Jack Chatfield on workers, unions, and blue- collar alienation

Detroit Blues

Detroit symbolizes what is most hopeful and most alarming in the American dream. It is an empire of machinery, the industrial capital of the consumer republic, the birthplace of the assembly line and America’s “people’s car.” The sitdowns.and battles of the 1930s seemed to tell America that class warfare could come to the more civilized industries of the urban nation (the mines had always been a nether world, an aberration). In those days young men came to Detroit, in Murray Kempton’s words, “like pretty girls to Hollywood.” And as Henry Ford believed that his Model T and the five-dollar day would be the salvation of the common man, so the Reuther brothers—who came to the city not as agitators but as young men on the make—believed that the UAW and the CIO would deliver the in dustrial working class. Detroit, the scene of so many struggles—including two of the worst race riots of the century—has also been the home of dreams, of the millennial fantasies of the machine age.

JC

About the Author

Jack Chatfield

Detroit Blues

Detroit symbolizes what is most hopeful and most alarming in the American dream. It is an empire of machinery, the industrial capital of the consumer republic, the birthplace of the assembly line and America’s “people’s car.” The sitdowns.and battles of the 1930s seemed to tell America that class warfare could come to the more civilized industries of the urban nation (the mines had always been a nether world, an aberration). In those days young men came to Detroit, in Murray Kempton’s words, “like pretty girls to Hollywood.” And as Henry Ford believed that his Model T and the five-dollar day would be the salvation of the common man, so the Reuther brothers—who came to the city not as agitators but as young men on the make—believed that the UAW and the CIO would deliver the in dustrial working class. Detroit, the scene of so many struggles—including two of the worst race riots of the century—has also been the home of dreams, of the millennial fantasies of the machine age.