Introduction

Reassessing the Fate of Postwar Cities, Politics, and Labor

He was arbitrarily fired. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t beg The Man but he asked him rather specifically, “What do you mean fired? Just for asking about my job?” And The Man said, “That’s right. You don’t ask you do what you’re told. You’re fired!” The brother went out and he got his gun and he did some firing. Many people thought this was a deplorable situation. I don’t; I think it practical, because we have forewarned that corporation.1

In the wee hours of July 23, 1967, urbanites took to the streets of Detroit in an uprising that stunned the nation. For days, Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods burned, and virtually overnight the city came to symbolize America’s inability to solve vexing problems of race and poverty. Almost exactly three years later, a thirty-five-year-old African American autoworker named James Johnson Jr. walked into the Detroit auto plant where he worked and proceeded to shoot and kill two foremen and one die setter in retaliation for numerous racially based offenses that he believed he had long endured. These murders brought the Motor City into the national spotlight once again.2

Johnson’s actions on July 15, 1970, might have been quickly forgotten after a brief spate of media attention; on the surface they were no different from other violent acts committed before and after in Detroit. But these particular killings touched a nerve in the city as few others had. Even though the fires of the 1967 rebellion had long been extinguished, to civic and labor leaders seeking to rebuild Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in Detroit, James Johnson’s sensational act signified that black Detroiters had regained little confidence in liberal programs for eradicating racial discrimination in the city or the plants. Indeed, to much of the city’s black community, Johnson’s act seemed one of intense frustration. It was a clear warning to city and labor leaders that, as long as conditions for Detroit’s African Americans remained intolerable, violence was inevitable. To many in the city’s white neighborhoods, on the other hand, Johnson’s violence seemed simply to substantiate a long-held suspicion that urban blacks were determined to destroy the city and its workplaces. And to still other Motor City residents—both black and white revolutionaries seeking a fundamental overhaul of civic and labor relations—Johnson’s act was politically symbolic and worthy of Che Guevara or Mao Tse-tung.

That a desperate figure like Johnson should be so familiar by the early 197os illustrates how extraordinarily complex both race relations and politics had become in Detroit since World War II. The bitter disagreement about what lessons might be learned from Johnson’s killing spree signifies that the Motor City and its auto plants remained in the grips of a severe racial and political crisis long after the bloody days of July 1967. Detroit’s future was still uncertain.

While Johnson is clearly not an Everyman, his participation in the Second Great Migration to Detroit during the 1950s, as well as his experiences in Detroit’s auto plants, courtrooms, and city streets during the 1960s and 1970s, were certainly understood by many Motor City residents and plant workers. Johnson’s story is emblematic of the complexity that was Detroit and the urban North writ large between 1945 and 1985. As such, it is woven throughout this book.3

By 1970, the soulful sounds of Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It through the Grapevine” and Diana Ross’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” filtered from the radios of cars and homes across the United States. But while many Americans might have related to the tales of heartbreak and romance told in these Motown tunes, such popular ballads struck an even deeper chord with Detroit’s listeners. Indeed, by 1970, the Motor City grapevine was buzzing with ideas for creating a completely new and different urban center, one in which the seemingly insurmountable mountain of problems faced by Detroit since World War II might finally be scaled. Out of the tumultuous 1960s, Detroit had generated powerful hopes for an urban transformation. Still, there was by no means a consensus about the future.

By 1970, African American Detroiters were more determined than ever to make their city a metropolis in which they at last could enjoy the promised, but long delayed, equality of opportunity. Simultaneously, many white city residents were just as determined to return to the “halcyon days” preceding World War II, when their position of dominance seemed far more secure. Significantly, however, these visions of a different Detroit were fragmented along political as well as racial lines. In 1970, even as liberalism was declining as a force in national politics, many Detroiters, both black and white, yearned for the Great Society to triumph in the Motor City. There were yet others, also both black and white, who shared a far more revolutionary dream. With still other residents, overwhelmingly white, advocating conservative law-and-order policy for the future city, Detroit in the early 1970s reflected how extraordinarily complex both race and politics had become in the United States since 1945.

