APRIL 18, 1936
While the sky darkens over Europe, Detroit, hosting a banquet to celebrate the success of its sporting stars, christens itself the “City of Champions.” In 1935, the same year the UAW was founded, the Tigers had won their first World Series, to be followed by championships for the Red Wings and the Lions. The governor of Michigan proudly declares April 18th “the Day of the Champions.” In the midst of the Great Depression, the celebration lifts the mood. At the same time, the economic suffering increasingly moves people to embrace progressive policies aimed at creating a social safety net—but some of those individuals, such as the infamous anti-Semitic Detroit priest Father Coughlin, merge these demands with rabid anti-Semitism and sympathy for Adolf Hitler. Coughlin’s radio shows command an enthusiastic following, but he is eventually sidelined when the United States enter World War II.
When the Detroit Red Wings defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs to win their first Stanley Cup on April 11, 1936, Detroit became the City of Champions. On December 15, 1935, the Detroit Lions had defeated the New York Giants, 26–7, winning their first NFL championship. On October 7, 1935, the Detroit Tigers had defeated the Chicago Cubs in game 7, winning their first World Series. Thus Detroit held the three major league championships of the time simultaneously, a feat not achieved by any American city before or since.
It is hardly surprising that politicians rushed to make hay of it. The City Council declared April 18th to be “Championship Day.” Governor Frank Fitzgerald issued a proclamation: “I am glad to designate Saturday, April 18th as the ‘Day of the Champions.’ It is my earnest wish that citizens of the state will observe the day by a display of flags, banners and pictures of our champions where possible.” In 1936, the State of Michigan couldn’t do enough to associate itself with Detroit’s success.1
On that Saturday evening, the Chamber of Commerce staged a testimonial banquet at the Masonic Temple, just two blocks from where the Little Caesars Arena is now located. Tickets cost $3. The temple is a remarkable neo-gothic structure completed in 1926, with its own athletic complex, including an elegant but sadly unfinished swimming pool. Today, it remains the largest Masonic building in the world. On Champions Day, six hundred guests attended, including the players from the three teams, along with Joe Louis. Louis wasn’t world heavyweight champion yet, but he was widely considered the champion-in-waiting, and the city revered him for his string of twenty-four wins since 1934.2 There are many photos from this era in which players from all teams pose with each other and with Joe Louis, who was a keen fan of all sports and especially baseball. As a black man in 1936, he would not have been allowed to play for any one of these teams.
Champions Day expanded to include a number of other sporting heroes from Detroit. Other champion teams included were the Dixie Oils, a fastpitch professional softball team that had won the George H. Sisler Trophy in 1935, the Stroh’s bowling team that had won the American Bowling Congress championship in 1934, and the Detroit Olympics, a minor league hockey team that won the International Hockey League title in 1935 and 1936. Individual achievement was recognized as well. In attendance were, among others, Gar Wood, who had held the Harmsworth Trophy for the world speed record since 1920; Walter Hagen, who had captained the U.S. golf team to victory in the Ryder Cup in 1935; Dick Degener, a champion diver who would win a gold medal at the Berlin Olympics later that year; Eddie Tolan, who had won gold medals in the 1932 Olympics in the 100 and 200 meters. The governor sent his apologies—he was unable to attend due to illness.
While the celebrations involved all kinds of sports, there is no doubt that the World Series victory was the centerpiece. Detroit had been a major league town since 1901, and before 1935, had appeared in and been defeated in four World Series. The most recent loss had come in 1934, when, after leading three games to two against the St Louis Cardinals in the best-of-seven series, the Tigers blew the last two games on their home field. The final game of that series had been particularly brutal, with a score of 11–0. When the Cardinals’ players started showboating, a near riot erupted. The crowd only calmed down when Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanded that St. Louis remove from the game the player who was irritating the Detroit fans the most.3
Frank Navin, who had been involved with the team since 1902 and been its principal owner since 1908, had despaired of achieving his dream of winning a World Series. Detroit was one of the most committed cities in baseball, but when it came to winning the big prize, it seemed cursed.
