Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Our 12 previous winners—a mix of distinguished historians, social scientists, journalists, and public thinkers—include Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, Jia Lynn Yang, and, most recently, Heather McGhee. Anderson is a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School.

The Fight to Save the Town chronicles the stories of Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan—four places with histories of booms and busts, places that the rest of the nation often readily dismisses for their high levels of poverty and violence. But Anderson, who came across these communities as part of a larger research project on cities that had gone through municipal bankruptcy or state receivership during the Great Recession, found them to be places of hope. Here, people were coming together—to train trauma recovery counselors, to rebuild a broken-down library, to make parkland out of industrial wasteland, to stop foreclosures.

One of our Book Prize judges wrote that in telling these stories, Anderson is able “to explain how much place matters to humans, and what they’re willing to do to save a place buffeted by global forces rather than abandon it. … Anderson’s portraits are a stirring antidote to anti-government cynicism and a call to action against wealth inequality and the disinvestment from public goods.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Anderson, who will also be interviewed by Community Coalition CEO and President Alberto Retana, will take place on June 15, 2023, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2023 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Anderson to talk about communities as teachers, the push and pull between federal policy and local problem-solving, and what it takes to build trust in a place of scarcity.

The post Michelle Wilde Anderson Wins the 2023 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But as a historian of Detroit’s autoworkers, I’ve come to realize that no one back then saw things that way. All but the most stubborn local boosters recognized that the auto industry was always volatile, and that auto work was always precarious. Throughout most of the 1950s, the big three automakers mostly earned hefty profits—but autoworkers themselves suffered from layoffs and insecurity beneath those numbers. The post-World War II boom that is central to our understanding of 20th-century American history, not to mention the autoworkers who are said to have led that boom, must all be reconsidered. Reality, in fact, directly challenges the existence of what is commonly thought to have been a golden age for American industrial workers at the heart of America’s postwar boom.

The auto industry’s instability started in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when materials shortages bedeviled the business. As the nation converted from wartime back to civilian production, there was huge demand for steel. Automakers stood in line with railroads, stove and refrigerator manufacturers, and many others for limited supplies. Strikes in the coal, steel, copper, and glass industries, whose workers struggled to keep pace with postwar inflation, further limited supplies, shutting down auto factories for weeks and sometimes months. With thousands of parts going into each car, any missing items—from seat frames to bolts and screws—could quickly result in tens of thousands of auto layoffs in Detroit. Official strikes and unauthorized “wildcat” walkouts in Detroit’s auto plants, for reasons ranging from overbearing foremen, to poor ventilation, to removing bathroom stall doors, also caused widespread unemployment.

These layoffs—whether from shortages or strikes—hurt workers much more than their employers. Unemployment compensation was meager, so anyone who worked in an auto factory had to have a secondary support system, often involving fallback jobs. In interviews I conducted with retired autoworkers, they recalled holding a wide variety of secondary gigs, including mobile home washer, cab driver, department store clerk, bank employee, telephone pole installer, promotional event searchlight operator, feedstore worker, cyclone fence installer, moving company worker, University of Michigan Law Club janitor, insurance-repair construction worker, winery employee, trash hauler, chicken farmer, wallpaper installer, Army surplus store employee, barber, berry picker, cotton picker, golf caddy, and soldier. Auto work was lucrative when plants were running, but it could not be considered a reliable source of income.

These interruptions remained a fixture of the industry, and they explain, in part, how the false idea of Detroit as a kind of worker’s paradise took root. Historians have assumed, as did many economists in the 1950s, that annual earnings for autoworkers could be calculated closely enough by multiplying the hourly wage by a 40-hour week, 50 weeks a year. In reality, layoffs continued to be so common that there was little correlation between hourly earnings and monthly or annual incomes. Macroeconomic data can be a poor indicator of how ordinary workers are faring; hourly wage rates meant nothing to people who were out of work.

