DECEMBER 29, 1957
In the championship game, Tobin Rote leads the Detroit Lions to an astonishing 56–10 win over Cleveland, securing the third NFL title in six years for the Motor City. In the same year, Ford launches its most ambitious car, the Ford Edsel, billed as the car of the future. Detroit is at the top of its game. But the Lions will never win another title, and the Edsel—overambitious, overpriced, and under-researched—becomes a symbol of the car industry’s miscalculations. The city enters its long economic decline.
“Can These Be OUR Lions?” the incredulous headline asked.1 Detroit is at its apex, and so is its football team. Fourteen minutes into the first quarter, the lead was 17–0; by the end of the half, it was 31–7. Being accustomed to nail-biters, the crowd of 55,000 at Briggs Stadium was stunned. Detroit hadn’t scored more than thirty-one points in an entire game that season (although, by coincidence, they had scored exactly 31 points four times, one of those to lose the game). But this was the championship game, and the opponents were Cleveland, natural rivals. The same team that had humiliated Detroit in the 1954 championship game, 56–10. In their growing exuberance, the Lions even scored a touchdown on a fourth-down trick play, switching from a field goal attempt to a run into the end zone.2
The Detroit team didn’t let up in the second half, either. After a Cleveland touchdown midway through the third quarter narrowed the score, the Lions got 28 more points, unanswered. The final 59–14 score pleasingly reversed the result of the 1954 debacle, and the Detroit Lions were NFL champions for the third time in six years. The result was all the sweeter for being something of a surprise. The team had started with low expectations and went 8-4 in the regular season, tied with the 49ers at the top of the Western Conference. The required playoff in San Francisco on December 22 didn’t start out well: at halftime Detroit was down 24–7. But by the end of the third quarter, the lead had narrowed to six points, and with ten more points and solid defense in the fourth quarter, it was the Lions who scored the conference title and went on to the championship game.
By 1957, viewing the game was no longer reserved exclusively for those in the stadium. The TV had reached almost 80 percent of all U.S. households, up from only 9 percent in 1950. This was a change at least as dramatic as the internet revolution of the 1990s, possibly more so.3 To be sure, most games still went out to regional markets, with only three games nationally televised—but one of those was Detroit’s traditional Thanksgiving game.
And then there was the TV blackout rule—in 1957, games could not be broadcast within seventy-five miles of the home stadium, so the championship games at Briggs Stadium would not be shown in Detroit—officially.4 Detroiters love their sports, they are inventive, and they’re not overly subservient to the rules. Briggs Stadium was sold out, so a lot of them just moved to the suburbs for the day, where TVs could pick up signals from other towers; the out-of-town bars welcomed the increased trade. Others, however, looked for solutions closer to home; one particularly enterprising homeowner in the city rigged up a long lead wire on a tree outside his house to act as an antenna long enough to allow him to catch the signal coming from outside the seventy-five-mile limit. In Wyandotte, fans borrowed chairs from a funeral home and repaired to the garage of a gas station, whose owner had kindly shelled out for a fifty-five-foot antenna.5
The shining star of the 1957 team was quarterback Tobin Rote. In the championship game, he threw for 280 yards with four touchdowns and no interceptions. His triumphal performance included one 78-yard pass as well the first rushing touchdown of the day. Rote had been acquired in a trade in the summer of 1957 after a spectacular 1956 season for the Green Bay Packers, when he led the league in passing yards and passing touchdowns and was second in the league in rushing touchdowns. In 1956, his 29 touchdowns had set a new record.
It might seem odd that the Lions traded for a star quarterback that season, since they already had their own: Bobby Layne, the future Hall of Famer. At the beginning of the season, Layne and Rote alternated, but in the penultimate game of the regular season, Layne broke his leg in three places. Hence it was either because of extraordinary foresight or a pure stroke of luck that the team had someone of Rote’s caliber to finish the season.6
Bobby Layne, aka The Blond Bomber, was the champion of the team, a larger-than-life Texan. As a college player for the Texas Longhorns, he set several records that stood into the twenty-first century, including accounting for all 40 points in their Cotton Bowl win over Missouri in 1946. He also played baseball in college, as one of the best pitchers in Longhorn history. In 1948, he had been drafted by the Steelers, but the team wasn’t to his liking, and after a series of trades, he ended up with the Lions in 1950. Layne led the team to consecutive championships in 1952 and 1953, and would have added a third were it not for that blowout defeat in the championship game of 1954.
In the 1950s, Bobby Layne was not just the face of the Lions, he was the face of the NFL. Notoriously tough, he eschewed the pads and protection other players wore. He ran the team as much as the coach did, taking part in designing plays before games and calling his own plays on the field. He helped to develop several innovations such as the two-minute drill, used to squeeze more plays out at the end of a game.
