As the war in Korea continued, auto employment in Detroit became increasingly precarious, and persistent inflation made it harder for autoworkers to cope. Government allocations of raw materials did not favor the auto industry, and military contracts tended not to go to Detroit factories, even when awarded to auto companies. Memories of full employment during World War II, when Detroit was the Arsenal of Democracy, motivated tens of thousands of people to migrate to the city despite dire warnings from industrialists, union leaders, and civic officials. In the background, and often hard to detect amid disruptions caused by the war, industrial engineers continued to develop new machinery that streamlined production and reduced the number of workers necessary in auto plants. Wildcat strikes also continued to disrupt remaining operations. As a result, unemployment in Detroit skyrocketed, and it was heavily concentrated in the industrial sector. At one point in 1952, 10 percent of all the unemployment in the nation was in the Detroit area. While economic commentators gushed over the thriving national economy, autoworkers in Detroit faced inflation, rising rents, and bleak prospects, even if they were on the job, but conditions were especially tough for those on layoff. There was no end in sight as federal government officials privileged the war effort over jobs for Detroit’s unemployed. Then a nationwide steel strike in 1952 quashed any hopes of an auto industry recovery. Not even top UAW officials knew how their rank-and-file members managed to survive. Yet by late 1952, steel supplies stabilized, the federal government relaxed wartime materials restrictions, and suddenly Detroit’s automakers, facing a labor shortage, began recruiting far and wide for new workers.
In early 1951 pessimistic predictions for the auto industry came true. Unemployment in Detroit worsened, in large part because of continuing materials and parts shortages. Chrysler plants experienced the most disruptions, especially when the Dodge Main plant was affected by a strike at the L. A. Young Spring & Wire Corporation, a Detroit firm that manufactured moldings and auto cushion springs. Persistent wildcat strikes also resulted in layoffs. Charles Scrosani, an employee at Chrysler’s DeSoto-Warren plant, complained in March that he had not worked a full week for the previous three months largely because of unauthorized strikes, and he blamed local union officers for condoning such disruptive action. By early February, Detroit layoffs totaled nearly 115,000. Then a railroad strike halted freight traffic between many auto plants, and winter storms prevented trucks and planes from picking up the slack. When parts could not be sent by rail from the Rouge to outlying Ford assembly plants, 30,000 more workers were sent home.1
Conditions deteriorated to a point where Detroit automakers, union officials, and government leaders collaborated to distribute anti-recruitment notices across the nation. Their message was blunt: “Attention would-be war workers! Stay away from Detroit unless you have definite promise of a job in this city. If you expect a good-paying job in one of the big auto plants at this time, you’re doomed to disappointment and hardship.” Moreover, the leaders emphasized, newcomers to Detroit would not qualify for either unemployment benefits or city welfare assistance. A Ford industrial relations manager noted in early 1951 that his company employed eleven thousand fewer people than it had during peak times in 1950. “Before we hire any new employes,” he emphasized, “we will call back our former employes now laid off. So there is no possibility of a walk-in-job-seeker getting work now or in the immediate future.”2
Inflation, especially for food, made unemployment particularly painful. “Prices are going up every day,” remarked a supermarket spokesperson. In this era, food generally comprised at least 40 percent of a working family’s budget, so rising costs made it more difficult for people to meet other obligations even when they were employed. With monthly car payments often in the one-hundred-dollar range, many autoworkers defaulted. “Collections are becoming difficult,” noted an auto finance official. Groceries were a higher priority for autoworkers, his agents had learned, especially for those with larger families. Economists debated how well UAW members had fared with respect to inflation. Official data showed that since 1941 the cost of living had increased 82 percent while autoworkers’ wages had gone up only 73 percent. But if the cost of fringe benefits was added to wages, workers could be said to have come out ahead, 87 percent to 82. Basic wage rates could be misleading, however, because of overtime pay or shift differentials and, of course, layoffs, which had been chronic. In the end, economists declared that the “average” autoworker now earned thirty-five hundred dollars a year and was either better off or worse off than before, depending on how one defined necessities and luxuries and how much debt he or she had incurred. The experts, however, did not ask autoworkers what they thought as inflation and layoffs soared.3
In the near future, autoworkers’ economic fate depended on the balance between civilian and military production. Early in 1951 GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Packard all announced lucrative government war contracts, but none of them were likely to result in Detroit-area employment anytime soon. GM’s successful bid to produce F-84 Thunderjet fighter planes was good news for those who would build it—in Kansas City, Kansas. Chrysler received a contract for $160 million to build tanks in Newark, Delaware, in a plant that was constructed as part of the government’s plan to decentralize military production during the Cold War. The company also won the rights to manufacture J-48 Turbo-Wasp jet engines, but the plant for this project had yet to be built at an undisclosed location. Ford was awarded a contract to produce 4,000-horsepower engines in Chicago. So while job seekers streamed to Detroit, wartime spending created opportunities elsewhere. In February the U.S. Navy chose Packard to manufacture marine diesel engines in Detroit, but that would happen well in the future, because the tooling process began only after the contract was secured. Ford predicted that it would eventually need forty-two thousand workers to meet its defense contracts, which surpassed the billion-dollar mark with a $195 million order for medium-size tanks. Only skilled workers were needed in the short term, however, as the projects were nowhere near the production stage and the tank plant had yet to be built.4
