Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  “What needed to be recognized is that the police were on the front line and trying to hold it together, but they could sense things falling apart,” John Tsampikou, who joined the force a year before the Scott shooting, recalled more than a half century later. “Things were changing then, and the police department was a lot of old school guys. Not idiots, not by a long shot . . . but predominantly conservative people who were self-disciplined, all with military training and work ethic. When I hit the streets, the rookies, we tended to be more compassionate until we got the message, ‘If you feel that way keep your mouth shut.’ You could sense things changing on the street. The civil rights movement. The increase in crime. To the average cop, this was all part of the same thing. We didn’t know how to separate it. Then the Cynthia Scott thing came along. I knew Ted Spicher after the fact, the kid who did the shooting. He climbed into the bottle. Whether he was a drinker before I don’t know. I think it had a direct impact on his life forever. Shooting at a fleeing suspect was the law. I am not saying Spicher was right or wrong, but the administration in those days supported the troops very well. You never heard of a policeman being charged criminally.”

  Another young Detroit cop then was Anthony Fierimonte, whose girlfriend was the daughter of the First District inspector. “I was over at her house one day,” Fierimonte recalled, “and the inspector called home and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to make it home, we’re involved in this big mess, rioting going on. Somebody shot the whore over here and now everyone’s going crazy that she was a good young girl and should not have been shot. On the news broadcasts it was totally liberal: ‘Oh, this poor black woman got shot, and no sense to the shooting.’ We were looking at each other and saying ‘She was a streetwalker and got in trouble.’ They just didn’t know what was really happening.”

  David Wright was a rookie cop in the adjacent 13th Precinct near Wayne State. “I worked a whore car for a while. There were three thousand [prostitutes] by fingerprint just at John R. And then white whores on Cass and Third Avenue.” The cops called the hookers “nooners,” Wright said. They would arrest them, take them down to the station, test them for venereal disease, and then release them at noon the next day. “If you went by the courthouse at noon, there’d be like a hundred that came out.” Most prostitutes accepted the routine and did not fight back. Cynthia Scott was different, according to Wright. She was big and a fighter, and she ran. “Most whores never fought. You’d say, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ The big sin was running from the police. What it was was, and people still don’t get this today—the fact that you shoot somebody in the back doesn’t mean shit. You are moving, they are moving. It’s an all-out panic situation.”

  If the cops considered it a battle out there on the streets of Detroit, it was an uneven fight. They had the far superior firepower, led by what was called “the Big 4”—unmarked police sedans, Chryslers or Buicks, carrying four officers, one in uniform, three in plainclothes, fortified with a store of weapons including ax handles, baseball bats, shotguns, and a Thompson submachine gun. Big 4s roamed the streets day and night in six of the city’s high-crime districts, which were predominantly black but also included an area populated by white immigrants from Appalachia. David Wright, who joined the department in 1961, worked on a Big 4 crew with a partner nicknamed Rotation Slim and another cop who liked to quote Shakespeare. “When police needed help, they called in the Big 4,” Wright recalled. “It was nice if you were walking the beat and there was a crowd forming. ‘Get inside or I’m gonna call in the Big 4.’ The Big 4 didn’t do public relations, they just started kicking ass.”

  In the weeks after the Cynthia Scott shooting, just before roll call in the First District, an officer would get out his guitar and sing a little ditty that began:

  Run, Cynthia, run

  Spicher gone to get his gun.

  George Edwards had taken the job at 1300 Beaubien with the zeal of a missionary and from the beginning understood that his reform administration could be effective for only so long. Two years maximum as police commissioner, he thought, and then time to move on. But his great ambition, as he said during that speech at Michigan State a few months earlier, was to create an atmosphere in Detroit that honored both full equality and law and order. He had left for Europe on a high, boosted by the success of the Walk to Freedom and a glowing note he had received from Martin Luther King. “As one who bears both the physical and psychological effects of brutal and inhuman police forces in the South, I was both uplifted and consoled to be with a police force that proved to be a genuine protector and a friend indeed,” King wrote. “I am sure that a great deal of the success of the march can be attributed to you and the significant leadership that you have given the police department of Detroit. You have proved to the Negro citizenry of your community that you are a friend rather than an enemy.” Now that praise seemed hollow, as Edwards faced the depressing realization that his hopes for equality and order might never be achieved, undone by the shooting of St. Cynthia less than a month after the great demonstration of interracial respect.

