Thinking Small (14 page)

Between 1877 and 1920, the United States was in the midst of its industrial revolution, shifting from a mainly agricultural-based economy to an economy that was mainly industrial. This new industrial market meant more jobs, more desired services, and eventually, more potential fear. During these years, the population of the country more than doubled, going from 36 million in 1870 to over 80 million by 1900. By 1910, over one million Jewish immigrants were living in New
York City, most of them having fled persecution in their Eastern European homes. Bill Bernbach’s mother and father came over in this wave, starting their family in the first ten years of the new century with their youngest, Bill, born on August 13, 1911. Likewise, Bill’s future Catholic in-laws, the Carbones, came over with the more than 3.6 million Italians who became part of the American population between 1880 and 1920.

When Eastern European workers in the United States organized a massive strike against the steel industry in 1919, unrest vibrated through the country, causing riots in twenty-five American cities. This was all part of what became known as the Red Scare: Americans feared Communists were taking over the country, and many responded with violence. A bomb exploded
at the house of Attorney General Palmer in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 1919 in protest, and
was followed by seven more bombs in different cities across the country.

For everyone involved, so much change was both thrilling and frightening, causing women like Bill’s mother to hold ever tighter to their religion, and causing many in America to pull closer together and protect themselves within familiar groups. It was a time of radical change: People could feel time speeding up, and distance shrinking. New colors and shades of everything were suddenly apparent: new faces, new landscapes, new kinds of work, new ideas.

In both America and in Europe, some people looked at what they saw as different from them, and talked of “being infected” by it. In both America and Europe, encountering so much change and difference continued to spur concerns about eugenics and diversity. And now that books and information could travel more easily, these theories were easily spread. In 1916, for example, a man named Madison Grant wrote a book called
The Passing of the Great Race,
about how America’s diversity was going to eventually be its weakness. As it turned out, the opposite was true; America’s diversity would be its strength, but at the time, many found it a valid argument. Hitler himself read the book in its German translation, and even wrote to the author to thank him for writing it, calling it his “bible,” and keeping it in his library till the end of his life.

This whirlwind of change was not only attributable to an increase in travel and immigration, it was also a matter of the mixing and meeting of new ideas and new ways of life. This was especially true in the United States, as internally, the country began to move around and explore itself (thanks in large part to the cars of men like Ford). The more Model T’s were sold, the more roads were built, and the more people migrated and mingled. In fact, by 1920, after
the expenditure of education, road construction was the country’s biggest public project and expense. As the country became more motorized, people explored new areas, they encountered more choices, and this affected
their lifestyles. As the American John Keats wrote in
The Insolent Chariots,
“The automobile changed our dress, manners, social customs,
⁴
vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer purchasing patterns, common tastes, and positions in intercourse.” All that change was just beginning to roar in the 1920s, and with it came resistance and fear. It was exactly this kind of fear, for example, that made Bill Bernbach’s Jewish family disown him for marrying an Italian girl.

When American cars first started coming over to Europe in the mid-1920s, it caused a similar shock. It was as if space aliens had arrived on four wheels. In the past decade, the United States had advanced at rapid speed, but to see firsthand the proof of how far advanced the “people over the pond” were was astonishing and unnerving. Companies in Europe reacted immediately, trying to readjust their own automotive plans, but they were still far behind,
especially Germany. In 1928, there was already one car for every 5 Americans. In England, there was a car for every 38; in France, Germany’s great rival across the Rhine, there was a car for every 43 people. And in Germany, the country that had once been the leader in technology and perhaps also the most powerful nation in the world, there was one car for every 134 citizens, a statistic that left them almost a decade in the past. By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, there
would be only 489,270 automobiles registered in Germany, which meant about one percent of the population owned a car.

There were both economic and social reasons for this. The First World War had debilitated industry, which meant it had also stymied the way modern machines were viewed. Many in Germany still rejected mass forms of production such as assembly lines because they were antithetical to the idea of German Quality Work, of artisanship that came with seeing one’s technical skills as something necessarily tied to one’s own inner life, rather than just something to
pay the bills. Assembly lines and machines did not appeal to the German way of life, and yet industry
and progress certainly did, and the two things were looking more and more inseparable. Voices could be heard on all ends of the spectrum: some felt Germany needed to embrace these new ideas and develop itself along these lines or else fear falling even further behind. Others felt no economic gain was worth reducing jobs to one repetitive mechanical gesture; humans
were not cogs on a wheel.

Through the twenties, the Weimar Republic debated and debated these things. Plans were drawn for a great highway system that would connect Germany and pave the way, literally, for a new way of thinking about the motor car. But none of those ideas or plans got anywhere close to being unanimously favored in the government, or in the public at large. German states kept taxes high on oil and gasoline, advocating the intricate railway network that had developed instead.
Train fares were kept affordable, and many argued that it made little sense to invest in motorizing Germany when the railway was so efficient. At the same time, however, big German cities were selling out of the books about industrial American pioneers such as Henry Ford, and universities were beginning to teach new American models of business. This push and pull of fascination with progress and industry, and desire to remain true to past ideals, left the country at a standstill. The
Germans wanted to go where the Americans had gone, but they did not want to take the same route.

