JULY 12, 1921
Alphonse Kronk, a twelve-year-old boy, is run over and killed by a motor truck, a terrifying new hazard of everyday life in the city. His father, John Kronk, an immigrant from Poland and local politician, is inspired to lobby for facilities that will keep youngsters occupied and off the newly dangerous streets. In 1922, he officiates at the opening of a city-funded gym at 5555 McGraw Avenue, which will be named after him a few years later. The Kronk Gym was part of the larger agenda of progressive mayor James Couzens, the business architect of the Ford Motor Company who had persuaded Henry Ford to pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day. Couzens sought to give Detroit capitalism a human face by supporting leisure facilities, parks, and other urban amenities. The Great Depression put an end to those programs, a loss that would significantly contribute to the neighborhood blight to come.
At 6 p.m., young Alphonse Kronk was hit by a motor truck on the corner of Junction and Kopernick, about two and half miles up Michigan Avenue from Navin Field, and about fifty yards away from his front door. The driver of the truck was Joseph Kraemer, who was delivering heavy equipment; he was driving alongside a streetcar at the time of the accident. Alphonse was playing in the street with one of his cousins. When the streetcar stopped, Alphonse ran into the road; he did not see the truck, which a witness said was traveling at around 20–25 miles an hour. The truck knocked Alphonse down, ran over his chest, and did not stop. Alphonse was still alive when the ambulance arrived, but he died on the way to hospital. An hour later Kraemer turned himself in to the police; he did not possess a driver’s license.1 Cars were changing the city, and the price of the new prosperity could be heartbreakingly steep.
We tend to think of sports in terms of the big games, the fierce rivalries, the legendary teams and players—but sports is also about pick-up games in the park, swimming in the rivers, tossing balls with your friends, batting practice with the neighborhood kids. When the car arrived to change American cities forever, the streets were no longer the space for any of that, though it took municipalities some time to come to terms with the new reality and the challenges it posed.
The scale and speed of the changes had been impossibly rapid. In 1910, a Model T Ford cost $950. By the early 1920s, the price had dropped to around $300, while over the same period average incomes had doubled. In 1910, Detroit produced more 100,000 cars for the first time; by 1923, the number had reached 3 million. Today, it is hard to comprehend the sheer scale of the changes that the automobile brought to Americans’ lifestyle. Previously, the road had been occupied by people going about their business, by kids playing, by horses, and by electric streetcars. Horses vanished from the streets almost immediately, and automobiles took up all the space on the roads. Pedestrians were relegated to the sidewalks, if there were any. Noise, traffic jams, and road accidents were not new, but they increased dramatically in the urban environment. By 1924, 23,600 people died in car accidents each year—more than half of today’s number but in a population one-third the size.
The history of the mass-market motor car is inextricably linked to the name of Henry Ford. The motor car evolved in two key stages in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The first of these, between roughly 1900 and 1910, entailed a series of technological innovations in the design of the automobile, making it into a relatively safe and reliable means of rapid transport. Many of these innovations were developed in Detroit, where Ford was a major player, but far from the only one. The second, between 1910 and 1920, transformed the automobile from a luxury item of the rich into an object every American could aspire to own. This stage entailed the development of a process of mass production that exploited economies of scale and lowered unit costs, and thus made the product affordable. In this process, the Ford Motor Company led the way almost single-handedly. As every schoolchild still learns today, Ford developed the assembly line, which enabled workers to build cars in a steady flow, replacing with machines the physical human effort of lifting and moving the parts. Today we are nearing the logical end of this process, as humans almost entirely disappear from the assembly process in a wide range of manufacturing activities.
Henry Ford did not hit on this idea entirely on his own. The logic of the assembly line had been articulated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, a management consultant whose book The Principles of Scientific Management is considered one of the most influential texts on business management ever written—it gives “Taylorism” its name. In 1911, when it was published, Taylor was already well known for his analysis of production techniques through his work at Bethlehem Steel.2 The design and implementation of the Ford factory in Highland Park where his ideas were put into practice was largely the work of lieutenants such as Ed Martin, Charles Sorensen, and William Knudsen (the latter two were Danish-born immigrants).3 The building itself was designed by the doyen of industrial architects, Prussian-born Albert Kahn.
