Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the Corvair disaster for General Motors, indeed for the entire American auto industry,” wrote Paul Ingrassia in Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster. “The scandal occurred just as the Vietnam War was fostering a new and profound mistrust of establishment institutions—the government, the military, universities, churches and others. The Corvair added General Motors—and, by extension, all of corporate America—to the list of institutions not to be trusted. In some ways, GM’s corporate reputation would never recover.”

  Culturally and economically, U.S. auto companies were not cut out to build small cars. For the first generation after World War II, American life was defined by one word: “more.” An unending expansion of prosperity that not only meant bigger cars and bigger houses, but two cars and two houses. No one benefited more than the UAW, but every time the automakers granted the union a more generous contract, to prevent a strike that would stop those big cars from rolling off the line, they made it necessary to build even bigger cars, to pay those bigger wages.

  The strike hurt the company’s competitiveness with Japan in multiple ways. The shutdown cost GM two percentage points of market share, which it never recovered.

  The thirty-and-out deal added to GM’s pension costs. Because the strike took place in the fall, at the beginning of a model year, it disrupted production of the new Chevy Vega, GM’s answer to the Beetle and the Corona.

  Keeping the Vega away from customers was not all bad. GM didn’t want to build a small car, so it built that car shoddily. The Vega was designed with sleeveless piston cylinders, to save weight, but the cylinders lacked a seal that prevented oil leakage, so the car dribbled dark stains onto driveways. Many Vega owners were first-time buyers who became convinced that all GM cars were junk and that, by extension, all American cars must be junk.

  THE UNION and the autoworkers negotiated a new contract every three years, which meant the 1970 agreement was the last before the Arab oil embargo, which ended the era of jetliner cars and the monopoly of the American automakers. By then, though, it wasn’t just a matter of GM’s having nothing more to give, it was a matter of its employees having everything they needed. Since Cooper had hired in right out of high school, he could retire at forty-eight years old, before manual labor wore out his body, and with health care to keep him alive another forty-eight years. His father’s generation—the Sit-Down Strikers—had set the table, so his generation could enjoy the feast.

  “The union got to a point where we ran out of things to negotiate for,” Don said. “What more could we ask for? We had a good wage, we had good health care, we had a good pension. Everything was there. I was there for the best years of Oldsmobile, as far as I’m concerned. I know many people that are production, salaried, engineers that I graduated with, they all say the same thing. We all saw the best Oldsmobile had to offer. I don’t think it’ll ever come back to what it was.”

  In the early 1930s, Walter Reuther had campaigned for Norman Thomas, the Socialist presidential candidate, and spent sixteen months in Russia, working as a tool-and-die maker in an auto plant. (Later, as UAW president, he would purge the union of Communists.) Reuther believed in universal health care and affordable housing. It was his genius as a labor leader to fuse capitalism and socialism by agitating for a system in which workers could own big American cars, big American houses, and big American boats while having the security of Soviet medical care, Soviet pensions, and Soviet job guarantees. Genius, of course, only shows itself where there is opportunity, and there was no better place and time to create this way of life than the Great Lakes Region of the United States in the quarter century after World War II.

  The Middle West became the industrial heartland of America because, as its name indicates, it was in the middle of things. Most importantly, it was midway between the two essential ingredients of steel—iron ore, mined in northern Minnesota and Upper Michigan, and coal, carved from the mountains of Appalachia. The Middle West also had the element needed to bring those ingredients together: water. After the ore left Duluth on a freighter, where could it go but Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Ashtabula, the railhead for Pittsburgh?

  In 1899, Buffalo attorney John G. Milburn lured the Lackawanna Steel Company from Scranton, Pennsylvania, by promoting his city’s location astride the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. Milburn invited Lackawanna president Walter Scranton to a luncheon in his Delaware Avenue mansion. There, according to Mark Goldman’s City on the Edge (the only history of twentieth-century Buffalo you will ever need), he assured the industrialist that Buffalo could provide all the essentials for steelmaking, inexpensively and inexhaustibly: iron ore from Minnesota arrived at the docks daily, Niagara Falls generated more power than any other waterfall in North America, and the unlettered immigrants from Poland, Russia, and Austria-Hungary had not yet been infected with the virus of unionism.

