Global Automotive Technology :: A Complete B2B, Media Portal for Automotive Industry

Who has been the most influential Canadian in the long history of the automobile?

You certainly can make a case for Oshawa’s Sam McLaughlin, who took the family carriage-making business and changed it into a successful automotive operation that eventually became General Motors of Canada.

You also can make a case for Peter Edmund Martin, from Wallaceburg, Ont., who was superintendent at Henry Ford’s huge new assembly plant in Highland Park, Mich., where he helped develop the industry’s first moving assembly line in 1913.

In more modern times there’s Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat Group and chairman and CEO of Chrysler Corp. Born in Italy, but educated and raised in Toronto, he holds dual Canadian-Italian citizenship and is responsible for the turnaround of Fiat and the subsequent acquisition and turnaround of Chrysler.

But what about Dr. Edwin Campbell, from the small Ontario town of Port Perry?

Dr. who?

Good question; and one answered in a new biography by Paul Arculus titled Durant’s Right-Hand Man (Friesen Press). The Port Perry resident has researched the project over many years.

His book was launched just in time to mark the 100th anniversary of Chevrolet because, along with Louis Chevrolet and William Little, Dr. Campbell was one of the founders of the Chevrolet Motor Co. on Nov. 3, 1911.

How did a kid from rural Ontario, the son of a part-time farmer and tavern keeper, end up among the titans of American industry?

Campbell was born in 1866 and graduated from medical school in Toronto in 1887 then moved to Flint. Mich. and set up a practice. There he met William Crapo Durant, on the verge of becoming an automotive giant, who became a patient. In 1906 Dr. Campbell married Durant’s daughter, Margery, even though he was 40 and she all of 18.

Durant was experiencing marital problems at the time and moved in with the newlyweds. His wedding gift, $150,000 worth of stock in the Durant-Dort Carriage works, sealed Edwin Campbell’s fate. He gave up medicine in 1908 to concentrate on helping Durant create General Motors out of a disparate group of car makers with Flint-based Buick as the keystone.

Durant lost control of GM in 1910, but using his friend’s Chevrolet brand as a stepping stone soon acquired even more automotive enterprises and, with Dr. Campbell’s help, regained leadership of GM in 1916. Two years later, Dr. Campbell was instrumental in convincing his childhood friend Sam McLaughlin to help form General Motors of Canada.

Before Durant lost control of GM for the second time, the Campbells had moved to New York and became part of that city’s social elite. They divorced in 1920, the same year Durant lost GM for good, but the following year Campbell was helping his friend and mentor rise from the ashes again with a new company called Durant Motors. Edwin Campbell died in 1929, a wealthy man.

How then could he be so forgotten today? As Arculus writes in his foreword, “Campbell’s name was not erased from history; it was simply overshadowed by the scope and achievements of those around him, and by his own quiet and unassuming manner.”

He also notes that no official records were kept of the brainstorming sessions between Durant and Campbell that created an empire only to lose it and then win it back before losing it for good.

This is a meticulously researched work five years in the making, which offers not just insights into the early days of the automobile industry, but of the colourful and wealthy characters who lived a fast and furious lifestyle in the first decades of the 20th century.

Durant’s Right-Hand Man has been published simultaneously in hardcover at $31.95 and in paperback at $21.95 and is in bookstores now

Comments

RSS

All rights reserved."