The story of Detroit, as most accounts would have it, begins in 1701 with Antoine De la Mothe Cadillac's founding of the settlement, initially named Fort Ponchartrain de Troit for the then Chancellor of France. The naming of the city (De Troit, for ‘the straits’, referring to its point in the river), the legacy of French street names, the early ribbon farms and first families, are all traced back to this point. This, chronologically, is where Mark Binelli’s book begins, with Cadillac a ‘forty-three year old hustler’ who ‘envisioned the beginnings of a colony, a real beach-head in what was, by any other measure, untamed land’ (Binelli 2012:40-41). Charlie LeDuff's Cadillac is also a hustler, as well as being ‘Detroit's first dope dealer’, having traded liquor with ‘the natives’, and spent a short time in prison (LeDuff 2014:168). Cadillac, whose name neatly flags both the settlement's French origins and the auto industry that came to
68 dominate some two centuries later, becomes our localised Columbus; bold explorer, significant white man, founding father. Hustler, (anti) hero, visionary. Cadillac's strategic genius and foresight in the siting and management of early Detroit, we are told, laid the foundations for the great city it would become. Cadillac's Detroit was a strategic outpost, necessary to protect the territorial interests of New France against the incursions of their English competitors - both in terms of access to the fur trade, and relationships with First Nations peoples that made this lucrative industry possible. The area around the fort was territory contested but unsettled.
However, writing in 1881, Chicago based map publisher Blanchard describes events in 1669 which call this accepted history into question, with mention of an ‘old Indian village, called Teuchsa Grondie’ having previously stood on the site (Blanchard 1881:56)3. Blanchard also describes an incident the following year, when two French priests were said to have discovered there ‘a barbarous piece of stone sculpture in the human form’, which they proceeded to destroy and throw into the river, offended as they were by its ‘impiety’ (Blanchard 1881:57)4. So, not only was Cadillac not the first French man to make use of the area, it seems to have been common knowledge at the time that the site had indeed been previously settled. Farmer's 1884 encyclopaedia of Detroit also mentions several previous names:
"In the old traditions of the Algonquin Indians, it was known by the name of Yon-do-ti-ga, or Yon-doti-a, A Great Village; its first name was thus prophetic of its future. It was also called Wa-we-atun-ong, Circuitous Approach, on account of its location at the bend of the river. The Wyandotts called the site of Detroit Toghsaghrondie, or Tyschsarondia, which name, variously spelled, will be found in the old Colonial Documents, published by the State of New York; it has been modernized into Teuscha Grondie, and has reference to the course of the river. The Huron Indians called the place Ka-ron-ta-en, The Coast of the Strait." (Farmer 1884:3)
3"In the autumn of 1669, at the Indian village of Ganastogue, at the western extremity of Lake Ontario, two distinguished explorers, La Salle and Joliet, met by chance. Joliet was on his return from a trip to the Upper Lake, as Lake Superior was then called, for the purpose of discovering the copper mines. In reaching this place from Lake Superior, he must have passed down the river, then without a name, now called Detroit river, and first called by the French " The Detroit" (The Straits). It is a matter of
record that an old Indian village, called Teuchsa Grondie, stood originally there, but no mention is made of it by Joliet"
(Blanchard 1881:56)
4"The next spring, 1670, two priests, Galinee and Dablon, on their way from Canada to the mission of Sainte Marie, which had been established at the Sault the previous year, landed at or near the present site of Detroit. The first object of interest they beheld was a barbarous piece of stone sculpture in the human form. This was quite sufficient to unbalance the equilibrium of the two fathers, whose zeal had been whetted into an extravagant pitch by the hardships they had encountered on their way. With
pious indignation they fell upon the "impious device " with their hatchets, broke it in pieces, and hurled the fragments into the river. The place would have been brought to light long before but for the Iroquois, who guarded the passage of the lower lakes
69 We might question too, the idea that Detroit was ever really a 'French' settlement, taking into account the actual demographic of its inhabitants. Certainly the governor, when he was
present, was French; the frameworks of authority and land claim were based in French colonial law. Following the standard colonial protocol of New France, Cadillac ensured that many allied First Nations tribes settled in the area surrounding the new fort. In Farmer's words; "[the fort] was intended to concentrate the French soldiers, traders, and friendly Indians at one place, and thus establish a permanent post" (Farmer 1884:220). Each of these groups were fundamental to the success of the settlement, with the 'Indians' serving a key defence, diplomacy and trade role (Farmer 1884:322; Blanchard 1881:59-60).
