TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988) directed by Francis Ford Coppola stars Jeff Bridges and recounts the attempts of Preston Tucker (a man on the cusp of the future with endless enthusiasm) to manufacture and market his Tucker ’48. A safe and reliable family automobile, the post-World War II model sedan offered innovative and revolutionary technologies of disc brakes, seat belts, fuel-injected engine, padded dashboard, front windshield that ejects upon severe collision, all instruments within the diameter of the steering wheel, and a padded dashboard with aerodynamic styling—radical concepts for the 1940s.
 Streamlined, futuristic and fast, the Tucker ’48 was the car every American dreamed of owning at a price most people could afford. So the Big 3 (General Motors reacquiring its post-war corporate footing) conspired with the political authority in Washington D.C. to bring Preston Tucker to ruin, and in so doing nearly dissolved this historic figure into obscurity.
Capable of being constructed for a mere fraction of the cost to build mainstream automobiles during the 1940s, the Tucker ’48 epitomized its creator’s ingenuity and daring with notions of what the United States could be like in the coming decades based on futuristic technology and pioneering spirit, inventiveness that stunned the American car industry, and would one day revolutionized automotive engineering.
Tucker’s visionary design and application made the inventor the 20th Century’s greatest automobile manufacturer which, ironically, became instrumental in his downfall.
 A motion picture concerned as much with hush and ominous narrative as with its joyful visual elements, the central plot of Coppola’s movie is that the Big 3—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—considered Preston Tucker a person to humor then heckle; but his invention a transgression, a threat to their product lines that could lift their herculean grip on the industry.
C o r p o r a t i o n
After starting his own auto company in the State of Michigan, industrial designer Preston Thomas Tucker (1903-1956) introduced features now widely used in every vehicle manufactured today. A natural born promoter, Tucker to wild acclaim publicized his model car throughout the U.S.—reviews from auto magazines effusively praised the Tucker Torpedo.
Stock sold in the Tucker Corporation set up a factory in Detroit to produce the “Car of Tomorrow” today—until it was shuttered in the midst of alleged fraud surrounding the Torpedo, mostly remembered for many features that have since become standard in modern automobiles. Production of the Torpedo was shut down amidst scandal and accusations of stock fraud on March 3, 1949.
Suspicion that Tucker’s enterprise was a sham compelled the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1949 to investigate,targeting the corporation for mail fraud and other allegations in March of that year. The indictment coming in June, a trial in October, and an acquittal in January eventually absolved Preston Tucker of every charge against him and his company, but the legal damage irreversibly shuttered his auto factory. The company’s stock fell during the investigation, as Tucker struggled with a skeleton crew to continue manufacturing the Torpedo. Production lasted only a few months when the corporation went into receivership. Assets were seized.
In the decade prior to Tucker’s corporate and legal travails, when the General Motors “dynasty” flourished, James D. Mooney, the company’s Vice-President of Overseas Operations had been an unofficial American diplomat in Europe during 1938, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
According, to captured German records, in August of that year while in Berlin, Mooney received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle for his distinguished service to the Reich, decorated with the merit cross for the Order of the German Eagle, First Class by Adollf Hitler, rewarding his merits for the Wehrmacht.
Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company received a similar metal, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner.
It’s believed that Adolph Hitler would have never considered invading Poland without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors. 
 On May 2, 1934, Mooney and two other senior executives with General Motor’s German division (Adam Opel GmbH) met Hitler in the Chancellery office; the Führer waited with his economic adviser, Wilhelm Keppler and greeted Mooney—but not with a stern-faced Sieg Heil, rather a businessman’s handshake. The meeting was one of many regarding contacts between the Nazis Party and GM officials. Little-known restricted Nazi-era documents that came to light during the New Deal-era revealed how GM and its Opel division were eagerly willing and absolutely indispensable cogs in the wheel of the Third Reich’s juggernaut; effectively, the automaker was an enabler for Hitler’s war machine and the conquest of Europe.
 While the company’s Vice President of Overseas Operations, Moody helped to mobilize the Nazi revolution for Germany’s economic recovery, General Motor’s president Alfred P. Sloan operated a program to undermine the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt by deliberately dismantling the urban rail infrastructure that became known as the “Great American Streetcar Scandal.” Adverse to violence of the sort associated with Henry Ford, the president of General Motors preferred the subtle use of spying; Sloan had built the best undercover apparatus the business community had ever seen up to that time with the shrugging philosophy: “The business of business is business.”
 And it was toward this end that Sloan led the company’s expansion of auto sales in maximizing profits: the automaker bought local mass transit systems and privately-owned railways then proceeded to dismantle them. Facing a saturated car market in the U.S. by the early 1920s, G.M. engaged a controversial policy with road-builders triggering the shift from mass transportation of the 19th century to “one-person-one-car” and thus undermining America’s electric mass transit—and by doing so addicted the country to oil. “A car for every purse and purpose,” Sloan had reflexively intoned, as buses and private automobiles continued to replace many public transport systems (trams) in the United States, orchestrated by the motor company together with Firestone Tire Corp, Standard Oil of California and the Mack Truck Company.
