The Origins of the Urban Crisis
Sugrue, Thomas
WHY DETROIT FELL APART The Origins of the Urban Crisis Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit Thomas Sugrue Princeton University Press. $35,408 pp. John Buell Perhaps the most fashionable...
...Liberals, labor, and civil-rights organizations could not match the power of corporations in shaping economic conditions...
...Unlike previous generations of immigrants, Detroit's black community almost immediately had to face the massive de-industrialization that started in the auto industry as early as the fifties...
...John Buell is the author of Politics by Other Means (Illinois University Press).ois University Press...
...The lack of an indigenous, non-Communist progressive movement committed to building counterweights to the power of both corporations and state bureaucracies left few alternatives to Reuther's increasingly narrow vision...
...But, Sugrue notes, neither were they completely powerless or above reproach...
...After the vast social changes brought about by the war, the industry continued to discriminate...
...Thomas Sugrue's careful work documents the ways in which patterns of racial separation and corporate power helped foster and entrench urban poverty...
...Moreover, civil rights organizations, focusing on job training and interview skills for potential white-collar workers, neglected to combat the economic forces eroding working-class jobs...
...They resisted efforts to build public housing and often vandalized houses purchased by blacks in white neighborhoods...
...Working-class whites sought to shore up their one major asset and protect an ideal of home and family that they thought was threatened more by blacks than by their own growing economic insecurity...
...Nonetheless, this line of argument is historically myopic...
...Wartime labor shortages resulted in the auto industry opening new jobs to minorities...
...Until the war, most blacks living in Detroit had been confined to domestic, hotel, restaurant, and maintenance work...
...The story begins with Detroit's wartime role as the "arsenal of democracy...
...More impressively, Sugrue suggests that the fluctuations of job markets, especially for unskilled workers, and racial or ethnic neighborhood boundaries interacted to produce high levels of unemployment and racial isolation in the cities...
...The conversion of the auto industry to military production encouraged the influx of blacks to the city...
...In such a context, many working-class whites held onto an increasingly localized and exclusive version of their American dream...
...The so-called "culture of poverty" does encourage self-destructive behavior...
...Concerned about union power, General Motors and Ford began automating and moving production to the suburbs as well as to plants in the rural South...
...Yet even amidst the wartime boom, blacks were generally given the dirtiest and most dangerous industrial jobs...
...Sugrue's work is a sad tale of misunderstanding and unnecessary resentments, but to his great credit he does not present it as an inexorable journey...
...And they knew that shortening working hours through curbs on overtime would create more jobs and improve the quality of life for all...
...John Buell Perhaps the most fashionable argument for the persistence of urban poverty is the "culture of poverty," a thesis associated with the neoconservatives' emphasis on "values...
...Throughout the fifties and sixties, Detroit and other major industrial cities were shaken by conflicts over housing, a declining manufacturing base, and staggering rates of unemployment among blacks...
...Conflicts over housing and jobs in a stagnant economy and a history of racial innuendo and violence-not perceived liberal weakness on crime and race-prepared the way for the shattering of the New Deal coalition that united the poor and the middle class...
...Urban rioting propelled many white ethnics into Nixon's "silent majority," a shift in voting patterns that eventually culminated in the "Reagan Democrats...
...At best, most young blacks could get temporary jobs, and could get these only by "loitering" in the "casual labor markets" located at certain street corners...
...These economic realities exacerbated racial tensions and stereotypes...
...For blacks these trends meant that the generation born in the late forties and fifties could no longer realistically hope for what many of their fathers had achieved: reasonable pay, albeit for hard and difficult work...
...For white workers de-industrialization also meant wage stagnation and diminished hopes that their children might go to college and escape the industrial life altogether...
...Looking at many inner-city neighborhoods today, one can find at least superficial evidence to support this contention...
...By the late forties and early fifties, blacks were most heavily represented in the least desirable and most dangerous jobs and had almost no presence in the skilled trades...
...But UAW President Walter Reuther insisted that the union focus on organizing workers in the new rural locations and seek continual wage growth rather than work to reduce hours and expand the number of jobs...
...Many, though not all, of those in the labor movement who were interested in building interracial coalitions to challenge corporate power over factory location and working hours were Communist-connected and advocated government ownership of domestic industry...
...Blacks came with the same hopes and dreams as other Americans, to purchase homes and make better lives for their children...
...Housing in Detroit followed an apartheid pattern that was sustained by real estate practices, restrictive covenants, and even federal lending policies...
...Fear and anger led to predictable results...
...Both management and the unions left hiring largely to the discretion of individual plant managers, and many factories were essentially white bastions...
...They "could not get loans to improve their property...
...In 1951, workers at UAW local 600, Ford's giant River Rouge facility, recognized that de-industrialization was a threat to workers...
...and would ruin any white neighborhood they moved into...
...In addition, Great Society job training programs expended much money with little impact, thereby fueling a growing antigovernment mood in the nation...
...In Detroit, sporadic crime and violence were followed by one of the worst race riots in U. S. history in 1967...
...As a result, their homes deteriorated....Moreover, the deteriorating neighborhoods offered seemingly convincing evidence to white landowners that blacks were feckless and irresponsible...
...Supporting the educational, neighborhood, and family structures that can ameliorate such pathologies should be part of any economic rejuvenation...
...Sugrue shows how housing patterns both reflected and reinforced racial boundaries and racial identities...
...The breakdown of the family, the concentration of the poor, and the absence of good role models are cited as principal causes of poverty...
...As Sugrue's study makes clear, those who wish to rebuild inner cities must focus on the ways race and class interact in undermining the hopes of all young workers...
...To reduce the number of new hires and control costs, auto manufacturers also started imposing overtime on the most skilled workers...
...Confined to crowded areas of the city and with limited access to lending institutions, blacks paid inflated prices for inferior housing...
...But parents and even the best schools aren't enough...
Vol. 124 • November 1997 • No. 19