The 1935 team changed all that. It was blessed with the fearsome 3G’s in the batting lineup: Charlie Gehringer—known as “the Mechanical Man” for his reliability—had been the star second baseman since 1924, and he is widely considered one of the greatest second basemen in history.4 Goose Goslin had been in the majors since 1921 and had appeared in three World Series before joining the Tigers in 1924; he had a reputation for clutch hitting. Hank Greenberg was the handsome young star of the lineup, always dressed well and noted for his charm.
The team was led by Mickey Cochrane, known as “Black Mike,” either for his swarthy skin or his dark moods. He was one of the best catchers in the league, and the Philadelphia A’s had only traded him because they were in financial trouble in 1934.5 At the time, Navin was working on a plan to hire Babe Ruth, and when this fell through, the opportunity to obtain the services of Cochrane was a stroke of good fortune. Navin made him player-manager.
Like all great baseball teams, Detroit in 1935 had dominant pitching. “General” Crowder, also acquired in 1934, was a reliable veteran. Tommy Bridges had debuted with the Tigers in 1930 and had come within one out of pitching a perfect game in 1932 (only 29 perfect games have been pitched in major league history). “Schoolboy” Rowe was twenty-three years old when he made his first appearance with the Tigers in 1933, and he had become an immediate sensation. When asked in 1934 to reveal the secret of his success, he confided, “Just eat a lot of vittles, climb on that mound, wrap my fingers around the ball and say to it, ‘Edna, honey, let’s go.’” Edna was the name of his childhood sweetheart whom he married that year.6 The other starter on the team was Elden “Submarine” Auker, so named for his low-arm pitching style. The first batter he ever faced in the majors was Babe Ruth, whom he struck out. That was in 1933. Auker would be the single remaining member of the 1935 team who attended the last game in Tiger Stadium on September 27, 1999.
The Tigers had started the season badly and struggled to get into contention, but by the all-star break, they were only one game behind the Yankees. Then, at the end of July, they took the series in New York two games to one, and with it the top spot in the American League, and they never looked back. Due to a scheduling quirk, the Tigers played at home for a majority of the month of August, and by September, they were nine games ahead and knew they would clinch the pennant and with it, a return trip to the World Series. Their opponents in the Fall Classic were the Chicago Cubs. The first two games of the series were at home, and after they lost the first, fans feared a repeat of 1934. The Tigers won the second game, but they lost Hank Greenberg, the 1935 MVP who had led the league in RBIs and home runs. He broke his wrist sliding into home plate and was out for the series. Anxiety levels grew. Some say that winning the next game, the first to be played at Wrigley Field, was the key to the series. If the Tigers could prove they did not depend solely on Greenberg, the team’s biggest star, hope was not lost. They did it. Having won Game Four, they had three chances left. Defeat in Game Five brought them back to Navin Field: surely they would not blow it again?7
In Game Six, it began to look like they might. In a tight game, the Tigers scored in the first, and the Cubs evened the score in the third; the Tigers led again in the fourth, but then conceded two in the fifth to give the Cubs a 3–2 lead. The Tigers leveled the score in the sixth, and the teams stayed even until the ninth. In the top of the ninth, Chicago’s leadoff hitter tripled, leaving the winning run ninety feet from home. The crowd went silent, but Bridges demonstrated his control in a tight situation: he sent down the next three batters, stranding the runner on third. In the bottom of the ninth, Flea Clifton, Greenberg’s replacement, who had not got a hit in the series to that point, struck out. Then Mickey Cochrane singled, and Gehringer hit a ground ball that moved the runner to second. Two out and a man on second, and Goose Goslin strode to the plate; known as a pull hitter, the second baseman stood back, almost a second rightfielder. Goslin hit the first pitch along right-field foul line but it landed foul. He connected with the second which looped into the outfield, just over the head of the despairing second baseman. As the Cubs fielders converged upon the ball Cochrane scurried home for the win. Detroit went crazy. The celebrations went on all night, and people who remembered said the city made more noise that day than on Armistice Day, which had ended the World War in 1918.8
