Alfred P. Sloan

From Freepedia

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Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (May 23, 1875 – February 17, 1966), long-time president and chairman of General Motors, was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied electrical engineering and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1892.

He became president of a machine shop making ball bearings in 1899. In 1916 and 1918, his company merged with United Motors Corporation and with another company to form General Motors Corporation, which started making cars. He became Vice-President, then President (1923), and finally Chairman of the Board (1937). In 1934, he established the philanthropic nonprofit Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. GM under Sloan became famous for managing diverse operations with financial statistics such as return on investment; these measures were introduced to GM by Donaldson Brown, a protege of GM vice-president John J. Raskob who was in turn the protege of Pierre du Pont -- the DuPont corporation owned 43% of GM.

During Alfred P. Sloan's leadership of GM, many public transport systems of trams in the US were replaced by buses. Many of the trams themselves were literally burnt in order to prevent any reversal in public transport policies. Some believe that GM orchestrated this bustitution; see General Motors streetcar conspiracy for details. Frequencies of bus services were decreased on less profitable routes, helping to encourage people to buy their own automobiles and travel independently.

In the 1930s GM, long hostile to unionization, confronted its workforce, newly organized and ready for labor rights, in an extended contest for control. Sloan was averse to violence of the sort associated with Henry Ford. He preferred the subtle use of spying and had built up the best undercover apparatus the business community had ever seen up to that time. When the workers organized a massive sitdown strike in 1936, Sloan found that espionage had little value in the face of such open tactics.

Sloan retired as chairman on April 2, 1956 and died in 1966.

External links

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose total assets had a market value of over $1.3 billion in 2002
• review of Klein and Olson's film Taken for a Ride
• contribution of Alfred P. Sloan to changes in rapid transit systems
• extract from Bradford C. Snell, American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus and Rail Industries. Report presented to the Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, United States Senate, February 26, 1974, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1974, pp. 16-24.