Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  What did Johnson’s Great Society require? Abundance, liberty, an end to poverty and racial injustice, the opportunity for every child to have a good education—but more than that. His Great Society was “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” “a place that honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race . . . a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods,” “a place where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.” Beauty, community, creativity, quality, meaning—this was moving past Kennedy’s New Frontier into ethereal realms of personal fulfillment usually considered beyond the reach of politics.

  Johnson also imagined what the world would be like fifty years into the future, in the year 2014. “Many of you will live to see that day,” he told the students, predicting that four fifths of all Americans by then would live in urban areas, that the urban population would double, that the size of cities would double, and that there would need to be a commitment to “rebuild the entire urban United States.” He quoted from Aristotle—“Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life”—and said it was becoming increasingly difficult “to live the good life in American cities today. The catalog of ills is long: there is decay of the centers and despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. Our society will never be great until our cities are great.”

  Only an hour earlier, at the airport, he had called Detroit “the herald of hope.” Now, in his litany of urban ills, he could have been describing a decaying Detroit of the future.

  The twenty-minute speech was interrupted by applause fourteen times. When he talked about bringing “an end to poverty and racial injustice,” Paul Julius Alexander, a noted classics professor and refugee from Nazi Germany, appeared to be the first to clap, initiating a ripple of applause that increased in intensity as it moved through the stadium. Johnson’s first mention of the Great Society was met with silence. Gene Roberts, who had spent much of the previous half year covering the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath, was in the stadium for the Free Press. It was six months to the day since Kennedy had been killed. There are times when reporters for various reasons miss the immortal rhetoric of history as it is being made. At the last historic address, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech the previous August, the hometown Washington Post failed to get that phrase into its main story. This time Roberts nailed it as he outlined the speech Johnson delivered in “his familiar molasses drawl.” In the lead paragraph of the story Roberts would write after the event, he noted that Johnson “tossed a new phrase—the Great Society—into the nation’s political vocabulary.” An editorial writer for the Free Press set about defining what that foretold. He concluded that LBJ had “adopted wholeheartedly the liberalism” of JFK. “The accent will continue to be on big government, with Washington taking the leadership in the attacks on poverty, pollution, and poor education.” Some of Johnson’s ideas for the Great Society “frighten more than inspire,” the editorial concluded. But “it was a beautiful day, and a fine commencement address.”

  As the commencement ceremony drew to a close, the Michigan band played “The Yellow and Blue,” the school’s alma mater, and the massive crowd, warmed by the late morning sun, sat in silence while a lone bugle call pierced the moment. Taps and reveille. End and beginning.

  Johnson and the platform guests led the procession out of the stadium and back to the trailer where he would shed the black robe and freshen up. Walter Reuther was waiting for him outside the trailer. Reuther had not been onstage, but he had witnessed the speech. Johnson’s vision was his vision. The support of his union, and Reuther’s own unequivocal voice, were essential to the civil rights legislation that was moving through Congress at long last and would finally be enacted in July. Reuther, like Johnson, believed deeply in the vital role of government in improving the lives of the people. He was working on his own version of a similar oration, one that championed the role of government. He wanted to “destroy the myth” that the government that governs least governs best. He believed that big government was a product of twentieth-century life, just as Ford Motor Company was a product of twentieth-century technology, and that government’s bigness was in accord with the magnitude of the problems that needed to be solved. According to the White House Daily Diary, Reuther and LBJ “spoke for a few minutes” before the presidential entourage boarded the helicopters for the return to the Detroit airport.

  Mayor Cavanagh had missed the speech, staying in Detroit, but was at the airport when Johnson returned from Ann Arbor. He was booked as a guest on the flight back to Washington to attend that night’s White House Correspondents Dinner. LBJ, he said, looked “extremely hot and sort of rumpled when he came back to the airport.” But what a day this had been. The largest commencement ceremony in history. A new slogan for his administration. The fervent crowds at the airport. An endorsement from Henry Ford II.

  It all looked so promising, Mayor Cavanagh remarked to LBJ as Air Force One lifted above Detroit. The reference was to political prospects, but the context was larger. In the urban landscape below them stood Henry Ford II’s Glass House and Walter Reuther’s Solidarity House and Diego Rivera’s muscular Detroit Industry murals and the River Rouge complex churning out alluring new Mustangs. Receding into the distance were Berry Gordy’s recording studios, where Motown was rollicking as Hitsville USA, and the wide lanes of Woodward Avenue flowing south past the Graystone Ballroom and the Fox Theater and on toward Cobo Hall, where Martin Luther King first dreamed his dream at the water’s edge as barges freighted with iron ore and automobiles budged up and down America’s busiest working river.