Consider how workers fared in 1950, which was generally a good year for the auto industry, with aggregate production and sales setting new records. But when the Korean War began in June, the business took a severe hit. Unlike during World War II, when Detroit became known as “the arsenal of democracy,” defense spending during the Korean War spread throughout the country to places like New Jersey, Ohio, Missouri, and California—while metals rationing strictly limited the number of cars that could be built in Detroit.

Prospective workers, however, streamed into Detroit from around the country because they heard only about industry profits, never about the problems. As a result, unemployment in Detroit was rarely under 100,000 people throughout the Korea conflict. Sometimes it reached as high as 250,000 job seekers, heavily concentrated among autoworkers.

The standard script for thinking about postwar autoworkers emphasizes the significance of contracts signed in 1950 between the UAW and automakers, especially General Motors, that provided for standard wage increases, cost of living allowances, additional wage increases to account for productivity gains, pensions, and improved health insurance. These contracts have been portrayed as the main force propelling autoworkers into the middle class, providing secure, rising incomes, and benefits equivalent to or better than those enjoyed by many white-collar employees in other industries.

But that scenario only makes sense if autoworkers’ lived experiences conformed to the contracts’ terms—which is not what happened. Consider that in early 1951, automakers and UAW leaders co-signed a leaflet, distributed far and wide, that warned: “Attention would-be war workers! Stay away from Detroit unless you have definite promise of a job in this city. If you expect a good-paying job in one of the big auto plants at this time, you’re doomed to disappointment and hardship.” By January 1952, 10 percent of all unemployment in the nation was concentrated in Detroit.

The auto industry boomed anew in late 1952 and early 1953, as the war wound down and metals rationing ended, and auto employment also skyrocketed, with tens of thousands of new workers—perhaps more than 100,000—again migrating to Detroit for work in factories.

At this time, because of demand for autos, discriminatory barriers temporarily diminished, as automakers, desperate to run three shifts, relented and hired more African-American men, white women, and people with disabilities—a significant population given recent wars and the dangerous conditions in factories.

But these new hires were not insulated from the industry’s volatility. In late 1953, the U.S. entered another recession, triggered by a lack of demand for American goods, and layoffs returned. Independent automakers such as Hudson Motor Car Company, Packard Motor Car Company, and the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation—which had once collectively employed many more Detroit autoworkers than General Motors—merged with Nash Motors Company, Studebaker, and Willys-Overland Motors, respectively, and moved remaining production out of the Motor City to Kenosha, Wisconsin; South Bend, Indiana; and Toledo, Ohio.

Detroit officials hoped that those who had come to the city when the industry had needed them would now return to their homes, whether Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, or northern Michigan. Some did, but most had come to consider themselves autoworkers and Detroiters, and hoped to be recalled to factories. Many people were laid off for several months, some for as long as a year.

Even in 1955, the year that best supports the golden age thesis, the cycle of layoffs repeated itself again. Brought back to life by resurgent demand for automobiles after the 1953-54 recession, factories buzzed with activity and steady employment, churning out over 9 million vehicles. The upsurge pushed auto employment to record postwar levels, but it also masked long-term, structural job losses due to automation, which replaced workers with machines.

Hoping that the good times would last, many autoworkers bought houses, rented larger apartments, bought cars, furniture, and appliances, and paid off debts. Given the history of the industry, these were risky investments. As a labor beat writer for the Detroit Free Press noted, “Anyone who has been around the State for the past few years knows full well that sooner or later the bottom is going to drop out of the job market again.” Sure enough, demand for vehicles in 1955 did not keep pace with production, and at year’s end almost a million cars sat unsold on dealers’ lots across the country. Auto production once again scaled back accordingly, with tens of thousands of layoffs, many of which became permanent.

Autoworkers fell behind on installment plans, resulting in repossessions of their purchases, and they found it impossible to keep up with mortgages and rents. Most autoworkers, and especially those with families, were priced out of the market for the new cars that they built—even though they were ostensibly among the highest paid industrial workers in the country. Adding insult to injury, business leaders blamed autoworkers for the industry’s woes, arguing that high wages had limited consumer demand by inflating the price of vehicles.

