Jim Trainor, his press secretary, marveled at how the mayor could “charm birds out of trees” and was perhaps himself living proof. He had been recruited to work for Cavanagh after being a tough old crow at the Times, a city editor straight out Ben Hecht’s The Front Page, chewing cigars and chewing out reporters with equal vigor, his ornery cynicism covering a soft heart. Another aide, Bob Toohey, had been taken by Cavanagh’s charisma since they both worked as guides at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village back in their college days. Whenever an important delegation arrived, Toohey recalled, Cavanagh invariably was assigned their tour. “He was charming. Once I had a group behind Jerry’s and we were going into the Menlo Park area, where his group already was, and I was able to listen to his speech. He slipped under the ropes and was at Edison’s desk and goes into this spiel—That chair right there is the chair Thomas Edison sat in—and he had this ability to mesmerize. People followed him like a school of fish.”
Now, in the early months of 1963, after one year as mayor, Cavanagh had a whole city following him. His tour guide spiel had risen to another realm, the ultimate urban sales pitch. Detroit was a city on the move, he said repeatedly during speeches that winter. It was a city with “a tremendously interesting and dramatic story to tell . . . a city which will continue in the future to be as it has been in the past—the envy of every other metropolitan area.” Mayors are expected to say such things—hyperbolic boosterism is a job requirement—but Cavanagh had reason to believe some of his own rhetoric.
It was in that frame of mind that he rode the elevator in the City-County Building from his office to a large hearing room a few floors below on February 15, a frozen Friday afternoon. Rising twenty stories above the bottom end of Woodward Avenue, the City-County Building was part of the new Detroit. It was built around the same time as the nearby Ford Auditorium, in the midfifties, a few years before Cobo Hall, and had a similar modern Internationalist design, its gleaming white marble exterior echoing the United Nations Building in New York. That worldly touch was what Detroit was now trying to sell; it was the crux of conversation at the meeting Cavanagh was about to attend: the first gathering of the Detroit Olympic Committee.
The city was going for it all then, striving in its underdog middle-American way to be the center of the modern world, bidding to be the site for the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 1964 and the 1968 Summer Olympics. The political conventions seemed out of reach and would soon go to San Francisco and Atlantic City, though just being in the running gave Detroit a publicity boost (and, for mayoral aide Jack Casey, the consolation gift of a baseball signed by Ted Williams courtesy of a GOP committeewoman from Maine he had escorted to a Tigers game during a site visit). But the Olympics was another matter. At a meeting in Chicago four months earlier, the U.S. Olympic Committee had endorsed Detroit as its candidate in the competition to become the host city. The final selection from major cities around the world would be decided in October by a vote of the International Olympic Committee, and Detroit seemed to have much going for it.
Avery Brundage, longtime president of the IOC, had made his fortune in Chicago, but he was born in Detroit. Douglas Roby, one of two other Americans on the IOC executive committee, was a full-blooded Detroiter, a former football player at Michigan, who spent his career at American Metal Products Company, which manufactured automobile parts. Roby’s job connected him to Fred Matthaei Sr., founder of American Metal, who happened to be chairman of the Detroit Olympic Committee and mastermind of its effort. Matthaei (pronounced math-eye) not only knew Roby and other key Olympic decision makers; he possessed a keen understanding of the peculiarities of the IOC. For a quarter century he had doggedly pursued his dream of making Detroit the summer venue and had accumulated as much inside dope on the politics of the organization as anyone except President Brundage. Almost alone during that span, Matthaei had carried Detroit to the final selection round five times, an extraordinary feat in itself, but he had never closed the deal. He had traveled to IOC conventions in London in 1939, Lausanne in 1946, Paris in 1949, Rome in 1955, and Munich in 1959, promoting Detroit every time and coming up short every time. He was seventy now, his hair gone white, and this was the city’s best chance ever, he thought, and perhaps its last.
By 2:30 that afternoon, the assemblage of Olympic boosters at the City-County Building totaled more than three hundred, including a coterie of Detroit’s ruling class. Benson and William Clay Ford, the Deuce’s two younger brothers, both vice presidents of Ford Motor Company, were there, along with Richard Cross, chairman of American Motors, Louis Goad, executive vice president of General Motors, Lynn Townsend, president of Chrysler Corporation, and a suited executive flock from Detroit’s leading banks, utilities, tire companies, airlines, newspapers, and public relations firms. As honorary cochairman, Cavanagh called the meeting to order, followed by his honorary partner, George Romney, who had been sworn in as Michigan’s governor only six weeks earlier. Romney’s inauguration at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing had been marked by its bipartisan nature, an ambience that puzzled his fellow Republicans and discombobulated some Democrats, but now, in pushing for the 1968 Summer Games, bipartisanship was at least temporarily in order.