  “Heat Wave.” Not from love, but from fear and misunderstanding, it seemed once again that high blood pressure got a hold on the city of Detroit.

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  THE VAST MAGNITUDE

  WORK STARTED EARLY for most of the men at the top of Ford. By seven each weekday, a stream of black limousines began flowing from Bloomfield Hills down to the Glass House, the company headquarters in Dearborn. Much like their GM and Chrysler counterparts, these were job-driven car guys who rarely drove; instead they were chauffeured from their suburban estates to the office and on toward downtown for their ritual appointments at the Detroit Athletic Club, nerve center of the business elite, a fleet of sedans double-parked outside while executives lunched or played their clubhouse games as members of the Three Bs: Beavers (swimmers), Blackballers (handball and racquetball), and Bowlers. For those who accepted the order of things, all still seemed golden in the summer of 1963, their work and play sealed off and protected. To them urban renewal meant a faster ride into the city and back.

  Holmes Brown, then a Ford public relations man, later called the company subculture of that era “the most isolated and insulated community I ever saw. It was, they thought, the ‘Big Operation.’ . . . Everybody was insulated within the company. . . . My wife fought it and hated it. She fought it all the time. She hated Detroit and Grosse Pointe, and the private schools where all the Ford kids would go, the wives saw only the wives and there was a pecking order, level by level, and there were meetings with [car] dealers, which were monstrous. Everyone wore the same coat among the wives. It was like a uniform. Not only did the men have a uniform with their suits but the women had the same. . . . It was something that no one ever told you to do. It was something you knew. You had to play golf or bridge if your boss did.”

  At the very top, the big boss might have been sympathetic to Mrs. Brown. Henry Ford II, in his own way, was rebelling against the regimented mores of his time and place. Typically he was still asleep at seven when his Ford men went off to work. He rarely woke before seven-thirty and did not leave his lonely mansion at Grosse Pointe Farms for another hour. The company defined his life, but the social expectations of Detroit’s auto society bored him. He was spending more time overseas, especially in Italy, home of his mistress, Maria Cristina Vettore Austin. Behind a crusty vocabulary that could sound jingoistic—“I don’t like frog tires,” he once snapped at an underling who put Michelins on a Ford—was a man of the world who spoke fluent French and was learning some Italian, had bought a $700,000 yacht, and was living out of a suitcase more and more. He and his wife, Anne, were separating that summer, and he was searching for new and sexier things, even toying with the idea of acquiring an Italian car company. “He was tired of being a suburban husband in a suburban city,” said his daughter, Charlotte, who lived in New York. “He envied café society, [envied] the owner of Fiat, who was having a good life, a boat ev
erywhere—I think it was very hard on him. He was another suburban businessman in Detroit and he was bored with it and you could almost see it happening. At the end it was real hatred in the marriage between him and Anne because he started to see Cristina. Cristina was the reflection of the desperate desire to get out of Detroit, and she was the perfect person at the perfect time.”

  The perfect time for Henry Ford II came during a period of automobile world bounty. Car sales were booming, the future seemed to promise only more of everything—more cars, more roads, more people, more drivers—and a series of anniversaries coincided as reminders of Ford’s consequential history.

