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American National Biography Online
Chapin, Roy Dikeman (23 Feb. 1880-10 Feb. 1936), auto industry
pioneer and secretary of commerce, was born in Lansing, Michigan,
the son of Edward Cornelius Chapin, a successful local attorney,
and Ella King. In 1899 Chapin enrolled in the University of Michigan,
but he left in the spring of 1901 to take a position with the
Olds Motor Works in Detroit. Chapin worked as a photographer,
helped out in the factory in May during a machinists' strike,
and served as a test driver. It was in the latter capacity that
Chapin drove an Oldsmobile runabout from Detroit to New York
in seven and a half days in 1901, arriving in time to display
it at the National Automobile Show. This trip, the one event
for which Chapin is best remembered, promoted sales of the frail,
600-pound car while providing a boost to Chapin's career.
In 1902 Chapin was given a top sales position with the Olds
company, despite the objections of R. E. Olds, who thought he
was too young and inexperienced for the job. Olds was overruled
by Frederic Smith, the secretary-treasurer, an early sign of
the rift between Olds and Smith, whose family controlled a majority
of the company stock. This rift led to Olds's departure in 1904
and Smith's assumption of the position of general manager. Smith
then named Chapin sales manager. His skill as a salesman had
helped make the Oldsmobile the world's bestselling car, with
sales doubling from 2,500 in 1902 to 5,000 in 1904.
However, in 1906 Chapin persuaded the Buffalo automaker Edwin
R. Thomas to back a new company that Chapin and three other Olds
employees wanted to form to produce a new runabout designed by
one of the four men, Howard E. Coffin, chief engineer for Olds.
Chapin was general manager of the resulting E. R. Thomas-Detroit
Company, but distribution of the company's cars was handled by
Thomas's Buffalo company. To free the Detroit firm from this
arrangement, Chapin in 1908 persuaded Hugh Chalmers to buy half
of Thomas's interest, with the company reorganized as Chalmers-Detroit.
It distributed its own cars, and Chapin continued as general manager.
In February 1909, Chapin, Chalmers, Coffin, and other investors
formed the Hudson Motor Car Company, which was named after Joseph
L. Hudson, a wealthy Detroit merchant and principal investor
in the new business. Later that year Chapin became president
of Hudson, which quickly emerged as one of the industry's stronger
companies. Production rose from 1,000 cars in 1909 to nearly
13,000 in 1915, at which time Hudson was reportedly the world's
largest producer of six-cylinder cars, which it had introduced in 1912.
With his newfound wealth, Chapin took more time to enjoy himself.
He and Howard Coffin, a close friend as well as business colleague,
took trips to Europe. On a trip to Georgia, Coffin introduced
Chapin to Inez Tiedeman, whom Chapin married in 1914.
From the outset of his career, Chapin took an active interest
in automobile trade association work and would become the industry's
recognized spokesman on many issues. He also became a champion
of the good-roads cause. In 1913, together with Henry B. Joy
of the Packard company, he took the leadership in forming the
Lincoln Highway Association, whose goal was a coast-to-coast all-weather road.
Too much attention to outside interests probably explains Chapin's
failure to note the rising costs that brought a sharp drop in
Hudson profits in 1915. His first reaction was to involve Hudson
in a merger that William C. Durant was trying to put together
in 1916. When that deal fell through, Chapin moved to regain
full control of Hudson, but his plans for restoring the growth
of the earlier years were delayed by American entry into World
War I in April 1917. During the war, Chapin was chairman of the
Highway Transport Committee of the Council on National Defense.
To ease the critical shortage of freight cars, he persuaded manufacturers
of trucks bound for the war to have them driven to East Coast
ports rather than shipping them by rail. The result was a dramatic
demonstration of the possibilities of trucks as long-distance freight haulers.
After the war Chapin turned his attention to company matters.
In 1917 he and his colleagues had formed a separate company,
Essex Motor Car Company, to provide Hudson dealers with a lower-priced,
four-cylinder car. Essex's production soon surpassed Hudson's.
The popularity of Essex and Hudson cars after the war was due
to the introduction in 1922 of closed-body models, a development
that constitutes Chapin's most important contribution to the
industry. Up to this time, closed cars were limited to luxury
makes, but Chapin priced closed Essex and Hudson makes at only
$100 more than the open models. Producers of other lower-priced
cars had to follow suit, and by 1925 over half the cars produced
in the United States were closed, not open models.
Hudson's success led Chapin and his partners to go public in
1922 with Chapin handling the negotiations. The stock offering
provided the remaining original partners with $7 million in cash
and $16 million in Hudson stock. In 1923 Chapin, while still
firmly in control of the company, stepped down as president and
took the less demanding role of chairman.
Chapin devoted more time to his family (which by 1930 included
six children) and his mansion in the Detroit suburb of Grosse
Pointe Farms. Chapin also helped organize the Pan-American Conference
for Highway Education in 1924, chaired the World Transport Committee
in Paris in 1927, and presided over the Sixth International Road
Congress in Washington in 1930. The last caused the French government
in 1931 to name him an officer in the Legion of Honor.
In July 1932 President Herbert Hoover appointed Chapin as secretary
of commerce. Chapin is best remembered in this position for his
unsuccessful effort to persuade Henry Ford to agree to participate
in a federal plan to save one of Detroit's two major banking
groups, Guardian Detroit Union. Ford's rejection of Chapin's
appeal precipitated a crisis that led to the Michigan bank holiday,
precedent for the national bank holiday proclaimed by Franklin
D. Roosevelt in March 1933.
Upon Chapin's return to Detroit in 1933 at the end of the Hoover
administration, he resumed active command of Hudson. The company's
production had plummeted from 300,000 cars in 1929 to only 40,000
in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. While many
of the remaining smaller auto companies were driven out of business
by the economic collapse, Chapin was able to raise production
to 100,000 by 1935 and to once again turn a profit. At the same
time he was actively involved with industry affairs as a member
of the committee that drew up the auto industry code required
under the provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act.
Chapin died in Detroit of pneumonia a few days short of his
fifty-sixth birthday. One of the leaders of the auto industry
during its formative years, he could claim as his most important
achievement the Hudson company, which he created and which he
headed for a quarter century, staving off the economic forces
that destroyed most of the auto companies in existence when Hudson
was organized. His eldest son, Roy D. Chapin, Jr., later became
an executive with Hudson and served as chief executive officer
of American Motors Corporation, its successor, from 1967 to 1977.
Bibliography
The papers of Roy D. Chapin are in the Michigan Historical Collections
of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor. It is one of the most complete and revealing collections
available for any of the leading auto executives. The only book-length
biography, John C. Long, Roy D. Chapin (1945), was commissioned
and privately published by Chapin's widow. Factually it is reasonably
adequate, but a new study, providing a more objective interpretation
of Chapin's work, is much needed. For a comparison of Chapin's
importance with other industry pioneers, see John B. Rae, American
Automobile Manufacturers: The First Forty Years (1959). See also
George S. May, "The Detroit-New York Odyssey of Roy D. Chapin,"
Detroit in Perspective 2 (Aug. 1973): 5-25; and, for insights
into the formation of E. R. Thomas-Detroit, Eugene W. Lewis,
Motor Memories (1947).
George S. May
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