There was, as it turned out, more to it than trying to sell Detroit to the world. As Roby and Matthaei explained when called on by Cavanagh, Detroit was now under attack again from its sun-soaked American nemesis, Los Angeles, whose civic and Olympic leaders had refused to accept the USOC’s earlier choice of Detroit and demanded—and somehow won—a reopening of bids. The word from L.A., delivered by messengers ranging from Governor Edmund G. Brown to Hollywood crooner Bing Crosby, was condescending toward the midwestern competitor. Detroit was dismissed as second rate, economically troubled, not big enough for the occasion. Los Angeles had the experience, having staged the 1932 Summer Games, and boasted superior facilities, finances, hotel rooms, attractions, and weather. Cavanagh bemoaned the reopening of bidding as “unwarranted and unsportsmanlike.” Romney complained that L.A. was “trying to rob Michigan of its Olympic birthright.” Roby surmised that the West Coast gambit could only wound Detroit and was nervous about the second vote, which would be held in New York on March 18. The Detroit newspapers railed against Los Angeles, though Martin Hayden, editor of the News, argued that the attempt at subversion had a unifying effect: “Our governor, our mayor, the business community, legislators from both parties and aroused citizenry suddenly find themselves marching in step toward a common objective. Here is the unforeseen and happy miracle wrought by the assault of a rival.”
So that was Detroit, anxious but as cohesive as the Rouge assembly line, with all parts snapping into place. Or so it seemed.
The following week, as city leaders mobilized to protect their Olympic standing, Wayne State University’s Institute for Regional and Urban Studies, led by sociologist Albert J. Mayer, issued a report titled “The Population Revolution in Detroit.” The report became a one-day story, relegated to a second section of the Free Press, but in retrospect, the findings and projections were of startling importance and haunting prescience.
The 1960 U.S. Census placed Detroit’s population at 1,670,144. By Wayne State’s calculations, if current trends continued the city’s population in 1970 would decline to about 1,259,515—a loss of about a quarter of the population in one decade. That was disturbing enough, but even more troublesome, the report said, was who was leaving Detroit and who was being left behind. “Productive persons who pay taxes are moving out of the city, leaving behind the non-productive,” the report noted. “Non-productive” was not used as a pejorative but as a statistical calculation. For the purposes of the study, “productive” was defined by measurements of economics and age. The most productive were people who held jobs and were between ages twenty-five and forty-four, while moderately productive included those who worked and were between ages fifteen and sixty-four. The rest fell into the nonproductive category. According to the sociologists, the city encomp
assed not only Detroit but two small municipalities, Hamtramck and Highland Park, that were in whole or in part geographically within the city. The metropolitan complex, meaning the suburbs to which most people were fleeing, included Wayne County past the city limits plus Oakland and Macomb Counties.
There was a racial component to the study that the authors did not want to be misconstrued or distorted. In the 1960 Census, Detroit’s population was 28.9 percent black. By 1970, according to their estimate, the city would be 44.35 percent black. But African Americans who had the resources to move and could find housing in the suburbs would do so with the same urgency as whites: “Present population trends clearly demonstrate that the city is, by and large, being abandoned by all except those who suffer from relatively great housing, educational and general economic deprivations.” Cavanagh, who inherited a municipal debt when he took office, had tried to deal with the city’s financial difficulties by pushing through an income tax that also applied to commuters who worked in the city. But the report suggested that the commuter tax would at best be of short-term benefit. With the suburbs growing not only from new housing but from shopping centers, offices, and industrial facilities, more people would not only live but also shop and work out there, turning the commuter tax into “a hollow mockery.” The authors were also skeptical of any beneficial effects coming from Detroit’s urban renewal, which, they said, despite all the money poured into it, produced very little housing, only about a thousand units to that point, with “only a few thousand more contemplated.” The inadequacy of public housing resulting from urban renewal had been a subject sociologist Mayer had been lamenting for years. As he once described it, “The elephantine efforts have brought forth a mouse.”
Step out of chronology for a moment to consider this. The Wayne State report was issued four years before Detroit was rocked by rebellion and riot in the summer of 1967, an event considered pivotal in the city’s decline and transformation. The report was written fifty years before Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, its population down to 688,000, the shriveled tax base incapable of supporting financial obligations. The report predicted a dire future long before it became popular to attribute Detroit’s fall to a grab bag of Rust Belt infirmities, from high labor costs to harsh weather, and before the city staggered from more blows of municipal corruption and incompetence. Before any of that, the forces of deterioration were already set in motion.
Detroit was being threatened by its own design of concrete and metal and fuel and movement, and also by the American dilemma of race. The Motor City’s proud grid of urban freeways had made it easier for people to live in the suburbs and work in the city. Years of urban renewal had uprooted traditional neighborhoods, many of them predominantly black, and set in motion the rippling effect of white ethnic enclaves washing farther outward beyond Eight Mile Road, the city boundary. The giant suburban shopping malls of Eastland and Northland (surrounded by a vast concrete plain holding 9,984 parking spaces), with Westland coming and Southland on the decade’s far horizon, were gradually tightening the noose around the city’s downtown hub. The auto companies themselves, while still identified symbolically as being in and of Detroit, had been relying more on plants and suppliers located outside the city and around the country. When Cavanagh and others thought Detroit’s future was to be envied, when they were striving to land the Olympics and earn the imprimatur of a world-class city, the sociologists at Wayne State were analyzing data and trends and noticed something troubling. They saw the shadows forming.
