Kevin Boyle, one of the great historians of his generation (his book, Arc of Justice, won the National Book Award in 2004), is also a native Detroiter and a true Rustbelt Intellectual. He grew up on Chatsworth Street, on the city's East Side during the 1960s and 1970s, and witnessed the dramatic racial and economic transformations that left Detroit--and so many other cities like it--ravaged by disinvestment.
In this moving article, Boyle revisits his childhood neighborhood where today, you can buy a single-family detached house for about $5,000 more than what his parents paid nearly fifty years ago. Boyle offers a subtle reflection on the intersection between memory and history. It's one of the most powerful, personal meditations on urban change that I have read--and a rare one that evokes childhood memories without slipping into maudlin nostalgia.
Three years ago, the Onion ran a perversely funny story, "Detroit Sold for Scrap." Now farce has become tragedy.
Last year, I visited the site of Detroit's long-abandoned and much picked over Packard Plant with a film crew from Britain. A half block away was a roving maintenance crew from Detroit Edison, replacing a hundred feet of power lines that had been stolen the night before by scavengers.
It's a sign of the times that scrap metal theft (even through metal prices have fallen in recent months) has become a boom business in inner cities. For a time here in Philadelphia, enterprising recyclers began stealing manhole covers--hundreds of them in a few months. Detroit, once the Motor City, is quickly becoming the Scrap Metal City. Everything is ripe for the plundering in a place with a record number of abandoned houses, skyrocketing unemployment, widespread poverty, and a thriving drug trade.
The metal theft business is not simply an urban problem. Like so many other social problems, it's rapidly suburbanizing. In 2008 alone, there were 145,000 foreclosures in Michigan, many in Detroit's suburbs. Thousands more houses are vacant, unsold in the bleak real estate market. Leftover suburban houses are a treasure chest of steel, copper, and aluminum. Air conditioners, gutters, doors, wiring, and plumbing fixtures are disappearing.
Chris McCarus, a Lansing-based journalist, recently ran an excellent three-part series on copper theft on his radio program Michigan Now. The epidemic of copper theft is a vivid example of the everyday devastation wrought by the current economic crisis.
I'm thrilled to introduce the newest contributor to Rustbelt Intellectual, John David Skrentny. John is currently professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, but don't let the fact that he grades papers and writes lectures sitting in a lawn chair under the bright blue skies of the Torrey Pines delude you into thinking that he's not a Rustbelt Intellectual through and through.
In fact, John is the original Rustbelt Intellectual. A native of Highland, Indiana, a near suburb of Gary, John grew up driving past the steel mills along Cline Avenue, fishing in the befouled waters of Lake Calumet, and visiting his grandparents in Gary's old Hungarian neighborhood (pictured above). Nearly twenty years ago, when John left his home state to attend graduate school at Harvard, he found himself in the orbit of the last great New York Intellectuals, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell, who had taken up residence in leafy Cambridge. The children and grandchildren of immigrants, the New York Intellectuals grew up in the heady but intensely fractious world of the city's Jewish socialists, where apartment buildings were controlled by one or another leftist sect and where arguments over Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were as common as street brawls and fought with the same intensity. But by the late 1980s, many the surviving New York Intellectuals, still brilliant and argumentative, had moved to the political right.
John and I attended Harvard at the same time and, after the fact, we discovered that we had many friends in common and even attended a few memorable parties together. But we never met there--or if we did, neither of us remember. It wasn't until we were both assistant professors at another Ivy League institution that we found that our shared Rustbelt roots gave us a shared perspective on politics didn't quite fit in with the elitism of many of our East Coast colleagues.