  Herald of hope? President Johnson said they would just have to wait and see.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  NOW AND THEN

  WHILE RESEARCHING THIS book, my wife and I often stayed at the Inn on Ferry Street, a hostelry located on a quiet block within easy walking distance of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Historical Museum, the Detroit Public Library, and the Walter P. Reuther Library on Labor and Urban Affairs. The inn comprises three old brick manses and a carriage house, all restored to early twentieth-century comfort—a hint of resurrection in a city of decay. Some guests at the inn were tourists who came to admire the world-class paintings at the art museum, but others were there to take in the decomposition of a city in the same way they might view the remains of an ancient civilization. Detroit might prefer it otherwise, but one of the ways it stayed in the public eye was through photographs and videos that came to be known by the hideous phrase “ruin porn.”

  Detroit is vibrantly alive in some places, despite wide swaths of emptiness and despair and foreclosed homes. Beautiful things can grow in forgotten places when no one is looking, and that is happening to some extent in Detroit. The downtown and parts of midtown and other nearby neighborhoods are being reconfigured and repopulated not just by developers and entrepreneurs betting on a comeback, but by artists, poets, musicians, activists, foodies, and techies, mostly young people of all races who see the desolate urban landscape as a haven for freedom and opportunity.

  There were mornings nonetheless when I could walk across eight lanes of Woodward Avenue at the corner with East Kirby, on my way from the inn to the Reuther Library, and not see a car within hailing distance driving in either direction along the city’s main thoroughfare. It felt as though I could safely read War and Peace while crossing, confident that I would not get hit. And there were chilly nights when we sat nearly alone in a cinematic Fre
nch bistro across the street from the art museum, enjoying tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches while listening to a talented classical guitarist, and wondered what had happened to everyone. What the Wayne State sociologists had predicted in 1963 had proven only too accurate. They calculated that the population of Detroit would drop from 1.7 million to 1.2 million in that decade, and continue dropping for the foreseeable future. By 2014 it was down to about 688,000. Maybe that was rock bottom.

  One day I went driving up Woodward, took a left at West Grand Boulevard, and rode past the Fisher Building and Ford Hospital and the Motown Museum until I reached the triangle with Grand River and Dexter, where I turned north on Dexter and went searching for landmarks in the northwest Detroit neighborhoods of my earliest childhood. The Fisher Y, where I learned to swim, a six-year-old shivering naked in a cold pool with other little boys, was at that corner. It was boarded up, but I could see “YMCA” etched into the cornice above the front door. The flat on Dexter where my family lived for a few years was now an empty lot in an area where it seemed as though two of every five houses were gone or fire-charred or abandoned; the house we moved to next, farther north and west on Cortland Street, seemed occupied but in a state of disrepair. Will the Detroit recovery, when and if it comes, include the people of these lost and forgotten quarters? Can it be called a recovery if they are left behind? On another trip I explored the neighborhood with Tom Stanton, a writer and professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, and we drove farther into the back streets in search of Winterhalter School, where I had attended first grade. The building was still there on Broadstreet, but the school had changed. It was a charter school now, going by the name Hope Academy.

  It was a summer day, the school year done, but a security guard in the parking lot said we might find the principal inside. Her name was Vaneda Fox Sanders. She was a product of the Detroit public schools who graduated from Cass Tech, received a graduate degree from Wayne State, and eventually settled in the east side neighborhood of Indian Village. Her academy was named Hope for a reason. From kindergarten through eighth grade, it taught nearly eight hundred children, who came from all quarters of the city. Ten percent of the parents were categorized as transient or homeless. Ninety-five percent of the students were on free or reduced meal plans. “This is the new wing,” she said, leading me on a tour of the school. The new wing was built in the 1960s. Talk about feeling old; that was after my time there, in 1955 and 1956. “Could we see the old wing?” I asked. The old wing was built in the twenties. As we walked down a hallway from new to old, I was overwhelmed by sensory perceptions long buried and seemingly forgotten. It was the woodwork, so solid and thick and blackish-brown, that got me, the windowsills, the trim, the benches at the stairwell landings—the sight of them incited a rush of memories, not as poetic as Proust’s taste of the madeleine cake, and not easily defined as sweet or sour, good or bad, but dizzyingly powerful. Detroit has that effect on me. Fox Sanders came out of a family of nine children, and of the six still alive, she was the only one who stayed in Detroit. At family reunions, her siblings would ask, “When are you leaving?” Never, she would say. She had no desire to leave.

  • • •

  What happened in Detroit after this story ends is mostly a litany of dissolution and leave-taking. Rev. C. L. Franklin was shot by armed intruders at his home on La Salle Boulevard in northwest Detroit an hour after midnight on the Sunday morning of June 10, 1979, and fell into a five-year coma, dying in 1984. The memorial service at New Bethel Baptist for Aretha Franklin’s father, organizer of the Walk to Freedom, went on for much of a day. Twenty-three preachers from Detroit and other cities delivered tributes, along with Coretta Scott King and Jesse Jackson, and the Staples Singers performed with two full church choirs.

  John White died in prison two years after his Gotham Hotel was raided and razed.