• • •
Composition and decomposition. Detroit dying and thriving at the same time. Seven weeks earlier, Cavanagh had christened the year 1963 with the mayor’s traditional New Year’s Day greeting to Detroiters. The Free Press ran it on the January 1 front page: “1962 has been a good year for most of us in Detroit. Fewer people are out of work, business in general is on the upturn, and our auto plants are busy turning out quality cars that have made Detroit famous throughout the world. The improved economic picture is only a part of the renaissance which has marked 1962 as the year of Detroit’s rebirth. Our city is striking out at blight and other stifling factors of urban life. Detroit is becoming a better place to live—not only through dramatic improvements in neighborhoods, expressways, and physical surroundings—but better also in a spiritual way. Gradually, we are learning how to live together, with understanding as human beings. . . . Now we must see to it that our progress, our momentum, is carried into 1963.”
Cavanagh’s own momentum came to a sudden stop that very first day of the year. He was traveling back to Detroit after attending Romney’s inauguration in Lansing when he started feeling a heavy, dull ache in his left side. After examining him, his doctor called in a chest specialist, who determined that he had pneumonia and sent him to Providence Hospital. His police aide, Sgt. Henry Wood, said the mayor seemed unperturbed about his condition but worried that he would miss watching the second half of the Rose Bowl between Wisconsin and Southern Cal. The doctors said he had worked and played himself to exhaustion, with his twenty-hour days and late nights at various restaurants around town. No more of that for now, nothing but treatment and bed rest for ten days. A daily hospital diet restricted to no more than a thousand calories. A few books at his bedside, including a biography of Fiorello La Guardia, the little flower of New York, and A Nation of Sheep by William Lederer. When he was released from Providence and spirited off to a weekend retreat by his wife, who was seven months pregnant, expecting their seventh child, his doctor instructed him to slow down and “have dinner at home more than once or twice a week.”
That same day, January 11, Life magazine hit the newsstands. The cover was dominated by actress Ann-Margret posed in pink, leg up, arms out, hair swirling, but the left side of the page announced a story and photo spread inside of an altogether different sort: “Glow from Detroit Spreads Everywhere.”
The celebration of Detroit started on page 26 with a two-page photograph of a beefy middle-aged car dealer in a swirl of miniature cars. “Boom . . . in Detroit,” the caption read. This was Arnold Klett’s moment of glory, representing his city and the car industry. Business was flush. He sold Cadillacs, at the top of the General Motors line, and people were buying them. GM was trying to keep up but lagged weeks behind on delivery. Klett alone had thirty-five customers waiting for Caddys, and until the real cars rolled in he was handing out toy models and posing happily for Life.
The photos were shot by Burk Uzzle, who months earlier had joined the Chicago bureau as Life’s youngest contract photographer, only twenty-three. Uzzle was at the start of a memorable career capturing indelible American moments through the lens of his Pentax and Leica, from the somber daze of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta to the psychedelic drizzle-dazzle of the nation’s tribal counterculture at the Woodstock music festival in New York State. Detroit was one of his first assignments. He visited Ford, Chrysler, GM, and American Motors, day and night, inside and out, from the boiler rooms to the executive suites and the design rooms, and even ventured up to Lansing to capture the inaugural ball for car guy Romney. Dozens of contact sheets from the Detroit assignment later found their way to a photojournalism archive at the Library of Congress, supplementing the array of photographs printed in Life. He photographed workers, white and black, on the assembly line, snapping parts into chassis frames, adjusting steering wheels, soldering doors, eating in the cafeteria, cashing paychecks, drinking and playing cards in nearby bars, and row after row of finished automobiles, gleaming in the winter snow, stacked high on triple-decker rail transport cars, ready to roll to St. Louis. Uzzle composed the most evocative shot, inspiring the cover headline, in the pitch darkness of the late shift outside the east side Chrysler plant: shadowy outlines of the factory and its smokestacks lit by the glowing neon Chrysler sign, heavy dark smoke billowing into the cold midnight sky. The caption: “Signaling the prosperity of the industry, a Chrysler Corp. plant in Detroit blasts on into the night.” “That was
back in the days when smoke was viewed as a sign of progress and prosperity,” Uzzle recalled. “People in Detroit were delighted to have us photograph it. It meant that things were booming.”
The main story was written by Keith Wheeler, a go-to writer in the stable of Life scribblers at Manhattan headquarters. The optimism that first became apparent at the Detroit Auto Show the previous October had intensified into cocky confidence. The car consumer had drifted away for years, Wheeler wrote, “but now he’s back, panting like the exhaust of a 325 horsepower Cadillac for the same old sweetheart, the American automobile. Well, perhaps not quite the same girl: she has been to the beauty parlor and the masseuse, and you’d hardly know her by the new contours.” What brought people flocking to new cars? Wheeler offered several theories: the prospect of a federal tax cut; a surge of public confidence after surviving the Cuban Missile Crisis; a drift away from the foreign car lure “of littleness for the sake of littleness,” a Madison Avenue–driven thirst for the best and fanciest. “ ‘In every make, with every model, it’s the top of the line that goes,’ said a gleeful industry man.”
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