He was what people call a natural leader—and a hard drinker. Rumor had it that he partied six nights a week and played football on Sundays. He used barroom sessions to forge team cohesion, and under his guidance, the Lions were thought to be the most tight-knit team in the league, on and off the field. Harley Sewell, who played guard for them, recalls that “when I was a rookie, I went with Layne to get a tube of toothpaste, and didn’t get back for three days.” Layne’s competitiveness was legendary, and the team that was shaped around him was the most successful in the history of the Detroit Lions. By the time he retired, he held the league record for total passing yards, total completions, and total touchdown passes.7
It wasn’t just the Lions. In the 1950s, the city had reached its zenith—on a per capita basis, Detroit was one of the richest big cities in America, making it one of the richest in the world. Its population peaked during that decade, reaching 1.8 million people. Motown Records launched at the end of that decade. But it is also the time when the city entered its economic decline—slowly at first, then rapidly. If there is a single symbol of what went wrong, it might be the Edsel, a car Ford Motor Company launched at the beginning of the 1957 football season.8 Named in memory of Henry Ford’s beloved son, the Edsel had been under development since 1955. It was meant to take a mid-market position, somewhere between models such as the Galaxie, in the price range of $2,000–$2,500 (for reference, the median income of a woman in full-time employment in the United States in 1955 was $2,100), and the Lincoln, which started at around $4,500 (the median income of a man in full-time employment in the U.S. in 1955 was $3,900).9
Edsel Ford had worked closely with his father on the development of the company from the 1920s, and he was largely responsible for the company’s conversion into wartime production, which would prove so essential to the Allied victory. In 1943, at the age of forty-nine, he had suddenly died of cancer. Edsel’s sons, Henry II and William Clay, took leadership positions in the company, but the move to commemorate Edsel by naming the new car after him may have been connected to the broadening ownership as well. In 1956, following a stock flotation, the family had given up overall control of the Ford Motor Company. Even if they no longer owned the whole company, however, they still wanted its products to represent the family and its values. Edsel’s two sons were divided on the issue: Henry II loved the idea, but Bill, who pointed out that cars named after people did not have a good track record, hated it.10 Henry won out.
The Edsel included several innovative features, such as a push-button transmission located on the steering wheel. The styling included a distinctive vertical grille as well as features that were, allegedly, created in response to extensive market research. And yet, the Edsel is remembered as a historic failure, “ugly, overpriced, overhyped, poorly made and poorly timed.”11 In the end, the hype might have been the biggest mistake. Ford had teased the release for a year—“E-Day” was meant to reveal nothing less than the car of the future. But the Edsel didn’t live up to the expectations the company had unwisely created—not nearly impressive enough to earn its advance laurels, the car turned out to be unreliable as well. Ford usually built its models in a dedicated plant, but the Edsel was produced across a range of them. As a consequence, the assembly lines never got used to the construction, and errors were frequent. The car of the future was a lemon.12
At the time, your car was the dominant means to signal your social status, and if you were moving up in the world, you needed your ride to show that. The Edsel—relatively expensive both to own and to maintain—competed with Ford’s other mid-market brand name, the lower-priced Mercury range, which possessed broadly similar features. It did not convey the kind of prestige that would have justified its price. When even the most intense marketing failed to produce sales, it turned out that the vaunted market research either had not delivered or had not been heeded. As soon as Ford realized that consumers weren’t going to take to the Edsel, Robert McNamara, who had rapidly risen to senior executive positions in the company, took action to kill the thing, and it disappeared in 1960.13
Today, the Edsel is often associated with an excess of style over substance. The name conjures up an era of tailfins and engines far more powerful than they needed to be. In fact, it was in many ways representative of the types of car produced in Detroit during these years, and many of its rivals, such as those made by DeSoto and Oldsmobile, looked similar and sold well. Detroit still dominated the production of cars globally, and its companies held a full 95 percent of the domestic market. The industry, in which there had been roughly twenty significant producers ten years earlier, was gradually consolidating into what would become the Big Three: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Over the years, the car companies had learned that it was more profitable to compete on style rather than on price, as the car was transformed from simply an efficient means of transport to a lifestyle statement. Above all, they emphasized speed, comfort, and looks, with powerful engines and plush interiors. To a certain extent, they were quite the success—the cars of this era remain recognizable today as some of the most stylish ones ever produced, and it’s hard not to smile when you encounter one on the road.
In the 1970s, James Flink would argue that there were three eras of “American automobile consciousness.” During the first, people became used to the idea of owning a car; during the second, lasting from 1920 through the 1950s, Americans idolized them. In the third era, however, starting at the end of the 1950s, the public imagination slowly began to see the car less as a progressive force than a social problem, related to safety concerns, worries about the environment, and the impact on urban life—such as the demise of public transportation, the compromised safety of pedestrians and children playing in the streets, pollution.14 The Edsel arrived just as attitudes were changing.
