CHRYSLER, WALTER P. 1881-1948

AUTOMOTIVE TROUBLESHOOTER AND CONSOLIDATOR

Early Years

Even had Walter P. Chrysler not founded the corporation bearing his name, he would have been an important figure in heavy industry of the 1920s. Like Henry Ford, he rose rapidly from the ranks of labor; a machinist by trade, he worked in railroad shops for several years and eventually became general manager of the American Locomotive Company.

Positions

Drawn to the auto industry, he became something of a corporate "troubleshooter." In 1912 he took a position as works manager of Buick, a unit of General Motors, where he was named Buick president and General Motors vice president. After a brief retirement at the age of forty-five, he was asked to take over the troubled Willys-Overland Company but then moved on to the Maxwell Motor Company, which he renamed the Chrysler Corporation. By 1925 he had produced the first car bearing his own name.

The Chrysler

The Chrysler was an almost instant success; a mid- to upper-scale car, it sold for __BODY__,595, the same as Buick. Its sales rose rapidly, but Chrysler desired to enlarge his line. In 1927 he developed and produced the lower-priced Plymouth, and in 1928 he acquired the Dodge Motor Company, which gave Chrysler a still-broader line of automobiles and made the corporation one of the so-called "big three."

The Chrysler Building

In 1929 Chrysler underwrote the construction of the magnificent seventy-seven-floor Chrysler Building in New York City, a skyscraper that immediately became an architectural landmark. Chrysler placed his toolbox with the handmade tools of his trade on display in the lobby.

Sources:

Walter P. Chrysler, Life of an American Workman (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927);

Ralph Epstein, The Automobile Industry: Its Economic and Commercial Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928).