these very rare vehicles. But it wasn't to last. The market at this point was already too competitive, anchored by Ford, and of course Durant's old company, General Motors by n Durant Motors was insolvent.

Durant himself was pretty much bankrupt by that time because he lost all of his fortune in the fallout of the stock market crash in nineteen nine, one of the events that precipitated the Great Depression. The story goes that after the stock market crashed, he poured even more money into the stock market in an effort to try and bolster Americans confidence in the stock market, but such a move proved to be unwise. He declared bankruptcy in nineteen

thirty six. New York Times said that his fortune was estimated at one twenty million dollars at its height before the crash. That would be close to two billion dollars in today's money, and he was left with around two d and fifty dollars afterward. Yikes. Durant's former colleagues at General Motors, including his replacement, Alfred P. Sloan, whom will talk about a lot later in this episode, arranged for Durant to receive a pension from General Motors, which helped

support him and his wife. In nineteen forty, Durant opened up a bowling alley in Flint in Michigan. He envisioned a world in which people would be enjoying prosperity and looking for diversions, and he was right. It would take a few more years after World War Two was over, but the nineteen fifties and sixties proved him right, but just a few years after he opened the Bowling Alley, he had a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed

and his health declined. He passed away in nineteen forty seven at the age of eighty five. But let's get back to General Motors. I figured we can finish up the section of the episode with the major things that happened to GM once it settled down after Durance Era I mentioned Alfred P. Sloan became Durant's replacement, so it's a good time to learn more about him a let's be generous. A complicated figure in General Motors history, as will become clear in this episode. Sloan was born in

eighteen seventy five. He was the son of a businessman who imported coffee and tea to the United States. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He attended m I T and he earned a degree in electrical engineering. He ran his first company, called Hyatt Roller Bearing Company, when he was twenty six years old, so not that long after graduating. It did help that his father had purchased a major stake in Hyatt Roller Bearing company. The automotive industry was a really big source of revenue for hyatt

roller bearing cars need bearings. After all, Oldsmobile was a big early customer, and during one of Durant's acquisition runs when he was head of General Motors, GM would actually scoop up the hyatt roller bearing companies. Not all the companies that GM bought were car companies, some of them

were manufacturing parts that cars used. Durant wanted to kind of holistic approach to owning all the different parts to have it be, you know, one big company, and that is how Sloan transitioned over to working for General Motors. In nineteen eighteen, Sloan became part of the executive committee.

He was a vice president at General Motors by nineteen twenty, and when Durant was shown the door, Sloan would end up becoming the operating vice president for the entire company, and by n three he was the president and CEO of General Motors. Now Durant had spent most of his time acquiring companies to be part of General Motors, the early era of Sloan's leadership focused on shaping these various

pieces into an organized business. He made five distinct automobile divisions, Cadillac, Buick, Oakland, Oldsmobile, and Chevrolet. Now, the idea was that each division would cater to a different subsection of the automotive market, with various car lines offering a variety of features and price points. So the goal was to target every potential car customer, from those who had more modest means to purchase a vehicle, all the way up to the upper crust who are

interested in a luxurious car experience. So from the least to the most expensive those car brands would go Chevrolet at the bottom end, Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick, and then Cadillac, so the Caddy was the most luxurious of the bunch, and Sloan granted each division a lot of autonomy to produce and sell cars in a way that made competitive sense.

So it was in some ways a decentralized approach to production and marketing, which helped GM get a firmer foothold in the market in general, But it also meant that the car lines began to drift apart from each other over time. There were bigger price gaps between say, the entry model Chevrolets and then the Oakland line, like there was a bigger jump between Chevrolet and Oakland than was intended,

and uh that gap represented lost customers. So GM then introduced some new car brands or car lines to occupy the gaps. These were called companion makes. So one of these was the make Pontiac. This occupied a price point between Chevrolet and Oakland. It was technically a companion to the Oakland brand. The companion to Oldsmobile was called Viking, Buick's companion was the Marquette, and Cadillac got the LaSalle line. Now, out of all of those, the Pontiac line was the

only companion make that lasted beyond the nineteen forties. It was distinct from all the other lines of cars. All the rest got phased out, and Pontiac actually was selling better than Oakland's the other companion like the the original line of cars, so GM eventually decided that Pontiac would replace the Oakland line of vehicles. So then your five major brands under General Motors where Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. But let's backtrack just to touch Sloan's reorganization

efforts paid off big time. General Motors itself had some guiding principles that applied to all five of the main automotive divisions, and there was a substantial corporate office at GM that oversaw the whole thing, but each branch still had a decent amount of autonomy to respond nimbly to changes in the market. Sloan also did not shy away from acquisitions entirely either, though he didn't show the same

sort of relentless pursuit as Durant did. Sloan was head of GM when the company acquired an English company called Vauxhall in nineteen twenty five. That's spelled v a u x h a l L. Originally I thought it was gonna be vox Hall, but then I remembered, hey, wait, we're talking English here. It's gotta be Vauxhall, And sure enough, that's what it is. Out of all the companies that were part of GM at that time, Vauxhall had the longest history. It was older than any other part of