Business was booming at the ballpark. Despite the 1934 World Series defeat, Detroit led the league in attendance that year with 919,000 seats sold, more than double the league average for the season. In 1935, the club beat its own attendance record with a figure of over 1 million—tops in the league again. By 1935 Frank Navin, who retained the majority of shares, had acquired a partner: the baseball fanatic Walter Briggs. After building two double-decker stands, between home plate and first and home plate and third, in 1912, Navin had renamed the field after himself—increasing capacity to thirty thousand seats had apparently obviated any need for modesty. The two owners now planned to extend the ballpark and enclose it completely. However, as work got under way, Navin suffered a heart attack while out on horseback, just six weeks after achieving his life’s dream. Briggs immediately swooped in to acquire Navin’s shares, allegedly sending a check to the very hospital where Navin lay dying. As sole owner, he not only continued the construction, but also followed Navin’s example by naming the modernized stadium after himself—what good is being rich if you can’t slap your name on big buildings? By 1938, the capacity had grown to 53,000, and Briggs Stadium was widely praised as the best stadium in baseball. It was in that year that the Detroit Lions started playing there, as they would continue to do until 1974, when they moved to Pontiac.9
In 1936, at least some Detroiters had grounds for economic optimism. After the horrors of the collapse in the early 1930s, car production was back up to over 3 million, and employment was rising. The city’s finances were in better shape as well, not least due to mayor Frank Couzens, a man with political pedigree: his father had been Henry Ford’s accountant before pursuing a career in politics and had been mayor of Detroit himself before becoming a U.S. senator.
Frank Couzens had overseen a restructuring of Detroit’s $400 million debt, after the closure of several of the major banks in 1933.10 That year, the city had defaulted on its debts. After borrowing heavily in the 1920s to meet the needs of the dramatic explosion in population, the city was completely unprepared for the collapse of tax revenues caused by the Depression. With higher interest rates on the city debt, the annual payments had forced major cutbacks in services. The younger Couzens had focused on extending the maturity of debt, and by 1936, much of it would not be due for repayment until 1945. This gave the city breathing space along with the capacity to spend money on basic services, such as streetlights and schools.
But below the sporting glory and a brightening economic outlook, dark forces were forming—in Detroit, in the nation, and globally. Political divisions were widening. As workers started returning to the factories, union organizers started to made inroads, especially among Polish Americans from Hamtramck. Detroit employers such as Henry Ford and Walter Briggs had always zealously opposed unionization, and had successfully obstructed previous attempts to organize, but the Great Depression changed the landscape in two major ways: already-appalling conditions for both employed and unemployed workers in the 1930s got even worse, and Franklin Roosevelt shepherded the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) through Congress in 1935, preventing employers from invoking antitrust law to thwart unionization. Owners had claimed that they were buffeted by the forces of competition, and that an entire labor force organizing to represent their collective interest represented extortion. However, in a world where jobs were scarce and the alternative was abject poverty, it was clear that employers held all the cards. The credibility of the bosses was further undermined by the fact that they paid detective agencies to spy on their workers, hired goons to terrorize those who attempted to join a union, and used non-union labor to drive out unionized labor with the blessing and assistance of the police.11 When the NLRA finally passed, the law compelled employers to recognize the union as the sole bargainer on behalf of the workforce, provided that a majority of workers chose to join it.
The United Automobile Workers (UAW) was founded in 1935 and immediately began recruiting members. There was no shortage of issues causing owner-worker disputes on the production lines: arbitrary hiring and firing decisions, pay cuts, dangerous pressure on workers to speed up the production line, and so on. Union organizers such as Walter Reuther quickly increased membership by demonstrating how effectively workers could focus their demands. But the main challenge was always to gain the owners’ recognition so that bargaining could be institutionalized. And for that, you needed the support of the majority of the workforce, and to take on the industry as a whole, or at least one of the Big Three.
