One last tragedy in the year of the fallen. It was with the resounding gospel incantations of Aretha Franklin that Detroit said good-bye.
Chapter 19
* * *
BIG OLD WATERBOATS
AT THE DAWN of his first full year as president, Lyndon Johnson believed that he could use his immense political skill and will to work his way through most problems. When it came to his domestic agenda, his attention often turned to Detroit. The health of its auto industry was essential to the economic well-being of the nation, and the strength of the United Auto Workers union was critical to LBJ in so many ways, both as a base of electoral support and as a progressive lobby for his civil rights agenda. But all of that worked in his favor, he thought, only if there was peace, not overseas but at the negotiating tables of Detroit. Somehow both Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther had to be satisfied. That notion was the backdrop for a recorded conversation about Reuther that Johnson had with Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense, on January 25. Johnson was doing most of the talking that Saturday. McNamara was mostly listening and trying to deflect without sounding too contrary. He knew Reuther in a way the president did not, as an adversary more than an ally. They rose together on opposite sides in the auto world of Detroit after World War II, with McNamara arriving at the Ford Motor Company in 1946 just as Reuther was ascending to the top of the UAW.
McNamara had been one of the young officers out of the U.S. Army Air Force who had applied military planning techniques and statistical analysis to revive Ford with a modernization effort that Norman Strouse witnessed with admiration as the manager of the Detroit branch of J. Walter Thompson. Quiz Kids, they were called at first, with a tone of sarcasm if not derision, for all of the questions they kept asking, but the success of their effort soon enough turned the moniker into Whiz Kids. It was that efficiency in running a massive operation that brought McNamara to Washington to run the Pentagon for JFK, and now for Johnson.
Domestic policy, not defense strategy, was foremost on Johnson’s mind in those early days of his presidency. He was determined to finish the work of the Kennedy administration in civil rights and to establish his own, more sweeping economic and social agenda. Since Johnson called Reuther’s hotel room in Washington one day after Kennedy’s assassination to say that he needed the labor leader’s help more than ever, their relationship had only deepened. Reuther yearned to be near the center of power, and Johnson was masterly at the twin arts of flattery and manipulation, making Reuther feel that he was the president’s confidant. Two weeks before Christmas, he had given Reuther the title of special ambassador and included him in the U.S. delegation that attended the December 12 independence ceremonies in Nairobi, Kenya. As frequent as Reuther’s contact had been with the White House during the Kennedy years, his interactions with Johnson were more intimate. Johnson was incessantly working the Oval Office phone, and Reuther was on the priority list of people on the receiving end. On December 23 Johnson called at 9:18 at night to discuss the civil rights legislation and a tax cut proposal. “We’ve got to get going on civil rights,” Johnson said. Richard Russell, the Democratic senator from Georgia who co-authored the Southern Manifesto, was a main obstacle to the legislation. Johnson told Reuther that Russell was now claiming he could defeat any cloture vote to end a filibuster. “If you fellows can put a little steel in Mansfield’s spine . . . that’s the only thing that’s ever going to best Dick Russell,” LBJ advised, referring to Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader from Montana.
Before his first State of the Union address on January 8, the president solicited a memo from Reuther on what he should say. The six-page “Economy of Opportunity” plan that Reuther and his aides provided was in some ways a rough blueprint of LBJ’s historic address declaring an “unconditional war on poverty in America,” calling for the elimination of “not some, but all racial discrimination,” and urging the creation of “a high-level commission on automation”—the technological transformation that was high among Reuther’s concerns. “If we have the brainpower to invent these machines, we have the brainpower to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity,” Johnson said, echoing a sentiment common in Reuther’s own speeches.
Automation, workplace conditions, middle-class wages, job security, meaningful work, and quality of life—those were the central issues for Reuther and his union. His mission involved a difficult balancing act. He had to try to satisfy the immediate complaints and demands of his disparate union constituency, but at the same time he prided himself on looking toward the future to address difficulties he saw headed his way. One problem he foresaw in January 1964 was America’s vulnerability in the world car market, and he connected that to other concerns, including displaced workers and the need for smaller cars to counter foreign competition. All of that, along with the demise of Studebaker, was in the background of the conversation between Johnson and McNamara on January 25.
Studebaker’s decline was so long and steady that nothing, not even the introduction of the Avanti, a sleek new car the company introduced at the 1962 Detroit Auto Show, could turn it around. With widespread rumors that Studebaker was faltering, its 1964 models, sent to dealers in fall 1963, were virtually ignored by consumers, and the situation collapsed from there. Five days before Christmas, the South Bend plant was shuttered, sending Reuther’s UAW members there out into the cold.