  On the second to last day of July, the Deuce’s Lincoln limousine followed its regular route to the Glass House, traversing the Edsel Ford Expressway for part of the trip, a road named for his father, an unavoidable reminder of how city and family were inextricably linked. His grandfather, the original Henry Ford, was born during the middle of the Civil War, less than a month after Gettysburg, and this July 30 marked the centennial of his birth. It was also the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Ford Motor Company and the fiftieth anniversary of Ford’s world-changing mass assembly line. Threes all in a row: 1863, 1903, and 1913. And there was another three in the mix: 1943. It had been twenty years since Edsel Ford, then president of the company and an underrated force in the building of the Arsenal of Democracy, died of stomach cancer at the too young age of forty-nine and young Henry was called back from navy training to join Ford’s management team. All of this, especially the centennial, could not go unnoticed in the Motor City Ford helped make famous. Mayor Cavanagh proclaimed July 28 to August 3 Henry Ford Centennial Week, a plaza to the west of downtown’s Ford Auditorium was renamed Henry Ford Plaza, local museums staged exhibits related to his work and hobbies and homes, the newspapers ran special sections recounting his biography and the creation of the automobile industry, and the political and business elite were now gathering with the namesake grandson to celebrate the founder’s memory at a hundredth-birthday anniversary luncheon at Lovett Hall in Greenfield Village.

  To one side of the Deuce at the speakers’ table sat Lenore Romney, Michigan’s first lady. To the other side was Cavanagh. As the audience spooned desserts of lime ice and crème de menthe, Detroit’s mayor described how his life, like so many thousands of others, had been shaped by Henry Ford. “It was fortunate for us in Dearborn and the Detroit area that Mr. Ford was born here one hundred years ago,” Cavanagh said. “There is no question that southeastern Michigan would be a different place today if Henry Ford had not been a native son. In so many ways Henry Ford has touched our lives. In my case, for example, my father was an employee of the Ford Motor Company for forty-two years. . . . I was made aware early in life of the vast magnitude of Henry Ford’s company. I also have worked as a guide here at Greenfield Village. As a guide I was proud to show the hundreds of thousands of visitors who came here each year the irreplaceable examples of America’s heritage which we owe to Mr. Ford and his love of his country.”

  “We shall have reproduced American life as lived,” old man Ford once said of his museum and village, and after lunch his grandson and the mayor and the other centennial celebrants dutifully boarded buses for another tour of that vision of American life. Here was the farmhouse where Henry Ford was born, transplanted from its original location on Greenfield Road a few miles away and restored on the faux village property. There was the Connecticut house where Noah Webster completed his dictionary. The Ohio bicycle shop where Orville and Wilbur Wright tinkered with their first flying machine. The Pennsylvania birthplace of William Holmes McGuffey, author of Americana’s sacred texts, the McGuffey Readers. The rural Illinois courthouse where Abe Lincoln practiced law. A replica of inventor Thomas Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey. Life mythologized and sanitized, as insulated from the changing world of the sixties as those Ford men riding down from Bloomfield Hills in the backseats of black sedans.

  Jerome Cavanagh might have felt indebted to the Ford Motor Company, but the mayor and the city he loved were excluded from the founder’s American myth. This was the infected heart of the Detroit story. Henry Ford, whose cars transformed the American landscape, whose assembly line stood as a symbol of the industrial age, whose Rouge plant lured hundreds of thousands of people off the farms and out of the small towns and into the metropolis, and whose cars made it easier for millions of people to escape to the suburbs, did not value urban life. He was a leading propagator of the pastoral idyll, the notion that urban life was not the good America, not the real America. And who was accepted and who was rejected in his real America? There the myth grew more sinister. Henry Ford II realized this long before he led the festivities honoring his grandfather’s hundredth anniversary. The grandson had been the beneficiary of the company’s “vast magnitude” more than Mayor Cavanagh or anyone else, but also more than anyone he had had to spend his life trying to overcome if not erase the vast malignancy attached to that Ford legacy. The flip side of Henry Ford’s rural sentimentality was a virulent, obsessive campaign against people he felt threatened by, especially Jews. He was the first of the automakers to hire blacks and also brought in large numbers of immigrants from Lebanon, eventually turning Dearborn into a national center of Arab America, but his attacks on Jews transcended these other characteristics of diversity. He might have offered Martin Luther King a job had King’s family made the migration to Detroit, but his dreamscape could not have differed more from the one King evoked after that walk down Woodward a month before the centennial celebration.

