Twelve thousand dealers: the network at its height

1918 - 1926

The measure of it: In 1918 Albert Russel Erskine, the corporation's president, wrote the company's history and addressed it, in his own preface, to the 3,000 stockholders of the Studebaker Corporation, "the 12,000 dealers in its products living throughout the world, its 15,000 employees and numberless friends." Twelve thousand dealers is the number to hold. The South Bend factory's reach was not measured in its 225 Indiana acres, considerable as those were, but in a selling army larger than the workforce that built the cars, spread across the branch houses and repositories the wagon century had planted. Every one of those dealers was a local businessman whose living depended on a factory in South Bend he would likely never see, which is one reason the factory's closing, forty-five years later, was felt in towns across the whole country and not only here.

The dealer who came to run sales: The network's own man reached the top of it. Paul G. Hoffman, remembered in the standard histories as the corporation's most successful distributor and dealer, came to South Bend in 1925 as vice president in charge of sales. The next year, 1926, Studebaker became the first automobile manufacturer in the United States to open a controlled outdoor proving ground, the track west of the city where, in 1937, five thousand pine trees would be planted spelling STUDEBAKER to the sky, and the last of the Detroit production was moved to South Bend. The proving ground and the dealer chief belong in one paragraph, because they are the two ends of the same machine: Hoffman had sold the cars in the field, and the ground he helped give the company existed to make the cars worth his dealers' selling. In South Bend, uniquely in this record, the dealer is not the factory's customer. He is its other half.

Sources:

1. Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (1918), preface (the 12,000 dealers, 15,000 employees and 3,000 stockholders).
2. The standard Studebaker histories (Hoffman's arrival in 1925 as the company's most successful distributor and dealer; the 1926 proving ground, the first controlled outdoor proving ground opened by an American manufacturer; the 1937 pine planting; the 1926 consolidation of production at South Bend; the 225 acre, 7.5 million square foot Indiana plant).