One contract would eventually benefit Pontiac Motor, which received the go-ahead to produce a new amphibious cargo vehicle called the “Otter.” Pontiac received more good news in April with its successful bid to manufacture medium-caliber cannons for the army, a project that could absorb as many as three thousand workers from car-making operations.5 Elwin Brown hired in at Pontiac Motor during this period. He had enjoyed a part-time job in the printing business and had no intention of becoming an autoworker, but he was not making much money, and he remembered well his dad’s demand that he apply at Pontiac Motor: “Get your ass over there and get yourself a job!” Brown obeyed and began in mid-February, but he became a victim of the lag time between the awarding of defense contracts and actual production. Laid off after three months, he ended up working at a friend’s gas station.6
Instability in auto employment occurred for many reasons, including inplant infractions and vulnerability during probationary periods. L. J. Scott recalled getting a job at Chevrolet Gear and Axle in 1951 after arriving from picking fruit in Florida with “$3.25 in my pocket.” Scott had never seen the inside of a factory. “Tall machines and all that noise and stuff around—I’m busy looking at that stuff,” he said, and he failed to notice when he walked through a no-smoking area with a cigarette in his mouth. Facing a two-week suspension—“I mean I made a mistake and I had to pay for it”—Scott looked for other work and found an entry-level position at a Chrysler plant. But he was let go before completing his contractual ninety-day probationary period and ended up working at an army surplus store.7
Automakers were reluctant to let new hires gain seniority, because parts and materials shortages continued to disrupt production goals. For example, Detroit’s Gemmer Manufacturing Company could not supply enough steering gears to keep Chrysler operating, even at reduced assembly rates. More ominously, the federal government announced new metals restrictions—from 50 to 60 percent below existing levels—for aluminum and copper.8 Immediately, Ford scheduled layoffs for ten thousand workers. Hudson followed shortly with ten thousand layoffs of its own, hinting that twenty-five hundred of those would be permanent. Blaming materials shortages, Chrysler laid off twenty thousand workers “for an indefinite period,” and Briggs did the same with eighty-eight hundred of its employees.9 Still common, as well, were wildcat strikes, mostly over production speedups, which affected supply chains. As one auto industry analyst described the situation, automakers “don’t know how many cars they will build during the next six months; they don’t know how much unemployment will result from material cutbacks, and they don’t know how many new cars will be sold during the July–December period.”10
Detroit manufacturing was in turmoil. Citing lack of metals, General Motors shut down most of its operations for a week while Ford quietly cut fourteen thousand jobs from its Detroit-area plants.11 The best bets for steady employment in the auto industry were either as a tool and die maker gearing up for war production or as a production worker for Cadillac, which was by far the smallest GM division but one with a steady, affluent clientele and a mostly high-seniority labor force.12 Government metals allocations continued to destabilize the auto industry. In September the National Production Authority (NPA) placed limits on the number of automatic transmissions, newly popular and aluminum-based, that automakers could install in various types of vehicles. Expensive cars (priced over $2,500) could all have automatic transmissions, but the NPA allowed only 65 percent of mid-priced cars ($1,800–$2,500) and 35 percent of lower-end cars (less than $1,800) to offer the new technology. These restrictions made sense in terms of national defense. Jets and cars drew on the same finite supply of aluminum, but an average passenger car contained between seven and eleven pounds of the metal, mainly for pistons and automatic transmissions, while a single Thunderjet fighter frame required seven thousand pounds.13 The new federal order did not have much effect on low-priced autos, few of which had automatic transmissions, but almost all mid-priced cars, such as Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs, had automatics and advertised them heavily. Perhaps consumers would purchase cars with manual transmissions out of a sense of patriotic duty, but even so there was no way to gain access to tens of thousands of alternative parts anytime soon. In November the Michigan Employment Security Commission (successor to the MUCC) stated the obvious: “The smooth meshing of defense and civilian economies in the Detroit area at present appears to be an objective rather than an actuality.” And Detroit was long past the point when experts had predicted that there would be a labor shortage because of increased defense work. Instead, more than one hundred thousand Detroiters were jobless, with at least another hundred thousand either underemployed or laid off intermittently without being counted in the official unemployment statistics.14
