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Striking fact about the industry's 1933 comeback was that although there are some 30 makes of cars in the U. S. all but nine of them sold fewer cars in 1933 than they did in 1932. And all but two (Essex & Austin) of those nine makes are products of the Big Three. Although this growing ascendancy of the Big Three depended largely on the sale of more cheap cars, that was not the whole story. Cadillac and Lincoln, like other high priced cars, found their sales still shrinking, but in the middle and lower middle price brackets the big companies made progress. Pontiac and Oldsmobile as well as Chevrolet, Dodge and Chrysler as well as Plymouth, got a share, if a smaller one, of the comeback.
Grand Opera, Not only by its 1933 record but by character the automobile industry is the prima donna of U. S. industries. No other industry moves with such pomp and circumstance of drama. Its annual show is always "good theatre," replete with all the tricks of the stage.* A few years ago the prima donna had a dozen great impresarios. Last week General Motors, preparing for motor show festivities, called the roll of its past executives. Among them were William Crapo Durant, Henry Martyn Leland, Alexander Winton, John D. Maxwell, Ransom Eli Olds, Charles W. Nash, Roy D. Chapin— impresarios all.
This celebration is to mark a silver anniversary, not of one great impresario but of a mammoth corporation, with $285,000,000 working capital, with 75 affiliated and subsidiary companies, with 350,000 stockholders, 125,000 employes. To the corporation and not to individual executives goes the credit of making one third of all the world's automobiles on its twenty-fifth birthday. A similar change has come over Ford. Henry Ford still rules Ford Motor Co. but he no longer is Ford Motor Co. He says "Yes" and "No," but Edsel Ford, Charles Sorensen, Peter Martin, William Cowling and others are an organization, and the organization makes Ford cars. In this year of Recovery, however, the prima donna of industries still has one impresario of the old school. One of the Big Three, whose 1933 record is the most striking of all, he is Walter P. Chrysler.