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Motor City: The Story of Detroit
by Thomas J. Sugrue
Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
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| Assembling Room, Chassis and Motors, Detroit, Mich. (Courtesy of Library of Congress, 3a50295r). |
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“You can see here, as it is impossible to do in
a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of
an industrial society.” So wrote essayist Edmund
Wilson, reporting on a visit to the Motor City in the
1930s. As the capital of America’s most important
industry—automobile manufacturing—Detroit
became a global symbol of modernity, of the power of American
capitalism and the labor that built it.
A second-tier commercial and industrial city at the end
of the nineteenth century, Detroit was home to machine
and stove manufacturing, cigar making, pharmaceuticals,
and food production. But the city had natural advantages
that suited it for automobile production. Located in the
heart of the Great Lakes region, Detroit had all of the
ingredients for industrial growth: it was close to the
nation’s major centers of coal, iron, and copper
mining; it was easily accessible by water and by land;
and it was near the nation’s leading, well-established
production centers. Still, it was not a great metropolis.
When Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903,
Detroit was only the nation’s thirteenth largest
city [see the interactive map
of urban expansion in this issue of History Now].
Of the 125 auto companies that sprang up in Detroit in
the early twentieth century, Ford quickly rose to the
top. A restless innovator, Ford devised the modern assembly
line. In 1908, the fledgling company introduced the Model
T, a car whose standardized production would revolutionize
the industry. Six years later, with hopes of building
a stable, loyal workforce, Ford announced the five-dollar
day, leading to a dramatic increase in pay for industrial
workers. Word of Ford’s high wages—along with
Ford’s international recruiting efforts—turned
the Motor City into one of the most racially and ethnically
diverse places in America. The auto magnate recruited
skilled artisans from the shipyards of Scotland and England
and blue-collar workers from the rural Midwest, as well
as workers from Mexico and Lebanon, and African Americans
from the city’s rapidly growing population of southern
migrants. By 1940, Ford was one of the largest private
employers of African Americans in the United States.
A handful of major automobile manufacturers—notably
Chrysler, General Motors, Packard, Ford, and a few smaller
companies—survived the technological and managerial
transformations that created the modern auto industry.
Ford was, by far, the most influential. Its assembly line
became the model for the mass production of cars worldwide;
its social service programs, especially the company’s
efforts to “Americanize” immigrant workers
(including a graduation ceremony where blue-collar workers
walked into a melting pot wearing their national garb
and came out dressed uniformly as “Americans”),
became models for “welfare capitalism.” And
Ford’s technological innovations, culminating in
the construction of the massive River Rouge plant—one
that employed more than 90,000 workers at its peak—brought
visitors from around the world to marvel at the might
and ingenuity of American industry. Business analysts
coined the term “Fordism” to describe Detroit’s
distinctive contribution to the technologically advanced,
labor-intensive, highly-productive form of modern industrial
capitalism.
By the mid-twentieth century, one in every six working
Americans were employed directly or indirectly by the automobile
industry, and Detroit was its epicenter. The “Big
Three” auto firms—General Motors, Ford, and
Chrysler—were all based in metropolitan Detroit.
The auto industry consumed vast amounts of steel, glass,
copper, and (later) plastic, fueling the rise of a host
of auto-related industries in and around the city. Detroit
was, in the words of one historian, a “total industrial
landscape,” a place where hundreds of thousands
of blue-collar workers found work on the assembly lines,
in stamping and tool-and-die plants, in foundries, and
in a myriad of small factories that made all sorts of
parts, from spark plugs to hood ornaments. The reach of
the auto industry extended far into Detroit’s suburbs
and into the small towns of the upper Midwest, where manufacturers
made everything from auto glass to engine mounts. The
dependence of towns like Toledo, Ohio and Flint, Michigan
on the auto industry led to a common adage: “When
Detroit gets a cold, the whole Midwest gets pneumonia.”
The auto industry employed vast numbers of working Detroiters
and, not surprisingly, became a major target for the industrial
union movement. During the Great Depression, organizers
from the United Automobile Workers (UAW) engaged in lengthy,
often brutal struggles to gain recognition from Detroit’s
auto producers. At Chrysler and General Motors plants
(beginning in nearby Flint, Michigan), blue-collar workers
engaged in “sit-down” strikes to pressure
employers to provide living wages and decent benefits.
