Maxwell Motor and the Making of the Chrysler Corporation

By Anthony J. Yanik

Great Lakes Books Series
Wayne State University Press
Detroit, Michigan 48201
2009

Today’s possible bankruptcy of the Chrysler Corporation is just the latest chapter in the more than 100 year story of bankruptcy and renaissance of the Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Car Company as chronicled in Anthony J. Yanik’s “Maxwell Motors and the Making of the Chrysler Corporation.”

While best known as the butt of endless Jack Benny jokes, the Maxwell marque actually represents one of the most successful early automobile enterprises in the United States, number four sales leader behind Ford, EMF and Buick in 1908.

Yanik’s history traces the personalities of the four major players, Benjamin Briscoe, Jonathan D. Maxwell, Walter F. Flanders and Walter P. Chrysler in the company’s early lives. These four individuals personify the characteristic qualities of the pioneers of the American automobile industry from its founding, thru its youth and adolescence into maturity. Briscoe, the money-man, entrepreneur, hustler and would be empire builder; Maxwell, the engineer, designer, mechanic inventor; Flanders, a Ford-like inventor, production manager and organizer; Chrysler, builder of the modern, a car for every garage, progressive market and engineering oriented car corporation.

Yanik focuses his story mainly upon the financial manipulations of Benjamin Briscoe and his many attempts to create a broad, conglomerate automobile company by attempting to forge unions with Buick, Ford, REO and other non-ALAM organizations. Not forgotten are the perennial marketing techniques of racing, glamour, and reliability. Engineering advances are covered, if not in detail, in enough depth to illustrate when Maxwell was ahead or behind the curve of automobile development.

“Maxwell Motor and the Making of the Chrysler Corporation” provides a convenient introduction into this important, but now mostly forgotten, save for a handful of collectors and restorers, marque.

However the book is not perfect. I occasionally had the feeling that Yanik is more familiar with his research material than with the cars, especially the early Maxwell-Briscoe and United States Motor Company incarnations. Yanik cites a footnote that early touring cars were rear-entrance tonneaus after earlier emphasizing Jonathan Maxwell’s predilection to side entrances on touring cars, which was the case (the confusion may have arrived as early Model H Touring cars had inward opening side doors as opposed to the usual outward opening door). He mentions Maxwell’s “distinctive radiators (a wide chrome horizontal band extending across the base)” which is correct in design, but wrong in composition, the band being brass and chrome not to be a part of car decoration for another 25 years or so. Yanik loses the Model AB, having the AA continue into 1911. And he identifies Alice Ramsey’s vehicle as a 1909 KA, not the DA that it was (an error included in James Zordich’s Maxwell monograph in HCCG Nov-Dec 1976).

Yanik provides much information in his history, but the small errors and a few editorial oversights put into question other information that is fresh to me. I want to believe it, but don’t know how to judge it.