(EXPANDED FROM 4/9/2024)
A few years ago Indie Auto commentator Kim in Lanark made the useful point that if American Motors had “kept the Nash and Hudson nameplates any longer, the AMC executives could drive their 1959 Nashes and Hudsons to bankruptcy court.”
As a friendly amendment, I would suggest that American Motors might not have collapsed — even Studebaker-Packard managed to make it into the 1960s. However, AMC could have done much worse without CEO George Romney’s decision to ditch big Nashes and Hudsons in favor of a single-minded focus on compact Ramblers.
This raises an awkward question: Why do automotive historians — both professional and armchair — tend to oversell the capabilities of Romney’s predecessor, George Mason?
Mason has benefitted from ‘bigger = better’ mentality
Automotive historians tend to lionize Mason. For example, Richard Langworth called him “a visionary among his peers” (2021, p. 49) and Stuart R. Blond described him as “far-sighted” (2021, p. 42).
Perhaps this partly reflects the extra regard given to people who die prematurely. Mason, who was CEO of Nash-Kelvinator, unexpectedly succumbed to pneumonia in 1954 after he spearheaded the creation of American Motors by absorbing Hudson.
Another reason Mason has been given high marks is for embracing the popular management philosophy of “get big or get out.” As far back as 1946 he called for the major independents to band together in a grand merger (Foster, 1993).
Less often mentioned is that Mason had a pretty unrealistic ambition — to create a full-line automaker that was “bigger than Chrysler Corporation” (Hamlin and Heinmuller, 2002; p. 557). The plausibility of that goal has not been seriously questioned even though the combined passenger-car output of all postwar independents never came close to matching Chrysler’s.
Nance partisans have assigned Mason a savior role
Mason’s reputation has also received a boost from those historians who have been champions of James Nance. They have apparently accepted at face value Nance’s highly questionable contention that he only became head of Packard after Mason agreed to a four-way merger. The first step was supposedly for Nash to merge with Hudson while Packard tied up with Studebaker. Mason died before the mega-merger could be consummated and Romney supposedly opposed it (Bonsall, 2000; Langworth, 2021; Blond, 2021; Hamlin and Heinmuller, 2002).
Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I have not seen any of the historians who have espoused variations on this narrative respond to Patrick Foster’s point-by-point rebuttal — which strikes me as more convincing (go here for further discussion).
If I may get up on my soap box for a moment, here we have a choice example of how American automotive history does not have effective venues for hashing out key debates that could advance the field. Folks are apparently more interested in polishing their collectible car.
Be that as it may, let’s get nerdy about auto history for a moment. I would suggest that Mason’s stature among historians appears to have been enhanced at least in some quarters because he has been viewed as the man who would have “saved” Packard if he had lived longer — which is a highly debatable proposition.
Mason did handle compacts better than competition
I have been hard on Mason, so to be fair I should add that he navigated the first half of the 1950s better than any other leader of an independent automaker. Although Nash was initially eclipsed by Studebaker, by 1954 it was the best-selling brand primarily on the strength of the compact Rambler.
Mason is frequently lauded for introducing the Rambler as a fairly expensive personal coupe of sorts rather than an economy compact akin to the ill-fated Henry J. Nash’s strategy may have made sense initially, but we should also note that Rambler sales didn’t begin to take off until 1954-55.
This was when the Rambler lineup was expanded to include entry-level models that undercut the Big Three in price for the first time. In addition, the Rambler also received a longer-wheelbase, four-door sedan and wagon that better fit six passengers. This resulted in output topping 80,000 units in 1955, which was higher than the big Nash and Hudson combined.
Mason deserves credit for more adroitly navigating the compact market than any of the other independents, but his basic strategy could have backfired if he had continued to lead American Motors through the end of the decade.
Mason saw compacts as a supplement to big cars
Whereas Romney believed that the automaker should focus exclusively on compacts, Mason saw the Rambler as auxiliary to its big-car lineup (Lehman, 2011b). So if Mason had lived, he likely would have invested in a major redesign of big cars in 1956 or 1957. Given how tight money was, the Rambler would likely have received relatively minor updates rather than the all-new body that Romney had championed.
