GM has never let the business side of the corporation's untold roots and traditions behind Earl's Auto Design Legacy leak out because it would expose too much sensitive information. Naturally, this is why so few people understand where "Detroit's Dependency on Design" originated. Instead of putting GM's illustrious design history on a throne, moving into the sixties, GM's new leaders moved forward with their own ideas of how to run the company and just decided to use a PR vernacular that would marginalize Earl and his potent designs that cemented GM near a fifty percent level for decades of time.  

Harley Earl would roll over in his grave if he were to witness where GM has gone in the last fifty years. But, what would surely surprise him most is how the great legacy of GM's history-of-design got lost.  

Attractive logo style and the Design Dome auditorium below; both heralded Earl's vision.

One auto journalist put it this way during the height of the 1950s, "GM’s Harley Earl is located somewhere between God and the president, but without the latter’s limitations." At this time, nobody understood this better than one of Earl's top protégés, William L. Mitchell. 

Detroit was not only the automobile design capital of the world but the Motor City had the lock stock and barrel of the global automotive pie (over 70 percent of the global auto market place).

After Bill Mitchell, Jack Gordon (President) and Fred Donner (CEO) landed in the top spots of General Motors Corporation moving into 1960, they began to take GM and Detroit for a ride down roads car guys like ex-GM president Harlow Curtice and Harley Earl would never have dared venture down. Smashing up Earl's legacy or throne of American auto design became the quickest vehicle to the vault to controlling the power behind GM's purse strings.  

Harley Earl's car designs originally lit the fuse that gave two separate, very important, generations (1930-1969) permission to dream. What people wanted was to become more modern, reinvent or shape the world and Earl was the first to enter our culture consciousness in a way that had never been done before. He was the one forging the trail in modern culture, and through him and his invention of the --- entire new 'car design' culture world --- it allowed people to say, "yes, you can tackle it and go ahead in a new direction." By the mid 50’s, his cool cars did something the next generation could never seem to do, all his designs and cars never set off a battle between the generations –  even bank presidents were thinking on the same lines as men like Elvis Presley. Everybody wanted Earl's cars, whether for business like beauty or strictly for fantasy. It was an open-minded new modern way of freethinking.

All that change, all that was going on…Americans had the feeling at the end of the 50s, it was nice to know that much power, that big a sword, was in the right hands at GM. It was extraordinary for the people who actually knew what was going on. Harley Earl and a small group in Detroit were holding the flame for the whole modern world and right when he was going to take the automobile design profession, as an art, to a new height among critics, academics and ultimately fans—Bill Mitchell and the financial leaders of GM radically changed the course of automotive history. Instead of cultural expectance or having an enormous impact on the perception of others, Harley Earl's auto work came to an abrupt halt.

Bill Mitchell ushered in a new concept towards living your life and his character taught the next generation of GM’s designers how to be. In a very direct way, Bill Mitchell began to break up, depose and spin Earl's deeds around and commingle them amid his own car designs (photo below shows Earl's major works cross-promoted with designs done by Mitchell). Mitchell's moral and ethical compass permitted acts of extreme selfishness and paying homage to others who came before you, was an idea he clearly rejected. 

Late 1960's photo in the futuristic GM Styling Dome: Standing on Earl's shoulders trumpeting his version of the story...which was based on narrow self-interests. After all, if it wasn't for Earl's milestone cars featured above... like the Y-Job, LeSabre and Earl's legacy of Corvettes, Mitchell might have a hard time ever even standing up in the auto world. Up to the day he died in 1988, Bill Mitchell used a well manufactured bodyguard of lies as his armor veil to greedily take all he could from America's auto world. 

The Seventies hit Mitchell, GM Design and the rest of Motown's auto world hard. Unlike Earl, there was no longer a precise periscope used to forecast long-term design visions and/or trends. That's why the oil crises created so much pain for American car companies. They never cared to think that safety and environmental matters were a large part of what would dictate future design parameters. Shrinking GM became the order of the day.

Since almost everything about Harley Earl and his "inventing the auto design profession" began to be covered up and enshrouded in secrecy by men inside GM like Mitchell, he and the other top leaders of GM realized they could easily play a deceptive game reporting on Earl and GM’s formidable design legacy (most people don’t realize today that this is also "America’s auto design legacy" too). As the Sixties passed, and Harley Earl died, Mitchell knew all too well how Earl's family would never pose a threat. So, that’s when he and GM's other top leaders began ushering in an unpleasant new trend. Taking credit for another man’s work was a great way [especially by publicly talking up yourself] to acquire prestige and power in this industry. Mitchell saw how he had the best weapon off all in this new game since pinching the talented design works of Harley Earl proved extremely valuable to his rise. 

Harley Earl’s wife, Sue, who outlived Mitchell by four years, said the following in 1988 on Mitchell's despicable behavior pertaining to why --- Harley Earl's name and his car design legacy --- became so publicly tarnished, 'Mitchell was an insufferable lout who after climbing into the position Harley created went on to ruin America's auto design legacy and set GM and Detroit back decades in time!" Sue Earl also passed on another seed of knowledge which directly pertains to why all the leaders of GM, after Harley Earl, were so adamant and have to this day remained so irreverent towards letting out all the facts on Earl's legacy of success, "How General Motors became No. 1 in the modern era, that's Harley Earl's story." 

Naturally, the new information that's spelled out above contributes to why America's auto world economy remains depressed. Detroit's future would be a lot brighter if leaders of the auto makers in Motown reversed the curse against Earl. On a final note, notice the beautiful GM Styling logo of GM's fiftieth anniversary, above. Leading up to the hundredth anniversary of GM in 2008, this company didn't even have a moving forward logo designed.