 TAKEN FOR RIDE (1996) documentary by Jim Klein and Martha Olson details how General Motors masterminded the systematic elimination of public transit by purchasing private fixed-rail transit systems before and after World War II—and why the U.S. still suffers with the poorest public transit in the industrialized world. The film advocates that G.M. increased sales of individual automobile by implementing a program whereby fixed-rail systems were eliminate throughout the country, motivating the public to buy cars and ride buses as “far more efficient and a better alternative” than riding public transit.
General Motors found guilty of violating anti-trust laws, the penalties imposed were nugatory: $5,000 fine for the company, and a $1 fine for each convicted executive. On March 4, 1940, Hitler received a visit from General Motors vice president, James D. Mooney, allegedly trying “to save the peace” between Nazi German and the United States, telling the Führer that President Roosevelt was “more friendly and sympathetic” to Germany “than was generally believed in Berlin” and that the president was prepared to act as “moderator” in bringing the belligerents together. The German ambassador to the United States (recalled to Berlin) saw Mooney immediately after the interview with Hitler and reported to the Foreign Office that the American businessman was “rather verbose” and added “I cannot believe that Mooney’s initiative has any great importance.” On March 11th a confidential memorandum prepared for Hitler by an unnamed American informant declared that Mooney “was more or less pro-German.”
In all events, the General Motors executive was certainly taken in by the Nazis. The memo stated that Mooney had informed Roosevelt (on the basis of an earlier talk with Hitler) that the Führer was desirous of peace and “wish to prevent the bloodshed of a spring campaign.”
 World War II brought problems for General Motors. The German division, Adam Opel GmbH supplied war equipment to Hitler's German army, and with the profits paid dividends to G.M.’s American shareholders. By 1940 the Nazi regime seized control of the Opel factory, ending all civilian production.
 June 1940, Sloan stated: “It seems clear that the Allies are outclassed on mechanical equipment, and it is foolish to talk about modernizing their Armies in times like these, they ought to have thought of that five years ago. There is no excuse for them not thinking of that except for the unintelligent, in fact, stupid, narrow-minded and selfish leadership which the democracies of the world are cursed with. But when some other system develops stronger leadership, works hard and long, and intelligently and aggressively—which are good traits—and, superimposed upon that, develops the instinct of a racketeer, there is nothing for the democracies to do but fold up. And that is about what it looks as if they are going to do.”
PM Magazine
August-September 1940
Early in August, 1940, PM Magazine, a sensationalist Chicago-based newspaper published a number of inflammatory articles regarding Mooney’s association with the Nazi government, accusing the G.M. executive of publishing pro-German propaganda: The articles centered on Mooney's receipt of the German Order of Merit of the Eagle in 1938 and a speech delivered in June, 1940 later printed in the Saturday Evening Post under “War or Peace in America?”
In this portion of the collection are numerous letters between Mooney and company executives, including the president Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., as well as officials at General Motors and PM Magazine that included Marshall Field, III—an American investment banker, publisher and heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune.
By the following year, during May 1941, the company’s president, Alfred P. Sloan is quoted saying: “I am sure we all realize that this struggle that is going on through the world is really nothing more or less than a conflict between two opposing technocracies manifesting itself to the capitalization of economic resources and products and all that sort of thing.” Such is how the president of General Motors perceived the thrust of Nazi Germany across Europe and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in its piratical reach for world domination.
 “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors.” A statement made by Charles E. Wilson, who succeeded Alfred P. Sloan as president of the General Motors Corporation in January 1941; and as president of G.M. during the United States involvement in World War II. As director of the War Production Board, he informed the Army Ordnance Board that in order to prevent returning to the Great Depression, the U.S. needed “a permanent war economy” which (by the 1950s) would evolve into the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower later warned the country against before leaving office. Wilson was still head of GM when Eisenhower selected him as Secretary of Defense in January 1953.
  General Motors wrote off its German Opel Division in 1942 as a complete loss. By 1944 the allies bombed the facility (pictured) to near destruction during the course of the war.
 G.M.’s internal records documents the giant American corporation’s dealings with the Third Reich as reported by Henry Ashby Turner, the author first to tell the fascinating story of how G.M. conducted business in Germany under the Nazi regime then assesses the legality and morality of the company’s policies.
 Presidential Medal for Merit is the highest civilian decoration of the United States, awarded by the President to civilians for exceptionally meritorious conduct. Charles E. Wilson, newly installed as president of General Motors, redirected the company towards a huge defense production effort, which in 1946 earned him this U.S. medal.
  General Motors resumed passenger car production in 1947 with the Olympia model.
Preston Tucker at the time of his death in 1956 was working on yet another car, this one to be built in Brazil. The loss of his Detroit facility complete, the loss of his dream was never absolute.
 But his legacy survives in the cars we drive—and due in no small measure to Francis Coppola’s ebullient filmmaking, shedding promethean light on Tucker’s ambitious plan to innovate the automobile industry with a corporate ruler’s noble breeding and a dilettante’s painful naïveté.
Frederick@dreamerchant.com
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