“i Like To Build The Things”

IN LATE 1923 A SERIES OF CURIOUS FULL-PAGE ADVERTISEMENTS APPEARED IN The Saturday Evening Post . The first, in the issue of December 8, presented just four sentences surrounded by wide margins. It began, “By reason of his past and pending accomplishments, the figure of Walter P. Chrysler is of interest and significance to all motor car owners.” Despite his years of notable work in the automobile business, the ad went on, Chrysler remained unknown to the general public, but in anticipation of “important announcements shortly to be made,” more information would soon follow. A footnote explained how to pronounce Chrysler’s name.

The tease continued over the next few weeks, gradually revealing details about Chrysler and the new car that was to bear his name. At last an ad in the December 29 issue of the Post offered pictures of four models of the car and an interview with Chrysler himself. “I have been convinced for years,” he said, “that the public has a definite ideal of a real quality light car.” His engineers, the best in the country, he asserted, had designed the car from scratch. It offered a powerful engine and top speed of 70 miles an hour but good gas mileage; a roomy interior, but on a wheelbase of modest length; and a light weight but with a soft, comfortable ride.

As described, the car seemed a mere compendium of dubious advertising claims. But the car and the man were for real. The new Chrysler Six was the first automobile with two features not previously found in its medium price class of around $1,500. First, its engine: It had a high-compression six-cylinder motor, at a compression ratio of 4.7 to 1 instead of the competition’s usual 4 to 1, offering greater power, torque, and efficiency with no added weight. Its combustion chambers were designed in the “free breathing” style recently invented by Harry Ricardo of England, creating greater air turbulence for better combustion. A typical car of the time produced about 10 horsepower per liter of engine displacement; the Chrysler, at 68 horsepower from 3.3 liters, doubled that ratio.

Second, the vehicle had fourwheel hydraulic brakes as standard equipment, while most competing cars still had mechanical brakes, and on the rear wheels only. Chrysler had told his engineers about a new hydraulic brake system developed by the Lockheed brothers of Southern California. Mechanical brakes, applied through rods, wires, and other exposed parts, could not reliably apply equal brake pressure to all four wheels as they bounced up and down on the road. Hydraulic ones, applied through cylinders and flexible tubes, stopped a car faster and more smoothly and evenly. Chrysler’s engineers designed a tubular front axle to absorb the additional torsional stress from the front-wheel brakes and improved the Lockheed system’s seals. The car thus offered a feature previously found, among American cars, only on the Duesenberg, which cost at least five times more than a Chrysler.

The Chrysler Six looked unlike competing cars too, about six inches lower overall, with subtly rounded lines. Its nickel-plated radiator shell swept back into the hood in a smooth stream of shiny metal, avoiding the flat surfaces and hard angles usual in the twenties. The car’s power and speed made a lower center of gravity necessary for safety, and this meant that despite its short wheelbase, it still appeared rakish and racy, even (Chrysler hoped) vaguely European or custom-made. The effect again suggested a high-priced car without the high price. At Chrysler’s urging, his automobile also included the first replaceable oil filter outside the engine, with an indicator on the dashboard near the temperature gauge, which itself was moved from its usual position on the radiator cap. The lights were controlled by a button at the center of the steering wheel, so the driver needn’t take his hands from the wheel. All this was standard equipment, along with other items—a rear-view mirror, a windshield wiper, and a brake light—that in competing cars might cost extra.

Propelled by the Post ads, the Chrysler Six became the hit of the annual New York auto show in January 1924. “The new Chrysler is haunted by no family resemblance to other lines,” said one automotive writer. “An excellent engineering job,” said another. Its engine was powerful but remarkably quiet and free of vibrations; “in hill climbing the Chrysler acts like a special racer,” shooting up steep grades “with startling ease and smoothness.”