One strategy for boosting auto production involved scouring the country for scrap steel and iron that could be converted to industrial use. Even in good times, as in early 1950, the auto industry depended on large quantities of scrap metal. One out of every two cars made in 1950 relied on the 29 million tons of scrap recovered and reused that year. Much of the waste came from steel mills and iron foundries, but millions of tons in 1950 could be found in outdated steam locomotives, newly replaced by diesel-powered engines. Millions more existed in abandoned farm equipment rusting in barnyards. In hopes of finding even more unused metal, the steel industry’s scrap mobilization unit sent seventy-five agents on reconnaissance missions throughout Michigan to see if manufacturers themselves were harboring unused, obsolete, or unwanted machinery. When forced to look, Packard alone discovered 2.5 million pounds of scrap steel in and around its various plants.15
Although wartime materials shortages created the bulk of short-term layoffs, new developments in automation also affected Detroit’s employment totals. The cutting edge of industrial engineering in the 1940s and 1950s was materials handling, which had historically involved muscle power to move parts from one stage of production to the next and had been disproportionately assigned to African Americans. Automakers had not hesitated to purchase new production technologies, such as huge, multistep stamping presses, but they had been slow to explore using machines to connect the stages of manufacturing. This was “in spite of the fact,” according to Ford vice president for manufacturing Del Harder, “that nearly 25 cents of every dollar paid for production labor was being paid for the handling of materials,” amounting to $9 billion annually. Harder offered an example of what he saw as a positive change in a Ford foundry, in which 112 workers, one hundred wheelbarrows, and twelve cranes had once been required to move scrap iron. Now the department needed only 36 workers, assisted by power trucks and hoppers. The company recouped the cost of the equipment in less than three months and now saved $250,000 a year on that change alone. That meant, however, that 76 workers had permanently lost their jobs. Chrysler’s newly renovated DeSoto plant required no manual laborers to move parts or materials; everything was transported mechanically. Meanwhile, advances in production automation continued. At DeSoto a few machine operators oversaw the manufacturing of engine blocks, which were milled, drilled, reamed, and bored automatically, displacing dozens of workers. In the Rouge plant’s piston department, the local union’s newspaper reported, “All you see now are machines, machines, machines! Technology, mechanical hands, automation, have reduced the workers from 1000 to 265.” In piston grinding alone, the paper noted, “by realigning the machines and by means of a series of conveyors, 39 of the 42 jobs were eliminated.” Variations on these stories took place in countless departments in factories across Detroit, adding to the city’s unemployment total but difficult to quantify amid the large-scale layoffs resulting from the war.16
Also concealed by aggregate unemployment data were the battles in many departments to ensure fairness with layoffs and recalls. Under UAW contracts seniority supposedly ruled, but sometimes the official provisions did not sit right with those who were laid off. For example, tensions often flared when only certain departments suffered layoffs, usually because whatever was produced in unaffected areas could be stockpiled or was needed in greater quantities further along in the production process. Sometimes lower-performing, high-seniority workers were bumped to jobs beyond their current abilities, or ones that they could not learn quickly enough to meet production quotas, which some saw as a cunning way by which foremen could dismiss them. If higher-seniority workers were laid off while those with less seniority in different parts of the plant remained on their jobs, hard feelings could provoke wildcat strikes and additional layoffs, regardless of the contractual language. Proposals for plant-wide seniority to correct this problem seemed fair on the surface, but because of inequities in hiring practices those with the highest seniority were disproportionately white males.17 Even when seniority favored African Americans or women, racism or sexism could trump the contract. In one such case at the Rouge plant, forty women were replaced by men with less seniority, including some who had only recently been hired. The women were desperate to regain their jobs, and two had already lost their homes because of missed paychecks, but Local 600 officers were unwilling to support them. When the women protested across town at UAW international headquarters, officials there apprised them of their formal rights under the grievance procedure, which meant they were once again at the mercy of their unsympathetic local officers.18
As the 1951 holiday season approached, around 120,000 people in the area were still officially out of work, many had exhausted their unemployment benefits, countless others were about to, and a good number more were unemployed but had not worked long enough at their current jobs to qualify for any relief. Unemployment was officially at about 8 percent in Detroit, but it was closer to 25 percent for industrial workers, most of whom supported families, which multiplied the number in hardship.19 Local 600 leaders considered their supposedly lucrative 1950 contract to be a bust, emphasizing that “THOUSANDS OF OUR MEMBERS ARE LAID OFF AND MANY MORE THOUSANDS ARE THREATENED WITH LAYOFFS.” A little more than a year after that contract was signed, employment at the Rouge had dropped from 70,000 to 47,000.20 Conditions worsened when 90,000 more autoworkers were laid off in December because of the government’s wartime materials quotas. Ford tried to soften the blow by offering holiday bonuses to those who would have qualified if they had still been on the job.21 More than twice as many people as usual lined up outside the Federal Building the first day applications were available for 10,000 Christmas-rush jobs at the post office. Hoping to shovel out the downtown area’s roads, thousands more stood in line for hours during a heavy snowfall. “These are mostly people who have been laid off,” said city official Sam Gentile. “Mostly they’re trying to get money for Christmas.” Fortunately for those who were chosen, it took several days to remove the heavy snow into waiting trucks to be dumped into the river. About a thousand men who were not selected, however, stormed the front of the line before police intervened.22
