What's completely off base about this 2004 Wall Street Journal article, below, is how come the WSJ writer knows absolutely nothing about Harley Earl's enormous influence or the fact this auto pioneer legitimized the Hollywoodization of Detroit in the first place! Clearly the oversight goes way beyond one writer not knowing anything about America's automotive design legacy. This broad based mistake is rooted directly to how Detroit's and/or GM auto execs don't what the public to find out a damn thing about what's on the fact sheet of this American auto design pioneer: Harley Earl. It's a key reason why GM’s bureaucratic execs lost or gave away the very formula of ingredients that made GM great in the modern era. This Detroit-minded failure of purposely going in an opposite direction to Mr. Earl's serious design formula has prevented The Big Three from regaining any preeminence status in the eyes of the American consumer.

This nasty trend of GM's execs turning a blind eye to Harley Earl's modern milestones should be put to rest. Mainly for if they better understood this important all-American form of individual expression (yes, H.J. Earl invented the auto design profession) they'd realize it could go a long way towards drawing an audience in better understanding GM's artistic side. For example, the movie TITANIC cost $200 million to make, yet this is merely one fifth of what it usually cost to design-engineer and launch one auto brand. And, yes it's no surprise the "design studios" is where the birth of the concept is born at every auto maker, and that the American public finds this area of the operation --- design of an automobile --- to be the most intoxicatingly elaborate segment of auto building. 

Why Detroit's elite today have a distinct aversion towards wanting anyone to better understand what's standing behind Harley Earl is one hell of a chair-spinner story. For example, I've spoken with both J Mays and Chris Bangle (respective vice presidents of Design at Ford and BMW today) on this topic and both agree if it wasn't for Harley Earl, they wouldn't have a job today. Funny thing about J Mays is when I met him for dinner one-on-one, he asked, "Was your grandfather blackmailed at the end of his career...I asked some of the old timers high up in management inside Ford Motor Co. about 'Harley Earl' before we were getting together, and that's what I heard." It's stuff like this that makes Mays and Bangle never want to share information on the hisotry of the auto design profession to members of the auto media. Plus, damaging information on someone's influential career, like what happened at the end of Earl's Detroit career, is also why Harley Earl's inside true story is never shared with the up and coming freshman class of auto designers today. In essence, the treasury office boys at today's major auto companies have become so much more powerful (in the 50s, designers were on equal footing w/ many treasury office administrators) that they don't want to share the credit with "auto design" leaders. Why? Because that would give car designers much power and clout. After all, that's what happened to Harley Earl [he became too powerful] and look what happened...he got pushed out.

Perhaps the main reason most U.S auto scene execs don't recognize what this man did has to do with the fact Detroit ditched Earl's "design leadership" paradigm a long time ago (starting as far back as the early 1960s). After all, the new profession this pioneer had invented was very much still in its infancy when Earl's reins of leadership were bushwhacked by the next squad who simple chose not to nurture what H.J. Earl had so deliberately fostered the rise of during his watch. So, the last thing they want to do these days is admit the giant failure, misunderstanding and huge oversight. Too much is at stake. Such as: the media and the American public could then judge certain members [who were very much accountable] for Detroit's debacle of hemorrhaging market share, prestige and billions of --- maybe even a trillion --- dollars over the last few decades. This scenario unfolding was no accident, it was premeditated. 

How would we know all this website? Because, you know you are on to something big when you got the leading nexus at the largest auto maker in the world trying to cover up something like this. Essentially, for the Motor City to succeed in the next decade will have everything to do with its top leaders adopting Harley Earl's automotive design legacy and building on top of it...instead of continuing to tear it down. 

Regardless of all the spin, the consistent fact holds true: For decades now, the Big Three auto makers have simply failed to build cars the American public want to buy!

Guys like Roger Smith found the easiest way of dealing with Harley Earl and his long shadow of accomplishments: Simply erase the memory of Harley Earl entirely. That's why the American public couldn't even recognize the name of Detroit's greatest modern car architect in the recent Buick advertising campaign. As a matter of fact, legions of GM execs didn't even know who the Earl figure was inside all those TV commercials where the look-alike actor (who held no true resemblance to the real McCoy) came on the screen and said, "Hi, my name's Harley Earl and I've come back to build you a great car!" So, imagine how shocked the American public was when this expensive GM ad campaign was launched and practically nobody of today's generation had a clue who this automotive titan was! Most people thought he was a fictitious character Buick's advertising people cooked up as a trick of marketing. 

And some people wonder why we continue to speak out on this ongoing storyline, or, bother emphasizing exactly why design is so important to the Motor City's future success? GM continues to take the stance of not coming clean on what's behind the central universe of Harley Earl's creating Detroit dependency on design. The mantra at GM these day is that the less the media and mass culture know about the importance of beautiful car designs...and how this is all tied into truly making the current auto industry tick these days, the better off it will be for everyone. Naturally, this is another tremendous oversight since most people, including legions of auto journalists, can't make the connection to how Harley Earl and his enormous visions played such a large role regarding what's discussed in editorials, in-depth-reports and basic business commentaries - just like this one below - that are practically written about daily relating to the decline of Detroit's auto industry. In other words, GM doesn't want to be accused of being responsible for "dumbed-down" designs that often come from the world's No. 1 auto maker.

But sadly, most auto industry insiders don't even understand the basic fundamentals on the who, what, when and where behind the importance of design in car sales. As a matter of fact, words like "redesigned" and "more attractive" (highlighted below in Rick Haglund's well done early 2005 report on GM's ongoing problem) were first pioneered only after Harley Earl introduced the concept of professionally pre-engineering the vehicle ahead of time via Styling Leadership principles. Then, and only then did the modern paradigm of creating mass produced automobiles with "beauty for everyone" in mind come into existence. If things are still foggy, just read the Ward's AutoWorld editorial beneath this commentary, for it straightens things out on who originally founded the design profession.

This objective cover story, shown above, is packed with facts. For example, the first quote below came from Robert Powers who was the editor and publisher of Wards AutoWorld in 1969. The second is an except from the extensive cover story by Christy Borth titled, Harley J. Earl—The Man Who Invented A New Profession. Mr. Borth, who became acquainted with Mr. Earl before he died, did a wonderful job bringing his central character and his story to life:

1.) "Harley Earl is the man responsible for many of the features on 1969 model cars. His innovations, combining a sense of artistry with engineering mechanics, gave the automotive industry a new profession."  

2.) "Despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, a weird notion has managed to persist among the “literarty” (the late Alexander King’s apt word-coinage), that Detroit’s phenomenal industrial drive to world-changing eminence was entirely directed by horny-handled ex-machinists who, though demonstrated capable in the work of making an abundance of things for the enrichment of human lives, were otherwise a pack of nearly illiterate, uncultured slobs. This monstrous myth prevails though it confronts a mountainous accumulation of contradictory fact.

Take Harley Earl for example. He was the embodiment of what is meant by the phrase, Renaissance Man. He would have been at ease, I’m certain, in the presence of such titans as the artist-engineer-anatomist-geologist Leonardo da Vinci, the multi-lingual scholar – humanist Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the insatiably inquisitive Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, of that remarkable Renaissance man, Giovanni de’Medici, the Florentine banker-epicure-aesthete who became the generous, good natured and broadly cultured Pope Leo X."

Finally, this critical article by Paul Goldberger in Architectural Digest, below, perhaps best supports the fact why today’s modern auto history in Detroit is entirely incomprehensible. In other words how can you expect auto designers these days to understand what Earl did if hardly anything has been done to properly locate his historiography?