Nonetheless, in the 1950s, Detroit was still booming. As the car companies shifted from wartime production back to peacetime manufacture, car output rose from just over 2 million in 1946 to over 7 million 1955. No wonder there was confidence in the future and a willingness to innovate. The optimism has also infected city planning, which had identified significant gaps to fill. Detroit had grown in higgledy-piggledy fashion as the car industry developed between 1900 and 1930, while the challenges of the Great Depression and wartime production in the 1930s and 1940s had not done much to beautify the city. Housing, in particular, was a tremendous problem for the city’s workers, whether they had arrived at the end of the nineteenth century or during any other wave of migration and immigration. City planners got ambitious: they wanted to improve the quality of housing, rationalize the zoning of districts, and create an urban space that would be both practical and comfortable.15 In the background of these laudable aims lurked a long-standing policy of racial zoning that had squeezed almost the entire black population of the city into the Black Bottom area, located on the downtown’s east side.
Despite appalling housing conditions, Black Bottom was a thriving neighborhood, bordering on Paradise Valley, the legendary entertainment district celebrated for its music and notorious for its vice: there you could catch performances by Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis.
Widely sanctioned and ruthlessly enforced, housing segregation ensured that there were not many other places to go if you were black; the shortage in public housing was acute, and worse for African Americans. As Thomas Sugrue notes, during the war, 14,446 black Detroiters had applied for public housing; 1,731 found a place. The situation didn’t improve after the war ended: between 1947 and 1952, 37,383 black families and 56,758 white families sought public housing—the city could accommodate 41 percent of the white families, and a bare 24 percent of the black ones.16 The slum landlords knew the black population had few alternatives, enabling them to charge monopoly rents well above those a white person would pay for an equivalent property. In the wake of the New Deal, pretty much everybody agreed that any policy of urban renewal had to improve the quality of housing, and in the 1940s, representatives of the African American community had supported the relevant initiatives. But it soon transpired, rather shockingly, that while Black Bottom would indeed be razed, the site would not be used to build integrated public or affordable housing. Rather, Black Bottom would be replaced with upscale housing units, under the aegis of private enterprise. And there would be a highway, of course.
In January 1946, Mayor Edward Jeffries’s housing commission asked the city’s Common Council to condemn the crowded neighborhood. Market ideology won out, and Black Bottom was losing the peace. In April of that year, Jeffries suggested that “this area be acquired by the city and completely cleared of all buildings thereon, that the area then be re-planned, with the object in mind of disposing of as much as possible to private enterprise for redevelopment for housing and incidental commercial purposes after providing sufficient space for parks, playgrounds, schools and other public uses.”17
In the early 1950s, using funding provided by the Federal Housing Act, the destruction of Black Bottom began, and black families were driven out of the area—it would be one of the first neighborhoods razed in the name of mid-century urban renewal whose cost would be borne by the poor. Unsurprisingly, the African American community came to despise the process and the ideology that displaced so many families.18 Using census data to map demographic data, you can see how dramatic a shift it was: a 1950 graphic shows a strong concentration of African American Detroiters in the east-central areas, bordering downtown. Just ten years later, most of the area is white, and black Detroit has been pushed northeast.