Armed with such notices and a flurry of advance orders, Chrysler approached his bankers for the several million dollars he needed to get his car into full production. Forty-nine years old in 1924, barely a decade from the shop floor, he still looked out of place in an executive office, a stocky man of coarse language with a balding, pointy head, an assertive walk, and piercing dark eyes. He typically wore the loud, oddly matched clothes of a Midwestern Rotarian, not the sober, subdued uniform of a proper New York businessman. When roused to some definite purpose, he was hard to resist: gesturing constantly, slamming a fist into his palm, slapping the arm of his chair, pounding the table, pushing his forefinger into the face of his quarry, then lightening the mood with a man’sman joke and a quick smile across his wide, friendly mug. “When he tells you something,” noted a journalist exposed to this performance, “you believe it!” Chrysler got the production money he needed and then sold almost 32,000 of his cars in 1924, a new record for a vehicle in its initial year.

This car gave the new marque an instant reputation for superior engineering. “The first truly modern automobile to appear in America,” the British automotive historian T. R. Nicholson later concluded. “No longer did an inexpensive, small, light, five-seater car need to be poorly made or uncomfortable or slow.” In 1972 a car writer named Mark Howell, from the distance of nearly a half-century, still remembered his youthful astonishment at the Chrysler Six. Starting the engine, he had heard only a taut, contained hum, without the clicking valve gear or whining camshaft drive typical of other cars of the time. The controls had felt unusually light and precise, even the gearshift; the throttle and brakes had responded surely, at once. On the road “there was a brand new kind of smoothness, so utterly lacking in effort, it reached the senses as a dynamic flow—backed by a torrent of power in reserve.”

The engineers behind the Chrysler Six—Fred Zeder, Owen Skelton, and Carl Breer—stayed with the company for the rest of their working lives. They functioned smoothly together, communicating in cryptic verbal shorthands, “the parts of a single, extraordinary engineering intelligence,” according to Chrysler. They even sat together at ballgames and married into one another’s families. Knowing their value and a bit awed by their academic credentials and achievements, Chrysler gave them nearly absolute freedom to follow their hunches.

Through the boom years of the 1920s, Walter Chrysler kept charging ahead, ever faster. Interviewed for Collier’s magazine in 1927, he used the word speed 16 times. “By speed I don’t mean breakneck travel for the sake of thrill,” he explained, “but quickness in getting somewhere to do something useful quickly. That is the pitch to which our American civilization is keyed.” In 1928 he acquired Dodge and added two new lines, the Plymouth and De Soto. Within five years of bringing out the first car bearing his name, an impossibly short time, Chrysler had taken his place alongside Ford and General Motors in the big three of American carmakers. Time magazine made him its second Man of the Year, after Charles Lindbergh.

Chrysler, born in 1875, grew up in a Republican family, comfortably middle class, in the railroad town of Ellis, Kansas (population 1,153). Ellis lay amid wheat-growing country in the state’s central prairie and was dominated by the Union Pacific Railroad’s substantial machine shops. Chrysler’s father, a Union Pacific engineer, also sold hardware, bought property, and prospered.

Walter, the third of four children, an older sibling having died when Chrysler was young, was a willful, bristly child, shaped by the enduring hardships of prairie life and many schoolyard fights over trifles. “You had to be a tough kid,” he later explained. He engaged as well in the. gentler childhood idylls of small-town Kansas: baseball, dancing parties, bicycle races, the town YMCA, and playing music. From an early age, though, he exhibited a preternatural maturity. On his own he contracted a lifelong fascination with machinery—a “passion,” he said later, “to learn about machines and the power that made them run.” By the age of 16 he had left school and, with the help of his father, become an apprentice machinist in the Union Pacific shops.

According to a story that he once told Franklin Roosevelt’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, Chrysler took part in the great Chicago railroad strike of 1894, when he was 19. Called by Eugene Debs and his American Railway Union, the strike spread quickly and halted passenger traffic on most lines west of Chicago. Small clashes between strikers and police in Chicago exploded into boxcar bonfires and pitched battles and killings. As Perkins recalled it, Chrysler said he was arrested by police and spent two days in jail. “I was a red hot labor man,” he told her, “and I was a red hot striker.”

True or not, the story presents an intriguing historical mystery. Four years of national hard times had begun in 1893, and that year the Ellis shops had shut down for a week because of a strike. Walter Chrysler, witnessing the everyday hardships in Ellis and probably worried about the next reductions, was already his own man. He may have gone to Chicago to attend the ARU convention in June 1894 and then stayed on for the start of the strike later that month. (Three years earlier, at 16, he had taken a Western trip on his own through Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.) If he did go to Chicago, he had returned to Ellis by July Fourth, in time to win a holiday waltzing contest, and thus missed the worst strike violence. He did not mention this putative episode in his autobiography or when interviewed about his life by journalists. But as Perkins recalled it, he told her, “I know what makes men strike. I know all about it.”