* * *
Crisis conditions in early 1952 prompted Detroit and state government leaders to plead with federal authorities for relief. Washington officials, however, believed that they were doing a tremendous job balancing military and civilian needs. Defense mobilizer Charles Edward Wilson, former president of General Electric (GE), issued a glowing report on his agency’s progress during 1951 and insisted that the nation should stay the course in the new year. Michigan’s governor G. Mennen Williams and auto executives complained bitterly, including a scathing charge leveled by the defense mobilizer’s namesake, Charles Erwin Wilson, the head of General Motors. “The Government has taken enough steel and copper from the automobile industry alone to fill all defense needs,” auto executive Wilson charged, while accusing the former GE leader of favoring the electrical industry. Mobilizer Wilson responded with outrage: “Nobody in his right mind with any sense of fairness would say that.” Governor Williams complained that steel and copper defense allocations had boosted production in places other than Detroit. In early 1952 about 12.4 percent of Michigan’s manufacturing laborers were involved in defense work, compared with a national average of 38 percent. NPA director Manly Fleischmann explained that “automobiles are less essential than military or industrial expansion.” Trying to defuse the situation, the government’s Wilson offered a “preferred basis” plan, under which Detroit firms could win defense contracts with bids 10 percent above any otherwise lowest offer. A month later, however, no new military contracts had been awarded for work in Detroit on any basis.23
Hollow gestures became the norm. Fleischmann boosted the quota for automobile production during the second quarter of 1952 from 800,000 to 930,000, which was cause for celebration in Detroit until the realization set in that the increased allowance was not accompanied by any additional metal supplies. “The fact of the matter is that we are being allotted both copper and aluminum for only 800,000 cars,” complained Henry Ford II. When Fleischmann came up with an extra million pounds of aluminum for auto production, no one in the auto industry was fooled. Without commensurate copper supplies, the increase was meaningless.24 Frustration grew in Detroit when defense mobilizer Wilson’s task force announced to Michigan’s congressional delegation that “dispersing the Detroit labor force” to areas with higher levels of defense-based employment was on its list of preferred strategies. Michigan senator Blair Moody immediately objected, insisting that “you can’t move men around like checkers.” It turns out, however, that many Detroiters, perhaps more than twenty thousand of them, had already adopted this strategy, some heading back either to their home states or to someplace else where employment prospects seemed brighter. Most of those who left for war-related jobs were young, single men, not those with families or significant seniority. It was all very distressing for Detroiters, who still prided themselves on having been the Arsenal of Democracy in the not-so-distant past. As one observer put it, this was a “strange combination of war and peace.”25
Some experts failed to comprehend what was happening in the city. When Business Week editor Gabriel Hauge spoke before a meeting of advertisers in Detroit, he predicted boom times in 1952. Defense spending would be greater than in 1951, he explained, consumers had saved $20 billion in 1951, twice as much as they had in 1950, and “if they spend in large amounts, the seams will split.” There were rumblings in the audience, however, because this rosy picture did not accurately describe the city in which he was speaking. Indeed, 10 percent of all the unemployment in the United States in early 1952 was concentrated in the Motor City. “Detroit is the squall area on the nation’s economic weather map,” Hauge conceded. “I am talking, of course, of the nation as a whole. I am confident, however, that the problem here will be worked out in due course.”26 Civic leaders put a positive spin on their economic woes. Detroit’s Board of Commerce admitted that Detroit was “one of the isolated thorns in the nation’s generally-rosy economy,” but insisted that since recent unemployment totals had been nearly eighty thousand anyway, these times were not all that much worse and did not compare with the depths of the Great Depression. Also on the bright side, the board reported that aggregate savings in Detroit banks were higher than the previous year. Economists speculated that workers with high seniority were banking their paychecks in case they were the next to be laid off. Yet virtually all industrial workers in Detroit, skilled and unskilled, lived paycheck to paycheck, and many were still trying to pay off debts incurred during previous layoffs. It was far more likely that white-collar Detroiters had boosted local savings totals.27
