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Driving Force: The
McLaughlin Family and the Age of the Car
By Heather Robertson
McClelland & Stewart,
402 pages, $34.99
At
the beginning of her “Notes and Sources” appendix, Heather Robertson writes:
“This is the first book to be written about the McLaughlins of Oshawa and
General Motors of Canada.” Robertson’s book shows why. The McLaughlins were,
at best, uninspired branch-plant managers and, by any measure, pretty dull
folks. The family patriarch, Robert McLaughlin, began making ax-handles in
Ontario in the mid-19th century. Later, he manufactured buggies
because the profit margin was bigger. As the century drew to its close, the
family’s entrepreneurial spirit, such as it was, sputtered and quit. The
McLaughlins never did create their own car. When they finally got into the
automobile business in 1907 — over the objections of Robert, who died in
1921 — they did so by attaching McLaughlin nameplates to vehicles assembled
in Oshawa from McLaughlin-manufactured bodies and parts made in Michigan,
all of which had been conceived and designed by David Buick. It does not add
up to much of a business saga. But Robertson’s account in Driving Force
offers a glimpse into the acquiescent branch-plant mentality that helped
define — for better or worse — much of Canada’s industrial character.
As
Toronto magazine writer and author Robertson tells it, the McLaughlins had a
good thing going in reassembling U.S. auto parts. But when, in December,
1918, GM made them a fabulously lucrative offer that they could not refuse,
they sold their enterprise to the American giant a decade after they had
started. Robert’s two sons, Robert Samuel (Sam) and George, embarked on
their main vocation: cashing dividend checks and amusing themselves. George
worked at being dour and parsimonious, increasing his efforts in that
direction following his 1924 retirement from the post of vice-president of
GM Canada. He died in 1942. The chief occupations of his brother, Sam—who
became president of GM Canada and vice-president of the American parent
after the McLaughlins sold their business—were aping the style of the
American robber barons he envied and angling for a knighthood. He died in
1972.
The
McLaughlins did not generate much in the way of scandal or drama; they had
just enough passion to muster occasional picayune resentments and simmering
peevishness. Drama in the book emanates from the titanic struggles of the
U.S. automakers and their corporate battles; it comes from the fight of
Oshawa’s GM workers to be treated as something other than cheap, expendable
plant equipment. And it comes from a five-page account of a 1921 lawsuit
involving Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery, stemming
from an automobile collision. (Neither party was driving a McLaughlin car.)
Robertson brightens her narrative with similar glimpses of the wider car
culture throughout the book.
Robertson labors mightily to animate the McLaughlin saga. But it is
difficult to warm to the self-absorbed Sam and the willfully insulated
George. Robertson is to be admired for presenting what appear to be honest
portrayals of her subjects. Too bad she chose such lackluster ones. |
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