Volume 9 Number 3 1996
Life For Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-1945, Richard W. Thomas, Indiana University Press, 1992, 366 pages, £35.50 hardback.
Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest, John C. Teaford, Indiana University Press, 1993, 301 pages, £32.50 hardback.
Thomas's study is of black workers in Detroit during the rapid industrialising period of 1915-1945. He draws upon nineteenth-century black experience to show how Detroit has almost always been a very important city for American blacks. The Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850 increased Detroit's role as a centre for tens of thousands of blacks to flee into Canada. The necessary mechanisms to operate the `Underground Railway' into Canada - forged papers, the sending of agents into the South to encourage escapes, safe houses and `vigilance committees' - all amounted to a collective system of self-help or `community building' which continued to serve blacks into this century when Detroit was transformed by motor and other manufacturing. Community building, according to Thomas, is an "organic approach to understanding the sum total of the historical efforts of blacks to survive and progress".
Within the community building process there has always been tension between the more reactive, confrontational elements which have sought independent black development, and the more conservative, consensus-seeking elements which have sought integration at best, but have usually been forced instead towards self-help. This duality has often reflected the different outlooks of the middle class and professional blacks with their more promising positions within the white-dominated status quo and the more volatile black working class with its clearer sense of oppression. In the nineteenth century the more radical blacks advocated black emigration to other countries whilst the moderate elements stressed the cultivation of good morals and habits of industry, thrift and temperance. Until 1940 or so the same essential class-based duality expressed itself industrially as, on the one hand, anti-union and encouraging employer paternalism, and, on the other, as seeking to build industrial unionism and militant opposition to discriminatory employment practices. Throughout the book, whether he is examining health and education or housing and employment, Thomas provides a good analysis of this class duality in the black response to white domination and oppression.
Detroit's growth as a manufacturing centre was greatly accelerated during World War I, and the subsequent restrictions on European immigrant labour opened up the factories to Southern black workers. By moving North to Detroit blacks obtained political rights as well as the material improvement denied them in the South. There developed a concentration of black labour in the automobile industry, and while blacks shared in the success of the industry in the form of high wages, they were also vulnerable to its economic swings. It was from such vulnerability and Detroit's institutionalised racism in housing, recreational facilities, religion, education and healthcare, that the black community, of all classes, had, in the main, to provide for itself. The alternative, of confronting discrimination head-on through independent industrial trade unionism and through assertive political mobilisation was not pursued until the late 1930s.
Thomas's book provides us with a well-written and useful account of a permanent and sizeable minority in a large industrial city and its efforts to overcome discrimination and disadvantage. Probably, because of its main industry, more books, articles and studies have focused upon Detroit than on any other city in the world, yet many of them have failed to include blacks as a significant group in the industry's and the city's development - Fine, Meyer, Nevins and Hill, for example. Although blacks have received attention elsewhere (Peterson, Reuther, Meier & Rudwick), Thomas provides us with a welcome account which is both more focused and yet at the same time more comprehensive than others. To this end he devotes a large chapter to the Ford company and its relationships with blacks as employees, and with black community leaders and institutions. The stress on the ambivalence of approaches within the black community as between, on the one hand, white paternalism, black capitalism, and the Republican Party, and between industrial trade unionism and the Democratic Party on the other, is especially well developed in the Ford chapter. It was the wavering support for Ford by his relatively well-treated black employees which in 1942 removed the last obstacle to the United Auto Workers' victory, and allowed the union and the CIO to consolidate their positions within large scale manufacturing for the following three decades or so.
The only criticism of substance is that of the omission from the study of another significant group who also shaped events and attitudes in Detroit: Southern whites, the `suitcase brigade'. To unionise blacks, the UAW leadership not only had to contend with Henry Ford and other fiercely anti-union employers but also elements within its own membership who often mounted wildcat strikes or threatened to defect to AFL unions because of the UAW's progressive stance on race. The substantial southern white element at the UAW grassroots were not only volatile and disruptive to union building, they must have convinced many blacks that northern industrial unions were, after all, little different from the southern AFL craft unions with their Jim Crow locals. On this point, although later than the period covered by Thomas, by 1950 some 60 per cent of all southern migrants to the mid-West states were white. This, and much other detail on population movements and economic change in what is now known as the Rust Belt is to be found in Teaford's book Cities of the Heartland - The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest.