The key event actually took place in Flint, one of the main production centers of GM, seventy miles northwest of the city. Flint was dangerous territory for the unions. Wyndham Mortimer, the UAW’s lead organizer there, would later recall that he had just checked into “the Dresden,” his cheap Flint hotel, when the phone rang: “A voice said: ‘You had better get the hell back where you came from if you don’t want to be carried out in a wooden box!’” Mortimer was unimpressed: “I was fifty-two years old and nobody had taken me out in a box yet. I’d be damned if this was going to be the first time! I ignored the phone call, which I attributed to the Black Legion, and proceeded to plan my work.”12
The work of Mortimer and his allies would culminate in what is known as the Great GM Sit-Down Strike, possibly the most important strike in the twentieth century, and it would kick off the golden era of unionization in Detroit. But when Mortimer arrived, a mere 122 of the 45,000 autoworkers in Flint were union members, and Mortimer “soon learned that the vast majority of the GM workers regarded these 122 men as paid agents of General Motors.” All legitimate organizers had been “fingered as a Red and fired.”13 Mortimer and his team organized on the down low for a while, keeping the names of new members a secret. But then the UAW found its opening when the workers at a Cleveland plant went on strike. The union announced it would not settle the Cleveland matter unless GM entered into a national agreement, and got ready to shut down the Fisher No. 1 plant in Flint. Because Cleveland and Flint were the only two factories making the dies for car body components, GM was vulnerable. When the company’s plans to move the dies out of the Flint factory became known, union members moved in and occupied the plant—in a reversal of the usual strike strategy of keeping workers from entering, a sit-down strike keeps management out, bars strikebreakers, and physically takes over the means of production. Howard Zinn describes the event here:
Committees organized recreation, information, classes, a postal service, sanitation. Courts were set up to deal with those who didn’t take their turn washing dishes or who threw rubbish or smoked where it was prohibited or brought in liquor. The “punishment” consisted of extra duties; the ultimate punishment was expulsion from the plant. A restaurant owner across the street prepared three meals a day for two thousand strikers. There were classes in parliamentary procedure, public speaking, history of the labor movement. Graduate students at the University of Michigan gave courses in journalism and creative writing. There were injunctions, but a procession of five thousand armed workers encircled the plant and there was no attempt to enforce the injunction. Police attacked with tear gas and the workers fought back with firehoses. Thirteen strikers were wounded by gunfire, but the police were driven back. The governor called out the National Guard. By this time the strike had spread to other General Motors plants. Finally there was a settlement, a six-month contract, leaving many questions unsettled but recognizing that from now on, the company would have to deal not with individuals but with a union.14
A key figure in settling the dispute was Frank Murphy, the governor of Michigan, who encouraged the car companies to recognize the UAW. The companies pressured Murphy to call in the troops to evict the strikers, arguing they were guilty of trespass. Murphy did—but he sent the National Guard to protect the strikers, not to take them down.15
Although the GM strike turned into a triumph for the unions, Henry Ford, alone among the major owners, continued to hold out and would not sign the first contract with the UAW until 1941—shortly before the AFL agreed to a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war. Ford loathed unions with a passion, and the company’s notorious “Service Department,” under the leadership of Ford’s enforcer Harry Bennett, intimidated everybody who sought to organize the company’s workforce. His tactics were ugly: firings, spying, threats, beatings. The Service Department had up to eight thousand people at his disposal, and unionization was a blood sport.16 Just a few months after the sit-down strike ended, in May 1937, the Detroit
“Battle of the Overpass” made nationwide news. The UAW had stepped up its efforts to conquer Ford, and billboards sprouted proclaiming that “Fordism is Fascism” and “Unionism is Americanism”—slogans that may sound a bit ham-fisted now, but the Nazis had taken over Germany, Ford had made his sympathies with Hitler fully known, and Father Coughlin, the still popular pro-fascist radio host, was railing against unions every day. On May 26, Walter Reuther scheduled a massive leaflet campaign at the Rouge Plant in Dearborn, specifically at Miller Road Overpass at Gate 4. He had recruited one hundred women to hand out the leaflets, and he had invited clergy and the press. Here is how the Detroit News describes the scene:
