Hostname: page-component-5d84bcc8dc-p56h2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-09-06T12:19:47.971Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Selling the World: Public Relations and the Global Expansion of General Motors, 1922–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2018

Jacob Anbinder
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

General Motors (GM) became the world's dominant automaker in the 1920s and 1930s thanks in part to a dynamic, centralized public relations operation. The intended audience of this marketing included GM's own overseas employees. As the company opened new plants in foreign countries, it used media such as General Motors World, an employee newspaper, to communicate that it understood the needs of different foreign consumers and to advocate against protectionist economic policies that hindered its ability to sell cars. The messages of General Motors World shaped global perceptions of GM's corporate structure and brand, and were a core element of the automaker's overseas activity.

Keywords

General Motorstransportationglobalizationpublic relationsbranding

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2018 , pp. 483 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

The author would like to thank Christo Datini for his generosity in arranging access to the General Motors Heritage Center, Dan Bertwell for his help in securing a grant that made the research possible, and Drew Morrison and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 Brown, Elspeth H., The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore, 2005), 137–38Google Scholar.

2 Wilkins, Mira and Hill, Frank Ernest, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents (Detroit, 1964)Google Scholar. The global expansion of Ford has been given more attention from scholars than that of GM. Recent additions to the scholarship include Anastakis, Dimitry, “From Independence to Integration: The Corporate Evolution of the Ford Motor Company of Canada, 1904–2004,” Business History Review 78 (Summer 2004): 213–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grandin, Greg, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; and Stefan Link, “Transnational Fordism: Ford Motor Company, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union in the Interwar Years” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012).

3 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., ed., Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry (New York, 1964), 14–17, 111–27Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 133–61Google Scholar. Chandler emphasized GM's embrace of modern “innovations in management” as opposed to Ford's “positive contempt” for such innovations as the main reason for the former's success. Twenty years later, David Hounshell agreed that GM's early embrace of “flexible mass production” was a key reason it outpaced Ford in the 1920s. Hounshell, , From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1984), 263–302Google Scholar passim.

4 Sloan, Alfred P. Jr., My Years with General Motors (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), 320–328Google Scholar. See also Bélis-Bergouignan, Marie-Claude, Bordenave, Gerard, and Lung, Yannick, “Global Strategies in the Automobile Industry,” Regional Studies 34 (Feb. 2000): 41–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dassbach, Carl H. A., “Enterprises and B Phases: The Overseas Expansion of U.S. Auto Companies in the 1920s and Japanese Auto Companies in the 1980s,” Sociological Perspectives 36 (Winter 1993): 359–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foreman-Peck, James, “The American Challenge of the Twenties: Multinationals and the European Motor Industry,” Journal of Economic History 42 (Dec. 1982): 865–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mason, Mark, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese Capital Controls, 1899–1980 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maxcy, George, The Multinational Motor Industry (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Turner, Henry Ashby Jr., General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker (New Haven, 2005)Google Scholar; and Wren, Daniel A., “James D. Mooney and General Motors’ Multinational Operations, 1922–1940,” Business History Review 87 (Autumn 2013): 515–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Marchand, Roland, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, 1998), 88–163Google Scholar passim; Marchand, Roland, “Customer Research as Public Relations: General Motors in the 1930s,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Strasser, Susan, McGovern, Charles, and Judt, Matthias (Washington, 1998), 85–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marchand, Roland, “The Corporation Nobody Knew: Bruce Barton, Alfred Sloan, and the Founding of the General Motors ‘Family’,” Business History Review 65 (Winter 1991): 825–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Merron, Jeff, “Putting Foreign Consumers on the Map: J. Walter Thompson's Struggle with General Motors’ International Advertising Account in the 1920s,” Business History Review 73 (Autumn 1999): 465–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yacob, Shakila, “Beyond Borders: Ford in Malaya, 1926–1957,” Business and Economic History On-Line 1 (2003): 1–26Google Scholar; and Yacob, Shakila, “Ford's Investment in Colonial Malaya, 1926–1957,” Business History Review 83 (Winter 2009): 789–812CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Brown, Corporate Eye, 138.