  The steel company was given 1,300 acres of Lake Erie shoreline and soon after incorporated its own company town—Lackawanna, New York.

  Buffalo is the mother of American manufacturing cities. The European immigrants who settled Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and smaller urban centers had to pass through Buffalo to get to the mill jobs awaiting farther west, and they copied its layout of ethnic villages and neighborhood taverns. But just as Buffalo was the first city to rise, it was the first to fall. Buffalo pioneered the Rust Belt cycle of decay beginning in the 1950s, at least a decade and a half before everyone else.

  As the last stop on the Erie Canal (“all the way from Albany to Buffalo,” as the song “Low Bridge” goes), Buffalo was the first freshwater city to achieve national prominence. In the nineteenth century, two Buffalonians—Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland—served as president. Their girths are today cast in bronze on the steps of Buffalo’s Art Deco city hall. By 1900, Buffalo was the eighth-largest city in the United States. It had the most millionaires per capita. It was the world’s busiest grain port. Only Chicago slaughtered more livestock. Every day, dozens of ships unloaded wheat for the bakers and brewers, and steers for the butchers. Competing with Chicago for the title of Greatest Inland City, Buffalo in 1901 threw a World’s Fair intended to surpass its rival’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. President William McKinley attended the Pan-American Exposition—and was shot by an anarchist as he shook hands in the Temple of Music. Eight days later, the president died of gangrene in a bedroom of Milburn’s house. Hours later, and less than a mile away, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as his successor.

  Buffalonians sometimes blame their city’s decline on the Curse of William McKinley, but Buffalo remained an important industrial center for over half a century after it hosted a presidential assassination. Buffalo fermented a good helping of the grain that came through town, in nearly two thousand breweries. Its best-known local beers, Iroquois and Simon Pure, survived until the Budweiser purge of the early 1970s. They were not as long-lived as other hometown swills drunk out of penury or local pride—Iron City in Pittsburgh, Genesee in Rochester, Stroh’s in Detroit, Old Style in Chicago—but Buffalo home-brewed first. Buffalo’s German brewers invented a fleshy local delicacy to stimulate thirst in their customers: the beef-on-weck sandwich. Tissues of rare roast beef, hot from the oven, packed within a kummelweck roll, studded with pretzel salt and caraway seeds. Even the abrasive Midwestern accent—the mother tongue of the Mayors Daley, Jimmy Hoffa, Dennis Kucinich, Iggy Pop, and Jim Belushi—originated in Western New York, as a hard astringent distillation of the nasal Yankee speech brought west from Vermont by the region’s pioneers. Today, amateur lexicographers can identify the New York State Thruway exit where waitresses stop serving “soda” and begin serving “pahhp.” (Exit 42, Geneva/Lyons, midway between Rochester and Syracuse.) It’s the spot where the East ends and the Midwest begins.

  During World War II, Buffalo’s steel mills made it the ideal city to build the U.S. Army Air Forces, the Royal Air Force, and the
Soviet Air Force. At the outset of 1940, Bell Aircraft employed 1,200 workers in its Buffalo factory. By the end of the year, Bell had a new, government-built plant in Niagara Falls, and 31,000 new employees to build the P-39A Airacobra, which would do battle with the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front. Curtiss-Wright, producer of the P-40 and the Tomahawk, expanded its payroll from 5,300 to 43,000. All three GM plants built airplane engines, and Lackawanna Steel, now owned by Bethlehem, forged the skins of tanks and railroad cars. Buffalo produced 2.5 percent of all American material, making it the fifth city of the war effort.

  On December 29, 1940, as the Germans occupied France, bombed Britain, and made plans to attack Russia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat on the topic of America’s munitions industry. He used a phrase coined months earlier by his speechwriter playwright Robert E. Sherwood.

  “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” Roosevelt said. “For us, this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.”