Two hours before the scheduled time, newspapermen arrived at the site and saw 25 cars filled with men in sunglasses who warned them to get out of the area, and threatened photographers. An hour before shift change, just before 2 p.m., Walter Reuther, Richard T. Frankensteen, in charge of the overall Ford drive, Robert Kanter, and J.J. Kennedy, the UAW’s East Side regional director arrived. The Detroit News photographer, James E. (Scotty) Kilpatrick, thought the backdrop of the Ford sign would make a great picture, and obligingly, the union men walked up the two flights of iron stairs to the overpass. Facing the photographers, Reuther and his partners had their backs to the thugs that were approaching them. The newsmen’s warnings were too late. They were attacked brutally: punched and kicked repeatedly. Frankensteen recounted how two men held his legs apart while another kicked him repeatedly in the groin. One man placed his heel in his abdomen, grinding it, then put his full weight on it. Reuther was punched in the face, abdomen and back and kicked down the stairs. Kanter was pushed off the bridge and fell 30 feet. The women who were to hand out the leaflets were arriving on trolley cars and were brutally shoved back into the cars, or pulled out and beaten. A lone police officer, appalled at the scene, pleaded with the “service” men to stop beating one woman: “You’ll kill her …” The Dearborn police did nothing else. They stood by and said the Ford men were protecting their private property.17
Ford’s goons went around confiscating photographic plates and ripping pages out of their notepapers, but the Detroit News photographer tricked them—he hid his plates in his trunk and handed over useless blanks. The next day, the photographs of the brutal assault were plastered all over the front page, and the wire services distributed them all over the world. As the paper writes in a retrospective published in 1997: “Ford won the battle but lost the war for public opinion. The NLRB castigated Ford and Bennett for their actions. In the next election the Labor candidates in Detroit won more than twice as many votes as they had ever gotten. Three years later Ford signed a contract with the UAW.” As mentioned earlier, Bennett was fired in 1945, after a power struggle with the family.
The story of Ford and the UAW is central not just to labor relations, but also to the racial politics of Detroit. From 1917 on, Henry Ford had started hiring African American workers in large numbers. This was the beginning of the Great Migration, which, over the course of half a century, saw millions of black Americans leave the Jim Crow South in the hope to find better conditions in the rapidly industrializing North. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ford was by far the largest employer of black labor in the city. Notably and unusually, he paid them the same wages he paid white workers, and he developed links with Detroit’s black community leaders, who in turn helped him recruit workers. Popular African American songs of the period talked about moving north to go work for “Mr. Ford.”18
Ford, however, was also a virulent anti-Semite, convinced that there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. In 1918, he had acquired the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper, and fashioned it into a bullhorn to rail against the “Jewish threat.” In consequence, Henry Ford was the only American mentioned in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle): “Jews are the regents of the stock exchange power of the American Union. Every year they manage to become increasingly the controlling masters of the labor power of a people of 120,000,000 souls; one great man, Ford, to their exasperation still holds out independently there even now.”19
Racism and anti-Semitism are closely allied ideological systems, so at first glance, it may seem surprising that the same man who rated a cameo in Mein Kampf treated African Americans as fairly as any employer at the time. Ford certainly did not think of black Americans as his equals—but he did see them as American citizens, whereas Jews, to his mind, would always be foreign interlopers intent on destroying what he thought of as the dominant “Anglo-Celtic” culture of America. Today, we would probably call him an “ethno-nationalist.”20 Blacks were racially inferior, as far as he was concerned, and they generally got the least pleasant jobs in his factories—but as Americans, they deserved to be protected. Paternalist Ford supported segregation, but he also felt that black families should enjoy the same amenities in their communities as white families. He did set up training programs for black workers, and in several cases, black foremen rose to positions of authority over white workers—an unthinkable event in most factories in Detroit at the time.