James Johnson Jr. at his arraignment for murder, July 16,1970. Corbis.

Because these contradictory visions had emerged with such force by the late 1960s, for many years the long-term fate of this major American city remained unpredictable. In fact, well into the early 1970s it was far from clear whether this city would exist as a white-dominated center of racial segregation and political conservatism, a place where Great Society liberals had finally achieved both integration and prosperity, an island of black nationalist and white leftist revolution, or an oasis of opportunity for the black middle class. Because each side of Detroit’s multifaceted political constituency believed so firmly in its vision of the future, the Motor City as well as its motor plants became virtual war zones between 1967 and 1973.

This book chronicles the social, economic, and political origins and conditions of this crisis-ridden period, during which Detroit’s self-appointed architects drew their detailed blueprints for the future city and its workplaces and fought tirelessly to implement their ideas. In light of the complex political and racial alliances that fueled this urban and labor war at home—and the mixed outcomes of its bitterly fought battles—this book argues more broadly for rethinking our received wisdom about the fate of postwar American cities, liberal politics, and the U.S. labor movement.

* * * *

Because America’s inner cities and its national political climate have undergone such a dramatic transformation since World War II, and because the American labor movement as well has changed, scholars have recently questioned exactly how the past became such a different present. What had occurred in previous decades to cause America’s inner cities to degenerate from centers of prosperity, growth, and vibrancy into impoverished, shrinking, and decaying postindustrial wastelands by the 1980s? What had happened to the heady days of the Great Society, in which politicians and their constituents could imagine, and thus were willing to fund, a better world—a world in which poverty and discrimination would be unknown? Indeed, how had Americans become so hostile to the progressive dreams that they had once held dear, and so willing to embrace the moral, racial, and fiscal conservatism of the Reagan Right? And, finally, how did the great industrial labor movement of the 1930s, which had played such a pivotal role in shaping the economic and social order during World War II, become such a pale reflection of its former self by the 1980s?

The scholarly attempts to make sense of cities, politics, and labor after 1980 have clearly provided much valuable insight into earlier postwar decades. A literature exists, for example, that delves into the state of urban centers during the 1960s, and it allows one to appreciate just how disenchanted many urban whites had in fact become with a civil rights and War on Poverty-informed liberalism. It demonstrates as well that the black militants of the decade, far from being irrelevant, were key players in the production of postwar politics.4 Another body of work traces the roots of urban and political crisis back to the 1950s, and it is more valuable still. By highlighting the contentious racial politics that antedated the Great Society, it goes further toward explaining why many urban whites became so hostile to civil rights a decade later, and also why poor innercity residents engaged in civic uprisings.5 And by showing that the ongoing process of deindustrialization actually began in the 1950s, this scholarship has provided a more nuanced interpretation of such important postwar phenomena as white flight and union decline than has the scholarship that focuses exclusively on the tumultuous years of the Great Society. Finally, labor scholars have also shed muchneeded light on the tremendous odds that the American working class has faced in its battle to be heard, and stay unionized, in every decade after World War II.

But significantly, the very questions that initiated new scholarly examinations of America’s recent past are themselves heavily laden with certain problematic assumptions about the character of cities, politics, and labor circa 1980. One key assumption is that the most startling and important fact about American inner cities by the 1980s was that whites had completely abandoned them. Further, when urban centers lost their white residents, they became largely irrelevant social and political entities. Another key premise underlying many new examinations of the postwar period is that the liberal agenda of the Great Society had been fully repudiated in the United States by the 1980s. With so many Americans joining the ranks of the Republican party by that decade, liberalism was surely dead. And finally, a powerful assumption flourishes that the American labor movement’s desperate situation by 1980, while notable, was largely unavoidable.

