“Studebaker!”: The Rise and Fall of a US Industrial Dream and a Forgotten Alliance

Despite geopolitical disagreements and the fading of history, human connection and a shared memory of the losses and cooperation during the war—symbolized by the American “Studebaker” truck — can transcend the decades and bring people together.

There is a moment, small and human, that cuts through decades of geopolitical noise like a blade through fog. In April 2015, in Moscow, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who spent 27 years briefing American presidents, attended a ceremony hosted by the Russians. This event marked the 70th anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe. In April 1945, American and Soviet troops joined hands on a bridge in Germany, realizing together that the war was nearly over.

McGovern had recited Nekrasov’s devastating anti-war poem in both Russian and English. When he stepped back from the podium, a towering Russian general, chest armored in medals, approached.

The general spoke no English. But he took McGovern by the shoulders and said the one word in his vocabulary that bridged the two worlds: “Studebaker! Studebaker!” And then came the Russian bear hug.

Blacksmith’s Shop to World’s Largest Wagon Maker

The Studebaker story begins, as the best American stories do, with almost nothing. In 1852, brothers Clement and Henry Studebaker opened a blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana.

Their starting capital was $68 and two forges. What they possessed in abundance was something that money cannot easily manufacture: the willingness to build things with their hands, better than the next man, and to stand behind what they made. They built wagons. Then thousands of wagons. By the 1870s, Studebaker was the world’s largest wagon and carriage manufacturer, making tens of thousands of vehicles a year, and supplied more than 100,000 wagons to the Union Army during the Civil War.

They helped outfit the great westward migration of a young nation that was literally building itself out of a raw continent. As historian Thomas Bonsall wrote of Studebaker’s arc, it was “in microcosm, the story of the industrial development of America itself.” This was the capitalism of tangible creation.

Companies built things; they were hubs for communities; they invested in equipment and expertise, and their prosperity hinged on what they produced. The South Bend Studebaker company had no isolated existence but was woven into the fabric of American industrial society, from the blast furnaces of Pittsburgh and the assembly line of Detroit to the shipyards of Baltimore. Looking back, it is astonishing just how completely all of it was disassembled. And, crucially, with the arrival of the automobile, Studebaker did not cede the playing field; it reconfigured it.

It made its first electric car in 1902 and its first gas-powered model two years later. By the 1920s, it stood in total assets behind only Ford and General Motors, an extraordinary position for an Indiana family firm that had started by hammering iron. The company’s strategy was simple and coherent: make durable, quality vehicles at competitive prices, invest in talent, and treat the product with respect. That strategy would define its golden years, and, in a painful irony, make its eventual death at the hands of financial mechanics all the more instructive.

Raymond Loewy and the marriage of Steel and Beauty

The 1930s meant near ruin, bankruptcy in 1933, the Depression, and retrenchment. But Studebaker survived, reorganized, and did something that set it apart from most survivors: it hired a genius. Beginning in 1936, Studebaker hired French-born industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whose impact on the company led to some of the most iconic automotive designs in American history. In the course of the Second World War, the........

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