In 1946, a Detroit newspaper legend published the first of two books* that would tell his story as it was entwined with that of the city in which he lived.
His name was Malcolm W. Bingay. Over almost half a century, he worked at three of Detroit's newspapers: first at the long-defunct Today, then at The Detroit News from 1904 to 1928. From 1930 to the 1950s he was editorial director of the Detroit Free Press. This was the great era of sometimes great newspapers.
Bingay watched as what he once characterized as "a parochial village" became the Silicon Valley of its day, only with smoke-belching chimneys instead of squeaky-clean shops. Bingay's career began before Henry Ford rolled the first Model T out of his little factory on Piquette Street and ended after Dwight Eisenhower became president.
As is now seen with the perspective of history, Detroit's was a very brief but tumultuous rise to eminence -- 1903 to 1928 -- followed by a long, slow descent into economic and social devastation beginning with the Great Depression.
Detroit endured and profited by both world wars as it had gathered the best technological know-how to itself in the automobile industry. It retooled after Pearl Harbor in a matter of weeks so that its factories could make tanks, trucks, aircraft and even highly complicated gyroscopes for submarines, which made the difference in the sea war with Japan and Germany. It reversed that process after V-J Day.
The American labor movement was perfected on the floors of those factories. The United Automobile Workers fundamentally created the American middle class with negotiated demands for decent hourly wages, eventually health care and other hard-won work rules that redeemed the spirit-killing effect of the assembly line.
I was born in St. Mary's Hospital in Detroit on Feb. 4, 1939 -- exactly 37 years after Charles A. Lindbergh was born in a house less than two miles away. In 1939, Detroit was just about to emerge from the Great Depression, but not quite. It had found itself the adopted home of thousands of African Americans who had come to take the factory jobs of the men Michigan sent to accompany Gen. John J. Pershing in the American Expeditionary Force in 1917.
After the first world war, the survivors returned triumphant and claimed the jobs they had left, leaving the African Americans on the street looking for work, some of them taking low-wage jobs in the 23 new hotels that had sprung up in Michigan's own boomtown from 1911 to 1927. Open housing as yet a distant dream, African Americans were crowded into what was known as Black Bottom (named neither for a skin color nor a body part) or Paradise Valley, which became a vibrant center in the development of American jazz and blues. Had there been a Barry Gordy on hand at the time, Motown may have been born 40 years earlier.
In 1925, a prominent African-American physician purchased a home in an all-white neighborhood on the city's east side, and the predictable uproar ensued with a shooting of a white protestor and what became the infamous Ossian Sweet case. If you want to know more, read Kevin Boyle's masterful account in his book Arc of Justice.** Suffice it to say that, with the Sweet case, Detroit had bought into a nasty racial conflict that would endure to this very day.
As the city rose to the challenge of the Second World War, its manufacturing plants were again employing African Americans to replace whites that enlisted or were drafted. When labor shortages occurred, more blacks came from the South along with Appalachian whites to join Rosie the Riveter in the 24/7 manufacture of war materiel. When the surviving troops returned and later were economically empowered by the G.I. Bill, they reclaimed their jobs, moved to the suburbs and became Republicans.
Freeways were built and shopping malls erected in several locations on the periphery of the city. Downtown Detroit over the decades became a ghost town. Its residential neighborhoods built to hold more than a million people became a thicket of abandoned and dilapidated housing in a giant slum where shootings, home invasions and carjackings have become just what happens at night -- and sometimes in the light of day.
This is what Bingay wrote in 1946 about Detroit at the dawn of the post-war era: "What the Detroit of 50 years from now will be we do not know. But one thing is certain: It will be dynamic. It is a destiny we cannot escape." And so it seemed then.
Now, 68 years later, the city is bankrupt, its retirees are threatened with a diminution of their pensions and the city's priceless art collection is the target of panting creditors. Gunshots are heard day and night. Half its streets and avenues are unlighted whilst the downtown struggles to come back as buildings from its glorious 1920s are being saved one at a time from the wrecking ball and restored.
Meanwhile the city's school system is a bad joke, as is the city government itself. Mr. Bingay would be appalled. I can only hope that in 2014, under a new mayor known for his turnaround capabilities, the city's slide into irreversible ruin can be halted. The task appears to be Sisyphean in nature. Old Sisyphus himself might choose a different rock and a different hill.
*Detroit Is My Own Home Town. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1946
**Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. New York: Henry Holt, 2004