Foster (1993) shows a photograph of a proposed Nash redesign by Pinin Farina that would have been substantially lower than the body that debuted in 1952. It doesn’t strike me as being a real winner, but even if it had been the redesigned big-car body could have had trouble generating a profit. This is because the premium-priced field collapsed in spectacular fashion from 1956-59. Much like struggling Packard, AMC didn’t have much room for error because in 1955 it produced only around 60,000 big cars.
American Motors reportedly came close to insolvency under Romney during 1956-57 (Foster, 2017). Thus, it is entirely possible that spending scarce capital on a big-car redesign that didn’t sell well could have been the final nail in AMC’s coffin.
A more optimistic scenario is that the Rambler managed to sell well enough that it pulled the company through the second half of the 1950s.
Nash’s quirky styling undercut merger potential
Mason apparently assumed that Nash would be more successful if its styling stood out from the competition. In theory that made sense, but in practice it would prove to be a key weakness — particularly by mid-decade.
Part of the problem was that Mason’s stylistic tastes were rather quirky. Enclosed front wheels, inboard headlights and the pontoon body curvature of the “Airflyte” Nashes may have initially looked advanced, but they didn’t age all that well. Indeed, by 1955 the big Nash didn’t look futuristic so much as it came off as weird . . . and those enclosed front wheels hardly helped the car’s turning radius.
Even more importantly, Nash bodies were so distinctive that they did not lend themselves to being used as a basis for a multi-brand lineup. That would prove to be a particular problem with the Hudson tie up. Even though the 1955-57 Hudson had significantly different sheet metal than the Nash, it was still quite rightly dubbed a “Hash.” Imagine what a Packard would have looked like if it had been based on the Nash body.
This raises an important question that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere: If Mason was an early proponent of a grand merger with Nash as its center of gravity, why didn’t he invest in basic bodies whose styling was flexible enough to be used by multiple brands? After all, Mason had five bites of the apple: The redesign of the big Nash in 1949 and 1952 as well as the introduction of the Rambler in 1950, the Nash-Healey in 1951 and the Metropolitan in 1954.
Mason spread Nash too thin with niche products
This brings us to another Mason weakness — he had a scattershot approach to product development. During the first half of the 1950s he engaged in more product proliferation than any other automaker of that era. While that gave Nash showrooms more variety, only the compact Rambler was very successful.
Nash’s other new cars — the Nash-Healey sports car and subcompact Metropolitan — arguably made it harder to achieve adequate economies of scale. This is because they diverted marketing resources away from core products and were not built in Nash’s Kenosha plant, so generated a lower profit.
One final weakness was that Mason appears to have assumed that maintaining a multi-brand lineup was a viable option for American Motors. That might have been the case if a merger had occurred early enough after World War II that each brand had the resources to carve out a decent niche. However, by 1954 there simply wasn’t enough money to provide adequate differentiation.
One could give Mason credit for proposing in 1948 a merger of Nash and Packard (Blond, 2021). That might have worked relatively well for Packard for a while but it would have made it harder for the merged company to pivot to compact cars in the second half of the 1950s. So Mason arguably dodged a bullet when the Packard board turned down his proposal.
Mason might have had one advantage over Romney
Mason might have had one advantage — albeit inadvertent — over Romney in leading American Motors. When Romney had the Rambler redesigned in 1956 he decided to make it bigger and more expensive. That may have made the car more competitive with the Big Three, but it also abandoned the bottom end of the market. This was arguably a problem in 1956-57 because an increasing number of buyers were shifting to imports.
Romney recounted that there was only enough money to redesign one platform, so he bet on the Rambler (Foster, 2017). If Mason had instead bet on big cars he presumably could have made only modest changes to the Rambler. And as the car’s design aged it would have made sense for Mason to have increasingly emphasized a low price.
One result is that Mason’s Rambler might have sold better in the crucial years of 1956-57 because it more substantially undercut the Big Three in prices. That could have single-handedly saved his bacon if AMC’s big Nash and Hudson declined in synch with the rest of the premium-priced field.
Another potential advantage that Mason might have had is that he could have been more inclined to continue a parts-sharing agreement with Studebaker-Packard (if a grand merger had not been consummated). One reason Romney had a cash-flow crunch in 1956-57 was the high cost of ditching the agreement and coming out with AMC’s own V8 engine.