Detroit never really got in sync with the nation’s prosperity during the 1950s. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 1957 outdistanced 1956 to become America’s “best year ever.” But that time in Detroit was marked, according to the Michigan Employment Security Commission, by “continuing serious unemployment, high payment of jobless benefits and concurrent reduction of manufacturing employment to the lowest point since 1949.”

Conditions worsened, both nationally and locally, when the 1958 recession devastated Detroit’s autoworkers and their neighborhoods. Over a quarter of a million Detroiters, mostly autoworkers and those whose jobs were supported by their income, were out of work in early 1958, and unemployment remained at least that high, and often worse, for well over a year. MESC Director Max Horton remarked that if he were one of the long-term unemployed autoworkers, he “would start seeking a job in some other line of work.”

But regardless of that advice, many autoworkers ended up having no choice. The auto industry in the 1950s was a boom-and-bust industry, and every good phase for workers—1950, 1953, 1955—was followed by a tough stretch that wiped out whatever precarious toehold they had established.

Things didn’t get much better in the 1960s: although the number of jobs increased, so did turnover. By the late ‘60s unemployment benefits had increased, softening the blow of being out of work, but that did not prepare workers or industry for the oil crisis of 1973 and 1979 and increased competition from foreign manufacturers. Job stability became an impossible dream for blue-collar workers.

So why do we continue to imagine that the 1950s were the heyday of the auto worker? In hindsight it’s clear that historians have romanticized the era for their own reasons. As current income inequality has grown, labor historians have painted the ‘50s as the decade when workers had a fairer share of the economic pie and union contracts gave them power that they now lack. Business historians, on the other hand, have used the same era either as a supposed counterpoint to the more austere post-1973 economy or to argue that excessive workers’ power, along with high wages, killed the profitability of the auto industry. None of these arguments, in my opinion, reflect the reality for workers in Detroit of the time.

The post The 1950s Were Not a Golden Age for Detroit’s Autoworkers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Watch your car for a dollar? His father
glanced around, wearily paid two black kids.
We parked on one of many snowy streets
of abandonment without meters or guarantees.
The kids scowled at me and Mark, eye-level.
the scowl they earned on the small stage
of their black neighborhood visited
by suburban whites for hockey
or Jethro Tull or Traffic or black
basketballers mugging for laughs.

*

The warm-up act was Ping Pong
played with methodical exuberance
as the sparse crowd settled, draping
coats over vacant seats. We sat down front
in Mr. D’s seats, front-row folding chairs.
A ping pong ball rolled off the floor,
and I palmed it into a pocket.

His father’s tickets stamped Complimentary
across the stubs he mangled in his fist.
I never learned what he did for a living,
for that too involved cash exchanges,
long disappearances and tinted glass.

Ping Pong diplomacy—a diorama
of an historical event lost on us. One player
may have been Chinese and held his paddle
like chopsticks, Mr. D said.
We had seen no one use chopsticks
except in buck-toothed cartoons.

*

The American won, waving his tiny flag
to squeeze the sparse crowd into polite applause,
then it was on to ”Sweet Georgia Brown”
and the depantsing of a Washington General
that might’ve caused a riot if it happened
on our street. Hyperbole no longer applied
to riots, in Detroit, in ’71.

The bucket of confetti tossed like water
did not surprise us, though we laughed—
it was expected. Just like the dollar.
It did not matter what truth existed
beneath smudged dollar bills.

Back home, Mark and I practiced spinning balls
on our fingers. He mastered that trick, but never
the lay up, never the jump shot, never even
the dribble. He spun himself into dropping out
of high school, then mopped the floors
at the Salvation Army where he stored
his life in a locker and watched all our cars for nothing,
but asked for dollars on principle, winter,
layered in stink, fueled by modestly wrapped bottles.