There is no direct evidence that Ford decided to hire large numbers of black workers in order to prevent unionization. However, for several years, that was the precise effect of his hiring practices. During that era, many white workers resented working alongside black workers, and well into the 1950s, they would engage in frequent “hate strikes” during which white workers chose to lay down their tools rather than work alongside black co-workers, as instructed. As a result, large segments of the African American community were suspicious of unions, a suspicion often borne out by the limited union support they encountered when demanding equal treatment.21 As late as 1966, James Baldwin would write in The Nation that “the Negro in America can scarcely yet be considered—for example—as a part of the labor unions—and he is certainly not so considered by the majority of these unions.”22
If Ford and Bennett had thought to exploit that tension to their benefit, they miscalculated. When they tried to bus in black strikebreakers in full view of white-staffed picket lines, African American leaders realized that management was exploiting racial animosity to defeat an organization fighting for better working conditions, and they wanted no part of it. The prominent black journalist George Schuyler scathingly described the Rouge factory as a “modern plantation,” and he compared black leaders who supported Henry Ford to the conciliatory protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Since every Uncle Tom’s Cabin must of course have an Uncle Tom,” he wrote, “it need occasion no surprise that there are any number of Uncle Toms in the Ford setup,” willing to betray “their people for filthy lucre.”23 Guardedly, African Americans decided that they were better off joining organized labor—even if the unions harbored racists, they calculated, they at least stood some chance of finding support against the white employers who had power over their livelihoods. And while we cannot know for certain that Ford’s early policies had been stratagems to divide and thus conquer his workforce, we do know this: once black workers joined the unions and Ford was forced to accept the UAW, his support for black citizens appears to have dwindled quickly, though he continued to employ large numbers of African American workers.
Thus began an uneasy alliance between the UAW, its white members, and black communities of Detroit. On the one hand, the white workers welcomed the solidarity and the improved work conditions of broad unionization; on the other hand, they clamored for segregation. And segregation they got—as mentioned in previous chapters, Detroit remained one of the most segregated cities in the North for decades to come.
Black workers, in turn, demanded equal rights as a condition for lending their strength to the cause. Union leadership expressed sympathy for them and their plight, but asked for patience—a refrain that echoes through the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, and beyond. Yet the union did deliver on some promises. In 1944, the UAW set up a Fair Employment Practices Committee that investigated cases of discrimination.24 In 1952, it issued a four-point plan to eliminate hiring discrimination in Detroit, including the adoption of fair employment legislation that would outlaw discrimination in hiring; in 1955, the state adopted a fairly toothless Fair Employment Practices Code.25 Finally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 superseded this law, making discrimination both illegal and punishable. The alliance between black and white workers in Detroit remained an uneasy one. If the Walk to Freedom in 1963 was a high point, the accelerating white flight of the 1960s signaled that white Detroiters would rather self-segregate in the suburbs than share the city—though it is important to keep in mind that many of those who left had no choice but to follow the work as the main employers moved Detroit’s jobs out of the city.
The NLRA was a part of the New Deal, on which President Roosevelt had campaigned to win the 1932 election. President Hoover’s response to the Great Depression had been to cut spending and to balance the budget, regardless of unemployment and the state of the economy—the basic austerity strategy. Roosevelt, by contrast, used the power of the government budget to get people back to work. In 1933, as starvation became a real prospect in America, feeding the hungry was the first priority, though, and the federal government instituted food aid to supplement the relief programs that cities had undertaken. Detroit was a significant beneficiary. The establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in May 1935 added large federal programs including road construction and other public works in order to create employment. Unsurprisingly, many conservative auto manufacturers decried the profligacy, though quite a few of these same people had been lobbying for new roads over the previous quarter-century. In the long term, they would benefit—more roads meant more driving, which meant more cars. FDR’s program turned out to be good for business, just as would be the government-funded Interstate Highway System, built under Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.