General Motors. It started out as a steam engine and pump company founded by a guy named Alexander Wilson way back in eighteen fifty seven. Their main business at the time had been in producing engines for small boats and pumps. Wilson found that it was hard to make a real profit in this business, and his company, then called the Alexander Wilson and Company, went bankrupt in eighteen ninety five. Wilson had actually left the company the previous year, but

the business emerged from bankrupts. It was restructured into Vauxhall iron Works Company, and the new leader, Fred Hodges, was an automobile enthusiast, and he began to move the company away from producing steam engines, which was what they had been doing, and toward producing internal combustion engines, and eventually he led the company to making its first automobiles in the early twentieth century. In nineteen o seven, the company

changed names again and officially became Vauxhall Motors. At first, Vauxhall mostly made luxury cars that only the wealthy among the UK could could afford, and after World War One the UK economy was in a pretty sad state. Vauxhall consequently found itself in a tough financial situation and when GM came along in nineteen twenty five with an offer Vauxhall couldn't really refuse. In return, GM got a stronger presence in the UK, where the Ford motor company had

been establishing a presence for around a deck eight. Vauxhall changed strategies and began making economy priced cars priced at levels that made the Vauxell brand more than competitive against Ford. The story of Vauxhall itself is really darn interesting all in its own right, but I'll have to save that

for another episode. Instead, I'm going to do the almost criminal thing by jumping ahead and saying that Vauxhall and another car company that I'm going to talk about after the break called Opal would be part of General Motors until twenty seventeen, at which point GM sold the divisions off to another company called p S, a group formerly known as Peugeot Citron. But for decades Vauxhall would be

part of GM's European division. The UK company would have many of its own ups and downs, including a really long period in which Vauxell wasn't really manufacturing passenger cars at all. Rather, they were importing cars that have been manufactured in other countries like Germany or Australia and then effectively slapping a Vauxhall badge on them to make them Vauxhall vehicles. But as I said, that's a story that

should have its own podcast. Now, when we come back, i'll talk about the other European company that joined GM and a big milestone for General Motors, as well as some pretty major controversies. But before I get to that, let's take a quick break. By all standards, ninety nine was a big year. That was the year that the stock market crashed and many companies around the world would not survive the turmoil that followed. General Motors was in better shape than a lot of other companies, though some

divisions within GM were struggling more than others. Vauxhall, for example, might have gone under entirely if it had not been for the fact that GM had acquired the company just a few years earlier. But was also when two other big things happened for GM. One was that for the first time, General Motors took over the number one American auto manufacturer spot from the Ford Motor Company and then would hold onto it for decades. But let's illustrate the

difference between Ford and GM. At the time, GM was a company that owned and operated five different major makes, and each vehicle was aimed at different slices of the overall market. Forward, by contrast, was making the model T

from nineteen o eight until nineteen twenty seven. Ford also made trucks starting in nineteen seventeen, and it had also acquired the Lincoln car brand in nineteen twenty two, which was purchased from Henry Leland, who if you listen to the last episode, you know had previously worked with GM,

but under the Ford brand. If it was a passenger car from Ford, it was a Model T at least until nineteen seven, that's when the company introduced the Model A. The company actually shut down all the manufacturing facilities of Ford for six months to retool the manufacturing process in order to start churning out model as instead of Model TS. So Ford was focused on mass production of a single model of car to appeal to a broad market, whereas

GM was taking a more segmented approach to the market. Anyway, in ninety nine, GM surpassed the Ford Motor Company, And the other big thing that happened in nineteen nine was that GM acquired a German automotive company called Opal o pe L. Opal and Vauxhall would become almost like sister companies over time, and the Opal story is also a really interesting one. Maybe maybe I'll make a podcast about Vauxhall, and I'll pair it with OPAL in the future because

those two companies have a very intertwined history together. But one major departure for OPAL comes to us courtesy of a conflict called World War Two. I'll cover that more extensively in just a bit, because, as it turns out, that story and GM's part in it, is really complicated.

