Stories From The Stacks

Everybody knows Henry Ford, then there’s the tycoon you’ve never heard of, Billy Durant. The motive force behind the early success of Buick and the founding of Chevrolet and General Motors, William C. Durant developed business practices that transformed the automobile industry. Durant was a businessman of marked tenacity and impatient of restraint, and he used these qualities to amass a fortune and to fend off would-be interlopers in his arena of corporate power. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, historian Bernie Carlson, professor at the University of Virginia, discusses his research into the role played by William Durant in the early automobile industry. Carlson suggests that the prominence of Henry Ford and Louis Chevrolet in the historiography of automobiles obscures the diversity of business practice that flourished in the early decades of the industry. Among Durant’s key innovations was the development of the holding company as a corporate form with control over subsidiary firms for manufact