In December 1907, at the annual National Automobile Show in Chicago, Chrysler, still a railroad man, glimpsed his future. On the main floor of the exhibition he saw a Locomobile touring car—and was transfixed. It was painted a creamy ivory white, with red trim and upholstery and shiny brass fixtures. The Locomobile was a substantial seven-passenger luxury vehicle, riding high on a 123-inch wheelbase and 36-inch spoked wheels. The khaki top could be folded down in fair weather. Chrysler was intrigued by the elegant toolbox on the running board. The entire car gleamed and beckoned irresistibly. For four days Chrysler hung around, haggling over its cost. The price remained firm at $5,000; he had only $700 in savings.

From his start in Ellis, he had risen through a series of locomotive shop jobs to his current position as superintendent of motive power for the Chicago Great Western Railroad. Living with his young family in Oelwein, Iowa, and happily running the largest, best-equipped shops he had ever seen, he expected to spend his life working for railroads. But standing before that Locomobile, dazzled and longing, he —like Paul on the road to Damascus, or Henry Adams beholding the dynamo in Paris—underwent an unwilled conversion. “I was a machinist,” he said later, “and these self-propelled vehicles were by all odds the most astonishing machines that had ever been offered to men.”

He talked a doubtful Chicago banker into lending him $4,300. He cleared out his barn and had the Locomobile shipped to Oelwein. For three months it stayed in the barn; he did not know how to drive and was more intent on the machine itself than on its uses. He spent long evenings and weekends disassembling the car, spreading its parts on the floor, puzzling and tinkering, then putting it back together. He read automobile literature and made technical sketches. Eventually he felt he understood the new technology. And at last his patient wife—who quite reasonably could not see the point of exhausting their savings and going deeply into debt for a car that was never driven—prodded him into going for a ride.

After setting the throttle and spark lever mounted on the steering wheel, Chrysler stood in front of the Locomobile and cranked its engine. Then, sitting quickly behind the wheel, he cautiously moved the transmission lever into gear. The chain drive to the rear wheels snarled and growled. When he engaged the clutch, the car bucked twice, lurched into a ditch, and stalled in a neighbor’s garden. With onlookers laughing, Chrysler sent for a team of horses to retrieve the Locomobile. He tried again. After a fair start he shifted into high gear, took a corner too fast, and headed off into a field. LHaving barely missed a cow, he returned home, accelerating at the end to a breathtaking 20 miles an hour just to show the neighbors. Soaked with perspiration, exhausted, he took a bath and went to bed.

He spent the next three years divided between cars and trains. He continued to treat the Locomobile like a big puzzle, breaking it down and reassembling it some 40 times in all. Meanwhile, in his work he shifted to locomotive manufacturing for the American Locomotive ComI pany in Pittsburgh. There his drive and inventiveness as works manager brought him to the attention of James J. Storrow, a company director who also had a position high up at General Motors. Storrow dangled the possibility of Chrysler’s switching to automobile manufacturing at Buick. He at once accepted the offer, taking a pay cut of 50 percent to a starting salary of $6,000. Money aside, he sensed that he was moving forward, from the transportation of the present to that of the future.

At Buick, beginning in 1911, he applied long-defined principles of railroad manufacture and repair to an infant industry that was overflowing with inefficiencies and waste. He found that carmakers, many from backgrounds in carriage building, knew how to work with wood but not with metal. He sped up or cut steps in painting and drying. He pioneered assembly-line techniques that Henry Ford, with much more fanfare, was developing concurrently at his factory. Under Chrysler’s supervision, a chassis with axles, springs, and wheels was placed on a track of two-by-fours. The chassis was pushed along the track as different workers added fenders, a gas tank, and finally a body. “Once we started making cars that way,” Chrysler recalled, “we had the whole scheme of mass production going, although it was some years before people said ‘mass production.’ We were just doing it without bothering about terms.”