If Ford’s vision was ultimately the driving force, it was a vision rooted in the homespun philosophy of self-reliance and autonomy that he had inherited from his father. In 1909, Ford articulated his ambition “to democratize the automobile. When I’m through, everybody will be able to afford one and about everyone will have one.”4 The Model T Ford was the car and the Highland Park assembly line was the place where this vision would become a reality. The first T was built in 1908, the Highland Park plant opened in 1910; between 1908 and 1913, production at Ford rose from just over 10,000 units to 168,000. By 1916, it was 735,000.5
Mass production both reduced the price of automobiles and restructured the auto industry. One critical factor that had enabled the car industry in Detroit to grow in the early years was the sheer number of small engineering companies that could make the necessary parts. The early car producers needed very little capital because they contracted out most of the production—all they really did in their workshops was assemble the pieces. It was the suppliers who bore the financial burden of investing capital to manufacture the parts. Ford brought all of these supply chains in-house. That move considerably sped up the production process—but it also required a lot more capital. Small-scale outfits could not match the mass producers on cost, and the number of producers required to supply the entire market fell. As this Ford-initiated process played out over the decades, Detroit would eventually see the number of major car producers cut to three or four.6 The Highland Park plant was followed in 1920 by an even bigger one, the River Rouge in Dearborn, which became known as the engineering miracle of the century. People would visit from all over the world to see this monument to modern production, and Diego Rivera would immortalize it in his complex murals commissioned by Edsel Ford and exhibited to this day in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
These new plants became islands of self-sufficiency in the urban landscape. From these strongholds, industrialists were able to shape urban policy and influence the economic destiny of the city. In 1914, Ford adopted another revolutionary policy—the $5 daily wage. This move was actually the brainchild of James Couzens, future mayor and U.S. senator. Couzens had been the business manager of the Ford Motor Company since its foundation in 1902, and in the first decade of the company’s existence, the two men formed a close bond. Couzens admired Ford’s engineering skills and visionary ambitions, while Ford recognized the need to find an ally in a company that, despite it bearing his name, he did not control fully until 1907. As one writer put it, “It can be presumed that Ford, by himself, could not have managed a small grocery store, and Couzens could not have assembled a child’s kiddie car.”7 Charles Sorensen, who worked for Ford for forty years and controlled the production for twenty years from the mid-1920s on, gave a good deal of credit for the early success of the company to Couzens:
From 1903 to 1913 was the Couzens period. True, the company had Henry Ford’s name, its product and production were his. There never would have been a Ford car without him. But the Ford Motor Company would not have made Ford cars long without James Couzens. He controlled expenditures, organized sales, and set the pattern for business operation. He drove Ford and the production side to produce cars to meet the public’s demand. He yelled for plant expansion and drove us from the Piquette Avenue Plant into Highland Park. Everyone in the company, including Henry Ford, acknowledged him as the driving force during this period.8
In those early years, Couzens and Ford shared a progressive vision that put industry at the service of the people and considered corporate ownership to be a responsibility held in trust, rather than a source of vast personal enrichment. As mass production of the Model T turned the two men into millionaires, Couzens became wracked with guilt at the visible hardships of the working families on which the company relied. Socialist ideas were gaining ground in the United States and the rest of the world, organized labor was beginning to flex its muscle, and Couzens persuaded Henry Ford that paying his workers $5 a day—twice the going rate at the time—would mark a new way forward for the capitalist enterprise.9 Of course, it also helped that higher-paid workers were more likely to be loyal, absenteeism being a perennial problem of factory labor. In one year in the 1910s, the Ford Motor Company “somehow managed to hire more than 52,000 people, despite having less than 15,000 on payroll at any one time.”10
A well-paid workforce had an additional benefit—they could buy Fords. But there was a catch: if you wanted to make five bucks a day, you had to live by Henry Ford’s idea of moral conduct. In 1915, the company published a booklet titled Helpful Hints and Advice to Employees to Help Them Grasp the Opportunities Which Are Presented to Them by the Ford Profit-Sharing Plan. The company, we learn in its preface, “has organized a staff of men, whose business it is, to help and encourage every man that needs assistance to grasp the opportunities that are his.” And indeed, these men were “trained to offer useful advice on hygiene and on how to manage household finances. Behind them stood the Ford legal department, whose lawyers would help, free, with everything from buying a house to becoming an American citizen. Should an employee get sick or be injured, the company maintained a full-time staff of ten doctors and a hundred nurses.”11
But they were also there to inspect your life, and soon, they’d be a force of two hundred men who were keeping a close watch on Ford workers’ lives. They were the “Sociological Department,” which would morph into Harry Bennett’s “Services Department” later on, and they were there to see if you were married, if your house was clean, if your kids seemed healthy, if your wife was around. The company would not tell its employees where to live, “but it does expect that they, to be profit-sharers, will choose wholesome and decent neighborhoods and buildings, and keep their homes and surroundings clean, sanitary and healthful.”12 The preface may have promised that “no rules or regulations, of a general nature, are employed” and that “each individual is given a chance to work out the very best condition for himself in a way that will give him the most pleasure and satisfaction and foundation for further growth,” but in reality, rules and regulations poured forth in abundance. Anyone who wanted the daily wage of five bucks had to “qualify as to sobriety, industry and cleanliness.” Women qualified only if they had “some relatives solely dependent upon them for support.” You also had to have worked at Ford for six months—an elegant solution to the absentee problem.