*

You know who won. The white Generals
had a job to do—inept and befuddled
and engaged. The Globetrotters laughed
and hooted. We were all in on the same joke,
with different punch lines. The Generals were privates
in the army competing for the entertainment dollar.

In 1967, the city burned. Tanks on the street,
helicopters keeping the beat. The white mayor
conferred with the white governor
and the white police chief. On the edge of the city
Mark and I counted choppers in the lazy daze
of our safe street—rumors to the contrary
that they were coming to get us.

Mark thought the Globetrotters were funnier on TV,
edited down on “Wide World of Sports.” The game
couldn’t end quick enough, isolated laughter echoing
over empty seats under the roof
where the great Gordie Howe played,

though Mr. Hockey didn’t mean shit to those kids
outside. The world spun on its axis, not a long black
finger. Meadowlark Lemon was not present
but Curly Neal was. Other Globetrotters played
other Generals elsewhere. More than one Santa Claus
and no Santa Claus, no guarantees. The hubcaps were
gone and so were the kids.

Mr. DiPietro shrugged and quietly swore.
He’d left his gun at home in deference
to the occasion. During the riots,
he wore a holster, drank beer on his porch,
nodding to neighbors as they passed
as if they all shared the same secret.

*

We’d gotten soaked by the confetti
of a contract shredded by our daily myths.
We shook it off and headed toward
the exits. Scoreboards were useless,
as were clocks. Somewhere
someone spun a hubcap on a finger
and evaluated its worth.

On our factory street, no one trotted the globe,
though a lucky few ventured Up North
one week each summer.

The world holds its breath. Does anyone
sing along to its bouncing ball? How many
of our choices are imaginary? What I don’t know
could fill the souvenir program Mark picked up,
scattered in trash beneath a seat.

*

Two kids emerged from shadow to conjure
fear. Color as weapon. Fear unacknowledged
in translation. Blurred borders and a gun
left at home in consideration of us, the children.

Neither dollars nor holsters nor white skin
could save Mark. Neither of us, nor
those black kids, would ever be Globetrotters.
We were all Generals, the game rigged
for the amusement of—of who?
Who could blame everyone for picking up
“equalizers,” even if used to shoot each other
instead?

I squeezed the ping pong ball
gently in my palm like a worry stone
or silver dollar or fake ID.
He dropped us off, then drove back
to wherever he lived. At home,
I sat on our couch. Our Christmas lights
did not blink. I showed my parents.
See, I said, opening my palm:
perfect, round, white.

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When people used to walk the streets of my hometown of Detroit, they knew exactly where they were. They were in Hitsville, the home of Motown Records. They were in the Motor City, the auto capital that put the world on wheels. They were in union country, a workingman’s paradise, one of the ventricles of the nation’s industrial heart.

We ain’t that no more. Ain’t been it for a long, long time, to be frank–so long, in fact, that I don’t think I ever knew that Detroit.

Sure, like a lot of kids here in the ’70s, I grew up listening to the Temps and Marvin Gaye. But the “Motown Sound” was by then so much corporate ventriloquism. Berry Gordy had moved the label to Los Angeles in 1972.

Likewise, the auto manufacturing that I knew was fast losing ground as the fount of great jobs, upward mobility, and blue-collar dreams. Instead, it was the business that taught me about “layoffs,” “planned obsolescence,” and, ultimately,
“de-industrialization.”

By the 1980s, the “Motown” and “Motor City” monikers seemed at best quaint and, at worst, laughable. As the world turned to Japanese manufacturers for efficient, quality cars, American carmakers embarrassed themselves with rolling jokes like the Dodge Shadow, the Chevy Cavalier, the Plymouth Caravelle, and the Cadillac Allante.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan had launched a wholesale disinvestment from urban America that continues to this day. Social programs were gutted. Crack cocaine took over the streets. A city that had been dogged by a blood-soaked reputation as the “Murder Capital” since the heyday of the Purple Gang in the 1920s was now awash in a new, more youthful brand of carnage that was exacerbated by the policy of turning poor, teetering neighborhoods in Detroit into a battlefront in the new “war on drugs.”