Under Chrysler’s leadership, Buick grew from 50 cars a day into the third-largest automobile maker in the world, with a daily output of 550 cars and annual profits of $40 million. But Chrysler chafed under the mercurial supervision of GM’s founder, William C. Durant, an impossibly exasperating boss, and the two men repeatedly fought. Chrysler would threaten to resign, and then Durant would give him a pacifying raise and promotion.

After a final door-slamming quarrel, Chrysler quit Buick for good in 1919. His reputation for cost cutting and profit building quickly brought him a new job. For a million dollars a year, an extraordinary salary in 1920, he was hired to restore the sagging fortunes of the WillysOverland car company. Soon he went to the failing Maxwell in a similar capacity. He became the chief executive of Maxwell in 1920, and after the success of the Chrysler Six in 1924 the name of the company was changed to Chrysler. By 1928 it was the third-biggest automobile manufacturer, behind GM and Ford, and by 1933 it had even passed Ford.

In October 1928 Walter Chrysler announced that he would build the tallest skyscraper in the world, at the corner of Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. Planned to peak at 808 feet, it would surpass the existing record holder, the Woolworth Building, by 16 feet. “I like to build things,” Chrysler told the press. “I like to do things. I am having a lot of fun going thoroughly into everything with the architect.”

The architect, William Van Alen, had acquired a reputation for unorthodox methods and surprising decorations. He used steel as both structure and ornament in skyscrapers and embraced the recent vogue for Art Deco, with its geometric shapes and designs, streamlining, and clean, symmetrical patterns.

In Chrysler, Van Alen encountered a client who had firm ideas of his own about designing and building anything. Chrysler harbored a surprising artistic side; his multiplying hobbies included collecting needlepoint tapestries and fine Oriental rugs. Van Alen brought him a plaster model of the structure. The lobby, with four large columns supporting its ceiling, looked cramped to Chrysler. “When people come into a big building,” he said, “they should sense a change, get a mental lift that will put them in a frame of mind to transact their business.” Out came the columns, at an extra cost of $250,000.

The Chrysler Building today ranks as both the finest and the most familiar example of high Art Deco architecture. But Chrysler’s own office on the fifty-eighth floor was done in a classic neo-Renaissance style that suited his rugs and tapestries. Many other parts of the building also reflected his touch. He had the tower redesigned from a squat derbylike structure to the long, tapering spire of shining steel that became his building’s signature. He approved the exterior steel itself, a particular stainless chrome-nickel alloy, after metallurgical tests at the Chrysler Corporation. He monitored the plumb lines in elevator shafts and made final decisions on the marble in the corridors and the wood veneer in the elevators. Certain exterior details—a flagstaff holder over the main entrance in the form of a Chrysler radiator cap, brickwork wheels with steel hubcaps under a horizontal mudguard of patterned brick on the thirtieth floor, just below four polished steel replicas of the winged and helmeted head of Mercury (the Chrysler hood ornament), and eight conquering steel eagle gargoyles on the sixtieth floor—made clear the building’s links to the automobile and to speed, movement, and bare, gleaming metal.

In the spring of 1930, when construction was almost finished, E. B. White of The New Yorker went to report on its progress. Terrified of heights, White nonetheless decided to go up for a look at the spire. The scaffolding, of two-inch steel tubes, swayed in the wind. “We ascended to the base of the spire last week,” he recounted, “by climbing ladders in the scaffolding—which we would do again for about fifty thousand dollars… . We were never more lonely, or more windswept.” He noted the view of the Ramapo Mountains to the north and the Jersey shore to the south. On misty days, he was told, moisture condensed on the cold side of the spire, falling to the street like rain, “increasing the mean annual rainfall of the Grand Central zone and surprising all the people.”

The Chrysler Building officially opened in May 1930. Chrysler was dressed for the ceremony in a gray-checked suit, an unstarched shirt, and a flowered necktie. In the observation gallery on the seventy-first floor, a glass case displayed the worn toolbox with which he had started his career: ever the honest workman.

Chrysler made the completed skyscraper a gift to his children. He and his wife, Delia Forker Chrysler, had produced two daughters and then two sons. The boys had grown up in New York, wanted to stay there, and had shown little interest in following their father into the car business. Chrysler conceived the building as a financial investment for their future, giving them “something to be responsible for,” as he put it. He set Walter Jr. to work in the building, starting by scrubbing floors in the basement. “He is president,” the father said later, “and he knows his job.”