Two-brand focus on big cars was less sustainable
Even under the more optimistic scenario discussed above, Mason would likely have been in a weaker position than Romney by the end of the 1950s. For one thing, it’s hard to see how a two-brand strategy was sustainable. At some point Mason would have likely needed to ditch the Nash and Hudson in favor of the Rambler unless he engaged in increasingly blatant badge engineering.
In addition, it was pretty much inevitable that Mason would have needed to abandon the big-car field. The longer he waited, the less likely American Motors could have carved out such a strong niche in the compact market.
As a case in point, the Rambler would have desperately needed a major redesign by the time that the Big Three’s first wave of compacts came out in 1960. Would Mason have been smart enough to ditch the big cars and invest in a redesigned Rambler?
We should acknowledge that Mason was getting up there in age: He died in October 1954 at the age of 63. However, even if he had retired only two years later at age 65, he still would have been responsible for key decisions such whether to redesign the big-car body or the Rambler in 1956 or 1957.
Mason was good — but not as good as Romney
The point of this essay isn’t to dismiss Mason. As I said, he strikes me as the most effective leader of an independent automaker in the first half of the 1950s.
Romney quite rightly lauded Mason as a “real genius in this industry who has never been adequately recognized for what he did” (Lehman, 2011a). After World War II Mason predicted a growing need for smaller cars — and engaged in broad experimentation with four- and even three-wheeled concepts.
As the 1950s wore on, Mason had the right general direction but Romney mostly did a better job of implementation. A key reason why was that Romney had a much keener understanding of economies of scale. During his tenure as head of American Motors, he championed an exceptionally lean lineup. I wonder whether Romney’s approach was partly a reaction to Mason’s dilettantism.
One of the most important marks of a great executive is the ability to recruit top talent. Could it be that Mason’s single greatest accomplishment was recruiting Romney, who had the ability to take his basic approach to the next level?
NOTES:
This story was originally posted on April 9, 2024 and expanded on Oct. 23, 2026. Production figures and product specifications are from the auto editors of Consumer Guide (2006), Gunnell (2002) and Wikipedia (2022).
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Auto editors of Consumer Guide; 2006. Encyclopedia of American Cars. Publications International; Lincolnwood, Ill.
- Blond, Stuart R.; 2021. Spellbinder: The Life of James J. Nance — Volume One, 1900-1954; Volume Two, 1955-1984. Kindle Direct Publishing.
- Bonsall, Thomas E.; 2000. More Than They Promised: The Studebaker Story. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
- Foster, Patrick R.; 1993. American Motors: The Last Independent. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- ——–; 2017. George Romney: An American Life. Waldorf Publishing, Grapevine, TX.
- Gunnell, John; 2002. Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975. Revised 4th Ed. Krause Publications, Iola, WI.
- Hamlin, George and Dwight Heinmuller; 2002. “All-New Contour Styling: The Twenty-Fourth and the Fifty-Fifth Series 1951-52.” In Kimes, Beverly Rae, ed., pp. 544-561. Packard: A History of the Motor Car and the Company. Automobile Quarterly Publications.
- Langworth, Richard M.; 2021. “1951-56 ‘Senior’ Packards: The Song was Over But the Melody Lingered On.” Collectible Automobile. December issue: pp. 47-57.
- Lehman, Paul; 2011a. “George Romney at the Nationals, July 7-10-1994: Part 1.” YouTube. Posted July 7; accessed July 15, 2013.
- ——; 2011b. “George Romney at the Nationals, July 7-10-1994: Part 2.” YouTube. Posted July 7; accessed July 15, 2013.
- Wikipedia; 2022. “U.S. Automobile Production Figures.” Page last modified Jan. 26 (page no longer available).
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- oldcaradvertising.com: Nash (1955)
- oldcarbrochures.org: Nash (1951, 1956); Rambler (1954, 1958); Packard (1950)
To me the question is who would have positioned the company better to compete against the Big 3 once they turned to making smaller cars. My knock on Romney is that his ascetic approach resulted in Rambler acquiring a negative brand image by the mid ’60s. Ramblers were cars for nerds and maiden aunts. On that score, I think Mason would have done better. He better recognized that pride of ownership is an important factor in consumer choice.