The suffering in blue-collar neighborhoods was serious. Mack Plantier, thirty-six, married with four children, was laid off in mid-December 1951 from his job inspecting bearings at the Rouge plant and survived on unemployment pay of $140 a month. “I was bringing home around $73 a week,” he reported in early January 1952. “Groceries alone cost us $25 a week. … We just got the gas and electric bill. The house payment is due pretty soon. It’s $45. I’ve been tramping around looking for a job to tide me over.” Finding nothing, all he did, he said, was “sit around the house. That’s what gets me. I’m used to working. I don’t feel right, just sitting. I get to arguing with the kids and the missus.” “Mack prowls around here like a lion in a cage,” his wife added. “The children get on his nerves and Heaven knows, he loves them dearly. It’s just resting that’s getting him.” Furniss Todd, forty-eight years old with a family, had been a machinist at Ford since 1928 but also had been laid off since mid-December. “We cut the milk down from a quart a day to a quart every two days,” he noted. “We send a little money to the telephone and the electric companies to let them know we’re in good faith and hope they’ll carry us.” John Manion, twenty-eight, was unmarried and still on the job as an inspector at a Chevrolet plant but only for four days a week. “There’s plenty of us single fellows who have as many responsibilities as the married men,” he insisted. “I’m taking care of my mother, and an uncle who was hurt in an auto accident. I have to earn $230 a month before I can see any of it. When I lose as little as a day’s work it’s more than I can stand.” Manion had waited in line to shovel the city’s streets. So had Simon Daniels, forty-six, with three children. “My rent is $8 a week and I’m behind. Me and the wife are living on beans and potatoes. It’s a long time since we bought a pork chop.” Calvin Thurman, twenty-nine, with a wife and a ten-year-old daughter, found temporary jobs as a short-order cook, as a bootblack, and in a laundry. “All of a sudden there just wasn’t any work,” he said. “I don’t understand it.” Most of Detroit’s unemployed did whatever they could to make a few dollars, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, washing windows, or possibly helping out at service stations, but most fell further behind on bills and installment payments. Top-level UAW leaders were as baffled as anybody as to how their membership survived while they were out of work. To find out, they commissioned a survey.28
Many secondary jobs came by way of recommendations from friends, clergy, or even foremen, which increased advantages for white workers. Whites owned more businesses than blacks did and were therefore more likely to be connected to job opportunities through social networks. In addition, many local shops refused to hire African Americans, further cutting off potential safety nets. In Pontiac, for example, some laid-off autoworkers found short-term employment at places like Lewis Furniture or Neisner’s variety store, both of which were charged by the local NAACP chapter with job discrimination in the 1950s. Nevertheless, many whites had great difficulty coping with layoffs, and when offered a chance to make some money or to gain greater security, they did not ask questions about any possible racial bias behind their good fortune. Gene Johnson left the military in 1952 and returned to joblessness in Pontiac. Before long he was hired as a taxi driver, a position largely off-limits to blacks. Paul Ross was laid off from his nickel-plating job in 1952 but scratched his way into an accelerated skilled trades program because of his work on a pipe gang in the navy during World War II. No African American would have been afforded such an opportunity.29
MESC officials did their best to quantify the unemployment crisis. Director Max Horton conceded, however, that his agency’s calculations were really just informed guesses, derived from regular surveys of five hundred large companies in the Detroit metropolitan area. At one point the MESC admitted to losing track of thirty thousand laid-off workers. “They can’t have all gone fishing,” an agency spokesperson said. “No doubt some have left the State, others have entered the service and some have gone to work at plants not covered by our reporting service. But there are still thousands which just can’t be accounted for.” In the end, unemployment figures were approximate numbers, at best, to be compared over time rather than to be considered accurate depictions of any particular moment. Horton asserted that “strikes, shortages, booms and busts” in the past few years made it impossible to label any period as “normal.”30 The commission did not hesitate, however, to call early 1952 the worst for unemployment in Detroit since the reconversion to civilian production after World War II. Thousands of autoworkers saw their jobless benefits expire and were therefore no longer even monitored by the agency. About two thousand job openings were listed through the MESC, but mostly for positions like metallurgist and mechanical engineer. “The main call is for hot-shot designers and machinists,” an employment agent said. “We could place all of those we could get.” Unfortunately for the tens of thousands of people looking for work, demand was low for unskilled jobs.31
As unemployment worsened and benefits expired, Detroit’s welfare system strained to handle the increased load. By early 1952 the city’s three shelters for homeless families were filled beyond capacity. The housing market remained extremely tight in Detroit, and since plenty of landlords refused to rent to anyone with children, many families had great difficulty finding places to live even in good economic times. Those with the most children—and this was the baby boom era—faced the worst prospects when seeking apartments and had the most difficulty keeping up with rents. It was not surprising, then, that many residents in Detroit’s homeless shelters were members of large families.32 Despite budget shortfalls, the welfare department relaxed its rules by allowing recipients to keep their cars and telephones for ninety days, but many laid-off autoworkers sold their cars whether or not they intended to apply for welfare, because they needed cash and could not afford to operate them.33 During this period of extreme unemployment, Detroit police reported sharp increases in crime, especially robbery, auto thefts, and larceny. Neighborhood grocers told of regular customers, who were desperate, out of work, with hungry children, showing up with cheap guns and useless masks to steal from cash registers, which often contained more IOUs than money. “If these men could tell about when they’ll get back to work,” speculated the chief of detectives, “it would relieve their worries.” Nevertheless, in the midst of this crisis the Detroit Board of Commerce claimed that the “typical” Detroit factory worker earned more than ever—$2.04 cents per hour, or $81.60 for a forty-hour week. Reality told a different story, as tens of thousands of factory workers were either unemployed or underemployed, but if they had been working full-time, they would indeed have made record amounts of money, and presumably much of the chaos would have been avoided.34