In fact, the 1980s was a far more complex decade than scholars have assumed. It is undeniable that when whites left America’s inner cities, many of them became centers of vast poverty and social malaise. It is also the case, however, that by that decade a great many cities had become places where African Americans, and more specifically the black middle class, finally could experience real social, economic, and political opportunity. Similarly, while American liberalism appears to have collapsed by 1980, this was only partially so. Scores of white urbanites did abandon the tenets of Kennedy-Johnson liberalism during the mid-to-late 1970s. This same decade, however, also saw the most dramatic rise of black liberal political power that has occurred in the entire twentieth century. Indeed, the principles as well as practices of 1960s-style liberalism were embraced, championed, and even expanded on in numerous major U.S. cities that came under African American political control in the 1970s.6 And finally, while the American labor movement was clearly in serious trouble by 1980, its dramatic decline was not inevitable. Labor’s fate was not decided, as some have suggested, by its move toward greater bureaucratization during the 1930s, nor by its anticommunism and racial conservatism during the 1940s and 1950s. Neither was labor merely a passive victim of economic circumstance in the decades that followed.7 Key choices that union leaders themselves made, long after the 1950s had passed, played a pivotal role in undermining their own power by the time that corporations initiated their most vicious antilabor initiatives during the Reagan Era.8

The failure to recognize the full complexity of American urban centers and politics during the 1980s, as well as the internal genesis of labor movement decline by that decade, has vast implications for the story told and not told by recent scholars of the postwar period. Efforts to explain the dramatic white exodus from inner cities, and their simultaneous rejection of postwar liberalism, for example, have led to an overemphasis on the American whites hostile to both African Americans and liberalism in preceding decades. Of course, not every white urbanite in the 1950s, the 1960s, or the 1970s and 1980s opposed racial equality or rejected the premises of liberalism. Likewise, while urban blacks were too often victimized by racist whites, they of course fought back. Indeed, the determined efforts of urban blacks to achieve greater racial equality, political representation, and economic opportunity from 1945 onward, in combination with the effective activism of urban whites sympathetic to civil rights and hostile to political conservatism, suggests that when white racial conservatives eventually abandoned inner cities, they did so as losers—not victors—of the intense war for urban control that had raged since World War II. Indeed it was the African American middle class, supported by hopeful poor and working class blacks as well as by more than a few white progressives that had triumphed in this drawn out civic conflict. Having taken electoral control of numerous urban centers in the 1970s, this black middle class not only sought to rebuild many conflictweary cities, it sought to resurrect them along self-consciously liberal lines. By the 1980s, America’s inner cities still were very much alive, and many remained islands of liberal vision, perhaps dampened but hardly washed away by the vast sea of conservatism swirling around them.

If sounding the death knell for American inner cities and liberalism too precipitously has obscured much about the postwar period, so have popular assumptions about why the American labor movement suffered such losses by the 1980s. To be sure, once unions traded in community-based activism for more hierarchical modes for conducting labor relations in the 1930s, worker militancy was constrained. And clearly the internal union purges of the 1940s and 1950s sapped union strength as well. It is also undeniably the case that American workers and the unions that represented them were buffeted by corporate and market forces beyond their control throughout the postwar period. Yet during key battles that took place between unions and companies, and internally, during the 1960s and 1970s—over shop floor racism, working conditions, and worker representation—union leaders themselves eliminated stillviable prospects for shaping workers’ destiny. The proposition that labor’s future was doomed virtually from the moment that it gained legal standing, or that its fate at the hands of corporate America in the 1980s was essentially inevitable, has too easily absolved the movement and its officers of very real responsibility for their own plight.

And if the state of cities and politics, as well as the fate of the labor movement, by the 1980s was more complicated than some have assumed it to be, so was the postwar period as a whole. American history has never been simply black versus white, mainly because for every racial divide, there have always been political bridges linking whites to African Americans. In every postwar decade, black and white Americans gravitated not just to the middle and the right of the ideological spectrum but also to the left. And, as the story of cities such as Detroit demonstrate, the Left, Right, and Center equally shaped the contours of what cities, politics, and the labor movement became by the 1980s.

