Before the clouds came in

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story. By David Maraniss. Simon & Schuster; 464 pages; $32.50.

EMINEM steps out of a sedan and into Detroit’s spectacular Fox Theatre, with its Corinthian columns and recumbent lions. He walks down the aisle towards a black gospel choir onstage, robed in red and black, their voices rising. The Detroit-based rapper turns around, defiantly pointing at the camera. “This is the Motor City. This is what we do,” he says.

David Maraniss choked up when he saw this two-minute Chrysler advertisement during the Super Bowl, the annual football extravaganza, with its images of smokestacks, ice skaters and Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals. Suddenly he realised how much he still cared for his birthplace, where he spent the first six and a half years of his life. So much so that he decided to write his 12th book about the city, when it was at the peak of its economic, political and cultural power. He picked the early 1960s, from the autumn of 1962 to the spring of 1964.

At the time Detroit was the economic engine of America. In January 1963 Life magazine published a story under the headline “Glow from Detroit Spreads Everywhere”. The factories of Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and American Motors were firing on all cylinders. The increase in women drivers, the trend towards two-car families, the rising income of the post-war baby boomers and the promise of foreign markets inspired tremendous optimism for the industry’s growth. The annual motor show was the biggest and most important event of its kind, the Academy Awards on wheels; on occasion even the vice-president came.

Detroit was also a centre of progressive politics and the civil-rights movement. Mr Maraniss devotes an entire chapter to Walter Reuther (pictured, left), the memorable boss of the most powerful union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). His parents, German immigrants, raised him with visions of social justice and workers’ rights. Reuther was an idealist but also a pragmatist, which made him enemies on the left as well as the right. George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, called him “the most dangerous man in Detroit” because of his ability to bring about “the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing norms of society”.

Reuther was concerned with civil rights almost as much as with workers’ rights. He invited Martin Luther King (pictured) to the UAW’s 25th-anniversary dinner and afterwards distributed copies of King’s speech to the rank-and-file. When hundreds of protesters were jailed after King’s Birmingham campaign of civil disobedience, Reuther dispatched two UAW staffers with $160,000 in money belts to bail them out of jail. “It could be said that to a significant degree Detroit and its autoworkers were the [civil rights] movement’s bank,” Mr Maraniss writes. In Detroit in June 1963 King led the “Walk to Freedom”, then the largest civil-rights march, and delivered a version of his “I Have a Dream” speech which he would give nine weeks later at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

One of the book’s strengths is its colourful cast: Jerome Cavanagh, the progressive Irish-Catholic mayor of Detroit, a bon vivant, father of eight and sharp dresser, who “kept four extra suits, 13 striped ties and a cabinet of fresh shirts” in a study adjoining his office; Henry Ford’s grandson, Henry II, called the Deuce, who was “impeccably dressed yet with a touch of the peasant, with his manicured nails and beer gut and carefree proclivities, his frat-boy party demeanour and head full of secrets”. Mr Maraniss also interviewed Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, the record company, who now lives in Los Angeles. He describes how Motown was the product of the entire Gordy family, especially Mr Gordy’s four older sisters. And how thanks to Grinnell’s, a well-known local piano-maker, the ready availability of pianos, even for black families, as well as inspiring state-school music teachers fostered the talent that flocked to Motown.

For all Detroit’s glow, the storm clouds were already gathering in the early 1960s. Mr Maraniss cites a study by Wayne State University in 1963 that predicted the population of Detroit would drop from nearly 1.7m to 1.2m between 1960 and 1970 and continue to dwindle. “Productive persons who pay taxes are moving out of the city, leaving behind the non-productive,” the report noted. It also mentioned that in 1960 Detroit’s population was 28.9% black and forecast that by 1970 the city would be 44.3% black, pointing out that blacks who had the resources moved to the suburbs “with the same urgency as whites”.

The report turned out to be unusually prescient. In spite of the efforts of Reuther, Cavanagh, King and others, Detroit was rocked by one of the worst race riots in history in 1967. From then on the pace of the city’s decline quickened. By the time Mr Maraniss was writing his meticulously researched book, which at times provides almost too much detail for the uninitiated, Detroit had declared bankruptcy. Its population was 83% black, its workers were largely unskilled and the city’s headcount had shrunk to 688,000. The city that had given America so much was in desperate need of help.