Today is the birthday of John Francis Dodge, one of the founders of the Dodge Brothers Company — you can still see their name on cars today. But their first efforts in the automobile industry weren’t in building cars. When they started the company in Detroit in 1900, they only made parts. They were pretty good at it, too; Henry Ford bought most of the parts for his 1903 Model A (the one before the Model T, not the later one with the same name) from them. And that brought them a big measure of success, because when Ford created his new company, he made a deal with the Dodges — in exchange for $10,000 worth of parts, they owned 10% of the Ford company.
They didn’t build a complete car until 1914, when they introduced the Dodge Model 30/35. It was bigger, more powerful, and more advanced than the Ford Model T — among other things, it used a 12-volt electrical system when most cars were using 6-volt systems (and continued to until the late 1950s). As John Dodge said, “someday people who own a Ford are going to want an automobile.”
But they still owned 10% of the Ford Motor Company, and their parts business was booming too. There were dozens of companies building cars in the teens, and Dodge transmissions and engines were known to be the best. By 1916, Dodge car sales were second only to the Ford Model T, and so well known for durability that the US government bought 13,000 cars and trucks from them to use in WWI.
Dodge’s stake in Ford finally paid off pretty well in 1916. Henry Ford was building the world’s biggest factory complex, the River Rouge plant, and to pay for it he didn’t pay any stock dividends that year. The Dodges — who, remember, had gotten their ownership stake in exchange for $10,000 in parts — had already earned $10 million in dividends, and sued Ford, along with other stockholders. Ford decided to buy them out, and the Dodges suddenly had another $25 million cash.
In 1920, though, both brothers passed away. John Dodge died of pneumonia probably as a result of the Spanish Flu, and his brother died later that year — supposedly from grief. Without the founders, the Dodge Brothers Company started to slide downwards. They lost their top rank in sales, slipping to seventh. People started to notice that quality wasn’t what it had been. Dodge cars fell behind their competitors in new ideas and innovation.
The widows of the Dodges, who had never been involved in running the company, decided to get out of the business altogether and sold the company in 1925 for $146 million. At the time it was the biggest cash transaction ever. It was also something of a first, because the company was sold to an investment firm: Dillon, Read, & Company. They installed a new chairman of the board — and investment banker who had never before been involved in the auto industry. Probably as a result, the company’s fortunes continued to decline, and the whole works was sold to the Chrysler corporation in 1928 — where it still sits today..
At least it sort of sits there. Chrysler itself has been passed around a few times, and it’s now really called Stellantis, the French multinational that owns several other auto brands including Dodge, Chrysler, FIAT, Jeep, Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Citroën, Lancia, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall. It will probably result in more swapping around of brand names on cars — even today many Jeeps and FIATs are the same cars, just with different nameplates.
You might have noticed that those car brands are from the US, Italy, France, England, and Germany — but not Spain. A lot of cars are manufactured in Spain, but it’s not generally a source of well-known cars — at least they’re not well-known in the US. That wasn’t the case back when the Dodge brothers were running their company; one of the top luxury makes in the world was Hispano-Suiza. Those cars came from Spain, and there were other makes as well. They were all better known in Europe than the US, but even here you could find an Elizalde or a Ricart if you wanted to. But then they all disappeared, and the only remaining major Spanish car brand is SEAT, which is part of Volkswagen.
What happened to the Spanish auto industry was the Spanish Civil War. It lasted from 1936 to 39, and when the smoke cleared the right-wing side had won. They imposed economic nationalism and isolationism, and the auto industry — not to mention quite a few others — never recovered. About the only good things to come out of that war were the arts. There was literature like For Whom the Bell Tolls, and there were paintings like Picasso’s Guernica, which shows a German/Fascist bombing attack on that town, which was leveled.
Picasso was born in Spain, but by 1937, when he painted Guernica, he was living in Paris. In spite of the war, there was a Spanish exhibit at the Paris International Exposition that year, and Picasso’s painting was the centerpiece. After that it went on tour in Europe and the US, and got even more famous. On October 25, 1937, the Exposition was still in session, and since it was right there in Paris, Picasso himself might have stopped by to visit it. Nobody really knows, but he might have been out and about that day — after all, it was his birthday!