The military continued to siphon off a number of the area’s workers, both unemployed and employed. Detroit led the Midwest in enlistments for the navy, the marines, and the Women’s Army Corps. According to military officials, the first months of any year were generally good for recruiting. “The men wait to spend one more Christmas at home before signing up,” an officer explained. There seemed no doubt, however, that in early 1952 unemployment spurred many to join. Only 40 percent of February recruits had jobs. Those who enlisted could generally choose their branch of service, which prompted many who expected to get drafted, almost certainly into the army, to act preemptively.35 It was common for those who received draft notices to have their working lives disrupted. Elwin Brown remembered the precise date: “July 23, 1952.” He had been recalled to Pontiac Motor after a three-month layoff and despite low seniority had maneuvered his way into a fairly good job, inspecting pin bearings on crankshafts. But he soon found himself in Korea, training troops on the Browning Automatic Rifle. Joe Woods was also drafted away from a position at Pontiac Motor to serve in Korea. His duties were familiar ones for blacks in the military, including engineering support on bridges and construction work, in his case on an air base west of Seoul. L. J. Scott had finally landed an auto job, but within a few weeks he was drafted and spent the rest of the Korean War as a cook at Fort Gordon in Georgia. Don Hester’s military service probably saved his auto career. He had joined the naval reserves in 1950 and had to report to Chicago for two weeks of training each summer. In 1952 those two weeks came at a perfect time, near the end of his ninety-day probationary period at Pontiac Motor. Hester would almost certainly have been let go before he acquired seniority, like those who were hired with him, but by contract no one could lose a job while fulfilling military obligations. When he returned from Chicago, he had seniority rights.36
When the United Steelworkers voted to strike in early April, there appeared to be little hope for recovery in the auto industry. Then, in a controversial move, President Truman seized control of the unionized mills and prohibited any walkouts while the courts considered the constitutionality of his action. The case wound its way through the legal system until June, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally overruled Truman. Detroit braced for the worst.37 Ford was in better shape than its competitors, yet company officials understood that their thousands of suppliers were as dependent as ever on a functioning steel industry, so they phased out assembly operations before shutting down completely in mid-July.38 Chevrolet laid off nearly 15,000 employees at its Detroit facilities. Additional cuts followed, including 5,400 at GM’s Gear and Axle plant in Detroit. Nearly 70,000 of Chrysler’s Detroit-area employees were out of work by mid-July, and 24,000 Briggs workers joined them. The total number of jobless Detroit autoworkers increased rapidly to at least 150,000 in mid-July. Only Pontiac Motor escaped relatively unaffected, largely because of defense contracts.39
This latest round of mass layoffs underscored the volatility of auto employment. There had been optimism in the spring that car production would rebound, labor reporter Robert Perrin reminded his readers, but by late June, “with no steel to feed the State’s hungry industrial plants, the jobless rolls are growing by the thousands daily as manufacturers scrape the bottom of their supply barrels.” James McGuire had heard the positive employment forecast for Detroit while working in a West Virginia coal mine and headed for the Motor City. “You find out that Detroit is the only place that’s capable of hiring people,” he recalled the wisdom at that time. “And what happens is, I came up here during a steel strike.” Six weeks into the steel walkout the MESC calculated that Detroit unemployment had risen to 240,000, and agency officials conceded that their figure was probably too low. Making matters worse, iron ore freighters were grounded, having nowhere to unload their cargoes. Since there were only so many ships in service on the Great Lakes, there would be no way to ramp up deliveries when the steel strike ended, which was critical because ice would eventually end the shipping season. “Most of the 1953 models are still underground in the Mesabi range,” remarked a despondent Detroit auto dealer, referring to the iron-rich area on the shores of Lake Superior. “When this city hits the skids it hits pretty hard.”40 After the steel strike ended on July 24, auto analysts anticipated that it would take up to six weeks to approach normal assembly levels, whatever that meant. Indeed, auto industry layoffs actually increased the week after the steel truce, eventually reaching an official total of 250,000 in Detroit. It appeared that the vegetable and fruit canning industry was likely to get priority over automobiles for new steel supplies; otherwise a significant portion of the nation’s crops would go to waste. In a best-case scenario, parts plants would resume production first, followed by the reopening of assembly operations in mid-August, with residual effects from the steel strike lasting indefinitely.41
Some autoworkers were clearly fed up. As one UAW member explained his view of the situation:
I have been a union man since 1938 and have saved as much as possible. I have a bank account and I have purchased $1,600 worth of Government bonds. Due to inflation my bank account and my bonds are worth about half what they were. Even though my wages are high, I find it difficult to buy the necessities of life because of high prices.