Vincens, in a biography of 17th century French- Algonquin interpreter and diplomat Isabelle Montour, notes that by 1703 - just two years after its foundation, the fort was ‘beginning to resemble a multicultural settlement of some consequence’ (Vincens 2011:148). By 1705, about ‘two hundred Indians had been persuaded by Cadillac to settle in the vicinity…’ writes Farmer ‘… In 1736 there were five hundred Indian warriors at Detroit— two hundred each from the Huron and Ottawa tribes and one hundred from the Potowatamies.’ (Farmer 1884:322). The French population at the time of the 1763 siege ‘occupied about 100 houses in the town and 50 farm-houses along the river, above or below it. …The Ottawas, Wyandots, and
Pottowattomies, had villages close by, which, with the French population, gave to the place a metropolitan character, to which no other spot in the whole country could be compared’ (Blanchard 1881: 107)
But beyond this traffic between the fort and the villages, the French colonial culture of early Detroit cannot be easily separated from the multiple other cultures surrounding it. While fort dwelling, male 'heads of household' may have been largely French by birth, their wives and children were not necessarily so. Cadillac encouraged marriages between French men and native women as a way of further ensuring protection for the settlement, and as a result says Farmer, children of mixed heritage "soon formed the larger per cent of the population" (Farmer 1884:340)5.
5 . Because of the colonial bias in contemporary accounts from which this kind of material can be gleaned, it can be of course hard to differentiate between historical record and racist fearmongering. Farmer, again, tells us that:
"Many of the earlier colonists mingled freely with the Indians, and adopted so many of their habits that they became more like Indians than white men, for, as Cadillac says in one of his letters, " With wolves one learns to howl." The coureurs de bois in their habits resembled the wildest and worst of the men in the lumber-camps of to-day, and the rioting and squandering of the lumbermen, on their return from the woods, is paralleled by the doings of these wild and reckless men of the olden time."(Farmer 1884:337)
70 The next landmark in the story, as it was on our tour, tends to be the fire of 1805 and the coining of that famous motto; Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus- 'we hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes'. Much is made of the city’s motto, by Detroiters and other commentators alike, seeming as it does to capture a spirit of persistence in the face of repeated disasters. Then, via a brief stop at Woodward's iconic radial street plan, our tour moved quickly on to the turn of the twentieth century- wasting no time in inevitably arriving at Henry Ford: the great white father whose life story, entrepreneurial genius, motivations and foibles are habitually afforded far more attention than the lives and motivations of those who provided essential labour to his factories and without whom his empire could never have been built. As with Cadillac two hundred years earlier, the story of the city's twentieth century success is framed as one of individual (white) genius, and a crudely differentiated mass of workers, for whom occupation and support is generously provided. White/black, male/female, both skilled and 'unskilled' - that artful word that seems in reality to communicate far less about the actual skills a person might possess than it does about the degree of control they are able to exert over the conditions of their employment.
