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...