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Harlow Curtice does not go in much for high-flown economic or social theory, but he is convinced that what Flint has found to be good can be emulated by the rest of the world. Thus, since late 1954 he has committed G.M. to $200 million for European expansions, primarily of its Opel plant in Russelsheim-am-Main, Germany, and its Vauxhall plant in Bedfordshire, England. Also, he is bucking local resistance to move both companies toward the annual model change. He wants to create a secondhand market so that cars can be bought by everyone. At the same time, he is pressing European automobile men to move with G.M. toward a 40-hour week, while maintaining the rate of pay of the current 48-hour week.
Newer for New. Some American thinkers shake their heads at the materialism and the waste implied in the annual model change. But, as in Billy Durant's day, their thinking takes no account of the nature of the American system, where something newer must replace the nearly new so that those who cannot afford the newer can still afford what was once new, whether it is a house, a sewing machine or a car.
But even the sleekest, hottest automobiles, as the proudest new car owner will ruefully admit, are not ends in themselves, but only means—means to roll free of the city into the countryside, to swing from the farm into town for a school-board meeting or a movie, to move the family across the country to find a better job. or to drive the kids to school and the beach and pick them up again. And so it is with the economic system that Harlow Curtice represents. This, too, is but a means to something far beyond fad and fashion, perhaps to a new level of community enterprise and culture-by-plan, as in Flint. Not far distant is the time when Americans need spend comparatively little time earning a living. Then they will be able to unleash their considerable powers for cultural, ethical and spiritual accomplishments of a magnitude yet unimagined.
* Four months later, he incorporated the $5,000,000 Durant Motors, which, on the strength of his name, had $31 million in orders before it had a factory site. He got out of automobiles in 1926, lost everything in the 1929 crash, and died in 1947 at 85.