I have lost months of work due to strikes in my factory. I have lost a lot more time because the company I work for has plants in other parts of the Country and when any of those plants strike, we have to go on strike, too. I have lost other time due to steel, coal and railroad strikes and every time any of the plants supplying my factory with parts go on strike, I again lost time.
All the increased wages I have received through my union have not paid the money back that I have lost from strikes. Besides higher prices for everything, my taxes are now higher and one wonders where and when will it all end.42
There is no way to tell how many workers shared this level of exasperation, but even if an autoworker maintained steadfast faith in the UAW and in the larger union movement, this description of instability in the auto industry and precarious economic security was still accurate.
Then, suddenly, conditions improved dramatically as steel supplies increased, and Detroit seemed primed for boom times. The federal government began to ease war restrictions, and it appeared possible that quotas could end the following spring. Automakers were ready to compete with one another, they said, rather than with the government and other industries for basic supplies. “Twelve long years of hot and cold wars, controls, materials shortages, substitutes, inflation, expansion, tensions, strikes, storms and turmoil are coming to an end in the auto industry, apparently, with the end of the 1952 model car production,” wrote business reporter Leo Donovan, conveying the automakers’ mood with more than a hint of sarcasm. One concern was that to ensure a spring boom, the industry needed more workers right away to build up parts inventories. In mid-September Detroit auto firms hoped to recruit at least twenty thousand unskilled and semi-skilled workers, in part by posting fliers in the same states from which they had discouraged migration a year and a half earlier. This was a rare postwar period when auto jobs were there for the taking, automakers had enough parts and materials to run full speed, and plenty of overtime hours were available. In addition, a number of defense projects, long in the planning stages, were finally ready to begin production.43
Ernie Liles benefited from this upsurge in production. After helping build the Bull Shoals Dam in his native Arkansas, Liles had tried making a living by leading fishing expeditions on the new backwater lake. Otherwise, he recalled, “there was no work down there,” except maybe “pumping gas for little or nothing.” By the early 1950s a number of Liles’s relatives had already moved to Detroit. “They didn’t want to be farmers no more,” he said. “I had three uncles work for Chevrolet. They worked in forge there at Gear and Axle. I had a cousin who worked at the same place. Then my grandfather, he come up here and went to work for Hudson.” So Ernie joined them. “Come up here on September the fifth, hired in at Chevrolet Gear and Axle,” he remembered, “to be a press operator.” He applied in the morning, had his physical the same day, and worked that night.44
Despite improved employment prospects, inflation continued to threaten autoworkers’ economic security. By July 1952 prices in Detroit had increased almost 11 percent since the start of the Korean War. The cost-of-living escalator clause in UAW contracts had helped to some extent, but most workers felt they were falling behind, especially when taking into account the long stretches of unemployment so many had experienced. The largest price increases in 1952 had been for food, in part because of a serious drought. Even residents of Birmingham, Michigan, a relatively affluent suburb, complained loudly about rising costs. Working-class neighborhoods, where most of the recently unemployed lived, were hit even harder, especially when the Consumer Price Index reached a postwar peak in the summer of 1952. Walter Reuther and GM president Charles Wilson agreed that the cost-of-living clauses in UAW contracts were not responsible for the national inflation rate. Yet autoworkers knew that as soon as they received pay increases, prices rose in the neighborhood stores where they shopped.45
Blue-collar workers received another jolt in October when the federal government ended wartime rent regulations. Immediately, the Detroit Area Rent Control Office, set up to handle complaints, was overwhelmed. “Our phones have been ringing all day,” said Director Morton Barris. “All but one said their landlords were boosting the rent 25 per cent or higher.” Monthly rental for one complainant’s house, for example, increased from $58.50 to $74.50. A low-end apartment now went for $45 a month instead of $31. One tenant who had rented a place for $35 a month was now asked to pay $5 a day. The larger the family, the greater the difficulty meeting higher rent obligations, especially with the rising cost of food. But that assumed such families had places to live. “Even if one can find a place to rent there is always a big question,” reminded Detroiter Irmgard Bobak. “Have you any children? If one can answer ‘no,’ he is lucky and can rent a flat or house. But if one must answer ‘yes’ he might just as well save himself the trouble of asking, for 90 per cent of the people will not take renters with children.” The Detroit Real Estate Board encouraged landlords to be “moderate and just,” but now that controls were lifted, property owners could do as they pleased. With thirty days’ notice a tenant could be evicted for any reason or for no reason at all.46
In this context the UAW asked General Motors to reopen their five-year contract, the Treaty of Detroit, signed before the Korean War began. The union hoped to increase by a penny the “annual improvement factor,” designed to account for productivity gains, to five cents per hour per year. It also insisted that GM incorporate into workers’ base pay most of the cost-of-living increases received so far and to limit any possible wage decreases, if there happened to be downward trends in the Consumer Price Index, to five cents an hour over the contract. In addition the UAW wanted to increase monthly pensions for its retirees to account for inflation. The strategy was clear. If GM agreed, then Ford and Chrysler would have to do the same. And the timing was no coincidence. The economic pain for workers was real, and General Motors wanted no disruptions as it maximized production to compensate for the steel strike.47
