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The Fabulous Billy Durant*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

John B. Rae
John B. Rae
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Abstract

Durant has been described as “the most picturesque, spectacular, and aggressive figure in the chronicles of American automobiledom” but he was much more than this. His career is a chssic study in the dual abilities, promotional and administrative, that created and nourished big business in America. Ultimate personal disaster grew out of Durant's failure to strike a balance between the two, yet his genius left imperishable marks, and his luster as the symbol of an era is untarnished.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1958, pp. 255 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1958

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References

1 The fullest accounts of Durant's early life are in Durant, Margery, My Father (New York, 1929), pp. 10 ff.Google Scholar, and Crow, Carl, The City of Flint Grows Up (New York, 1945), pp. 29, 31–32.Google Scholar

2 This estimate of the senior Durant is based on letters in the Crapo Manuscripts in the Michigan Historical Collections. I am indebted for the information to Professor Martin D. Lewis of Baldwin-Wallace College, who is writing a life of Henry Crapo.

3 Pound, Arthur, The Turning Wheel (New York, 1934), pp. 78–79.Google Scholar

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9 He organized the United States Motors Corporation in 1910. It collapsed two years later and was reorganized as the Maxwell Motor Car Company, later to be the nucleus of the Chrysler Corporation.

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15 The story of the refinancing of General Motors in 1910 is told in Seltzer, op. cit., pp. 163–165. The information on Nash was given to me by Mr. David F. Edwards, Chairman of the Board of Saco-Lowell Shops, who was one of Storrow's aides at this time.

16 The intervention of the Lelands is mentioned by Seltzer. I am indebted to Mrs. Wilfred C. Leland for a detailed account of the contribution of her husband and her father-in-law to the saving of General Motors.

17 This information was given to me by Mr. David H. Howie, now of the Fiduciary Trust Company of Boston, who became Storrow's secretary in 1911.

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29 Ibid., p. 119.

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