Durant, William C. 1864-1947

DURANT, WILLIAM C. 1864-1947

Automotive promoter

Twenties Symbol

The flamboyant William Crapo Durant became a symbol of the Roaring Twenties. Rising to great wealth and fame, he died in poverty and near obscurity as the result of his stock-market speculations. In 1908 he founded the General Motors Corporation, which became in the 1920s the largest corporation in the world. He was ousted as president of the company in 1910, regained control of it in 1916, and suffered a second ouster from GM in 1920.

Promoter

While Henry Ford and Walter P. Chrysler were production men, Durant was the epitome of the salesman and promoter, essentially a marketing specialist. But he also had a great eye for design and quality, putting together a line of cars that, under the GM banner, included Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, La Salle, and Cadillac.

Flamboyance

By the beginning of the decade GM was a company that attracted wide interest from investors and even more attention from a vast chain of suppliers. Durant was impatient and sometimes erratic in his methods. He disliked controls and rigidity, especially in financial matters, and he was apt to embrace innovative financing methods if things moved too slowly. A great many officials, both inside and outside the firm, disliked this quality; they also felt that Durant was paying too much attention to his outside interests. Both factors contributed to his second ouster from GM. For a time Durant survived as an independent, manufacturing the Durant, a medium-priced car, and the Star, a lower-priced competitor to the Ford and to the GM Chevrolet, which Durant had originally developed.

Aftermath

Following Durant's departure, Pierre S. du Pont became GM's president with Alfred P. Sloan as manager. For several years the firm was essentially controlled by du Pont interests.

Sources:

Lawrence Gustin, Billy Durant (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973);

Bernard M. Weisberger, The Dream Maker (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).