It made sense to push for gains when auto production picked up, because it was never clear how long relatively good times would last. “Anyone who has been around the State for the past few years,” noted Free Press reporter Robert Perrin, “knows full well that sooner or later the bottom is going to drop out of the job market again.” Based on Perrin’s reading of the postwar years, it was guaranteed: “Michigan citizens might just as well add the unemployment crisis to death and taxes as the only sure things in our world.” Earlier in the year, he recalled, joblessness in Detroit had been nearly two hundred thousand, and it had been close to three hundred thousand during the steel strike. Those episodes could be added to a long list, including postwar reconversion, the natural gas crisis, recurrent metals shortages, the 1949 recession, and the 104-day Chrysler strike, as causes of the largest waves of postwar unemployment.48
Now, however, the call was out for thousands of new workers to come to Detroit. This was nothing new. According to a 1952 University of Michigan survey, two-thirds of Detroiters over the age of twenty-one had been born somewhere else, having moved to the city, most of them as adults, because of real or imagined demand for their labor. “Idle labor reserves have dropped so low that many plants are unable to staff their second-shift operations,” the MESC announced. Michigan employers worried that prospective laborers might find newer industrial regions, especially on the Pacific Coast, more attractive than Detroit. “We are hiring all the men we can find,” said Charles Williams, personnel executive for Packard. “We don’t care what color they are.”49 Many employers, however, continued to care about race. A number of African American men agreed in late 1952 that they were not as likely as usual to be bypassed in favor of white job seekers at major automotive plants, but they maintained that discrimination had by no means ended. And African American women experienced little improvement in their dismal chances at hiring gates, even at factories like Ternstedt, on Detroit’s west side, that had a largely female workforce.50 Given the disproportionately high rate of unemployment for blacks, in good economic times and bad, it stood to reason that there was an underutilized labor reserve already in Detroit. In 1952 the African American population in Detroit was roughly 300,000 out of nearly 1.8 million people in the city. Blacks who sought work in the auto industry, however, had learned over the years that what they desired made little difference in hiring offices. “A vast source of untapped skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor is going stagnant,” wrote Detroiter Earl Clemens. If there really was a labor shortage, he concluded, “let it occur for reason only of a true lack of takers for jobs.”51
While debates continued about the labor supply already in the city, thousands of new auto industry recruits appeared at Detroit’s train and bus stations. Elbert Garner, who had moved to Detroit from Tennessee and found a factory job, brought his wife and seven children to join him in October and spent all of his savings on an apartment and groceries. There was nothing left for clothing. Back home, Mrs. Garner said, “The children usually get out and pick cotton to earn money to buy shoes. But there isn’t any cotton up here. It’s just the blamed cold, or we could get by for awhile.” Recent arrivals often went straight from the train station to hiring gates, without having a place to live. Some had lost contact information for relatives and wandered around the city hoping to locate them. Although some would-be autoworkers, like Gene Johnson, gave up on the Detroit employment roller coaster and returned home—in Johnson’s case, to Missouri—tens of thousands of people migrated to the Motor City.52
If one considered the most favorable economic information, those new arrivals to Detroit were likely to find good jobs and prosper. Despite all disruptions in auto employment, 1952 had turned out to be the fourth-best year in history for vehicle production, and Michigan led the nation in manufacturing payrolls. The economy was on the upswing, and industrial leaders held this to be proof that the United States could win the Cold War while sustaining a booming consumer economy.53 At least until its last few months, however, 1952 for most autoworkers was a cruel year, filled with unemployment, uncertainty, and economic strain. One piece of economic data flattened the peaks and valleys of everyday life but still revealed much about where autoworkers stood in the early 1950s. The median family income for Detroiters in 1952 was $4,550. If an autoworker made $2.00 an hour for forty hours a week and was employed steadily for fifty weeks during the year, that worker’s annual income would have been $4,000, well below the median. Yet few autoworkers had experienced anything like steady employment, and the few weeks of overtime in the fall hardly made up for the weeks, and in many cases months, of layoffs earlier in the year. Only about 10 percent of autoworkers, the skilled tradesmen who were kept on payrolls to keep them from bolting for more stable work, had any hopes of earning incomes above the median.54 During the Korean War, Detroit had not reprised its role as the Arsenal of Democracy, pumping out war materiel and providing full employment for all who sought it. Instead, the war years had been anything but stable and prosperous for Detroit autoworkers. By the end of 1952, however, the economic rollercoaster appeared to be on the upswing even as the war remained mired in a stalemate.