Detroit: Touring Empire's Ruins.
This article appeared in The Nation June 23, 2009. While The Nation is usually way out there as far as I'm concerned, I thought this was a good story about what has happened to Detroit and decided to Excerpt it for you. This is a long article so I've only posted the parts regarding Detroit itself. As an aside I went to law school in Toledo, Ohio { a town also not in great shape} and since Detroit was only about an hour away, used to go up there all the time to Tiger's baseball and Redwing's hockey games. Even then the sections of Detroit we used to pass through on the highway looked like parts of Berlin circa 1945-47. A doctor buddy of mine who did part of his residency in inner city Detroit tells of being chased by packs of dogs. {Excerpt}
Touring Empire's Ruins: From Detroit to the Amazon
By Greg Grandin, June 23, 2009 This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
The empire ends with a pullout. Not, as many supposed a few years ago, from Iraq....But from Detroit. ..... Of course, the real evacuation of the Motor City began decades ago, when Ford, General Motors and Chrysler started to move more and more of their operations out of the downtown area to harder to unionize rural areas and suburbs and, finally, overseas. Even as the economy boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, fifty Detroit residents were already packing up and leaving their city every day. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Detroit could count tens of thousands of empty lots and over 15,000 abandoned homes. Stunning Beaux Arts and modernist buildings were left deserted to return to nature, their floors and roofs covered by switchgrass. They now serve as little more than ornate birdhouses.
In mythological terms, however, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace of storied American capitalism......Forget the possession of a colony or the bomb, in the second half of the twentieth century, the real marker of a world power was the ability to make a precision V-8.
There have been dissections aplenty of what went wrong with the US auto industry, as well as fond reminiscences about Detroit's salad days......Few of these post-mortems have conveyed, however, just how crucial Detroit was to US foreign policy--not just as the anchor of America's high-tech, high-profit export economy, but as a confirmation of our sense of ourselves as the world's premier power......
......Detroit not only supplied a continual stream of symbols of America's cultural power but offered the organizational know-how necessary to run a vast industrial enterprise like a car company--or an empire. Pundits love to quote GM President "Engine" Charlie Wilson, who once famously said that he thought what was good for America "was good for General Motors, and vice versa." It's rarely noted, however, that Wilson made his remark at his Senate confirmation hearings to be Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of defense. At the Pentagon, Wilson would impose GM's corporate bureaucratic model on the armed forces, modernizing them to fight the cold war.
After GM, it was Ford's turn to take the reins {Former Ford CEO) Robert McNamara.....used Ford's integrated "systems management" approach to wage "mechanized, dehumanizing slaughter," as historian Gabriel Kolko once put it, from the skies over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Perhaps, then, we should think of the ruins of Detroit as our Roman Forum......Among the most imposing is Henry Ford's Highland Park factory, shuttered since the late 1950s. Dubbed the Crystal Palace for its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, it was here that Ford perfected assembly-line production, building up to 9,000 Model Ts a day--a million by 1915--catapulting the United States light-years ahead of industrial Europe.
It was also here that Ford first paid his workers five dollars a day, creating one of the fastest growing and most prosperous working-class neighborhoods in all of America, filled with fine arts-and-crafts-style homes. Today, Highland Park looks like a war zone, its streets covered with shattered glass and lined with burnt-out houses. More than 30 percent of its population lives in poverty, and you don't want to know the unemployment numbers (more than 20 percent) or the median yearly income (less than $20,000)......
In mythological terms, however, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace of storied American capitalism......Forget the possession of a colony or the bomb, in the second half of the twentieth century, the real marker of a world power was the ability to make a precision V-8.
There have been dissections aplenty of what went wrong with the US auto industry, as well as fond reminiscences about Detroit's salad days......Few of these post-mortems have conveyed, however, just how crucial Detroit was to US foreign policy--not just as the anchor of America's high-tech, high-profit export economy, but as a confirmation of our sense of ourselves as the world's premier power......
......Detroit not only supplied a continual stream of symbols of America's cultural power but offered the organizational know-how necessary to run a vast industrial enterprise like a car company--or an empire. Pundits love to quote GM President "Engine" Charlie Wilson, who once famously said that he thought what was good for America "was good for General Motors, and vice versa." It's rarely noted, however, that Wilson made his remark at his Senate confirmation hearings to be Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of defense. At the Pentagon, Wilson would impose GM's corporate bureaucratic model on the armed forces, modernizing them to fight the cold war.
After GM, it was Ford's turn to take the reins {Former Ford CEO) Robert McNamara.....used Ford's integrated "systems management" approach to wage "mechanized, dehumanizing slaughter," as historian Gabriel Kolko once put it, from the skies over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Perhaps, then, we should think of the ruins of Detroit as our Roman Forum......Among the most imposing is Henry Ford's Highland Park factory, shuttered since the late 1950s. Dubbed the Crystal Palace for its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, it was here that Ford perfected assembly-line production, building up to 9,000 Model Ts a day--a million by 1915--catapulting the United States light-years ahead of industrial Europe.
It was also here that Ford first paid his workers five dollars a day, creating one of the fastest growing and most prosperous working-class neighborhoods in all of America, filled with fine arts-and-crafts-style homes. Today, Highland Park looks like a war zone, its streets covered with shattered glass and lined with burnt-out houses. More than 30 percent of its population lives in poverty, and you don't want to know the unemployment numbers (more than 20 percent) or the median yearly income (less than $20,000)......
......Ford preached with a pastor's confidence his one true idea: ever-increasing productivity combined with ever increasing pay would both relieve human drudgery and create prosperous working-class communities, with corporate profits dependent on the continual expansion of consumer demand. "High wages," as Ford put it, to create "large markets." By the late 1920s, Fordism--as this idea came to be called--was synonymous with Americanism, envied the world over for having apparently humanized industrial capitalism.
But Fordism contained within itself the seeds of its own undoing: the breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets. Goods could be made in one place and sold somewhere else, removing the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they made.
In Rome, the ruins came after the empire fell. In the United States, the destruction of Detroit happened even as the country was rising to new heights as a superpower.
Ford sensed this unraveling early on and responded to it, trying at least to slow it, in ever more eccentric ways. He established throughout Michigan a series of decentralized "village-industries" designed to balance farm and factory work and rescue small-town America. Yet his pastoral communes were no match for the raw power of the changes he had played such a large part in engendering......
But Fordism contained within itself the seeds of its own undoing: the breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets. Goods could be made in one place and sold somewhere else, removing the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they made.
In Rome, the ruins came after the empire fell. In the United States, the destruction of Detroit happened even as the country was rising to new heights as a superpower.
Ford sensed this unraveling early on and responded to it, trying at least to slow it, in ever more eccentric ways. He established throughout Michigan a series of decentralized "village-industries" designed to balance farm and factory work and rescue small-town America. Yet his pastoral communes were no match for the raw power of the changes he had played such a large part in engendering......
posted by CR English at 5:56 AM
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