The mid-1930s were a watershed in Detroit politics. Since the 1910s, when the auto industry transformed Detroit, city government had been largely run along non-partisan, pro-business lines. Nominally Republican for the most part, the people running the city had devoted most of their energy to nuts-and-bolts issues: the most efficient way to organize the construction of sewers or the appropriate price of street car services. Radical politics played a limited role, and, amid and despite all the poverty and inequality, Detroit saw itself at the forefront of creating a new world order, solidly capitalist in outlook. The Depression changed all that. On one side, socialist and communist organizers won converts—they argued that the capitalist economies were at a standstill while the Soviet Union was enjoying rapid economic growth and sharing the fruits of that growth more equally. By contrast, in the United States the workers most heavily bore the brunt of market fluctuations, such as the drop in car production between 1929 and 1932 that had led to massive layoffs. A rational, planned system of production, the socialist argued, could prevent such hardship in the future. While not socialists, the New Dealers echoed many of these ideas, and a sense that the old meth ods were not working had brought Roosevelt to power. In the election year of 1936, the scale of Roosevelt’s landslide victory made clear how popular the New Deal had become. He took 60.8 percent of the popular vote, won 523 out of 531 electoral votes, and took all but two states. No president since has won with a larger margin of victory.
Detroit reflected the national mood. The city had elected left-leaning figures such as Frank Murphy, mayor from 1930 to 1933 and governor of Michigan from 1937 to 1939. Murphy played a crucial role in the strikes of 1937. While freely acknowledging that such occupations were technically illegal, he refused to accede to the employers’ demand that he send in the National Guard to end the occupations, effectively forcing the employers to the negotiating table where they would have to recognize the unions.
While the left argued for a fairer distribution of wealth and equality before the law, other forms of populism also prospered. Detroit was the poster child for the melting pot, with its diverse population of ethnicities whose origins lay in Europe (France, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Italy, Scandinavia, Malta, and other countries), Africa, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America and Asia. As the economy turned sour, some politicians seized the opportunity to exploit ethnic tensions. Segregation of African Americans was already well established, and more or less the official policy of the city—no matter how liberal the mayors professed to be. Anti-Polish sentiment was also strong, particularly among immigrants who had arrived earlier, notably those of Anglo-Saxon origin who, as Protestants, feared that Catholicism might one day dominate. Ethnic slurs of all sorts were common, and anti-Semitism was on the rise.
The embodiment of these tensions was Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Canada who was sent to Detroit in 1923. In 1926, he founded the Shrine of the Little Flower, a church on Woodward and Twelve Mile Road, just north of the city. Before Coughlin arrived, the vehemently anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan had burnt a cross outside the church. Protestant animosity to Catholicism had a long history in the United States, and it remained a force at least until the election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960—Kennedy repeatedly had to assure the electorate that he would not take his orders from Rome. In the beginning, Coughlin preached a gospel of friendship and reconciliation, and he was one of the first leaders to realize the potential of the new mass communication medium: radio. He spoke on the city’s radio station, WJR, in 1926, and quickly acquired his own weekly slot. His radio sermons became so popular that CBS offered him a contract in 1930, giving him national exposure.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1930, Coughlin’s talks became more and more political. He views were homespun and his solutions simple. He viewed the banks of Wall Street as the great evil that had brought the country down, and he supported Roosevelt in 1932 because of his promise to get people back to work. In his view, the bankers of Wall Street had caused the Depression by the uncontrolled expansion of credit, and the federal government needed to take proper control over the supply of money. His support, which was embodied in his slogan “Roosevelt or Ruin,” played a significant role in the election. Once Roosevelt was in power, however, Coughlin’s views began to change. He now feared that the Depression would drive working people to godless communism, and therefore destroy religious life in the United States, especially Catholicism. He supported some form of capitalism, as long as it was nationalist first, but he also called for full employment, something like a minimum wage, and a social safety net including pensions.26