Attracted by the cosmopolitanism of the urban East Coast, but repelled by its pretensions (what we called the "Harvard-o-centric view of the universe"), we found ourselves having to explain the quirky politics of our families, our relatives, our neighbors, the people we grew up with to our East Coast friends. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Midwestern "Reagan Democrats," a term that described many of our relatives, became the subject of intense scrutiny by pollsters, pundits, and political scientists--and derision in our own circles. But so many of those commentators treated blue-collar and middle-class Midwesterners as an exotic species. John and I found ourselves having to explain the politics of race, rights, and justice--the everyday notions of fairness and difference--that shaped and sometimes distorted the politics of people like those in our extended families.
Back then, in the self-satisfied precincts of Harvard Square, John rebelliously coined the term "Rustbelt Intellectual," describing an identity that captured the two-ness of coming from modest Midwestern origins but finding ourselves in the self-proclaimed (if greatly exaggerated) Athens of America. Like the New York intellectuals, we were products of the disputatious politics of our white ethnic families. Just as the New York Intellectuals leaned right, away from their socialist backgrounds, we Rustbelt Intellectuals leaned left, away from our Reagan Democrat roots. And just as the New York Intellectuals could never fully escape their origins in Brooklyn and the Bronx, even as they thrived in the goyische precincts of Cambridge, so too were we the products of Gary and Detroit, shaped by the Catholic sensibilities of our families, deeply tied to our troubled home towns, attracted by the economic populism of some of the Rustbelt's more compelling political figures, and, at the same time, battling against the demons of race and unacknowledged white identity politics that colored the politics of Michigan and Indiana.
I hope you find John's distinctive political voice a refreshing addition to this blog. We don't always agree politically, but John is one of the most thoughtful analysts of contemporary American politics and culture. It's great to have him aboard as an occasional contributor.
Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, once the darling of the DLC and hailed as the mayor of the "hip hop" generation, has been mired in a scandal that is a tragedy for the struggling Motor City but a farce for everyone else. I won't rehearse the whole sordid story of a covered-up affair, "hear no evil, see no evil" police protection, the politically-motivated firing of whistleblowers, $9 million misspent city dollars on a losing court case, blatant perjury, bail skipping, and cop-shoving. Kilpatrick should have stepped aside long ago, for the sake of his constituents and his city.
But Kwame is now the unwitting tool of a group of politicians even slimier than he is. The Tennessee Republican Party is running an ad linking Barack Obama with the troubled mayor. Why should Tennessee residents care about the mayor of a far away city with only a nominal association with the presidential candidate? Call it one small dose of guilt by association and three big doses of "scary black man" race-mongering. This is appalling stuff. Expect worse to come.
Just a little over four decades ago, as a wee slip of a child, I lived through the Detroit uprising of 1967. Over the course of a week, 43 people were killed (34 of them black, almost all by the police and National Guard), thousands of houses and stores were burned, and more than 7000 people were arrested. I don't remember much, except the sight of National Guard vehicles rolling past my house and the fact that I could not play in my front yard, for fear that I'd be the victim of sniper fire.
The riots were a trauma on the body politic. Many burned-out shopping districts never recovered. Detroit had been steadily losing population and jobs since the 1950s. That hemorrhage continued after the riot--the pattern of economic flight, disinvestment, and population loss was already deeply entrenched. The aftermath of the riots certainly did not improve Detroit's fortunes, though it's historically inaccurate (if compelling narratively) to blame Detroit's woes on that week in late July 1967. But even if Detroiters exaggerate the centrality of the riots in their city's fate, the events of 1967 forever shaped the way that Detroiters and other urbanites talk about their cities.
Our memories of the urban past are inevitably tinged with nostalgia--the product of forgetting as much as recollection. Whenever I visit Detroit, I am struck by the wistful memories that city residents (or more likely former city residents) have about their childhood neighborhoods. White folks invariably see the 1967 Detroit riot as the turning point. Before "they" took over the city and ruined it, Motown was a city of tight-knit neighborhoods, of racial harmony, and tranquility. If only "they" hadn't destroyed Detroit, it would be a thriving metropolis still. The film above, prepared for Detroit's bid for the 1968 Olympics, captures some of the romance of the lost past (though as you watch, recall that Detroit's population was about one-third black when the film was made and further recall that they city had already been devastated by the loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs, mostly in the late 1950s). Whites don't have a monopoly on romantic evocations of the urban past. Black folks also have sepia-toned memories of the segregated city, where neighbors were friendly, where middle-class and working-class people lived side-by-side, and where they all patronized "race" businesses.