While the connections between Detroit's role in the development of the US car industry, and the city's fate once these big companies passed their American heyday may be obvious, it is no less important to pay attention to the ways in which this part of the city's story is told. Ford’s $5 day, mentioned regularly, often without much context (see Cwiek 2014, New York Times 2015) was certainly a major step for both the US industry and workers in Detroit. But as Beth Tompkins Bates shows, far from representing a simple pay rise, the application of the ‘Five Dollar Day Ford Profit Sharing Plan’ was in practice rather more complicated. Workers, in line with others in the industry, were paid $2.34 a day for a nine-hour shift. With the introduction of the profit sharing plan this was raised to $2.34 a day for an eight-hour shift, with an extra $2.66 per day dependent on employees’ successful transformation of themselves and their families into ‘worthy profit sharers’, a process involving intense surveillance by investigators from Ford’s Sociological Department, who took several months to decide whether workers and their families were sufficiently ‘Americanized’ (Bates 2012:23). And while Detroit’s mid
twentieth century middle class lifestyle aspirations of home and car ownership and steady employment reflected a significant development in the expectations of the average American family; Ford’s motivation in paying higher wages was not in fact the creation of a new
consumer class, but an attempt to break unions and deal with staff turnover.
Maloney and Wattley’s (1995) work challenges the assumption that the production line’s use of ‘unskilled’ labour brought in a less responsible workforce, with higher rates of absenteeism -
71 a problem the $5 day is credited as an attempt to address (see Cwiek 2014 again). They find that not only were Ford workers’ educational levels on a par with workers elsewhere, but that Ford had a particularly high concentration of married black men who, they argue, had to accept the harsher conditions at Ford in exchange for the family wage white workers were able to access at other plants: ‘Ford's willingness to hire black Detroiters enabled the company to benefit from the discrimination practiced elsewhere in Detroit in the form of a large and stable work force of married black men who had no choice but to make the extra effort that Ford required of them…’ (Maloney and Watley 1995:490).
Indeed, the idea that these were great jobs, overpaid and allowing ‘unskilled’ workers to get ideas above their station, seems to prevail in much of the discourse around Detroit’s decline. The quote below, from an interview with a residential landlord in 2013, is typical:
"the problem with Detroit I think is, it was a place that attracted people that could make a… could make money with unskilled work. And, and that was like a dream you know, that a not skilled person could have a very good standard of living here by working in factories. ….and it used to be just like dominated so much by the factory mentality." (Interview with LJ 2013)
But the labour required in exchange for these apparent riches was no easy task, classed as ‘unskilled’ though it may have been. Writing about his experience in pre-1950s Detroit Charles Denby called Ford a ‘man-killing place’, recalling workers falling asleep on the way home from shifts and having to be helped up steps by their wives (Denby 1989:35-36; Bates 2012:62-63; Maloney and Wattley 1995:472). ‘The companies called their methods automation’; black workers in Detroit called them niggermation’, write Georgakas and Surkin (1998:85) talking not about Ford this time, but the city’s auto factories in general, and conditions at Chrysler in particular. As accounts of greedy unions’ role in the city’s demise abound surrounding Detroit’s bankruptcy (McIntyre 2013; Smith 2013) it is worth bearing in mind that workers at auto plants in the 1970s were regularly dying on the job due to overwork and unsafe equipment
(Georgakas and Surkin 2012:85-106).
Migrations
Like any large American city of the twentieth century, migration proved as key to Detroit's boom years as it had to the town's initial successes. A census for 1880 shows thirty different
72 countries of birth for the city's inhabitants. But migration from other states and territories of North America accounted for over half of the population at this point, with Farmer noting that at the time of that census, Montana was the only member of the union not to have
contributed migrants to Detroit (Farmer 1884:336). While the city's older French, Irish, Polish, and German, as well as more recent Mexican and Bangladeshi arrivals, have certainly left their marks on Detroit's cultural and social life, the most significant movement of people came from the Southern states - as black sharecroppers, industrial workers, and white Appalachians alike left the South in search of a better life in the rust belt's growing northern cities (Wilkerson 2010).