By 1915, workers were already wise to their employers’ regime—the booklet notes, with evident pique, “that some young men, in order to qualify as profit-sharers, have hastily married without giving serious thought to such an important step in their lives. Seldom does such a marriage prove a happy one.” Of course, heavy-handed regimes invariably produce enterprising schemes to subvert them. Richard Snow relates the fine anecdote of eleven young Ford workers who lived in a boarding house: “Whenever an agent stopped by, the man he was visiting would borrow the generous-spirited landlady and present her as his wife. Fortunately … the social workers never called on all eleven at the same time.”13 And apparently, quite a few scammers saw an opportunity and posed as Ford investigators to sell their wares, prompting the booklet’s authors to issue the following warning: This Company has nothing to sell but Motor Cars, and is in no way connected with any company, firm or individual engaged in selling real estate or anything whatsoever. No one who tries to sell an employe [sic] anything is an agent of the Ford Motor Company. If he says he is, he lies. Do not buy anything from him.
Such anecdotes aside, Ford was serious about controlling the moral life of his employees and put real resources behind the undertaking. “A staff of investigators has been chosen whose duties are to explain the profit-sharing plan, and collect information and data from every one of the employes,” the book lays out. If the investigators found you unworthy of profit-sharing, your case would go before a committee of the Sociological Department, which would pass final judgment. Foreigners were under special notice: “The investigators have found, upon going into the homes of many employes, and particularly some of those of foreign birth, that in many cases they were living and sleeping in overcrowded rooms and tenements. Often these rooms and tenements were dark, ill-ventilated and foul smelling, with poor sanitary conditions as to toilet accommodations and the disposal of garbage and refuse…. Notice that the most advanced people are the cleanest.”
Ford’s Sociological Department is, without a doubt, the forerunner of the sort of “private government” corporations impose on their employees that Elizabeth Anderson analyzes in her 2017 book of the same title.14 She notes that to this day, “if the government imposed such regulations on us, we would rightly protest that our constitutional rights were being violated. But American workers have no such rights against their bosses. Even speaking out … can get them fired.” To be sure, Ford and Couzens were convinced that they were acting in their workers’ best interests—a new age, they thought, needed new cultural norms, and an industry heavily reliant on an immigrant workforce had to forcefully acculturate them to run smoothly. In fact, when foreigners graduated from Ford’s “English school,” the Henry Ford Museum tells us, they went through a ritual ceremony in which they literally stepped into a giant cauldron labeled “‘American Melting Pot.’ After going through a virtual smelting process, the immigrant’s identity was boiled away, leaving a new citizen to emerge from the pot wearing American clothes and waving American flags.”15
These clean, thrifty, sober, married, moral, well-paid workers were meant to produce the next generation of well-bathed, thrifty, moral Americans. Helpful Hints warns in particular against the kids running wild: “Children who are compelled to resort to the streets and alleys of the city for playgrounds are not getting what they need. To insure good health, and enable them to enjoy in fullest measure the desires of happy childhood, they should have open ground and space for play. Choose a home in a locality where ample room, with good wholesome surroundings, will enable the children to get the greatest benefit possible from their play, under conditions that will tend to clean and healthful ideas, rather than those likely to be formed in the streets and alleys of the crowded section of the city.” Of course, the city would not have been nearly as crowded, dirty, and dangerous were it not for the Ford Motor Company and its competitors. Little Alphonse Kronk was just one of scores of victims—there were tens of thousands of cars on the streets of Detroit when he was hit, and a feature in the Detroit News mentions that in “the 1920s, 60 percent of automobile fatalities nationwide were children under age 9. One gruesome Detroit article described an Italian family whose 18-month-old son was hit and wedged in the wheel well of a car. As the hysterical father and police pried out the child’s dead body, the mother went into the house and committed suicide.”16