Teaford traces two hundred years of economic and social development in the Midwest or `Heartland' states and cities. Many of the latter - Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Toledo, Flint, Akron, Cincinnati - are cities which are now the main centres of industrial decline as encapsulated in the term `Rust Belt'. It is a broad-ranging book which, through the use of many non-economic and non-demographic indicators of Midwest society (literature, architecture, painting), attempts to place the region in its relationship with the rest of the United States.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the region was attractive to employers because it was largely non-union, was politically conservative, and, unlike the East, possessed an unambiguously pro-enterprise culture. Before the Civil War the Heartland cities amounted to the nation's frontier, seen in cultural as well as economic terms as being inferior and marginal to the East. By the 1920s and 1930s the industrial Midwest saw itself as being the core of the American economy, consequently, as having the self-confidence to challenge the cultural supremacy of the East and as therefore being the heart of America. In literature and architecture (the Prairie School) a short-lived challenge was made to New York and Boston. By the end of the Second World War, though, it was apparent that the East had reasserted its dominance of the nation's cultural life and that the centre of economic vitality was moving west and south. The Midwest's sense of being more truly American than the effete, cosmopolitan east and the less developed and primitive west was short lived:
"In the decades before the Civil War, the Heartland cities had shared a consciousness of the interior as frontier; by 1900 they shared a sense of the interior as central to American life; at the close of the 1970s they all feared an emerging vision of the interior as void" (p.xi).
The Midwest has been important in terms of working-class development, in spite of the region's attractiveness to employers as a non-union area. The strong strand of egalitarianism in Midwest culture did provide some basis for socialism and anarchism (Chicago and Milwaukee especially), but the other strand, of individual success exemplified in the rise of Abraham Lincoln, was in the end strongest. However, and more relevantly, the industrial Midwest gave birth to the industrial union movement in the 1930s, and four decades or so underpinned the unprecedented collective strength of American workers. Teaford provides much well-researched detail on the rise and fall of the automobile and associated industries, and the patterns of migration which occurred as a consequence.
Ironically, the reason for the rapidity of the Midwest's decline from Heartland to Rust Belt was simply the obverse of its success in the 1920s and 1930s. The region has been too dependent upon a single industry. Industry failure has seen many factory closures and massive job losses in auto cities like Detroit, Anderson and Flint, and in associated cities like Gary (steel), Akron (tyres), Youngstown (steel) and Saint Louis (glass). The impact of decline is spelled out in the case of Detroit:
"In the late 1980s Detroit's inventory of abandoned buildings grew at the rate of twenty-four hundred a year, and in the last six months of 1989 the city's busy wrecking crews levelled three thousand abandoned structures ... In 1989 some Detroiters sighted tumble-weed rolling down the city's deserted streets. Others spotted a ring-necked pheasant stalking downtown, the city's many vacant lots with their high weeds providing good cover for these game birds" (p.228).
The combination of closure and automation of those factories which have remained has meant the weakening of union organisation and bargaining power in what has been the Heartland of the trade union movement as well. Production transferred to the rural Midwest or the Southern states has invariably meant lower pay and union-free factories for managers. Although America may be experiencing something of a modest manufacturing revival, in great part through Japanese investment, this is not likely to mean revival for the Midwest or for organised labour. For the Japanese, even more than American managers, prefer areas where unions are weak and the population overwhelmingly white and Republican. These characteristics were part of the original attraction of the Midwest for manufacturers, and laid the basis of the migration from the South. Time will tell whether the reverse migration of jobs and capital will eventually see the successful organising of labour forces in the South, the South West, and in Mexico. Whether the facts are positive or negative in terms of workers' jobs and incomes, Teaford's book provides much detail and sound analysis of the profound effects which executive decisions have on the lives of ordinary people and their communities.
References:
FINE, S., 1969, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937, University of Michigan Press.
MEIER, A. & RUDWICK, E., 1979, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, Oxford University Press.
MEYER, S., 1981, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921, State University of New York Press.
NEVINS, A. & HILL, F., 1962, Ford: Decline and Rebirth - 1933-1962, Scribner.
PETERSON, J., 1987, American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933, State University of New York Press.
REUTHER, V., 1979, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW, Houghton Mifflin & Co.
Peter Cook
University of Plymouth