At the same time, reports were coming out showing how much the world car market had changed in the fourteen months since that 1962 auto show, when big cars seemed resurgent and Henry Ford II had talked so confidently about Detroit’s position against foreign competition. In 1963, for the first time, even as the Big Three were enjoying their best sales year ever, more than half the cars in the world were made outside the United States, with estimates that the gap would only widen year by year from then on. Volkswagen was rising, and even Japan was beginning to stir, both taking hold of the worldwide small car market. Between 375,000 and 400,000 imports were sold in the United States in 1963, and estimates for 1964 were up to a half million. One reason, experts said, was that the compact cars the U.S. automakers started manufacturing in the late fifties in response to an earlier foreign surge were getting so much bigger every year that by now that might as well be classified as midsize vehicles.
Out of these negative developments Reuther saw the possibility of something positive. For fifteen years, since 1949, he had been urging American automakers to adapt to a changing world by making smaller cars. Now he and his aides at the UAW developed a grand scheme to create what he called an “all-American small car.” It would require central planning and cooperation between labor and industry and the automakers themselves, concepts that were dear to Reuther, evoking the New Deal and the all-for-one mobilization during the war, but increasingly alien to the impulses of American industry. The car was to be manufactured at the idle plant in South Bend, reemploying laid-off Studebaker workers, and be a joint venture pooling the engineering talents of Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Reuther dug out a quote from Henry Ford II to explain why a joint venture was needed. “Volkswagen sold about two hundred thousand cars last year in this country,” Ford had said. “But if we started to compete with it, then General Motors would go in, and probably Chrysler, and by the time we start divvying up what is left in a market of this size, there’s nothing there.” A joint venture would overcome that problem, Reuther argued. If the Big Three came together in a peacetime version of the Arsenal of Democracy, they could win the economic world war and improve the U.S. balance of payments, which “suffers severely from failure of the nation’s automobile industry to produce a small car to compete for the U.S. and world markets.” And to save on costs, Reuther argued, the all-American small car could avoid making yearly model changes. He cited a Senate subcommittee estimate from several years earlier claiming that annual model changes added about $200 to the cost of the average car. Volkswagen had already “proved that model changes are not necessary in the small car market.”<
br />
Any such joint venture would require strong support from the federal government, including an agreement by the Justice Department to suspend antitrust enforcement, which explains how LBJ ended up discussing it with McNamara. It appeared from the conversation that Johnson’s interests were not so much in the merits of the small-car proposal as in his desire to keep Reuther mollified—for several reasons. It was not just that Reuther was a key supporter of the president’s initiatives; there were raw political calculations involved as well. Labor contracts with the Big Three automakers would be coming up later in the year, just as Johnson was running for election. He did not want to be embarrassed by a massive autoworkers strike that could stall the economy in November. That is where the discussion with McNamara began. One other issue was connected to Johnson’s ploy. A year earlier, the European Economic Community had placed a stiff tariff on the import of chickens produced in the United States. In what became known as the Chicken Wars, Johnson retaliated by imposing a 25 percent increase in the tariffs on imported brandy, potato starch, dextrin, and light trucks. The tariff on light trucks was aimed especially at Volkswagen, some of whose vans were classified in that category. It was also aimed at pleasing Reuther, bolstering the U.S. labor force by debilitating foreign competition. Johnson considered this another card in his hand as he tried to pressure Reuther to avoid a future strike.
“He’s going to push on [the auto contracts] to the wall and it’s going to be murder on us,” Johnson said to McNamara. But as a world-class student of human behavior, especially in the political world, LBJ thought he saw a way to placate Reuther. “I think, though, he’s vain enough that if we could get some company to . . . put this little car on manufacture it’d be real novel . . . and have the Justice department behave and have it be his idea.”
McNamara was nonplussed. What was his boss thinking? Aside from all the ways this idea ran counter to the automakers’ free enterprise philosophy, it also seemed naïve, blind to the realities of Detroit. The Big Three would reject the idea outright, McNamara advised, speaking from his experience at Ford, precisely “because it was Reuther who wanted it.”
Johnson seemed undeterred. Rather than argue with McNamara, he tried to drag him further into his conniving. The Defense Department could “do a little contract” to help Reuther’s plan get off the ground, he said. “You’re the biggest users. Why don’t you give ’em a contract, instead of running around in these damn big old waterboats you gotta have? Why couldn’t you buy a hundred thousand?”
McNamara thoughtfully declined to mention that LBJ enjoyed rides in two of the biggest waterboats around, not only the outsized presidential limousine but a white Lincoln convertible with which he chauffeured guests around his Hill Country ranch in Texas. (JFK too seemed partial to Ford; his favorite was a 1961 Thunderbird convertible, the same cool car that Detroit advertiser Bill Laurie drove.) Small cars were just not right for the Pentagon, McNamara said. The brass needed more room, more comfort. To which Johnson replied, “[Well what about] all those sergeants whirling around in Mercurys, delivering messages for generals?”