Ford was right that the city’s children needed room to play, but where would all these parks and playgrounds for wholesome frolic and exercise come from in this city? At least, citizens like John Kronk tried to step up. Today, the only reason anybody knows Kronk’s name is the Kronk Recreation Center, a venue linked to the heyday of Detroit boxing in the 1980s. Back in the 1920s, however, he was instrumental in finding funding for recreational facilities, finally an integral part of city policy. John Kronk himself was born on Polish land in 1883, at a time when Poland had been divided for more than a hundred years by the encircling powers of Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire.17 The family had emigrated soon after he was born, and they eventually moved to the southwest corner of Detroit, near the railyards, an area that was one of the main industrial centers of the city at the time. Back then, it was considered a Polish neighborhood—nowadays it is known as Mexicantown. Young Kronk worked as machinist and for the Detroit Union Railway before opening a saloon in 1910, just off Michigan Avenue.
When it was time to enter politics, however, the saloon had to go—he sold it in the same year he became an alderman, for in order to succeed in city politics, he needed the favors of the Prohibitionists.18 At that time, the City of Detroit was organized politically in a ward system—small sections that tended to reflect local ethnic interests. The city elected forty-two aldermen, and an arcane network of committees made the decisions—a system rife with influence trading and backroom deals. The rising stars of the auto industry, who were achieving national acclaim, felt unrecognized in their own backyard, and they had little influence on city policies, which tended to be live-and-let-live. Local politicians supported ethnic schools, customs, and habits, tolerated alcohol consumption, gambling, and, to some extent, prostitution and brothels—exactly the kind of life Ford’s Sociological Department had made it its mission to stamp out. Led by Henry Leland, president of the Cadillac Motor Company, the industrialists formed the Detroit Citizens League (DCL) to lobby for electoral reform. In essence, they wanted the city to be run like a corporation—and with greater deference to their interests.19 Their clean-living regimes made them natural allies to the Prohibition movement, and if John Kronk wanted them as allies, selling his saloon was probably essential.20
Detroit might not have been exactly a company town, but the car industry’s muscle was massive by then, and the DCL got what it wanted. In June 1918, the city voted to accept a new charter drawn up by the League. It gave power to the mayor and an elected council of nine “at-large” representatives—a system that survives to the present day. In 1919, John Kronk was elected to the first City Council. In 1920, he opened a bank, no doubt helped by the influential business figures who were now his friends. Throughout the rest of his life, he would serve on the council on and off, winning some elections and losing others—he was still serving at his death in 1953.21
Perhaps his most interesting, if ill-fated proposal, advanced in 1939, was that Detroit and the surrounding region of Southeast Michigan should secede from the state of Michigan and form their own state. In general, however, his politics tended toward the mundanely pragmatic, including his celebrated victory over the Detroit Union Railway (DUR), which had sought to raise streetcar fares to six cents: the “Kronk Ordinance” fixed them at five.22 In this endeavor, he allied with James Couzens, who had entered politics after leaving Ford and continued a bitter campaign to bring the streetcars under municipal ownership and eliminate the private monopoly of the DUR. When Couzens succeeded in 1922, having been attacked as a “socialist” by his opponent, he had finally brought to fruition an idea first proposed by Mayor Hazen Pingree, an earlier “Republican socialist.”23
Kronk’s most lasting imprint, however, may have been his role in the expansion of recreational facilities. The DCL saw overcrowding in the central city as the root of much evil in urban Detroit. It advocated expanding affordable housing along with the creation of municipal recreation facilities. In 1919, Couzens’s new city administration won voter approval to spend $10 million in bond revenue to construct new playgrounds and playing fields and to extend the city’s park system. Wholesome recreation was meant to foster wholesome politics: according to the DCL, “one of the best weapons for fighting against radicalism and for completing the solution of the saloon problem lies in a generous supply of recreation facilities.”24 Such facilities, as Kronk understood only too well, would also help to keep children off streets made more dangerous by the explosion of motorized road traffic. New developments mushroomed, and the city expanded from 47 square miles in 1915 to 140 square miles by 1926.
