Responses to Deindustrialization, Segregation, and the Urban Crisis in Postwar Detroit, 1950-1970
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Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations January 2018 Envisioning The City Of The Future: Responses To Deindustrialization, Segregation, And The Urban Crisis In Postwar Detroit, 1950-1970 Andrew Hnatow Wayne State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Hnatow, Andrew, "Envisioning The City Of The Future: Responses To Deindustrialization, Segregation, And The Urban Crisis In Postwar Detroit, 1950-1970" (2018). Wayne State University Dissertations. 2104. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/2104 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. ENVISIONING THE CITY OF THE FUTURE: RESPONSES TO DEINDUSTRIALIZATION, SEGREGATION, AND THE URBAN CRISIS IN POSTWAR DETROIT, 1950-1970 by ANDREW HNATOW DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2018 MAJOR: HISTORY Approved By: __________________________________________ Advisor Date __________________________________________ __________________________________________ __________________________________________ __________________________________________ DEDICATION For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are. E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS If John Donne were correct, and no one is an island, than this is doubly true for a PhD student. My thanks to my advisor, Liz Faue, and to my committee members, Tracy Neumann, Janine Lanza, and John Pat Leary. My thanks to the many faculty members in the WSU Department of History and many outside of it, who helped me along the way. My thanks to my peers in the Departments of History and English, and the many more in and from places across North America, Europe, and West Africa, who helped me think through this project via presentations and conversations. I could not have finished this journey without the support of my family, who always show me anew what love means. I could not have done it without my friends, who enrich my life in ways I could never express in words. I never would have begun it except for those who showed me the fascination of history in high school and as an undergraduate. My final thanks and gratitude are to those who call Detroit home, past and present. Speramus meliora; resurgent cineribus. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication____________________________________________________________________ii Acknowledgements____________________________________________________________ iii Chapter 1 Introduction___________________________________________________________1 Chapter 2 “Ghost Towns in the Very Near Future”: Industrial Decentralization and Working- Class Organization in Suburban Detroit in the 1950s__________________________________39 Chapter 3 “This Potent, Though Invisible, Barrier”: Housing Segregation and Civil Rights in Suburban Detroit, 1943-973 _____________________________________________________81 Chapter 4 The City That Might Be: Doxiadis and The Urban Detroit Area Research Project, 1965-1970__________________________________________________________________119 Chapter 5 From Detroit to Washington: The Federal Response to the Urban Crisis and the Fight for Model Cities, 1966-1970____________________________________________________163 Chapter 6 The Urban Imaginary of the Great Society, 1967-1968________________________213 Chapter 7 Epilogue___________________________________________________________255 References__________________________________________________________________261 Abstract____________________________________________________________________274 Autobiographical Statement____________________________________________________276 iv 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The crisis of Fordism rapidly or simultaneously became the crisis of the Fordist city. W.F. Fever1 There have been many Detroits over the past one hundred years. There has been the city of Henry Ford, of the assembly line, and of five dollar days. There was the Motor City, the world capital of automobiles, suburbanization, highways, and a working class with middle class remuneration. Or there was Motown, where glamor, music, and fame ruled supreme, regardless of the color of one’s skin. There was, too, the model city of race relations in the United States. With 1967 came the Detroit of civil unrest that may be, depending on the beholder, a riot, an uprising, or a rebellion. Then there is the city of industrial ruins, the way paved by decades of deindustrialization and disinvestment, followed by the murder capital of crisis, crime, and violence. Finally, there is the empty city, an urban space perceived to be devoid of residents. A place of fear, of abandonment, which all-to-easily elides with the revitalization fantasies which paint the city as a blank slate, free for the taking. During World War II, Detroit, the Motor City, claimed the mantle of the “Arsenal of Democracy,” even as it began to encounter the costs of rapid growth and mass industrial production. By 1950, with the Second World War receding into memory, many began to image the future of Detroit in different ways. Some had visions of broad and stable homeownership and employment; others styled futuristic renderings of driverless cars and manufacturing facilities contained within mountains. Very few people in 1950, however, imagined Detroit as an urban space riven by racial and class divisions, plagued by unemployment poverty, and housing crises. By and large, Detroiters all wished and imagined a better future, although what they understood to 1 Fever, “The Post-Fordist City,” in Ronan Paddison, ed., Handbook of Urban Studies (London: SAGE Publications, 2009), 276. 2 constitute a better future was wide-ranging and occasionally conflicting. Central to the varying visions of the future of Detroit were different conceptions of what contemporary problems in urban spaces were and what future shape Detroit might take. At the end of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, some automobile workers and their local governments railed against industrial decentralization, warning of “ghost towns” if industrial employment moved away. At the River Rouge industrial complex, in Dearborn, workers brought their concerns to the attention of the Ford Motor Company. Union officials and automobile companies disagreed with this prognosis, as did a federal judge. Across town in Grosse Pointe, a suburban community just over the city lines practiced a systematic and codified form of housing segregation, later subject to a state investigation. Defenders of the segregation system acted as they did out of a fear of the future might bring otherwise for their community. They saw themselves as guardians and protectors. But not all of members of their community agreed with this vision of a lily-white future. Instead, the dissenters organized to bring integration to their community. By the late 1960s, local elites foresaw the need to plan for infrastructure needs up to the end of the millennium. An internationally prominent urban planner and theorist was engaged to plan the future of the Detroit region in the year 2000. Brilliant, imaginative, comprehensive yet human-centered, the planner and his team nonetheless argued that class and racial divisions were outside the project’s purview. The city they imagined called upon technology and a planned physical environment to create a different future for Detroit. Around the same time, the Lyndon Johnson administration, prompted by Walter Reuther, moved to address the urban crisis across the country. Legislators responded with criticism and then a defense of what came to be known as the Model Cities program, revealing a spectrum of views with regard to race, class, federal intervention, and urban spaces. Similarly, the public statements 3 and internal communications of the LBJ administration on Model Cities revealed that, while the intention was good, an understanding of the class and racial divisions in urban America, as will be shown in the first two chapters, and the experiences of working-class and non-white city residents, was missing from these high-level conversations and plans. The urban crisis is the conceptual heart of this study. Here, urban crisis is used as it was in the 1950s. That is to say, as a structural interpretation of the existence and causes of low-quality housing, industrial decentralization, the decreasing capacity of cities to provide services to their residents, and segregation.2 It asks questions about whether residents in Detroit imagined these changes and how they attempted to get beyond them. In addition, this study draws form the work of Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey.3 It does not concern itself with the “culture of poverty” or underclass interpretations of urban concerns, which blame cultural conditions rather than material ones for poverty and segregation in urban spaces.4 Instead, this study focuses on the on-the-ground effort to assess Detroit’s problems and imagine a way out of them, toward a different urban future. For local residents, the future included stable, unionized, employment and, while opinions were split on the merits of integration, the role of racial