But after the devastation of World War Two, I mean, opal's manufacturing facilities were pretty much wiped out through the bombing of Germany, and then subsequently some of those manufacturing facilities were located in regions that became East Germany and thus outside the administration of General Motors. But GM would rebuild OPAL and over time it returned to being an important component in GM's European strategy. But as I mentioned with Vauxhall, Opel would also ultimately change hands to the

p s A Group in two thousands seventeen. And I'll save all the details for that other podcast sometime in the future. Let's get back to General Motors history. Alfred Sloan, while excellent at streamlining processes and increasing efficiency and lowering costs and maximizing profits, wasn't nearly so attentive towards the more people oriented parts of running a business. In fact,

the outright opposed workers organizing and forming unions. He saw unions as kind of a hit on profits and that just didn't sit well with the extremely profit oriented capitalist. He also opposed movements like FDR's New Deal program, and he campaigned against it, at least by providing a significant amount of money to organizations that opposed the New Deal. And that's putting this in very mild terms. Some of the organizations that Sloan helped fund in some cases, uh,

he even helped found a couple. Some of these were anti Roosevelt and embraced some truly despicable philosophies, all in an effort to undermine Roosevelt's authority and to try to defeat him in the nineteen six election. So we're talking about some organizations that championed racism, corded the ku Klux Klan, they had some really anti Semitic messaging and more like really awful stuff. Now, whether Sloan himself subscribed to these same philosophies or he just thought of them as means

to an end is unclear to me. I'm not sure it really makes that much difference, because just supporting those kinds of organizations, particularly by providing significant funds, can lead to immeasurable harm. The group's failed in their main purpose because Roosevelt won re election in nineteen thirty six by a landslide BacT. Some historians suggest that it was in part thanks to groups like the American Liberty League, which was funded by elite members of American society, including Sloan.

That was partly their impact that helped Roosevelt win. By standing in as a sort of you know, antagonist, Roosevelt could point at them and say, two citizens, this is what I'm fighting against. Are these elite, wealthy people who don't have the same problems that you have. In nineteen thirty six, the brand new United Automobile Workers Union played a major part in some historic workers strikes at several GM manufacturing facilities in the United States, many of which

were in Flint, Michigan. In fact, the most famous of the strikes occurred in Flint. Now, just the organizing process alone, way before any strikes happened, just that was difficult. He was reportedly employing lots of folks to act as as

essentially spies to find out what was going on. But ultimately the organizers were able to actually meet with enough workers to form an alliance and they carried out labor strikes in late nineteen thirty six that stretched into February of nineteen thirty seven, and these were sit down strikes. So with to sit down strike employees occupied the manufacturing plans. They didn't pick it outside the facility. Instead, they essentially took control of the factories and kept management and thus

strike breakers out of the buildings. It was kind of like being sieged by an army. The strikes were met with force from Flint police officers. At least initially, that was not a big surprise because General Motors was was in pretty deep with local politics in Flint, Michigan. But the strikers persevered and the governor of Michigan stepped in and mediated the dispute, and that ended with General Motors recognizing the U a W as the representative union for

General Motors employees. In subsequent strikes, the union was able to negotiate better conditions for General Motors employees, including a wage hike, though the deal reached was below what the union originally was aiming for and Sloan must have hated every second of it. Sloan also became chairman of General Motors in nineteen thirty seven. He stayed on as CEO, but replacing him as president of the company was a

man named William Knudsen, who was originally from Holland. As I recalled, Knudson was only president of GM for three years. He stepped down in nineteen forty. I'll talk about more of that in a second. He was replaced by Charles E. Wilson. And then there's the matter of World War Two, which gets super duper complicated. For one thing, there are a lot of different accounts as to what was actually going on leading into World War Two regarding GMS various interests.

Remember they owned Opal in Germany, and just for the sake of full disclosure, I don't really know where the truth of the matter actually rests. But one way to look at this is that General Motors would effectively manufacture material for both sides of World War Two, the Allies and the Access Powers. Though the company has repeatedly denied that it really had any say in the matter as far as the Access Powers are concerned, how true that

is is a serious matter of debate. Based on what I've seen, it definitely appears as though Sloan was happy to profit off of GM's interests in Germany until it became politically impossible or at least impractical for the company to keep doing it. Here are some facts about the matter. Around ninety nine, General Motors senior executive James Mooney received a medal from the German government ak the Nazis for

distinguished service to the Reich. That distinguished service was the production of stuff like military vehicles and engines for planes, many of which were being made in OPAL factories. While Sloan would write in his memoirs that GMS for stilities in Germany were nationalized, that is, the German government took