One of the very first steps of the new council was to approve the construction of a “community house” at 5555 McGraw Avenue, just nine months after Alphonse’s death and just a mile away from where he died. At a cost of $160,000, the house consisted of a gymnasium, a swimming pool, changing facilities, and an auditorium. Clarence Brewer, appointed commissioner of the Department of Recreation in 1921, claimed it was one of the finest in the country. Mayor Couzens and Councilman Kronk officiated at the opening in March 1922.25 In 1926, the council passed a resolution naming the community house after Kronk, in recognition of the fact that he had been the leading advocate for its creation.26 Brewer had even more ambitious plans. In December 1921, he proposed the construction of a fifty-thousand-seat municipal stadium with a view to hosting the 1928 Olympic Games. It was to be funded by municipal bonds and would cost $900,000—a modest price tag if you consider that that figure in 1921 dollars amounts to $12 million today.27 Compare that with the cost of the $863 million Little Caesars Arena that opened in 2017! But the price was considered too steep, the stadium was never built, and Detroit would never see the Olympic Games.
That doesn’t mean that the city didn’t invest. In 1920, Detroit spent $350,420 to maintain 144 recreation centers under paid leadership.28 By 1927, the budget had increased to over $1 million, serving over a million users; it reached $3.5 million by the beginning of 1930.29 The Recreation Department was responsible for a dizzying array of activities: managing parks and gyms; maintaining facilities such as tennis courts, swimming pools, and baseball diamonds; running competitions for children and adults; and organizing camps, festivals, and outdoor entertainments. It was even responsible for licensing dance halls, a tricky issue in Prohibition Detroit—they were very popular, but dancers frequently felt quite a bit more nimble after a drink or five, and accommodations had to be made.
The extent to which these programs in the 1920s had the desired effects of reducing delinquency and vice is not clear, and because of the excesses of Prohibition, the outcomes remain cloudy. However, it is hard to believe that publicly funded recreation facilities did not do quite a bit of good. Parks do break up the oppressiveness of urban landscapes, and children do need to play outdoors—which had become much more dangerous in the automobile era, as John Kronk learned in the hardest possible way.
As is so often the case, these lovely developments had a dark underbelly—by and large they excluded Detroit’s growing African American population, both with regard to housing and to the accompanying recreational facilities. This is where the roots of Detroit’s extreme segregation lie, which would continue to define and haunt the city—first as a matter of official city policy and then as a matter of city practice. In the 1920s, as we noted earlier, the KKK was powerful in Detroit and the Midwest, and the Klan’s growing influence cowed even the white politicians who claimed to be sympathetic to the black housing crisis. Redlining and other blatantly discriminatory practices were the order of the day.
The Recreation Department did take some steps to meet the needs of the African American community. Forrester Washington, a pioneer of African American social work, commented approvingly:
Another encouraging feature of the development of recreation among Negroes is the active steps that certain cities are taking to provide recreational facilities in those sections where large numbers of colored people live. Detroit stands foremost in this particular. In this city in 1915 there was one paid colored play director; in 1927 there were five; in 1905 there were one hundred colored summer playground directors; in 1925 there were three hundred and twenty-five. On April 6, 1928, the City Council of Detroit, on the direction of Mayor Lodge, voted $268,000 for the erection of a recreational center at 637 Brewster Street, in the heart of a large Negro community. This new structure will consist of six large club rooms, an auditorium with stage, a gymnasium with balcony, a swimming pool with balcony, and will altogether be one of the best recreational centers in the country.30
Kronk and other civic dignitaries were in attendance when the Brewster opened on October 25, 1929—the same gym where Joe Louis would enroll as a sixteen-year-old, one year later.31 Unlike the Kronk, it has survived—after a long period of dereliction, the site is now under redevelopment.