A Citizen’s Responsibility: On Edward Renehan’s “The Life of Charles Stewart Mott”

Edward Renehan | The Life of Charles Stewart Mott: Industrialist, Philanthropist, Mr. Flint | University of Michigan Press | 2019| 268 Pages

As you travel north on Michigan’s storied M-22 near Arcadia, the deep sapphire of Lake Michigan flickers behind a moving scrim of beech and maple leaves. Here, one is about as far west of Flint and its infamous topaz tap water as one can get in the Lower Peninsula. Vehicle City and Arcadia Dunes Preserve, however, share a common patron: it was the foundation established by Charles Stewart Mott that likely saved this priceless stretch of lakeshore from development.

Mott’s influence, according to the thoughtful and highly readable biography by Edward Renehan, extended from his beleaguered (and beloved) city of Flint, across his adopted state of Michigan, and throughout the world. Mott’s role as a pillar of General Motors, where he served as a member of its board of directors for sixty years, is well documented in histories of the American automobile industry. Since 1926, Mott’s eponymous foundation has made grants of over three billion dollars in support of education, the arts, medicine, and the environment.

Renehan’s book is the first solely devoted to Mott’s long and significant life. Mott himself was uninterested in writing an autobiography, preferring throughout his 97 years to “look forward.” Born in 1876, the “undemonstrative, seriously minded, purposeful, hard-working” Mott came from a business- savvy New York state family who raised him with a strong dedication to public service. “America has afforded me [the] opportunity to make reasonable headway in the world,” he told publisher B.C. Forbes in a 1922 interview. “Why should I not stand ready, like a loyal soldier […] to obey any summons to service from my country?” In addition to serving on numerous boards and supporting important civic projects, Mott served twice as mayor of Flint and seriously considered a run for governor of Michigan in 1920.

At General Motors, Mott was a peer of Alfred P. Sloan and Pierre du Pont. His conservative, fact-driven management practice was often called on to counterbalance the “riverboat gambler” style of GM’s cofounder Billy Durant. “Get facts. Never Guess,” Mott told Forbes. “Think things to the very bottom.” 

An accomplished biographer, Renehan reveals facets of the capitalist’s personality that might surprise some readers. For a staunch, FDR-disparaging-Nixon-admiring Republican, Mott strongly supported women’s suffrage and civil rights. Though opposed to Social Security and other New Deal programs, Mott “argued against GM closing down its employee stock-investment program, as he firmly believed it was healthy for laborers to feel a sense of shared ownership in the mission of the company.” No friend of organized labor, he was nevertheless well respected by his employees. Many of them followed him to Flint from Utica, New York, when he moved operations of his Weston-Mott company, a supplier of wheels, rims, and axles to the fledgling auto industry. Though fond of Applewood (his gentleman’s farm) and The Parapet (his estate in Bermuda), Mott also enjoyed roughing it and, like fellow New Yorker, Teddy Roosevelt, had a sincere fondness for the company of working cowboys.

Stubborn and occasionally obtuse, Mott could also be forgiving and affectionate. He knew his employees’ names and remembered their stories. He liked kids. One of the campers at his Mott Camp for Boys had been born with a leg deformity and Mott remembered: “We had him sent up for repairs […] to the Children’s Hospital in Detroit, and […] they made a regular kid out of him, so at last, today, his pins are working perfectly.”

A reviewer hand-chosen by the Ruth Mott Foundation, Renehan perhaps treads a bit gently around his subject’s flaws. Fortunately, however, he doesn’t spare any of Mott’s contemporaries. Of Sloan he wrote: “when it came to choosing sides between the Allied and Axis powers, Sloan was for GM”; and describing a dubious Durant business deal: “The sky, as someone perhaps once said to Icarus, was the limit.” Renehan doesn’t look overly closely at how Mott’s politics, policies, and blind spots might have contributed to the eventual economic evisceration of Flint. Mott worried about the negative effect automation would have on unskilled labor before many others did, but one wonders if he could have done more to encourage economic diversification to offset Flint’s dangerous dependence on GM. Civic foresight of this kind was rare in Michigan’s history, but not unheard of. Philanthropist (and robber baron) Charles Hackley aggressively recruited diverse industries to Muskegon in the late 1800s, thus providing the “Lumber Queen of the World” with another sixty years of economic stability after its sawmills closed.

The Flint of Mr. Mott’s heyday, with its excellent schools, architecturally tasteful working-class neighborhoods, and high standard of living (GM’s Flint workers once “enjoyed the second highest wage scale […] of any municipality in the nation”), has disappeared. “We grew up playing in the dust General Motors left behind,” writes Melissa Richardson in BELT Publishing’s Happy Anyway: A Flint Anthology.  “Our forefathers were the ones who walked right out of high school and onto the production floor at General Motors […] easing into their retirement just as General Motors was shipping their jobs overseas. Our parents were left to scavenge for scraps of jobs and stand in long welfare lines.”

Renehan does not dwell on the current state of Mr. Flint’s city. However, in closing, he recounts a sadly ironic event from 1914, when then Present Woodrow Wilson telegraphed Mott—at the time mayor of Flint—signaling him to open the city’s new, state-of-the art Filtration Waterworks Plant. “Simultaneously, all around Flint and in the White House itself, people raised glasses of filtered Flint water while C.S. read a scripted toast.” 

The Life of Charles Steward Mott is highly recommended. Renehan’s detailed accounts of business finance and the vicissitudes of corporate structure will be comparatively painless for readers (like this one) with scant business background. Renehan’s writing—fluid and frequently delightfully arch—makes Mott and his place in Michigan history vivid and memorable.