over those facilities and General Motors leadership was removed. There's a distinct lack of paperwork that shows that this was in fact the case, and there are a lot of historians who argue that GM was much more involved, at least in a managerial capacity, Like they were aware of what was happening and we're still profiting from it to some extent, but they took great strides to hide their involvement. I don't know what the truth is I can tell you that there are people on both sides of the

issue who argue passionately for their side. GM did build plants in Germany leading up to World War Two, but after the rise of Hitler, I mean that did happen. There was one that was built in Brandenburg that ended up producing trucks that were used by German forces in

the invasions of both Poland and France. It leads some investigators to suggest that without General Motors businesses in Germany, Hitler would have been unable to carry out the rapid Blitz style warfare that gave him an early advantage in World War Two. GM did business in Germany rather than divest itself of its German interests, which really, when you get down to it, does mean the General Motors efforts helped Germany during those early days of World War Two.

Now again, General Motors maintains that all executives stepped down once war broke out in nineteen thirty nine, but The Washington Post published a lengthy article in nineteen that disputes this, at least to a point. As late as nineteen forty one, an American lawyer was overseeing General Motors interests in Germany, and the bad stuff doesn't stop there. The manufacturing facilities

in Germany benefited from forced labor. If you listen to my episodes about Volkswagen, you heard me talk about the use of forced labor with that company, while the American owned companies in Germany, like Ford and GM subsidiaries, also made use of forced labor. Meanwhile, back in America, both GM and Ford initially resisted calls from the US government to produce war material for the Allied powers. GM told shareholders that its assembly lines weren't adaptable to manufacturing stuff

like tanks and airplanes. Now, eventually the policies that these companies changed. Knudsen, for example, when he was president of GM, really wanted to support the American effort. They felt a great sense of duty to the country where he had found opportunity to succeed. So he defied Sloan's wishes and committed General Motors towards the war effort, and GM would end up producing tons of stuff for the American military. But looking back on the history, it's definitely a dark

stain on corporate identity. Right. An American company that was making equipment for Nazis leading up to World War Two, and depending on some accounts, continuing to do so until at least nineteen forty one, when the United States entered the war. Was also the company that was resisting demands to do the same thing back home in the United States. As for Knudson, he left General Motors in nineteen forty to join the US government as chairman of the Office

of Production Management. That job, by the way, paid one dollar per year, so you could literally see where his loyalties lie. By mid nineteen forty, General Motors was in full production mode, and by nineteen forty two all of the company's manufacturing facilities were geared towards producing for the war effort. They were no longer producing vehicles for civilians for the Allies. That is, that's what they were doing

for the Allies. According to The Guardian, General Motors ultimately supplied around twelve billion dollars worth of materials for Allies, which included tanks, trucks and airplanes. On a side note, I just want to say it's very odd to do research about all this because when you look at like the first round of websites that give history about General Motors, most of them kind of skip over World War Two entirely, or maybe devote a sentence to what the company did.

It's like they say nine GM becomes the number one automaker in the US, and then they jump to the nineteen fifties and say that General Motors thrives in a booming American economy. So I guess the complicated stuff in the middle is pretty hard to summarize while also remaining, you know, intellectually honest. And as I mentioned, I'm certain I don't have access to the full story, and it's impossible for me to judge how complicit General Motors may or may not have been regarding the rise of the

Nazi powers in Germany. But it looks like they were at least somewhat complicit in the early days, which is heavy, heavy stuff. But that wraps up this chapter of General Motors history. I didn't plan on doing this many episodes about GM, but as I said, the company's history is really fascinating, not just from a technological standpoint, but also political, social, cultural standpoints and more. And many of the things we saw around this era of GM's history would end up

shaping the automotive industry in the world in general. Forever. For example, one thing that happened under Sloan's leadership was the approach to restyling brands of cars every year. Because in the old old days, you know, companies would just design a car and stick with that design year after year, which was easy enough to do. Factories had been optimized to mass produce a specific style of vehicle. That's why

Ford made the Model T for nearly two decades. But under Sloan's leadership, General Motors began to not just offer different makes of cars for different types of customers, they also changed the styling of each line of cars year after year. This created another way to attract customers. New cars looked new, not just because they were shiny and clean, but because the style of the car was different from the cars that had come out the year before. And

now this is standard in the automotive world. We take it for granted. Every year we get treated to the next year's models. I'll keep going down the path of General Motors history in our next full episode. My plan is really sincerely to close it out at that point, to make Part three the end of General Motors story so far. But there are a lot of big things we'll need to talk about from controversial decisions to bankruptcy to bail out and beyond, but we're gonna save that

for the next time. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff. Maybe there's another big company you would like to know the history about and how they became influential, Or maybe there's just a technology you've always wanted to know. How does this work? And does it mean let me no? Reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.

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