Both sets of memories have elements of truth. The city was a safer place 60 years ago than it is today; many neighborhoods (especially compared to their turn-of-the-21st century counterparts) were close-knit. And the cumulative effect of sixty years of disinvestment makes things much, much worse economically then when Detroit was the nation's "Arsenal of Democracy." But the story of decline and memories of a better past simplify and distort the city's history. White neighborhoods were tight in large part because of their racial exclusivity. There wasn't a lot of racial harmony in the postwar city--the city's segregation was the result of a poisonous combination of racist public policy, real estate discrimination, and grassroots organization and often violence by whites who wanted to keep their neighborhoods free of black "invaders." And the "they" who ruined many urban neighborhoods includes lots and lots of white folks--absentee landlords and shopkeepers who let their properties run down, industrialists and business leaders who abandoned the central city, and politicians who aided and abetted white flight. And the black romance with the past overlooks the high rates of poverty that characterized black lives, the ravages of systemic underemployment and unemployment, the dreariness of most black shopping districts, and the fact that most "race" businesses were economically marginal.
Several years ago, ethnographer Phil Kasinitz published a fascinating paper on his interviews with long-time residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood Red Hook. At that time, Red Hook was on the brink of gentrification, as artists and hipsters, priced out of more expensive neighborhoods, began moving into the old tenements and warehouses along the Brooklyn waterfront. But Red Hook was a heterogeneous place, home to a large public housing project, shipyards, storage facilities, and small factories. Many of the neighborhood's older residents were blue-collar workers and stevedores who resented the mostly black residents of the public housing projects and the monied newcomers who opened galleries and coffeehouses.
What Kasinitz found was a huge gap between how white old-timers (the subject of the article) remembered their 'hood (usually romantically--everyone knew each other, people left their doors open at night, the economy was booming) and the reality of their own lives (unemployment and economic insecurity, the lack of public safety, substance abuse, and crime). In other words, people retold the history of their community through the lens of their current reaction to changes going on in the neighborhood.
My childhood memories of racial conflict temper my still rosy-hued recollections of life in my little corner of the city. I saw white racism--even as a child--for what it was. But I still miss the lively street life and the sidewalk camaraderie of my West Side block. It's those two sides of the urban experience--the spirit of community and diversity and the vast political and economic forces arrayed against it--that continue to shape both my scholarship and my choices about where to live, and my politics. I can't forget the Motor City.
The Motor City is still shrinking. The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments estimates that Detroit's population will fall to 705,000 by 2035, a loss of more than 20 percent of its current population and a drop of more than one million from the city's 1.85 million peak in 1950. My friend Kurt Metzger, a Detroit-based demographer doesn't believe it. "I'm perfectly happy to accept slow growth across the region," Metzger told the Detroit Free Press. "The economy is going to continue to drive people out, but I don't believe Detroit will empty out to this degree," he said. "They're still leading in building permits in the region. I suppose it could all fall apart, but the city is just on the precipice of moving forward."
Even if his metaphor is more than a little mixed, he might be right. Demographic projections are infamously inaccurate. Even if the prognosis for Detroit seems grim today, there's nothing inevitable about the trajectory of urban growth or depopulation. After all, in the early 1970s, a Brookings Institution study ranked Boston and Detroit as two of the nation's most distressed cities. Ten years later, they were only half right.
Detroit's hope might be in its bankable land. Much of Detroit has reverted to nature, but that means huge tracts of open land, ripe for the reuse.
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