  Walter Reuther and his wife, May, were killed in a crash in 1970 as the pilot of their small plane attempted to land in bad weather near Black Lake, Michigan. It was believed the altimeter had malfunctioned. One of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, a pragmatic idealist who, from his base in Detroit, had been instrumental in enlarging the nation’s middle class, was gone at age sixty-three, his autoworkers union already in a long, slow decline from its peak of power. There were strikes against the automakers in the fall of 1964, but not serious enough to jeopardize the election of Lyndon Baines Johnson over Barry Goldwater. The civil rights push of the previous summer resulted in nation-changing legislation, first the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Detroit—with the financial and lobbying support of Reuther’s UAW along with the city’s strong African American community—played some small but vital role in the creation of both. After Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, it was John Conyers, a Detroit congressman, who led the long and eventually successful effort to make his birthday a national holiday, with essential help from Stevie Wonder. By then, many disaffected white union members from the Detroit suburbs had turned away from Reuther’s progressive ideals to vote for George Wallace and later Ronald Reagan.

  Jerome Cavanagh became a pivotal voice for the cities of America during the early years of the Johnson administration, in 1966 becoming the first mayor to serve simultaneously as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and of the National League of Cities. But his life and career disintegrated the following year. His wife, feeling emotionally abandoned, booted him out of the house and filed for divorce—so much for the all-American, Kennedyesque family. Then his city went up in flames. During five days in July 1967, after a police raid of an after-hours joint known in the vernacular as a “blind pig,” Detroit was devastated by a race riot, or rebellion, depending on one’s perspective. The spasm of civil disorder resulted in forty-three deaths (thirty-three black, ten white victims), 483 fires, widespread looting, and more than seven thousand arrests. Cavanagh was criticized for the city’s slow response. Three years into an attempted transformation of Detroit through Model Cities and War on Poverty programs, this marked a low point in the aspirations upward to a Great Society as well as the end of an era of racial progress that Cavanagh and George Edwards, his first police commissioner, had hoped would make Detroit a haven of tolerance and equality. It also halted Cavanagh’s political ascent, the once-promising career of a JFK acolyte left smoldering in the ruins. He died in 1979 of a heart attack, long out of politics.

  After avoiding conviction on the police bribery charge in 1963, Tony Giacalone, the Detroit mobster pursued so vigorously by Commissioner Edwards, was convicted of income tax fraud in 1976 and served ten years in prison. Of greater national interest was Tony Jack’s role in the disappearance of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who was last seen on July 30, 1975, in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township outside Detroit. Hoffa had gone to the restaurant for a meeting with two mobsters. One was Tony Provenzano, a Teamster boss in northern New Jersey; the other was Giacalone.

  After winning reelection to a third term in 1966, George Romney became an early favorite for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 but hurt himself with a series of missteps, including a statement upon returning from South Vietnam that he had “just had the biggest brainwashing anyone could get” from the American military. Far more than that, he found his moderate brand of Republicanism increasingly out of favor in the GOP and finished fifth in the nomination contest won by Richard Nixon. He was appointed secretary of housing and urban development under Nixon and continued pushing civil rights issues, including programs intended to desegregate housing in the suburbs, a concept that was nowhere more unpopular than in the communities outside Detroit and that also further isolated him from the conservative movement within his own party.

  Henry Ford II’s second marriage, to Maria Cristina Vettore Austin, lasted fifteen years. Near the end of that tumultuous relationship, the Deuce uttered the famous last words that defined his personal life. “Never complain, never exp
lain,” he said after being arrested for driving while intoxicated in the company of Kathleen DuRoss, his mistress (and next wife). Ford and the flamboyant Cristina divorced in 1980. His professional relationship with Lee Iacocca did not last as long as that marriage. He fired Iacocca in 1978, explaining, “Sometimes you just don’t like somebody.” HF2 died of pneumonia at age seventy in 1987 at Ford Hospital. He and his occasionally friendly nemesis, Reuther, were both awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—Ford by LBJ and Reuther, posthumously, by President Clinton three decades later.

  The Mustang, after a remarkable early burst as a driving and marketing phenomenon, a sexy and stylish symbol of the sixties, grew fat and heavy and out of favor by the early seventies. Though it staged several comebacks and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2014, it could never duplicate that first golden era. Much the same could be said for all of the Detroit auto industry.

  The buildings designed by Albert Kahn still stood a half century later. Except, that is, for the Ford Rotunda, which burned to the ground, and the Hotel Gotham, which was axed by officers in the gambling raid and then leveled for urban renewal. The massive River Rouge Complex in Dearborn had been automated and reconfigured, its workforce trimmed since its heyday, with many of the manufacturing tasks once undertaken there spread to plants across the country. But Kahn’s designs remained as symbols of Ford Motor Company’s might. The General Motors Building, Kahn’s neoclassical fifteen-story colossus on West Grand Boulevard, no longer served as headquarters for GM; it became known as Cadillac Place and housed a few dozen agencies of the state of Michigan. GM relocated to the high-rise Renaissance Center down on the Detroit River. The Detroit Athletic Club on Madison Avenue and Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien were largely unchanged, outside and in, with the exception that both fortresses were now fully integrated.