By its permanence and prominence the Chrysler Building established the family’s status in New York. For Walter and Delia, it capped a hard climb upward. More refined and deeply cultured than he, his wife had been his hometown sweetheart in Ellis. He always gave her substantial credit for his success. She stayed in the background, playing few public roles; only insiders knew how much he drew from her judgment, though she could not, it seems, subdue his fashion sense.

The Chrysler Building was the world’s tallest for only a few months, until the Empire State Building was finished. But over the years no other Manhattan skyscraper has been so admired, as a work of art and architecture and as a monument to the vaulting optimism and romantic hopes of the 1920s. It faithfully embodies the cheerful assertiveness of Walter Chrysler.

In April 1932, standing at one of his favorite spots, the intersection of advertising, show business, and automobile engineering, Walter Chrysler moved to propel his Plymouth cars into serious competition with Ford and Chevrolet in the lucrative low-priced market. Since debuting in 1928, the Plymouth had remained a distant third in its field, registering only 94,000 new cars in 1931 to 529,000 Fords and 583,000 Chevrolets.

The strategy for a Plymouth breakthrough began—as usual for Chrysler—with an engineering innovation. Engine vibration remained a stubborn problem for internal-combustion automobiles. In fourcylinder motors like the Plymouth’s, the sequence of explosions in the cylinders, the thrusting pistons, and the turning crankshaft set off a twisting, pulsing clatter of thudding motion and noise. Vibration upset the delicate adjustments of the engine, created squeaks and rattles in the body, and fatigued and annoyed passengers. It also shortened the useful life spans of vehicles and engines.

At the Chrysler laboratory in Highland Park, Michigan, Owen Skelton and his staff focused on the problem of torque vibration. Especially when the throttle was suddenly raised or lowered, torque made an engine rock on a fore-and-aft axis roughly parallel to, but at a slightly raised angle from, the axis of the crankshaft. Skelton’s solution was to mount the engine so that its axis of oscillation intersected with its natural center of gravity, muffling much of the vibration. The engine was secured high at the front and low at the rear. That and placing it on rubber bushings minimized the transfer of vibrations to the chassis.

This system, called “floating power” for advertising purposes, gave the Plymouth a measure of the humming smoothness of more expensive six- and eight-cylinder cars. Ford and Chevrolet did not have it. Twitting the competition, Chrysler drove one of the first new 1932 Plymouths from his assembly line out to Ford headquarters in Dearborn and gave Henry and Edsel Ford and their top men a test drive. He took a taxi home, thoughtfully leaving the Plymouth for their fretful inspection. Charles Sorensen, Ford’s head of production, recognized the advantages of the novel engine mounting, but his boss, deep into technological senility, shrugged it off. “Henry Ford did not like it,” Sorensen recalled. “For no given reason, he just didn’t like it, and that was that.”

The admen responsible for introducing the new Plymouth, at the J. Stirling Getchell agency, suggested a bold tactic: an advertisement with Walter Chrysler leaning over the hood of a Plymouth and proclaiming, “Look at all three!” At the time, Madison Avenue did not indulge in comparative advertising. Nobody was supposed to name, or even make oblique reference to, a competing product. Chrysler executives balked at the ad in mockup. “Why the hell,” said one, “do I want to sell Fords and Chevies?” But when the proposed ad was submitted to Chrysler, along with their objections to it, he said, “I don’t give a damn,” slamming his hand on a desk. “I want to run that ad!”

The campaign began in April 1932. A typical ad showed a photo of Chrysler with Zeder, Skelton, and Breer, making the point that engineering came first at Chrysler. “Go and see the new Plymouth with Floating Power,” the copy said. “Look at all three cars in the lowest-price field and don’t buy any until you do.”