7 Tone, Andrea, The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America (Ithaca, 1997), 2, 101–11Google Scholar.

8 A print run as long as that of General Motors World was unusual for an employee newspaper. A study from Princeton University in 1933 found that about half of the 415 house organs its authors could trace were already defunct. Baker, Helen, Employee Magazines in the Depression (Ann Arbor, 1933), 1Google Scholar.

9 Marchand, “The Corporation Nobody Knew,” 843–46, 870–72.

10 Wren, “Mooney and GM's Multinational Operations,” 542.

11 General Motors Export Co., General Motors Export Monthly (New York, June 1922), 1, Permanent Reference Collection, General Motors Heritage Center, Sterling Heights, Mich. (hereafter GMHC). Unless otherwise noted, all issues are from the GMHC.

12 Marchand described an analogous process of “re-selling” the messages of GM's domestic advertising to its employees in American plants. Marchand, “The Corporation Nobody Knew,” 857, 872–74.

13 Wren, “Mooney and GM's Multinational Operations,” 520–21; Fourie, Louis F., On a Global Mission: The Automobiles of General Motors International, vol. 3, General Motors Worldwide Review, North American Specifications and Executive Listings (Victoria, B.C., 2016), 1499Google Scholar.

14 Mooney, James D. and Reiley, Alan C., Onward Industry! The Principles of Organization and Their Significance to Modern Industry (New York, 1931), 486–87Google Scholar; Lewis, David L., The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit, 1976), 191–92Google Scholar. Ford's overseas dealers and distributors invested in advertising even when the automaker did not. See Yacob, “Ford's Investment in Colonial Malaya,” 797, 805–10; and Wilkins and Hill, American Business Abroad, 146.

15 Sloan, Clifford A. and Mooney, James D., Advertising the Technical Product (New York, 1920), 161–65Google Scholar.

16 General Motors Export Division, General Motors World (hereafter GMW), June 1932, 5.

17 Brown, Corporate Eye, 137.

18 Wissler, Willis, Study of Content and Arrangement of Employe Magazines—(Plant Organs) (Columbus, 1930), 11Google Scholar, table 1.

19 See Wilson, George Frederick, The House Organ—How to Make It Produce Results (Milwaukee, 1915)Google Scholar; Ramsay, Robert E., Effective House Organs: The Principles and Practice of Editing and Publishing Successful House Organs (New York, 1920)Google Scholar; and Hall, S. Roland, Business Writing: Articles—House Organs—Reports—Advertisements: Methods of Gathering Data and of Writing Business Copy of News, Educational and Promotional Character (New York, 1924)Google Scholar.

20 Wissler, Content and Arrangement of Employe Magazines, 28, table 7.

21 For examples, see Illinois Steel Company, The Mixer, Oct.–Dec. 1921; Chrysler Industrial Association, Chrysler Motors Magazine, Feb. 1938; National Cash Register Company, NCR Factory News, May–Nov. 1934; and Wissler, Study of Employe Magazines, 36. Around the time General Motors World was launched, Ford included an occasional article on the company's products overseas in its companywide magazine Ford News, but its focus was domestic.

22 See George E. Roberts, “Present Conditions and Prospects in Cuba,” The Americas, Sept. 1915, 11–13; Alfred P. Sloan Jr., “Industry's Stake in World Trade,” Think, Sept. 1935, 7, 23; Alfred P. Sloan Jr., “Enhancing Prosperity for All Peoples,” Think, May 1938, 7, 32.

23 Bernays, Edward L., “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (May 1928): 971CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernays, Edward L., Propaganda (1928; repr. Brooklyn, 2005), 71Google Scholar; “Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ and Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103,” New York Times, 10 Mar. 1995, B7; Bird, William L. Jr., “Better Living”: Advertising, Media and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, Ill., 1999), 37–38Google Scholar; Cutlip, Scott M., The Unseen Power: Public Relations, a History (1994; repr. New York, 2009), 203–6Google Scholar.