By 1961-62 Romney was focusing heavily on boosting AMC’s manufacturing quality above typical American levels, and he later told Patrick Foster that that the new-for-1963 senior Rambler illustrated the design direction he sought to go: “If you’ll take a look at it, you’ll see that the styling was really very simple. The concept was that style was no longer a major factor with people who were basically interested in a good, dependable piece of transportation — one that still looked good, along the lines of a Mercedes-Benz (Foster, 1993, p. 98).
So would that have translated into AMC becoming an affordable American Mercedes of sorts? We can only speculate, but to me that’s an intriguing scenario given how badly the U.S. automakers were subsequently pummeled by the imports.
Regardless of whether that sounds compelling to you, two additional things to consider: 1) AMC under Mason may not have survived the 1950s because of the depth of the premium-priced market’s collapse; 2) by 1960 Mason would have been 69 years old.
It seems reasonable to assume that he would have retired before then, so the biggest questions revolve around where he invested AMC’s scarce development dollars in 1955-57 and who he handed off leadership to. How long would Romney have stuck around waiting his turn?
Pat Foster is the living custodian of George Mason’s memory thru Pat’s personal friendship and professional collaboration with George Romney. Pat says that Romney was hired and trained by Mason to be Mason’s successor, as Charlie Nash had hired Mason (and purchased Kelvinator Corporation). Pat probably isn’t repeating tribal knowledge. Pat probably is passing on what he learned from Romney, who would have been Mason’s successor. Whatever their respective titles at the time or in the future, it seems that Romney generally was satisfied with Mason and the succession of authority at the time of Mason’s death.
While I think George Mason was a visionary, his time was 1940 to the date of his death in 1954. G.M., Ford and Chrysler had set the pecking order with their 1955 models, which were previewed in the 1953-1955 G.M. Motoramas. From the time of Mason’s death, until 1964, Romney had to deal with A.M.C.’s existing platforms until the fall, 1962 debut of the Rambler Classic / Ambassador because of limited resources. The bets on the 287 / 327 V-8 and the 1956 Rambler platform were the right investments that saved A.M.C. and gave them the money to incrementally invest in the revival of the Rambler American and the ability to create the modern, lighter 232 / 258-cu.-in. sixes as well as replace the 1956 Rambler platform / body shell(s). Think about this: Romney and his team did for A.M.C. what Studebaker-Packard could not do after 1953…produce TWO new sets of bodies (on a unit-body, no less) while creating a unique position for the cars and station wagons that turned a profit. George Mason might have spent more money on sheet metal than Romney had Mason lived, but would Mason have sold more cars between 1955 and 1964 than Romney did at A.M.C.?
This poses a fascinating question about the focus of Studebaker-Packard management in 1955-1956, aside from trying to obtain loans from their bankers (denied) and figuring out what to do under Curtiss-Wright’s oversight in 1956: How focused was Studebaker-Packard on producing a market-competitive Studebaker and a limited-market upscale Packard to save the company ? I would suggest that James J. Nance had more resources under his control in 1955 than Romney had, but that Romney was much more resourceful, doing more with less. In 1955-1956, Studebaker and Packard had more and better dealers than Nash and Hudson, at least in urban centers like Indianapolis, IN. A.M.C. did not have up-to-date dealerships in Indiana, at least until 1959-1960, while after 1956, Studebaker dealers began their decline.
IMO, Romney’s magic was finding an unserved part of the market.
From 1955 to the 80s, GM and Ford kept coming back to the 1955 Ford and Chevy packages as the sweet spot for a good family car. Romney stayed there, especially with the new 1963 car. As long as he had it to himself, Rambler could keep a factory humming. Ford and GM kept returning to that size and diluting Rambler prime market. In particular, GM bracketed Ford with the A bodies and the Nova, then fired for effect. AMC was a hapless, helpless battle casualty.
The sweet spot for a good family car moved with the GM X cars, tho the actual X cars weren’t the beneficiaries of the insight.
In the early 60s, Rambler had about 3k of maybe 30k new car dealers. Ford and Chevy were about half of 30k. If Ford or Chevy sell a sorta Rambler, it would have to reach X car (or Renault Alliance) levels of infamy to be outsold by the actual Rambler.