Ed Cray’s ‘Chrome Colossus’ offers a masterful history of General Motors

January 2, 2021 Steve Readings 0

Chrome Colossus: General Motors and its Times, is one of the best automotive history books in my library. Author Ed Cray eschewed the usual focus on product minutiae and instead focused on how GM’s growth in the marketplace interacted with its political power, such as in the building of the interstate highway system, fending off antitrust actions and attempting to stymie safety regulations. Cray also did an excellent job of walking the reader through GM’s complex internal politics.

A book like this arguably could not be written by someone who made his or her living in the automotive buff media; it strays too far from industry groupthink. Cray was a journalism professor at the University of Southern California. He wrote an eclectic mix of books, including biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and the musician Woodie Guthrie (Roberts, 2019).

Chrome Colossus is a critical but not an ‘activist’ book

Chrome Colossus does not have the hard-charging rhetoric of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed (1966). Even so, Cray’s narrative is very much grounded in accountability journalism. He tells a damning story about GM’s consistent opposition to safety and environmental regulations as well as its slowness in responding to the increasing popularity of imported cars.

I have found Cray’s discussion of antitrust policies to be particularly useful. Chrome Colossus pays considerable attention to congressional hearings in the 1950s that assessed whether GM had become too big. Cray drew from the testimony of American Motors’ head George Romney, who presciently argued that oligopolistic structure of the U.S. auto industry was stifling its ability to respond to changes in consumer needs (p. 379). For additional discussion of antitrust regulations, go here.

Cray cut GM slack in championing auto dependency

The odd paradox of Chrome Colossus is that Cray gave GM management a get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to the energy crises of the 1970s. He concluded, “No corporate executive in the days of twenty-cent gasoline could have imagined the costly energy dependence that General Motors’ large cars would foster. No executive, no soothsayer anywhere, could have foretold the dire effects of America’s wholehearted reliance on the automobile as personal transportation. In the opulent years, it had all seemed so appropriate for the richest nation in the world” (p. 531).

Cray’s argument may partly reflect the “on the other hand. . .” quality of American journalism. Fair enough. However, his conclusion doesn’t acknowledge that opposition to an auto-centric transportation system began to generate momentum in the 1960s (e.g., Cathcart-Keays and Warin, 2016).

In retrospect, he also sounds naive in light of recent revelations that GM and Ford researchers knew about climate change as far back as the 1960s (Joselow, 2020; go here for our take). Of course, Chrome Colossus was published in 1980, well before climate change received much attention even among environmental groups.

Kirkus Review offered sharp but vague critique

A Kirkus Review panned Chrome Colossus, calling it a “mundane, plodding affair, with little new information to impart and nothing (fresh or otherwise) to say” (1980). The unnamed reviewer did not back up his or her critique with a whole lot of evidence besides declaring the book inferior to Bernard Weisberger’s Dream Maker (1979). However, the review concluded by arguing that Chrome Colossus “falls below the Fortune standard of fluent, informed business journalism.”

I imagine that Cray would have found the above sentence to be a compliment. If Alex Taylor III’s (2012) review of American Icon: Alan Mulally and the fight to save Ford Motor Company is any indication, Fortune magazine would seem to favor fawning tributes to auto executives (see my take on American Icon here).

Cray died in 2019 at the age of 86 (Roberts, 2019).

Chrome Colossus: General Motors and its Times

  • Ed Cray; 1980
  • McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, NY

“Events moved quickly in the presidential election year of 1916. Durant, the uncontested majority stockholder, was elected president in Nash’s stead. One by one, the bankers followed Nash from the board room and were replaced by the heads of the motorcar companies, including Henry Leland and Walter Chrysler. Chrysler’s decision to stay on came as a last Durant-inspired slap to Nash and Storrow, who had expected the one-time Kansas farm boy to join them in a new automobile venture.” (p. 146)

“The committee considered no alternatives to a massive highway system; it had not intended to. In the two years before the committee’s recommendations were adopted as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways — in the Cold War era, ‘defense’ was a righteous mantle which special interests sought to cloak themselves — no one weighed the merits of mass transit or rehabilitated railroads. The emphasis and concern were solely upon the automobile and truck. In effect, a major redirection of national policy  had been predetermined by companies that would most benefit from that redirected policy.” (p. 358)

“‘Unlike Ford, GM have (sic) always controlled Vauxhall’s product policy very tightly from Detroit,’ British automotive writer Graham Bannock observed, ‘even to the extent of forcing Vauxhall to follow the American styling trends of the ‘fat fifties.’ They were spectacularly out of place in Britain at the time and were probably responsible for Vauxhall’s unhappy ‘tin-can’ image. Finally allowed to produce a smaller car in the late 1960s, Vauxhall’s new Viva was, in appearance and technical design, ‘clearly derived from GM products in the United States.'” (pp. 518-519)

OTHER REVIEWS:

Kirkus Review | Amazon | Goodreads

RE:SOURCES

This is an expanded version of a mini-review that was originally posted March 31, 2013.

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