Ford was the site of some of the bloodiest battles over
unionization. The auto giant hired its own private security
force to deter labor organizers, leading to the infamous
“Battle of the Overpass” at the massive Ford
River Rouge plant, where union supporters were savagely
beaten. Still, the UAW succeeded. Its success was the
result of intensive grassroots organizing, with the support
of the federal labor law, particularly the 1935 National
Labor Relations Act which required employers to allow
union organizing and to recognize duly elected trade unions.
By 1941, after a hard-won victory at Ford, the UAW negotiated
contracts with every major auto firm. By the end of the
1940s, the Big Three offered generous wages, extensive
benefits (including unemployment insurance, retirement
benefits, and health insurance) that made auto workers
among the best paid in the country. In the 1950s, social
scientists and journalists held up the auto industry as
an example of the end of class conflict in America. They
argued that auto workers, who enjoyed hefty paychecks
and good benefits, had become “embourgeoised”—that
is, they had entered the ranks of the middle class. By
the mid-twentieth century, a majority of Detroit residents
were homeowners; many autoworkers saved money to send
their children to college; and tens of thousands could
even afford lakeside summer cottages—leading to
the rise of blue-collar resort towns throughout Michigan.
Live by the car, die by the car. By 1950, Detroit had
become the fifth largest city in the United States, home
to nearly two million people. But in the midst of that
prosperity, the auto industry restructured its operations.
Between 1948 and 1967—when the auto industry was
at its economic peak--Detroit lost more than 130,000 manufacturing
jobs. The auto industry began to decentralize its production,
building new plants in suburban “greenfields”
and in the small towns of the upper Midwest and, increasingly,
the Sunbelt. Many smaller auto-related manufacturers also
left the city in search of low-wage workforces and open
land for new factories. At the same time, the auto industry
experimented with new labor saving technology—called
“automation”—that replaced many assembly
line jobs with new machinery. The results were devastating.
Many of the large, early twentieth-century factory buildings
in the city emptied out. The massive Dodge Main plant,
which employed more than 30,000 workers at its peak, winnowed
its workforce to a few thousand before closing in 1980.
Ford’s River Rouge plant hemorrhaged jobs beginning
in the 1950s—and although it continues operations
today, it has but a few thousand workers, a shadow of
its World War II-era might.
Like other Northeastern and Midwestern cities, Detroit’s
deindustrialization came at a moment when the city’s
white population was suburbanizing. Between World War
II and the 1960s, the city’s African American population
rose exponentially, as hundreds of thousands of blacks
were lured to the city by the promise of high-paying industrial
jobs. Just as they arrived, those jobs—especially
the entry-level positions that had served as the first-rung
on the economic ladder—were disappearing. By 1967,
when Detroit erupted with one of the worst race riots
in American history, the city had already lost tens of
thousands of manufacturing jobs, had experienced massive
white flight, and had seen many of its neighborhoods (especially
those that had been built in the shadow of the major automobile
plants) gutted by depopulation and disinvestment.
By the 1970s, Detroit’s image had been completely
transformed from the mighty engine of American capitalism
to the embodiment of America’s urban woes. The auto
industry, buffeted by the oil crisis during the Nixon
and Carter administrations, continued to contract. The
rise of international competition, especially from Japan
and Germany, further weakened Detroit’s auto industry.
Chrysler, the smallest of the “Big Three,”
filed for bankruptcy in 1979, while Ford and General Motors
struggled with reputations for producing gas-guzzling
behemoths and faced serious deficits. Although the fortunes
of the auto industry eventually rose again, especially
during the economic boom of the 1990s and the growth in
popularity of sport utility vehicles, the Big Three would
continue to struggle for market share in an economy increasingly
dominated by overseas manufacturers. Detroit, already
weakened by decades of disinvestment and depopulation,
fared badly. The Motor City was nearly completely abandoned
by whites (who today comprise just a little over ten percent
of the city’s population). Metropolitan Detroit
is still home to the Big Three headquarters, but the city’s
population has plummeted to 886,000; its job base continues
to shrink; and its skyline is now dominated by the rotting
hulks of old factory buildings. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, boomtown Detroit is a distant memory,
visible only in the old factory buildings and rubble-strewn
lots that were once magnets of opportunity. A fitting
symbol of Detroit’s transitory industrial might
is Ford’s Highland Park plant—home to the
first assembly line—now empty and deserted, a stark
monument to the city’s history as the cradle of
the modern American consumer culture.
| For a list
of books, websites, and other resources on
the topic of Detroit and the auto industry,
visit our Additional
Resources Page |
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