As politicians and union organizers on the left grew stronger from 1933 onward, Coughlin blamed Roosevelt for their success, and he started to campaign against him—he was now convinced that FDR was a Wall Street pawn. His own program would strike any contemporary American as rather left-leaning: in 1934, he established a political organization called the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ), which called for higher taxes on the wealthy, monetary reforms, nationalization of railways and major industries, and the federal protection of labor rights. At the time, “social justice” was a central term in the Catholic social theory, often marshaled to lure the working class away from unions and into the bosom of the church. The NUSJ’s membership ran into the millions. In 1935, Coughlin proclaimed that “I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world’s goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world’s happiness.”27
A populist with a muddled economic message, he was also a rav ing anti-Semite, and in the late 1930s, he would support both Hitler and Mussolini—when the war broke out in Europe in 1939, the Roosevelt administration forced him off the air. In the mid-1930s, however, he was influential enough to form a political party, together with pension advocate Francis Townsend and Gerald L. K. Smith, who had taken over Huey Long’s followers after the U.S. senator’s assassination in 1935. In 1936, the newly formed Union Party nominated Republican William Lemke and labor lawyer Thomas O’Brien for the presidency. Their platform was incoherent, representing a mixture of the founders’ views, and in the end, they won less than 2 percent of the vote. When the party dissolved, Coughlin focused all his energy on his NUSJ.
As the vicious nature of Hitler’s regime emerged ever more clearly, Coughlin’s anti-Semitism finally came into sharper focus as well. Coughlin supported the Nazis because he continued to see Communism as the biggest threat, and he became an apologist for Nazi atrocities. The Jews, he argued, had brought their fate upon themselves. Naturally, he was a fan of the fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious document used by anti-Semites to drum up hatred. Coughlin printed extracts from the tract in 1938—after all, so had Henry Ford in the 1920s. All the while, Coughlin’s vast radio audiences absorbed these messages of hate.
By the early 1940s, Charles Coughlin was largely a spent force. He had been forced off the air, and the postal service refused him second-class mailing rights for his magazine, effectively pricing him out of circulation. In 1942, his bishop instructed him to cease all activities outside his parish, where he remained until his death in 1966. But even though Father Coughlin could eventually be neutralized, anti-Semitic slurs were an everyday occurrence in 1930s Detroit, as were ethnic insults of all sorts. Hank Greenberg suffered endless taunts while playing at Briggs Stadium, and he would remember later that at “every ballpark I went to, there’d be somebody in the stands who spent the whole afternoon just calling me names.”28
In 1934, Greenberg had taken a career risk when he refused to play on Yom Kippur—a decision that some feared would add fuel to the anti-Semitic hate machine. In the end, though, his courage, along with his towering athletic talent and his clean-cut image, did much to counter the hatred of people like Coughlin, and for many Jews, Greenberg in the 1930s became a symbol of hope and pride. In 1938, Greenberg almost matched Babe Ruth’s home run record for the season, and he later said: “I came to feel that if I, as a Jew, hit a home run, I was hitting one against Hitler.”
Like Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, Greenberg knew well that sports and politics are not distinct spheres of endeavor, and that any triumph by those deemed inferior by the Nazis was a symbolic victory over them. Like Louis, Greenberg knew what he meant to other Jewish Americans. One morning, he was having breakfast with Manila “Bud” Shaver, the Detroit Times sports editor, while opening his mail. He showed Shaver a handwritten letter. It was from a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who told him how much Max Baer had disappointed her when he lost to Jimmy Braddock. She had now transferred her loyalty to Hank, and, as Shaver remembered, “begged him not to fail her or his people.”29
There is no doubt that during the 1930s, the City of Champions had a long way to go. If it pulled together, it was unbeatable, but its factionalism spelled calamity.