The result is still evident: in some regards, Lafayette Park stands as one of the finest pieces of urban redevelopment in the United States, with stylish townhouses, apartment buildings, and green spaces representing an oasis near the city’s center. The redevelopment was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a leader of the Bauhaus movement and one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. Mayor Albert Cobo, who oversaw the plans, led the city from 1950 to 1957; his election had depended significantly on his commitment to maintaining segregated housing in Detroit, and he also made sure that the city would invest little in the construction of public housing.19 According to 1970s census figures, Lafayette Park, built on the grounds of Black Bottom, was 70 percent white. The Burton Historical Collection, part of the Detroit Public Library, holds more than two thousand photographs of the vanished neighborhood, and in 2019, Emily Kutil curated a stunning exhibition titled “Black Bottom Street View” that allowed visitors to walk past these photos to get a house-by-house view what was now a spectral neighborhood.20
It is important to keep in mind that the 1950s, often idealized as America’s golden age, were not golden for everybody, and sports were no exception. In the South, of course, Jim Crow still reigned, but the North had found its own, no less effective roads to segregation. The Lions saw the systems clash after they signed their first black player in 1948: Bob Mann. Mann, whom they later traded for Bobby Layne, was soon joined by Mel Groomes and Wally Triplett. The integration of the major leagues was there to stay, but the transitional years were rough. Mann was from Virginia, and he had played football at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of only two African Americans playing for the Wolverines at that time. Back then, Michigan still dominated college football, and in the 1948 Rose Bowl, Mann’s team thrashed the University of Southern California, 49–0. The Lions had been poor in 1948 and were actually not much better in 1949, but Mann had an excellent first season with the team, leading the NFL with over 1,000 yards receiving. Mann was thus a valuable player—but not valuable enough for the coach to stick his neck out. At one point, when the Lions were to play an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans—a city that, like most Southern cities, strictly enforced segregation—Mann asked his coach, Bo McMillin, to stand up for the black players, and to let them play against their segregationist opponents. McMillin refused, telling the players they couldn’t stay with the white teammates at the hotel, and during the game offered them a place on the bench. Decades later, in 2005, Mann would recall this incident with bitterness: “I said if I can’t play in the game I don’t want to sit on the bench…. Bo could’ve ended all that. He was supposed to be Mr. Great Liberal. But he didn’t do it. He just passed it by. He could’ve been a big guy, a big fellow, but he didn’t do it. I’ve never forgotten that. Don’t tell me how liberal Bo was; he wasn’t. He had a chance to be a hero, step up to the plate, but he didn’t do it.”21
Adding insult to injury, the team asked Mann to take a pay cut at the end of the season. He turned them down and moved to the Green Bay Packers; the Lions then traded for Layne.22
It was only a year before Bob Mann joined the Lions that Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Over the following decade, more and more baseball teams integrated, but by 1957, the Detroit Tigers stood out, along with the Boston Red Sox, as one of the two teams that had remained all-white. This was almost certainly a result of the policies of Walter Briggs, who was the sole owner of the Tigers from 1935 to his death in 1952. Briggs was devoted to the Detroit Tigers, but, certainly in the eyes of contemporary African Americans, he was also a stone-cold racist—and at the time it showed in his managing of the ball club.23 Briggs had started his working life as a laborer in the railyards of Detroit in the 1870s, and became an upholsterer of railway carriages. His experience transferred to the newly developing automobile industry of the 1900s, and he ended up running his own firm. In close collaboration with Ford, he became one of the largest builder of auto bodies in Detroit. His factories were known for their dangerous conditions and low wages, and Briggs was famous for his fierce opposition to unionization. He did employ African Americans, just as he was prepared to rent out his stadium to teams from the Negro Leagues in the 1920s and 1930s, but he was less receptive to African Americans attending Tigers Games and certainly to African Americans actually playing for the club. It wasn’t until August 1953, a year and a half after Briggs died, that the club hired the first African American to its minor league affiliate, and not until July 1958 that Ozzie Virgil, a player from the Dominican Republic, became the first black player to represent the Tigers.24
1958 turned out to be a terrible year for the Detroit auto industry. The failure of the Edsel was mirrored in poor sales of new cars, particularly in the mid-price ranges. Since the 1940s, cars had become wider and longer in order to provide more comfort, while more aerodynamic designs also made them lower. Cost-conscious consumers were more interested in low-cost, entry-level cars. The Detroit companies found themselves unable to build such cars at a significantly lower price than the mid-range cars, and they gambled on the assumption that, given the sheer size of the country and the distances people traveled, there would always be a demand for spacious, comfortable rides. From the mid-1950s on, however, Detroit started to face competition from companies who built exclusively for shorter-distance markets and urban conditions, where smaller size was a real advantage on narrow streets. In 1958, the Volkswagen Beetle became one of the best-selling cars in the United States. Imported cars rose from around 3 percent of the U.S. market in 1957 to over 10 percent by 1959.25
Car production in Detroit fell to just under 4.2 million in 1958, down by more than 2 million from the previous year. The decline in sales was enough to trigger a recession in the U.S. economy as a whole, which shrank by 0.7 percent, causing a sharp rise in layoffs and unemployment. It was a warning to the industry, but the economy rebounded in 1959, and Detroit recovered much of its market share by the early 1960s. The respite would prove temporary, and foreign competition would soon return to torment the automakers.
1958 was also the year the Lions lost Bobby Layne—traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the team he had sought to avoid joining years earlier. The Lions coach confessed that the system of having two star quarterbacks was impractical, and he decided to go with Rote. The next couple seasons were not kind, and Rote was unable to prop up an aging team; he in turn was released at the end of the 1959 season. By the same token, Layne did not go on to win any championships with Pittsburgh. Joe Schmidt, a linebacker who played alongside Layne for the Lions and went on to coach the team from 1967 to 72, would later claim that “to this day I believe we would have won three more championships if Layne hadn’t been traded.”26
As the years of failure would mount, the legend of the curse of Bobby Layne grew. Reports that he cursed the Lions so that they would not win a championship for fifty years are probably unfounded.27 Then again, Detroit has been waiting for another title ever since.