At university in the midst of all of this, Nordhoff could see that the future of German automobiles would be tied to the innovations already in use in America. He didn’t see how it could go any other way, but following the example of Henry Ford did not mean having to make the same decisions, or even the same kinds of cars. There were other American models coming to the forefront now too, new cars being tested and sold in a competitive market no longer dominated
by the Model T. For those who could read English, as Heinrich did well (later, he would subscribe to the
New Yorker
and diligently read every page), it was possible to seek out these new methods and study them. He also wanted to study them firsthand, which is why he applied for a
job at the Nash Motors Company in Detroit. It was a company that had been created by a former General Motors man, with a
give the customer more than he’s paid for
philosophy that Nordhoff found very appealing. Things looked good for Heinrich at first: The Nash Motors Company was interested in him and offered him a job. But by the time they’d started serious negotiations, it was 1929, and the United States was on the cusp of something Heinrich hadn’t bargained for: the stock market crash. After Black Friday, Nash wrote to Heinrich to tell him they were sorry but things had changed. Suddenly there were not even enough jobs for
Americans; Heinrich would have to find something else.

Luckily, there was another option for getting experience with the American production model. One big piece of news in Germany in the late 1920s was the interest that General Motors was showing for a car company in Germany called Adam Opel. GM was emerging as the largest automobile manufacturer in America at the time: In 1928, GM represented 40 percent of the American market with profits of over a quarter of a billion dollars. Alfred P. Sloan, charming but tough, with
thick facial features and the rugged build of a Marlboro Man, toured the Adam Opel company, looking to expand into the European market.

By the end of the 1920s, Fordism had been widely accepted for well over a decade, and now another business model was also coming into play, the GM model. Alfred P. Sloan believed that GM was initiating a new era in automobiles, and he described the change as a historical progression of sorts: Luxury cars had come first—Sloan called this “the class market”—then there had come Ford’s “mass market,” where the population had
become motorized, and now, ushered in by GM and Sloan, there was “the mass-class market,” a time characterized primarily by choice, a time where money was no longer the problem but rather large amounts of consumers got to decide what they most desired from among an array of elegant options.

People were also learning how to feel richer with less. General Motors invented installment buying, for example, allowing
the population to enjoy a product while earning the money to pay for it. By the mid-1920s, one out of every three cars that General Motors sold was financed through an internal loan with the General Motors Acceptance Corporation. American car companies were also becoming more aware of the international market and the possibilities
of what we today refer to as globalization. Because of innovations in communications and transportation, the foreign market was being seen as a viable, untapped consumer base, full of millions of people who would one day buy cars.

The Ford Company had opened plants on its own in Germany, England, and France, selling cars under its own brand. But GM thought the best business move was to invest in the future of Europe from the inside, to be there when the inevitable auto industry boom did finally occur. GM was not interested in building a People’s Car or in motorizing the German population as Ford had done in America with the Model T. What they wanted to do was “acquire companies in
individual countries and build upon their existing reputations.”
⁵
Opel was the perfect company for that: not only did it have a solid, indestructibly German reputation, it was also the only company in Germany already equipped with an American-style factory. With over three million square feet of factory space, Opel was churning out nearly half of all German
automobiles produced. Sloan was impressed with what he saw there. And with Germany’s recent entry into the League of Nations, it looked like a good time to invest. Thus, in 1929, General Motors of America bought 80 percent of the shares of Opel stock and Germany’s biggest family-owned company became a daughter of an automotive company from the United States. Thus, when working for Nash fell through, Heinrich Nordhoff naturally applied to Opel. New management was coming
in to work with the German management already there, and Nordhoff soon found himself speaking English with an American man. On the day of the interview, he discovered his future boss suffering from a hangover and lying
down on the couch in his office. They talked anyway, and Heinrich got the job. A German man accustomed to slow and methodical processes, Heinrich said he’d be happy to start in two months. His new American boss smiled: It would be better if
Heinrich could start
next week.

At the Weintraub advertising agency
in New York City, Bill Bernbach was like a kid in a candy store. He had a steady job again. His days had structure. And there was so much to learn. Aside from the one ad he’d written at Schenley, Bill had yet to prove himself a capable copywriter: A powerful man had decided to take a chance on him, choosing him over two big-agency men who had applied for the same copywriting job. Bill was hired without a portfolio of any kind; hired because of a letter he’d written, and because of the warm recommendation from his former boss at Schenley. It might seem like he was at a disadvantage, starting in such a way, but the novelty of it all gave him a fresh take and a powerful desire to prove himself. It provided all that energy humming in him a place to flow.

In those years, the advertising agencies lining Madison Avenue structured themselves as service industries with isolated departments and well-defined parts: there were those who pursued the customers and made the deals (the accounts department), those who negotiated for top ad space in magazines (the sales department), those who wrote the ads (the copywriting department), and those who created the look and added the images (the art department). At Weintraub, Bill’s concern would be the written message of the ad. As any new employee, Bill was expected to learn the previously established structure and fit in to the machine. But one of his first encounters in the advertising
business would alert Bill to a rather radical notion he’d already sensed in his readings of men like Einstein—the established way of doing things was not always the better route.