In a corner the ad also plugged Chrysler’s new radio show, “personally conducted by Flo Ziegfeld,” Sunday nights on CBS. The Ziegfeld radio program, the third leg to the Plymouth strategy, drew on Chrysler’s contacts in show business—and his personal generosity. Despite Delia’s fondest hopes, his cultural tastes had remained lowbrow. He bought season opera tickets to please his wife, but for himself he favored flashy Broadway musicals, especially the brassy tease of Ziegfeld’s Follies . He and Flo Ziegfeld, as prominent men around town, had become friends, and in the winter of 1932, when Ziegfeld was broke and dying, Chrysler had asked what he could do to help him. The impresario’s answer: Sponsor a Ziegfeld Follies of the Air . The contract set a new record for the cost of a weekly radio program. Chrysler paid $20,000 a week for network expenses, $7,000 for the entertainment, and a $5,000 option to Ziegfeld. “Don’t forget,” the announcer said, repeatedly, “to accept Mr. Chrysler’s personal invitation to inspect the good value of the Plymouth.”

This peculiar Detroit-Madison Avenue-Broadway gumbo of floating power, the Getchell ads, and the Ziegfeld show—held together by Walter Chrysler’s personality—made Plymouth a serious player. At the bottom of the Depression, it was the only American automobile to sell more cars in 1932 than in 1931. Its share of the major low-priced market vaulted from 7.8 percent in 1931 to 24.1 percent two years later. In 1933, just nine years after his first automobile was introduced, Chrysler over took Ford for second place behind General Motors, “an achievement without modern parallel,” according to Fortune magazine.

In January 1934 a new magazine advertisement, again featuring the boss, showed a photo of Walter Chrysler standing behind the desk in his office high in the tower of the Chrysler Building. Beaming, his right fist about to pummel his left palm, he was introducing the Airflow, a car that would become his only major mistake. The ad, cast as an interview with the boss, listed the Airflow’s innovations. Again, engineering led the way. The passengers sat between the axles, instead of on top of them, lowering the cabin. The new seating arrangement’s redistribution of the car’s weight softened the ride. The car’s bridgelike unitized construction, with body and chassis built as a single component, placed riders within a protecting frame, not just atop it. Chrysler mentioned the styling last. (The ad, oddly but revealingly, included no picture of the car’s exterior.) “We are proud that the new Airflow Chrysler is a very different-looking car,” he insisted, as though expecting an argument. The car was sleek and efficient, he said, like the functional streamlining of nature and of modern airplanes and trains. Letting form, in effect, follow function, “we arrived naturally and inevitably at the Airflow shape.”

The Airflow looked like no previous American automobile. In 1934 the typical car profile had not changed much for decades, with a vertical grille at a right angle to the road, freestanding headlights, fenders separated from the hood (which was as long as possible to suggest a large engine), a vertical windshield, a boxy passenger compartment defined by more right angles, and a trunk that either stretched out to the back or dropped straight to the ground. It amounted to a geometric construction of straight lines and sharp corners.

The Airflow appeared from the side as one gentle, continuous curve. Its “waterfall” grille of thin vertical chrome strips was canted backward to flow smoothly into the stubby hood. Its headlights and fenders were integrated into a nearly seamless front of sheet metal. The profile curve swept UD through the windshield and roofline and then fell precipitously across the slightest bump of a trunk. Viewed from the front, the grille and headlights formed a lugubrious expression. To observers in 1934, the Airflow looked like an enlarged passenger compartment between a sawed-off hood and trunk. (One of many Airflow jokes asked, “Is it coming or going?”) To observers today it looks like an overgrown Volkswagen Beetle. To anybody at any time, it looks strange.

Within the Chrysler company, the Airflow represented a characteristic triumph of engineering over the styling and manufacturing departments. Walter Chrysler was still acting from his boyish fascination with machinery. Shortly after the 1929 crash he had called a meeting and told all his department heads to slash their budgets by 20 percent. Afterward Carl Breer had drawn him aside and asked if that really included engineering research. “Hell no,” said Chrysler, putting his arm around Breer. “Go right ahead. Just don’t say anything about it.”

Breer, intrigued by streamlining, had started wind tunnel tests. On a whim he tested a conventional car model backward, with the bulkiest mass (the trunk and passenger compartment) up front. “To our astonishment, air resistance was some 30% less,” he later wrote. “This astounding enlightenment was the motivating force that started our design and development of the Airflow series.” The most streamlined shape, it seemed, was a large forward oval tapering into a smaller section in back, so that disturbed air currents closed in smoothly behind the moving object instead of being spread out into turbulent waves by a narrow prow.

