By Bill McGraw
During the eight years Dennis Archer was mayor, from 1994 to 2001, the national and local economy improved, but the decades-old forces of decline continued to drive away people and jobs from Detroit, and the city’s international stature remained trapped in a downward spiral. When Archer decided not to run for re-election, he left behind a stack of black briefing books that detailed the sad state of affairs in nearly every city department.
Yet throughout his reign, Archer repeatedly called Detroit “a world-class city,” though that was a tough sell given the circumstances.
The book is being released next Tuesday.
Archer was hardly alone in using a slogan as a civic cheerleading device. Jerome Cavanagh, Detroit’s mayor during the 1960s, never stopped preaching that Detroit “was a city on the move.” The world generally believed Detroit was going places when Cavanagh was mayor, but where was it really going in 1963? The destination was not where Cavanagh and others believed, as we all know now.
For contemporary readers, Detroit’s descending trajectory is always looming in the background of an interesting new book by David Maraniss, a Detroit native who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post associate editor and biographer of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi.
“Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story,” is a biography of Detroit in the year 1963, plus a few months in 1962 and 1964. That’s an era when Detroit’s status was rarely in question. The city of 52 years ago had about a million more people than the city today. It almost landed the 1968 summer Olympics, and still sported the reputation as the world’s foremost creator of desirable cars. It was filled with energy, and its homegrown start-up, a black-owned record company, was revolutionizing pop music.
Among its alpha males were such nationally known figures as Cavanagh, Ford Motor boss Henry Ford II; UAW President Walter Reuther; the Rev. C.L. Franklin, the civil rights leader and father of Aretha, and Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.
In 1963, big cars seemed resurgent in the cocksure auto industry, Maraniss writes, and Ford Motor spent 1963 preparing to launch the fabled Mustang. Reuther was a regular visitor to the Oval Office and a power and funder behind the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the civil rights movement. Cavanagh, an Irish Catholic Democrat and bon vivant, just like President John F. Kennedy, became known for efforts to deal with poverty and simmering racial conflicts.
Franklin, a preacher famous across black America, took the lead in organizing the massive march that King led on Woodward Avenue, and Gordy’s West Grand Boulevard hit machine was starting to peak: Gordy was becoming wealthy and Maraniss writes that his company could compete with the best in New York and Los Angeles. Yet three of his greatest acts – the Supremes, Temptations and Four Tops – had yet to attain their eventual success.
The city was taken so seriously around the nation and the world that in 1963 it came in second, to Mexico City, in competition to host the ‘68 summer games.
When the annual Detroit Auto Show opened, in October 1962, “The Motor City had an intoxicating buzz,” according to Maraniss. The TV networks focused on the show, Look magazine devoted its cover to the wide-mouthed grilles of the 1963 cars, and the city’s elite kicked off the week by attending an invitation-only concert featuring the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at Ford Auditorium.
He writes: “Detroit wanted to think of itself as a city of national and international stature, the center of the modern industrial world, and this was the celebration of its importance, the auto-culture variation of Hollywood’s Academy Awards, New York’s Fashion Week, and Washington’s White House Correspondents Dinner.”
Despite the global significance of the city and its leaders, a multi-faceted crisis was slowly building. The plant closings, automation, layoffs and white flight of the 1950s had set the stage for the emergency to come, and Maraniss sprinkles foreshadowings throughout the book. The 1967 riot/rebellion was just four years away, and even during the full-blown hubris of the 1962 auto show, he writes, for the first time, half of the vehicles being made in the free world were manufactured outside of the United States. Volkswagen was coming on strong; auto show organizers brought in its CEO to address the Detroit Economic Club.
More ominously, a researcher at Wayne State University, Albert J. Meyer, released a little-noticed report that predicted a dire future for the city. Titled “The Population Revolution in Detroit,” it anticipated the coming drop in residents, the rise of the black community and the shriveling of the tax base.
Referring to the city’s web of freeways, urban renewal attempts and growing suburban sprawl, Maraniss writes: “Detroit was being threatened by its own design of concrete and metal and fuel and movement, and also by the American dilemma of race…When Cavanagh and others thought Detroit’s future was to be envied, when they were striving to land the Olympics and earn the imprimatur of a world-class city, the sociologists at Wayne State were analyzing data and trends and noticed something troubling. They saw the shadows forming.”
One of the most chilling forewarnings was the police killing of Cynthia Scott, a prostitute who was well known amid the street life of John R north of downtown. Two young cops, driving what was known inside the department as the “whore car” for arrested street walkers, attempted to take her into custody. But when she resisted, one of the officers shot her, in the back.
The city’s black leaders staged protests for days. The killing took place less than a month after 125,000 people had walked down Woodward for civil rights, and the incident shattered the police commissioner, George Edwards, a labor activist whom Cavangh had hired to improve relations between cops and African Americans.
As an author, Maraniss might not be a household name, but his previous books and newspaper career have made him a VIP in the literary and journalism worlds. “Once in a Great City,” set to be published next week, undoubtedly will attract notice and focus even more attention on Detroit. With all that’s been written about the city in the past 20 years, it manages to be a unique and absorbing take.
Even Detroiters who lived through the 1960s will find Maraniss’ account enlightening. As often as authors have told the story of Gordy and the rise of Motown, Maraniss still captures the vitality and enterprise on West Grand Boulevard in a fresh way and even comes up with another reason why black Detroiters seemed to have a lot of musical ability: the family piano. Maraniss says it was available to the black working class and middle class, thanks to good salaries, single-family-homes and Grinnell Brothers, the Detroit-based company that, he writes, was the largest retail music emporium in the nation.
He is equally adept at capturing the white-run city’s complex racial dynamics at a time when black leaders were becoming more militant and clashing with each other over the proper level of assertiveness.
Maraniss, right, who lived on the west side before his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, when he was 6, is a
David Maraniss
skillful storyteller, and his interpretation of events in Detroit a half century ago is well founded; he cites a number of the academics whose work has set the tone for the discussion on the complicated forces that caused the city to decline.
Maraniss stumbles a couple of times, though, in providing details about the city and its people. He refers to West Grand Boulevard as “West Grand,” which sounds jarring to Detroiters, who for generations have shortened the name of that street to “the boulevard.” More seriously, he writes that old Henry Ford died “in a Detroit hospital named for him,” when all historical accounts put the place of death as Ford’s Dearborn mansion. And I’m still trying to figure out the location of the “Fairlane Inn” – where Maraniss says an important meeting took place concerning the Mustang. The closest I can come is the Fairlane Room of the well known Dearborn Inn, which is located at the epicenter of Ford Country in Dearborn.
Those are quibbles. Maraniss will only add to his reputation with “Once in a Great City.” It’s a good read if your interest is only to visit Detroit’s remarkable recent past. It’s even a better read if you are interested in the city’s extraordinary devolution. In either case, it’s a story that is haunting, thought-provoking and, in the end, sad.
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, by David Maraniss. 441 pages. Simon & Shuster. $32.50.
Bill McGraw is a staff writer for Bridge Magazine and a co-founder of Deadline Detroit.
