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Make America 1962 Again

Review: David Maraniss, ‘Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story’

Downtown Detroit in 1963
Downtown Detroit in 1963
September 25, 2016

In his most recent foray into Deep Thinking, rapper Kanye West declared himself and Henry Ford, among others, to be "artists [and] merchants." Though Kanye was mocked for his egotism, his description of Ford was well put. Ford not only sold products, but saw his ideas made real. Even the most abstract of these ideas—vertical integration—became reality in the largest industrial complex ever built: the River Rouge.

Designed by Albert Kahn, the Rouge covered 1,300 acres. During the 1930s, over 65,000 men worked at the plant on three shifts. The namesake river was dredged and widened to allow ships access to the facilities. Raw materials—iron, sand, rubber—brought by barge into one end of the complex, could be transformed into steel, glass, and tires on site, and assembled into a finished car at the other. When America entered World War II, the raw materials didn’t change, but the final products did. Model Ts gave way to the armor plate and aircraft engines that helped smash the Axis. When the Cold War began, rumor had it that the Soviets feared the Rouge’s industrial capacity so much that they trained a nuclear missile not on Detroit, but on the Rouge itself.

Today, the Russians would be unlikely to launch that missile, and not only because a Russian company bought the Rouge’s steel mill in 2003. (It was sold it to an Indian conglomerate in 2014.) Cars are now merely assembled at the plant, and many of the Rouge’s parts-production components have been spun off or shuttered. The workforce numbers about 6,000. Tours for visitors highlight the site’s history and the plant’s new "living roof."

In its grand scope and subsequent downfall, the Rouge is emblematic of the city it sits outside of—Detroit. In Once In A Great City, newly issued in paperback, native Detroiter and Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss focuses not on the city’s current problems, but on its former glory. Covering late 1962 to early 1964, the Detroit he depicts was at its zenith, one of the nation’s foremost cities.

Politically, the voters had just elected Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, an energetic operator and JFK acolyte, who blended activist governmental policies with a strong commitment to civil rights. Economically, the Big Three recovered from a brief slump in the late 50s—caused by public enthusiasm for the VW Beetle and other compacts—to sell more cars in 1963 than any year prior. The men who made those cars shared in that success, with the UAW, led by Walter Reuther, securing middle-class wages and benefits for its members. Culturally, the city was alive with all sorts of music—classical, rock, and a new genre, Motown, presented and promoted by a young Berry Gordy. And it looked as if all this would soon propel Detroit to global prominence: the U.S. Olympic Committee chose the city—over Los Angeles!—as the American bid for the 1968 Olympics. (Detroit ultimately lost to Mexico City by one vote.)

Maraniss effectively conveys the excitement of this time with a breezy style and chapters that each focus on some event, contain newspaper articles and editorials on the same, and include a character sketch of or author interview with key participants. This formula manages to give the reader a sense of place while not overwhelming him with detail. Maraniss writes well, and has a journalist’s eye for telling details and a good anecdote: Lyndon Johnson acidly noting that Mayor Cavanagh, like JFK, wore button downs—"those Ivy League shirts"; a young Stevie Wonder, reprimanded for collecting spare pennies left behind by a Motown employee, telling the employee she was "taking money from a poor blind boy!"

But Maraniss’s approach also makes Once In A Great City shallow and less incisive than it might have been. While Maraniss's character sketches are fun, using them so extensively limits the book to the activities of colorful people. So, we learn a lot about Ford—along with the Mustang-maker Lee Iacocca and bon vivant Henry Ford II—but almost nothing about GM or Chrysler. And Maraniss’s sympathy for his subjects sometimes gets in the way of his judgment. Asked by Bobby Kennedy to provide bail money for civil rights demonstrators jailed by Bull Connor, Walter Reuther and a partner "rounded up $160,000" for the purpose. They then sent "UAW staffers . . . on their way south, the cash stashed in bulging money belts around their midsections." Maraniss doesn’t ask the obvious question: where’d the money come from?

More important, Maraniss’s light touch causes him to skim over a big problem, already apparent in 1963, that would cripple Detroit in the decades to come: poorly conceived and undemocratic urban planning. While he makes frequent mention of the disruption caused by "urban renewal" projects of the 1950s and early 1960s, Maraniss doesn't clearly explain how harmful these projects were to the city and its residents.

Using federal money and eminent domain in the 1950s and early 1960s, the city and state governments destroyed low-income (and largely black) neighborhoods to build highways and industrial facilities. Though conditions in these neighborhoods were hardly ideal, residents received little input in the process. And not much new housing was built to replace the old. With few other options, a substantial number of Detroit's poor crowded into subdivided, formerly single-family homes in middle-class neighborhoods. They paid unscrupulous landlords exorbitant rent for the privilege. Fearful of this increased density and the crime it brought with it, middle-class residents, both black and white, fled these neighborhoods for the suburbs—and used the new highways to commute back into the city for work.

Maraniss clearly understands this dynamic. But he doesn’t include all of this information in one place, instead scattering it throughout the book. He deserves credit, however, for recognizing that Detroit’s decline began not with the riots of 1967, but far earlier, as people and capital moved beyond the city limits.

It’s impossible to finish Once In A Great City without feeling dread at this slow-motion collapse. Maraniss wisely avoids discussing much after 1964, and closes by describing his own recent visit to Detroit. At the Motown Museum, in the house that served as the label’s first headquarters, he encounters visitors from Japan, and a group of South Africans "dancing and singing and posing for pictures on the front walk." He asks: "What did Detroit give America?" And answers: "You could hear the answer in every song."

Yet it gave America much more. This old Detroit is the encapsulation of what our present politics seeks to achieve; the object of our neuroses. Trump supporters seeking to make America great again find pride in its vast factories, manned by American workers, that produced the best in the world. Clinton partisans look favorably on its vital trade unions, and its sense that there was no problem government could not solve.

There is nothing wrong with being inspired by the past—but seeking to recreate it is a different matter. The Detroit of Once In A Great City was made possible only by the fact that America, alone of the industrialized nations, emerged from World War II with its infrastructure unscathed. The concentrated wealth produced during this time was dispersed as Europe and Japan recovered, and it won’t return.

Obsessing over past glories also slights the people trying to make something of Detroit now, in its present form. Nostalgia can be comforting, but it is ultimately a crutch. This truth is summed up by the city’s motto, written by a priest after a fire destroyed nearly all of Detroit in 1805: "We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes."

Published under: Book reviews