So the goal became to shift a car’s bulk forward. Working from the back, the Chrysler engineers moved the rear seat ahead about 20 inches from its usual position over the back axle. That dropped the seat down and made possible a lower center of gravity. The rest of the passenger compartment was also adjusted forward. To achieve a short hood and a concentrated forward mass, the front wheels were brought back; that put the engine over the front axle instead of behind it. The body’s profile was drawn as a parabola, with—for aerodynamic reasons—the highest point over the front seat, from which the body tapered to its modest tail. This unusual shape allowed a monocoque construction, the body and chassis fully integrated so that the entire structure could act as a trussed frame, with greater rigidity and torsional stiffness.

In most cars of the time, conventional leaf springs and weight distribution subjected passengers to constant jittery movements of about 120 cycles a minute. The Airflow’s front springs were lengthened eight inches, and more spring leaves were added both front and back. With the more rigid frame and the forward-shifted mass, these improvements helped smother road disturbances and reduced the usual chatter of constant motions to a more tolerable range of 70 to 100 cycles a minute. “I’ve driven an Airflow De Soto, and a lot of other cars are never going to seem quite the same,” one car writer declared in April 1934. “I’m going to believe all the ads after this. There was an extraordinary floating sensation.”

By almost any measure the Airflow was a true breakthrough. Its seminal influence was evident at once. The 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, now a revered classic, copied the Airflow shamelessly with its bridge-truss construction, fender-mounted, faired-in headlights, “alligator” hood hinged at the back instead of the side, and Art Moderne interior with seats mounted on chrome pipe frames. The Zephyr sold well, though, while the Airflow did not. One poll of the automotive public named the Airflow both the best- and worst-looking car of 1934. Given such a contrary response, the car was redesigned to look slightly more normal, but it still attracted few buyers and was soon retired. When Chrysler published his autobiography a few years later, he included not one word about the Airflow.

Chrysler stands as a persuasive argument for a great-man theory of automotive history. By the 1920s the car business was consolidating into its modern form of fewer mannfarrnrers organized into anonymous holding companies without dominant personalities. Chrysler bucked this trend by starting his own company and stamping it with his robust self. “Most people have a friendlier feeling for a business headed by a real, living human entity,” he maintained. After the startling success of its early years, the company not only survived the Depression but prospered through it.

Until quite late in his career, Chrysler was still underestimated. Observers did not expect so subtle an intellect within the lingering affect of an unpolished workman. He was a “rough, tough man,” according to Nicholas Kelley, one of his lawyers, yet had “an exceedingly active mind, just as fine and delicate and accurate as the finest Swiss watch, or the finest piece of machinery.” Always looking ahead, Chrysler believed fervently in what he called “the adventure of quick motion” and in the transforming power of machinery to improve life for everybody.

After a delayed start he spent only about 15 years in the top ranks of Detroit leadership. Once under way, he felt driven to act fast, to recognize and seize the right moments as he rushed toward them. He went after his goals aggressively, forcefully, yet with a rough-hewn charm that made him remarkably few enemies. “Bluff, sanguine, gregarious, he commands respect and friendliness,” a New Yorker profile concluded in 1927; “you cannot be with him and not like him as a man.” Perhaps his most appealing quality is that he came so far, from ElHs and the Union Pacific machine shops to eminence as the most successful American businessman of his generation, yet remained quite approachable. When he saw a disabled car on the road, he would typically stop, fix the problem with his own tools, leave his card, and urge the astonished motorist to buy a Chrysler.

After his death, in 1940, Chrysler’s cars and skyscraper kept the name alive even as the man himself became obscure. The name, though universally recognized in America, has lost any generally recognized connection with the person. No biography has ever appeared. His contemporaries Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and William Durant, the latter two of General Motors, all are better known today. Yet Chrysler was the most complete car man in this group, with the strengths of Ford in engineering and sales, of Sloan in management, and of Durant in fearless entrepreneurial vision—but without the particular blind spots or excesses of these rivals. Judged by versatility alone, Chrysler should be the most honored American automotive figure of this century.