  The sobriquet “Arsenal of Democracy” would be claimed by Detroit. Outside that city, along a creek called Willow Run, Henry Ford had built a plant containing the largest room on Earth, to produce the B-24 Liberator bomber. But Roosevelt intended the name equally for the shipyards of Oakland and the steel mills of Buffalo.

  Like most Northern industrial cities, Buffalo’s population in 1950—580,000—was double its population today. Buffalo’s midcentury misfortune was the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. Its importance as a port was based on its position as the last stop on the Lower Great Lakes. Once the seaway opened, freighters carrying ore and grain bypassed Buffalo’s mills and silos, sailing directly to the Atlantic Ocean. The city fathers knew the canal would eliminate the nautical monopoly that had made Buffalo a city in the first place. They’d been trying to stop the seaway since it was first proposed, in the 1920s. In 1953, a desperate Common Council passed a resolution declaring the seaway would be vulnerable to Communist bombs (dropped from planes Buffalo had built for the Soviets a decade before).

  “Buffalo’s long-dreaded nightmare had finally come to pass,” wrote Goldman in City on the Edge.

  The city, which for so long had dominated the stream of commerce on the Great Lakes, was now bypassed as a dead-end route. As a result, the entire range of water-fed industries—boat companies, ship chandlers, ship repairers and shipbuilders—suffered the most. In 1962, the American Shipbuilding Company closed, the last vestige of an industry that had been in Buffalo since 1812. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Buffalo had been the grain storage capital of the world, harboring millions of tons of Midwestern grain in its internationally renowned grain elevators. Now, as increasing amounts of grain were shipped to Montreal via the seaway, Buffalo’s significance as a port of storage quickly eroded.

  Buffalo fell first. Detroit fell next, and did it with a bang.

  3.

  The Motor City Is Burning

  In January 1966, Detroit’s boy mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, was sworn in for a second term. Cavanagh, who at thirty-seven still looked like an Irish seminarian, declared his city was enjoying “the greatest prosperity in Detroit’s history.” From his office atop Detroit’s limestone city hall, Cavanagh could see the riverbank where the French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac had landed in 1701. If he looked in the other direction, north and west, he could see the fifth-largest city in the United States, spread out for twenty miles along the six-lane Gallic boulevards radiating from the river. “Detroit” was not just the name of a city; it was a metonym for the automobile industry, builder of the most important consumer product ever invented. Cavanagh could see so far not just because Detroit was built on a flat alluvial plain, but because it was in every other way a horizontal city. The tallest skyscraper, the forty-seven-story Penobscot, had been built the year before the Depression. Since then, Detroit had reached no higher. Detroiters did not move up. They moved out. Detroit had more houses than any American city, and per resident, it had more cars. This was not just a matter of supporting the hometown industry. It was a necessity. The derelict Detroit Street Railway system, obsolete in an atomized city, had retired its last car in 1955. In its place, Detroit built a web of freeways. Once the assembly lines began building cars again after World War II, even a city whose main streets were wide enough for a bus’s U-turn needed more room for more automobiles. Many Detroiters migrated to the suburbs along those roads. Detroit had lost 200,000 residents in the 1950s but still had 1.6 million. Along with the people, though, the businesses were leaving, too. In 1954, Hudson’s, the downtown department store that was to Detroit what Macy’s was to New York, opened Northland, the nation’s first suburban shopping center, just across 8 Mile Road, in Southfield. The auto plants were moving as well. The multistory factories, castles around which industrial peasantry had gathered in wooden bungalows, were out of date, and there was no room in Detroit to build the enormous shop floors that Henry Ford had pioneered at Willow Run. Packard went out of business in the late 1950s, abandoning its four-story plant in northeast Detroit. Around the same time, Chrysler built a plant on farmland in Livonia, west of the city.