The white flight that had begun in the 1950s accelerated in the ’70s and ’80s, turning metro Detroit into one of the most segregated regions in the country. Race-baiters like Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson sold the city’s northern suburbs as a safe haven for whites who refused to be governed by Detroit’s new black political class. Department stores and other businesses followed, taking with them jobs and any hope of maintaining downtown Detroit as a retail center. The city’s tax base dwindled. Many of the black families whose patriarchs had moved “up South” to work the city’s auto plants, and who had become the cornerstones of a thriving middle class along the way, also began to leave–first in a trickle, and then, by the 2000s, in a deluge.

Once a city of nearly 2 million, Detroit today has a population of less than 800,000. The city has a $300-million budget deficit. The school system has been taken over by an equally inept, even hostile, state government.

Yet when people talk about what it will take to bring Detroit back, many of them–from President Obama to local city councilmen–spend their time dwelling on its long-gone auto industry. While domestic manufacturing remains critical, and Detroit should be part of it, people need to let the city move on.

We can’t keep thinking what’s good for GM is good for Detroit. Of course, this notion was never entirely true. The car companies encouraged the gutting of street-car systems and the expansion of local freeways that destroyed many of Detroit’s neighborhoods. But if it wasn’t entirely true in the past, it’s an outright falsehood today.

Yes, General Motors maintains headquarters in downtown Detroit (the Obama administration almost demanded it), while Ford and Chrysler are headquartered in nearby suburbs. But only a couple of plants remain in the city proper and thus on Detroit property tax rolls, and fewer Detroiters than ever work in the auto industry. Certainly, these companies are important to the region and the rest of the country, but they cannot be the salvation of Detroit. Just last year, GM enjoyed its largest profit ever, $7.6 billion in revenue, but it meant little for conditions in the city. Unemployment remained sky-high. Residents kept moving away. GM has been booming the past year or so, but Detroit has continued its death spiral.

Years ago, men with only high school educations–sometimes not even that–could earn wages comparable to those of many white-collar professionals. They worked hard and they thrived. That isn’t the reality anymore, but, in Detroit, too many people act as if nothing has changed. Higher learning still gets short shrift. Consider: Only about 11 percent of Detroit residents have college degrees, in contrast to about 25 percent of Americans nationally.

So when car companies air Super Bowl commercials extolling Detroit’s “toughness” and “grit,” they feed a dangerous misperception that all we need to be good at is manual labor, that we don’t have to be thoughtful, nuanced, or informed. A couple of years ago, Detroit-area musician Kid Rock, considered by many to be a personification of the area’s blue-collar aesthetic, told Fox News, “I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up and everyone’s driving a Prius and living in a condo, and we’re all getting health insurance.”

How ridiculous is that? You’re afraid of cars that don’t pollute the air? Detroiters don’t need healthcare? Is that too soft, too liberal, for those of us who live in overworked industrial wastelands? No, that’s what you get when your identity as a Detroiter goes no further than the stereotype of an anti-intellectual meathead too busy putting together gas-guzzlers to care about the social contract.

But it’s not just muddled pseudo-conservative illogic that’s the problem. Whenever President Obama pops into town, he seems to be concerned only with visiting car factories. I know, I know: It’s all about touting the success of the car bailout. But damn, man, take a trip around the rest of the city. See how the city’s once-vibrant eastside–where Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue plant towers above vacant lots and ramshackle homes–is wasting away amid blight and violence. Look at how the enclave of Hamtramck teeters on the brink of bankruptcy despite GM’s Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant. Take a look at the full picture, not just the shots with smokestacks in the background. If pols and others want Detroit to embrace a brighter future, they need to stop harping on the symbols of its past.

Darrell Dawsey is a book author and freelance journalist who lives in metro Detroit. His work will appear on the soon-to-launch website Deadline Detroit.

*Photo courtesy of Bernt Rostad.

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