A standard narrative - not present in our downtown tour, but certainly ubiquitous in
conversations I had with many Metro Detroiters, tells us that the racism of the Jim Crow South pushed poor black migrants north to rust belt cities like Detroit, where they were attracted by the aforementioned riches of Ford's $5 a day jobs and the promise of a middle-class standard of living. When these hopeful pilgrims arrived, they found that Jim Crow had followed them, in the form of white migrants seeking those same opportunities. Racial tensions persisted and came to a head in explosive race riots in 1967, resulting in widespread property damage and beginning a process of white flight that would see the city's population and tax base plummet, leaving chaos and poverty in its wake. The quote below from a 2013 New York Times shares similar themes with my conversation with residential landlord LJ above, illustrating the result of this storytelling on common sense ideas about Detroit’s problems:
‘The reason so many manufacturing-sector workers in the United States received such high pay at that time was not that they had exceptional skills or had received superior training; it was that the corporations for which they worked were unsurpassed in their dominance and generated huge revenues. But that dominance was, to a considerable degree, a momentary quirk of history: the absence, in the wake of World War II, of any real competition from other nations. For the United States, the day of reckoning came as other nations recovered from the war…In that moment, American companies, communities and employees should have started taking the competition seriously. That did not happen. Companies like General Motors continued to shower blue-collar workers with handsome pay and benefits.’ (Richter 2013)
The careful selection and placement of historical facts as part of a particular dominant narrative frames the story as one of job creation, with employment and opportunity as something gifted to the working class. We have already seen how hard Ford's employees had to work for every penny of their wage; it is perhaps more useful to raise the question of that
73 labour's role in building the wealth and power of the auto giants who were later to take these resources elsewhere. The story also rests on the notion that racial tensions were both
inevitable, and imported from the South - and indeed, on the breaking down of racial categories into a simple black and white. In doing so, it sets up what we think Detroit's problems are, and how they might be fixed. We see a helpless and childlike African American population, lost without the benevolent direction and largesse of Ford. And we locate racism in the personal prejudices of poor whites, rather than a system of economic and social domination as foundational to the Northern states as it is to the South.
While the great migrations of the twentieth century are a fundamental piece of the city’s history, black Detroit did not begin here. As Bates writes;
‘Detroit had been on the short list of desired destinations for black southerners since long before the Civil War. The city's proximity to Canada made it an attractive place for slaves escaping from bondage in the American South. African Americans in antebellum Detroit and the sizeable black communities that developed across the river in Windsor and Chatham, Canada, often collaborated in the anti-slavery crusade…. John Brown met with his co- conspirators in Detroit and Chatham to plot the final stages of the armed insurrection he carried out in October 1859 against the United States Arsenal at Harper's Ferry.’ (Bates 2012:20)
To look to the city’s earlier history counters the prevailing idea of Detroit's blackness as something imported when needed by big industry, and instead establishes African Americans, both enslaved and free, as early settlers and citizens with a crucial role in building the city. This speaks directly to the minimising of Detroit’s connections with the Underground Railroad, witnessed on our tour. Herb Boyd’s work is a helpful corrective to these omissions, chronicling Detroit’s early black history in painstaking detail; looking more broadly, Bontemps and
Conroy’s much earlier work excavates the stories of black Americans’ role in the westward expansion, and the early colonial history of the Midwest (Boyd 2017; Bontemps and Conroy 1945)
Returning to the great migrations of the twentieth century, Wilkerson paints a rather different picture to that of the abject masses, duped into promises of milk and honey in the North, and importing the social problems of poverty and illiteracy with them;
74
‘Throughout the Migration, social scientists all but concluded that… the Migration had led to the troubles of the urban North and West, most scholars blaming the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants themselves. The migrants were cast as poor illiterates who imported out- of-wedlock births, joblessness, and welfare dependency wherever they went…
…Newly available census records suggest the opposite to be true. According to a growing body of research, the migrants were, it turns out, better educated than those they left behind in the South and, on the whole, had nearly as many years of schooling as those they encountered in the North. Compared to northern blacks already there, the migrants were more likely to be