24 Clifford A. Sloan and Mooney, Advertising the Technical Product, 31.

25 General Motors Corporation (GM), 1922 Annual Report (New York, 1923), 18.

26 GM, 1925 Annual Report (New York and Detroit, 1926), 23, table “Sales of Cars and Trucks,” 24, table “Overseas Sales.”

27 General Motors Export Co., General Motors Export Monthly, June 1922, 1.

28 GMW, Dec. 1923, 4. See also Wren, “Mooney and GM's Multinational Operations,” 520–23.

29 GMW, Aug. 1923, 8; GMW, Sept. 1923, 8.

30 Sultan Chinoy, “Price of Petrol: To the Editor of the Times of India,” Times of India, 29 Jan. 1923, 7.

31 Alfred P. Sloan Jr., My Years with General Motors, 438.

32 GMW, Dec. 1922, 3; GMW, Apr. 1923, 4.

33 Nerbas, Don, Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914–1947 (Toronto, 2013), 170Google Scholar.

34 GMW, Nov. 1923, 4. According to Fourie, the first vehicle, a Chevrolet truck, was not assembled until January 1924. Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1465.

35 Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1091, 1119.

36 GMW, Nov. 1923, 4; GMW, Jan. 1924, 3; GMW, May 1931, 4–5. Examples of the assembly instructions can be found in GM, The Organization and Functional Duties of the Production Department, Detroit Office, Export Division, General Motors Corporation, sec. 8 (Preliminary Engineering Features), sec. 9 (Chassis Assembly Notes), sec. 10 (Body Assembly Notes), sec. 12 (Body Operation Bulletins), sec. 13 (Deviation Requests), sec. 33 (Continental), sec. 70 (Confidential Paint Letters), Permanent Reference Collection, GMHC.

37 Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1168–71. To compare this timeline with the dates when Ford opened warehousing, assembly, or manufacturing operations in foreign countries, see Wilkins and Hill, American Business Abroad, 434–35, appendix 2.

38 GMW, Feb. 1928, 1.

39 GMW, July 1924, 5; GMW, May 1924, 6. Beginning in 1930, the Export Division, the Export Company (known after 1937 as the Foreign Distributors Division), and GM's semi-independent subsidiaries such as Opel and Vauxhall were together referred to using the umbrella term “GM Overseas Operations Group,” of which Mooney was president. In 1938, the name was shortened to “GM Overseas Operations.” Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1102–3.

40 GMW, Sept. 1923, 3–4.

41 GMW, July 1934, 1.

42 GMW, Sept. 1923, 3–4; GMW, Apr. 1923, 3–4.

43 Sjöblom, Gustav, “The Shift from Railways to Roads: Four Propositions about the Interwar Period in Britain and Germany,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 48 (June 2007): 57, 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Carter, John, “This Road Building Era,” North American Review 228 (Nov. 1929): 594–95Google Scholar.

45 GMW, Apr. 1923, 2.

46 “U.S. Transportation Expert Arrives Here,” Japan Times & Mail, 11 Feb. 1930, 3; “Country Needs Roads to Advance,” Japan Times & Mail, 14 May 1921, 6.

47 Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1470.

48 Downes, Richard, “Autos over Rails: How US Business Supplanted the British in Brazil, 1910–28,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (Oct. 1992): 556–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 571.

49 GMW, Feb. 1932, 21.

50 Downes, “Autos over Rails,” 562–64, 568, 579; James D. Mooney, “Man Yielding to Motor Influence,” New York Times, 19 Feb. 1928, 13.

51 James D. Mooney, “Making the World Move Faster,” Nation's Business 16 (Dec. 1928): 22, 98.

52 Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1468.

53 GMW, Nov. 1934, 3, 12–13.

54 GMW, Oct. 1934, 4–5.

55 James D. Mooney, “The Motor Outlook in Europe: Welcome Optimism,” Times of India, 27 Aug. 1928, 8.

56 “General Motors Managers Meet,” Japan Times & Mail, 18 May 1929, 3.

