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Paul Hoffman is also an extremely successful businessman. He is a recognized power, well beyond the size of his company, in the rough & tumble automobile industry. What is more remarkable, he got there as a salesman, not a production man.
He is the rarest kind of supersalesman: an uncomplicated man who is genuinely deprecative of himself and sold on his product.
Paul Hoffman has always bet on winners —big winners. First, it was the automobile. As a boy, he learned about cars from a decrepit secondhand Pope-Toledo that he heckled his inventor-father into buying. When Paul quit the University of Chicago at 18, he began selling autos in Chicago by the simple but unusual method of driving one up Michigan Avenue and not returning until he had sold it.
By 1911, when he was just 20, he picked Los Angeles as a site for operations even before its citizens recognized its manifest destiny as the world's greatest automobile market. He also learned to love competition by practicing it; auto selling in those days was a murderous free-for-all. Angelenos still remember that even so noble-minded a salesman as Hoffman bought up wrecks of competing makes, regaled his customers with lurid tales about the fate of their hapless owners.
By these and other less spectacular sales methods, Paul Hoffman owned Studebaker's Los Angeles outlet by 1919. When Studebaker President Albert Russell Erskine persuaded him to move to South Bend as vice president in charge of sales in 1925, the Paul G. Hoffman Co. was doing $7,000,000 worth of business a year and Hoffman had made his million.
Industrial Statesman. At South Bend, Paul Hoffman got to be a big shot. He and Studebaker Production Manager Harold S. Vance took over the company's management, as receivers, after President Erskine's attempts to buck the Big Three in the middle-priced field and to ignore the Depression landed Studebaker in the courts. By 1935 it was President Paul Hoffman and Board Chairman Vance.
After three years of planning—and a whopping 1938 deficit—Hoffman and Vance took a chance on the lightweight Champion. It put Studebaker back on its feet. Then came a share in the biggest job in history: war contracts, including a big order for Wright airplane engines, that will skyrocket its sales to around $350,000,000 this year.
While he turned Studebaker into "the leading independent," Hoffman became a sort of industrial statesman. He fathered the Automotive Safety Foundation, became a trustee of the University of Chicago, and of little Kenyon College in Ohio, where his eldest son went to school. He became a director of Chicago's Federal Reserve Bank; he was asked to make speeches and to represent industry in Washington powwows. Early in 1942 he organized an outstandingly successful $10,000,000 United China Relief campaign and he is still chairman of U.C.R. Since last June he has also been a director of United Air Lines.
That, on the record, is Paul Hoffman: no world-shaking figure but a man who has done what he intended to do, and done it well.
During all this activity, Paul Hoffman began to discover that professors were people and that some were men of sound sense. He also began to worry about how to free U.S. politics from pressure groups, including the monopoly-minded business-as-usual bloc on his side of the fence.