Then the subject changed and that was that. Reuther kept pushing his all-American car idea, but it never got anywhere beyond the calculating mind of the president. The auto companies had no more interest in the small car than they did in his suggestion that they lower prices. They would never do that just because Walter Reuther wanted them to. The market would determine what the prices should be, along with the marketers. Reuther nonetheless remained loyal to LBJ; the issues of civil rights, poverty, and federal action to promote social equity were too central to him to be subject to negotiation. He considered himself a social progressive first, a collective bargainer second. But there remained the prospect of labor strikes before the election.
Chapter 20
* * *
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
OFIELD DUKES OF the Michigan Chronicle started the new year by roaming the streets of Detroit with photographer Jim Cleaver to assess the lives and hopes of those at the bottom. “What does the resident of skid row, the drifter, the wino, the prostitute, the unemployable, the hard pressed escapist have to look forward to in 1964? On what basis do these social lepers, these outcasts of society embrace hope and faith that the wheels of fortune and the laws of destiny will operate in their interest and favor?” The answers Dukes came back with were no surprise.
First stop was a flophouse on Gratiot between St. Antoine and Beaubien, only a block and a half from Detroit Police Department headquarters. It was a bitterly cold night; an arctic air mass had whipped subzero temperatures into Michigan, and the ragged men taking shelter inside looked at the inquisitive intruders with bewilderment, as if any thought beyond the matter of not freezing to death was superfluous. One man said he had been without a job for twelve years, since 1952, when he left Pittsburgh in search of work. Another said he was too old to be concerned with civil rights. A third said he was looking forward to an early spring and the comfort of a jail bed. In the dead of winter, he said, “I could go out on the street and look drunk, even lie on the sidewalk, but police won’t arrest me. This is not the season. They don’t start picking us up until spring—March, April, and May.” Dukes added as a side note that “the man . . . doesn’t feel that the Negro will progress much in 1964.” Similar responses came from prostitutes, store owners, and street people up and down Chrysler Drive, an access road paralleling the Chrysler Freeway along what once was Hastings Street. At the bottom, there was not much hope.
That story was published in the first Chronicle issue of 1964, an edition brimming with assessments of the year past and predictions for the new one. Rev. C. L. Franklin was named one of eight Ministers of the Year. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and former police commissioner George Edwards were among the Citizens of the Year. There was a roll call of events connecting Detroit and the national story: The Walk to Freedom. The “Negro Revolt” sweeping the American South. LBJ’s visit to Second Baptist to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The March on Washington. King’s “dream” speech. The police shooting of Cynthia Scott at the corner of John R and Edmond. The drive for federal civil rights legislation. The defeat of an open-housing bill by the Detroit Common Council. The booing of the National Anthem at the Olympics rally in front of the Spirit of Detroit sculpture. The political murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi. The death of four young girls when the Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Malcolm X’s fiery “Message to the Grassroots” at King Solomon Baptist. The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. The overdose death of Dinah Washington. “The year 1963 was the most dramatic, poignant, encouraging, tragic, reactionary, and progressive paradox of any single year that we know in American history,” wrote Broadus Nathaniel Butler, a Chronicle columnist and administrator at Wayne State University who had served with the Tuskegee airmen in World War II and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan. “There have been periods, some long and some short, representing all facets of things that happened in 1963, but no one year to our knowledge encompassed and mirrored—with such complete clarity and depth of meaning—the whole dramatic history of the United States.”
Above the Broadus column was an editorial with the headline “1964—A Year of Unfinished Business.” All of that activity in civil rights needed to be met now with legislative achievement, the editors wrote. “The star of the Negro blinking in a murky sky radiates a glimmering ray of hope for 1964. But this hope has to be combined with hard work, determination, and greater unity if the aspirations of the ’63 revolt are to be crystallized in ’64.”
Aside from the glow of the Walk to Freedom, progress in Detroit was modest and subject to contrary interpretations. Despite the defeat of the open-housing bill, Richard Marks, executive director of the Commission on Community Relations, said his agency had recorded sixteen instances where “known Negro families” were living in neighborhoods that formerly had been described as all w
hite—areas west of Schaefer Road on the west side and north of Seven Mile and west of Connor on the east side. But the movement of blacks beyond the de facto confinement of their established territory was met with ever increasing hostility by white neighborhood associations that employed the language, and some of the tactics, of paramilitary organizations, a not so cold racial war that had been intensifying year by year for two decades. As historian Thomas Sugrue noted, these groups referred to “invasions” and “penetrations” and strategies of physical and verbal resistance. “The first black family to cross into the Northeast side neighborhood surrounding Saint Bartholomew’s parish in 1963,” Sugrue reported, “was greeted with a sign that read ‘Get back on the other side of 7 Mile.’ ”
Once in a Great City Page 33