  It is difficult to overstate Ford’s anti-Semitic malevolence, documented for posterity, far from the sight of Greenfield Village tourists, in old issues of the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he owned and used as his primary propaganda tool during the twenties. In ninety-one consecutive issues starting in May 1920, Ford’s paper ran article after article attacking Jews as “the world’s problem.” Using the editor, William J. Cameron, as his mouthpiece, Ford set forth a worldview that blamed Jews for everything from the despoilment of baseball to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, from the betrayal of Christopher Columbus to the creation of the evil Jewish state of the Soviet Union, from the corruption of Anglo-Saxon culture through jazz and provocative movies to the evil of Jewish bankers who he claimed started and prolonged World War I. In the pages of the Dearborn Independent, anything wrong in the world traced back to a conspiracy by the Jews.

  Ford found an audience for these diatribes at home and abroad. In Munich leaders of the rising Nazi Party spread the columns to followers in The International Jew: The World’s Problem, an anthology translated into German. The New York Times reported that Adolf Hitler kept a well-used copy of the book in his library and hung a portrait of Henry Ford on his wall. Back in the United States, where the Ku Klux Klan contemporaneously was surging as a nativist force, the columns were distributed at rallies, and Ford was promoted as a presidential candidate. At the same time, he was developing a nationwide network for the newspaper by instructing Ford car dealers in cities and towns across America to sell subscriptions along with automobiles. At its peak the Dearborn Independent reached nearly 700,000 subscribers. In parallel with the propaganda effort, Ernest G. Liebold, who served as general manager of the newspaper and one of Ford’s personal henchmen, set up a private squad to identify and investigate Jewish radicals, and was so connected to the Nazis that he had a box of swastikas shipped to his Dearborn office. Later, as Hitler was preparing his invasion of Europe, he honored Ford with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, presented to the American industrialist on his seventy-fifth birthday, a quarter-century to the day before the centennial celebration at Greenfield Village. By that time Ford’s virulence was outpaced by another fearmongering Detroit figure, Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a prominent fascist sympathizer who laced his nationally popular radio commentary on The Golden Hour of the Shrine of the Little Flower with attacks on Jews and blacks and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

 
; Although Ford had issued an apology of sorts for the screeds, relying on a claim that he did not know all that the Dearborn Independent had been writing in his newspaper, the apology was never fully believed or accepted by his wounded targets, and intense hostility toward Ford Motor Company was something Henry Ford II had worked to overcome from the moment he took command from his grandfather near the end of World War II. What had started as angry boycotts became a deeply embedded matter of pride and faith in the Jewish culture. You did not buy a Ford. “I started right out to change that,” Henry Ford II recalled in an oral interview with company historian David Lewis, a transcript of which is archived at the Benson Ford Research Center. “I spent a lot of time on the West Coast working on the movies because of their propaganda influence. The four Warner brothers ran Warner Brothers. Harry Warner, who was a sort of chief, wouldn’t allow an employee to drive a Ford product. Gary Cooper, who was a friend of mine, couldn’t drive his Ford product into the Warner Brothers lot. I made a great effort to straighten out this situation. . . . It was bad. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I was told that Bernie Baruch [Bernard Baruch was a noted Jewish financier and presidential adviser who had been assailed in the Dearborn Independent as “the pro-consul of Judah in America”] at one time was riding in a taxicab and a guy with him said, ‘This is a Ford,’ and Baruch stopped the cab and got out.” Old man Ford died, senile, in a Detroit hospital named for him, and it was left to the grandson to pay penance, which he did through words and deeds. He immediately fired Cameron, the Independent editor, then set about supporting Jewish antidefamation organizations, contributing to Yeshiva University, establishing business dealings in Israel, and courting Jewish advisers.