57 “General Motors Activities,” Straits Times, 9 Nov. 1929, 9.

58 GMW, Feb. 1932, 14.

59 GM, 1935 Annual Report (New York, 1936), 17, table “General Motors Overseas Sales.”

60 GMW, May 1932, 5, 20.

61 GMW, Dec. 1932, 6; “President Hoover Signs Tariff Bill,” Japan Times & Mail, 19 June 1930, 1; GMW, Apr. 1935, 1.

62 GMW, May 1931, 3, 21. For more examples of General Motors World editorializing against tariffs in the years following the stock market crash, see GMW, Sept. 1932, 1; and GMW, Sept. 1933, 1.

63 James D. Mooney, The New Capitalism (New York, 1934), vii.

64 Mooney, The New Capitalism, figures 31–34.

65 Mooney, The New Capitalism, 52, 201.

66 GMW, July 1931, 1; GMW, Sept. 1931, 1, 3–5, 10–13, 24; GMW, Nov. 1931, 1, 3.

67 GMW, Nov. 1931, 1; GMW, Aug. 1932, 9.

68 Merron, “Foreign Consumers on the Map,” 465–66, 469, 472–80.

69 Kreshel, Peggy, “John B. Watson at J. Walter Thompson: The Legitimation of ‘Science’ in Advertising,” Journal of Advertising 19 (1990): 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marchand, “Customer Research as Public Relations,” 85–109 passim.

70 Letter by Lillian Schoedler, 21 Aug. 1927, series III, Correspondence, 1898–1963, folder 89, Papers of Lillian Schoedler, 1890–1963, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; GMW, Jan. 1928, 9.

71 W. T. Whalen, “Field Men Overseas Observe Native Ways,” New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929, 34.

72 GMW, Apr. 1924, 1–2; GMW, Nov. 1924, 6; GMW, Mar. 1928, 9.

73 GMW, Nov. 1929, 30.

74 GMW, Feb. 1928, 1–2; GMW, Feb. 1932, 3.

75 GMW, Feb. 1928, 22.

76 Fourie, On a Global Mission, 1503, 1512, 1514.

77 GMW, Sept. 1934, 5; GMW, Nov. 1934, 12–13.

78 GMW, Dec. 1934, 13.

79 GMW, Mar. 1928, 24.

80 “The General Motors,” Times of India, 13 Apr. 1929, 14.

81 GMW, Mar. 1932, 14.

82 For examples of these communications see GM, Organization and Functional Duties of the Production Department, GMHC.

83 Link, Stefan, “The Charismatic Corporation: Finance, Administration, and Shop Floor Management under Henry Ford,” Business History Review 92 (Spring 2018): 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 See Chandler, Strategy and Structure; Chandler, Giant Enterprise; and Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production. For Chandler's general assessment of the importance of administrative coordination within large firms, see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 1–12Google Scholar, 462–63. See also Wren's article, which partially revises Chandler's argument by showing that the decision-making processes within GM's foreign divisions centralized in response to the Great Depression. Wren, “Mooney and GM's Multinational Operations,” 519, 523–24, 535–37, 541–43.

85 See Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul; Marchand, “Customer Research as Public Relations”; Marchand, “The Corporation Nobody Knew”; Merron, “Foreign Consumers on the Map”; and Tedlow, Richard S., New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (Boston, 1996), 165–81Google Scholar. For a more general assessment of the power of public relations see Cutlip, The Unseen Power.

86 As is often the case, these groupings of scholarship are best understood as differing in their focus rather than directly opposed to each other. Daniel Boorstin, for example, accepted Chandler's argument about GM's structure while also arguing that advertising helped create new “consumption communities.” Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), 89–90, 91–156Google Scholar passim, 552–56.

87 Ammon, Francesca Russello, Bulldozer: Demolition and the Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven, 2016), 15Google Scholar.