In fact Detroit is a fine place to test such abstract claims about the complexities of postwar cities, politics, and labor. Not only is Detroit one of America’s largest cities; it is also home to the American auto industry and a major industrial union, the United Automobile Workers (UAW). Throughout the postwar period, Detroit’s auto industry set trends for management strategy across the nation, just as the UAW set the bargaining agenda for scores of other American unions. The massive wartime and postwar Second Great Migration and the dramatic transformation of civic and workplace life that it touched off was as important in Detroit as in any other northern city. Like the rest of the urban North, Detroit attempted to come to terms with its new biracial character during the 1950s and, as a result of failing to do this, became a hotbed of political activism in the 1960s for George Wallace supporters, Great Society liberals, black nationalists, and black and white revolutionaries alike. Detroit—arguably more than cities usually thought to epitomize the radical 1960s, such as Berkeley—witnessed militant leftwing activism in virtually every realm of civic and labor life. Detroit experienced the same intense conflicts over housing, education, and law and order as those that raged nationally during this decade, but it also exploded in countless battles at the point of production. And like most northern urban centers in the postwar period, Detroit endured the deleterious effects of both white flight and deindustrialization.

It is fair to say that Detroit has held symbolic meaning for America in every decade since World War II. In the 1940s, this city represented America’s vision of itself as an “arsenal of democracy.” In the 1950s, it exemplified the best of postwar American consumerism and productivity; in the 1960s, it was deemed a “model” Great Society city; in the 1970s, it was called the “murder capital” of the then-troubled country; and by the 1980s, it represented the worst of what America had become after decades of social and political turmoil.

The Motor City has also been time and again connected to America’s northern urban and labor experience by the historic figures that passed through it, and the many famous and infamous events that it experienced. The nation witnessed one of its most brutal cases of hostility to neighborhood integration when Detroit residents attempted to prevent Dr. Ossian Sweet from moving into a white neighborhood in 1925. Dr. Sweet found a potent defender in famed attorney Clarence Darrow. In the 1930s, Detroit saw the founding of the Nation of Islam as well as America’s leading industrial union, the UAW. In 1943, Detroit experienced the nation’s worst race riot to date, but it also made national headlines as home to the world’s most famous black boxer, Joe Louis. During World War II, renowned black Marxist C. L. R. James made Detroit a base for his intellectual and political activities, while Detroit’s auto industry bolstered America’s military efforts abroad. In the 1950s, such nationally known figures as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Berry Gordy either came from or lived for a time in the Motor City; some worked for a time in Detroit’s auto plants as well. By the 1960s, Detroit became known around the world as “Motown,” after the recording label, and Detroit’s sound became the “Sound of Young America.” When Dr. King led a civil rights procession down Detroit’s Woodward Avenue in June 1963, America got a preview of the historic March on Washington. During the 1970s, when the international oil crisis began, the gasguzzling, hulking automobiles of Detroit were routinely featured in national news footage, either as they rolled off of local assembly lines or sat idling in gas station lines across the country. In 1980, Detroit held the dubious distinction of being the city chosen by the Republican party to hold its national convention that nominated presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

The postwar history of Detroit—both as “Every City” and as a fascinating urban center in its own right—is clearly a tale worth telling.9 By excavating the history of innercity Detroit and its labor movement, and by reexamining their respective fates as the twentieth century neared its close, this book demonstrates the following central claims: America’s urban centers did not merely waste away by the 1980s; political tensions among radicals, conservatives, and liberals after World War II shaped urban America as surely as did racial clashes; and finally the U.S. labor movement always had more power over its destiny than its leaders imagined.

Even more broadly, this study calls attention to the fact that when the urban North became a biracial society after the Second World War, it quickly became embroiled in the same political tensions and battles that the South had experienced for generations in labor and civic relations. And just as social and political crisis in the South had always been the product of vision rather than stagnation, so was the crisis-filled period in the North between 1967 and 1973 indicative of promise, not inevitable collapse. Given their brutality and high body counts, the battles to create a more just and equitable biracial South often yielded victories that were most costly to African Americans. The urban North’s struggle to come to terms with its biracial character proved to be equally vicious, and its African American victories as qualified and high-priced. But we do not see the major defeats suffered by white racial conservatives in the South as signaling that region’s demise. Neither should we view the ability of northern blacks to beat back the forces of white racial conservatism where they lived or their successful appropriation of the political agenda of white racial progressives as an unmitigated disaster heralding urban decay. By taking more seriously the possibilities embedded in postwar urban turmoil, we find that determination—not decline or decay—best characterizes our nation’s cities.