  By the early 1960s, at the beginning of Cavanagh’s first term, Detroit was already one third black. During World War II, when Southerners flocked to Detroit to build tanks and planes, a race riot broke out between blacks who resented their lack of advancement in the factories and whites who resented Northern customs of racial equality, killing thirty-four and injuring hundreds. Afterward, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote that “careful consideration [should] be given to limiting and in some cases putting an end to Negro migrations into communities which cannot absorb them, either on account of their physical limitations or cultural background. This needs immediate and careful consideration. When postwar readjustments begin, and jobs are scarcer, the situation will become far more acute … It would seem pretty clear that no more blacks should move to Detroit.”

  But more blacks did, lured by jobs in the liberated auto industry. In the 1950s, Detroit’s black population increased from three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand—an increase that did not quite compensate for the white flight it caused. At the same time, Black Bottom, the East Side neighborhood to which African-Americans had been confined since the early twentieth century, was demolished to make way for highways and housing projects. Unwelcome in most parts of Detroit due to restrictive covenants, blacks were packed into new ghettos, even more crowded than Black Bottom, such as Twelfth Street, where the population was twenty thousand per square mile and blacks were charged double the rent vacating whites had paid, because where else did they have to go? After paying the rent man, the newcomers were exploited by liquor store owners, used-furniture dealers, corner grocers, and tavern keepers. Twelfth Street became Detroit’s Levee, its red-light district, its Sin Strip, where both blacks and whites sought out marijuana, heroin, numbers runners, and whores—over and underage. The hedonists were followed by the vice squad, who, as one early sixties resident remembered, “rode around … busting prostitutes, dope pushers and just plain fucking with people.” The police force was 97 percent white. That didn’t go unnoticed on Twelfth Street, either.

  The black migration to Detroit peaked just as the city’s auto employment was declining. Over the course of the 1950s, Chrysler laid off half its forty-six thousand employees in Detroit. Jobs in the new suburban plants were beyond the reach of urban blacks; in the older city plants, the UAW prevented blacks from apprenticing in the skilled trades, which were closed guilds.

  There were, however, neighborhoods where blacks and whites lived together in the 1950s and ’60s. Northeast Detroit was tributary to Packard, Hudson, the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, and three Cadillac plants. Poles began settling there in the late nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth, they’d established a Polish
Broadway on Chene Street (pronounced “Shane,” after the French colonist who farmed there when the soil belonged to Louis XIV). It was one of those self-contained ethnic villages that existed in every Northern city just before and after World War II. The men could walk to work at the factory and the women could do all their shopping in a few blocks of Chene, buying the furniture from Moliszewski, the sausage from Jaworski’s Butcher Shop, and dressing the family at Rathenau’s. Chene’s merchants bragged that their street had more retail businesses per square foot than any American thoroughfare but Fifth Avenue. The children spoke the mother tongue until they went to school, and heard it every Sunday during Mass at St. Stanislaus and St. Hyacinth. The Ivanhoe Café served fish every Friday, and every Saturday, Polish truck farmers and Jewish vegetable peddlers set up stalls at the Chene-Ferry Market.

  Then, in the 1950s, the Edsel Ford Freeway—named for Henry’s only son—bisected the neighborhood. Packard closed. The Hudson-Nash merger that created American Motors resulted in Hudson’s thirty-five thousand jobs moving to the Nash plant in Wisconsin. As the auto plants left, the Black Bottom diaspora began arriving. Janice Harvey, who grew up in one of the neighborhood’s first black families, when “everybody was just about at the plant,” didn’t notice any racial tension as a girl; her grade-school sweetheart was an Italian boy named Angelo. But once she got to Northeastern High School, the black population had reached a tipping point that was causing white parents to move to suburbia.

  “When I entered in 1954, and you looked down the hallway, you would see little dark spots,” she remembered, “but by the time I ended, in 1958, you would see little white spots.”

  Marion Krzykowski’s family arrived on Chene Street from a displaced person’s camp in Germany. His earliest memories were of a mixed neighborhood, where Poles patronized a black dentist and a white kid felt safe pedaling his bike on the colored folks’ blocks. Even when blacks bought the houses next door, the Krzykowskis didn’t think of moving, because they were still in the center of Polish Detroit.