The upsurge in auto production that began in late 1952 continued well into the new year, surpassing mid-1950 as the best approximation of a postwar boom. The end of government wartime controls on industrial materials created the free market conditions that auto executives had long coveted, and Detroit automakers experienced acute labor shortages in early 1953. Thousands of migrants from outside Michigan headed to Detroit for auto jobs, but not enough to fill available openings. Despite the labor shortage, intense debates occurred as to whether or not women could or should enter the industrial workforce in great numbers. Employers continued to relent a bit on racist hiring practices, however, and they were willing to provide jobs to middle-age men who were normally considered well beyond productive usefulness. Yet even during the boom there were concerns about the future. Production was so high early in the year that UAW leaders predicted both a significant drop-off and widespread layoffs in the fall. With the end of the Korean War, Detroit workers who had finally settled into military-related jobs wondered what would happen if the government canceled those contracts. An enormous explosion in August at GM’s transmission plant in Livonia, just west of Detroit, led to tens of thousands of layoffs in the area and much additional disruption to workers’ lives. For a month or two, the fallout from that tragedy masked tens of thousands of unrelated layoffs resulting from declining auto production. Business leaders offered the theory that those affected were “marginal” workers—women, African Americans, the old, the partially disabled, and Southern migrants—none of whom should be considered real Detroiters or actual autoworkers, and whose fates should be of no concern. Although UAW officials and business leaders disagreed about what the future would bring, the many thousands of new migrants to Detroit, along with residents who signed on for auto work during the boom, found themselves in precarious circumstances as the auto market slackened, layoffs increased, and housing options in the region continued to be few and expensive, especially for workers with children.
* * *
The auto industry indeed boomed in early 1953. Assembly lines ran full bore, supply lines remained stable, and auto employment climbed to a record post-1945 level. In early January total factory employment in Detroit reached 736,000, the highest since World War II, and over 100,000 more than in nonmanufacturing sectors. Automakers’ optimism soared in mid-February when the federal government ended the metals rationing system. After defense needs took first claim, all remaining metals would be available in a rough-and-tumble free market with no production quotas.1
To take maximum advantage of these rare circumstances, however, automakers needed tens of thousands more unskilled laborers in addition to those already recruited in late 1952. Detroit business leaders continued to worry that the rise of industry across the country, in part because of the decentralization of auto production, drew potential workers away from the Motor City. The dismal housing situation in Detroit also discouraged new migrants. “There is a big turnover among those who come here, get a job and then spend their week-ends trying to find a place big enough so they can send for their families,” explained a Chrysler official. “After a few weeks of this, a worker will quit and go back home.” An even bigger deterrent, automakers maintained, was the persistent instability of their industry, which, according to one report, was “so well recognized that potential workers know that today’s hiring boom can become tomorrow’s layoffs.” Thousands of onetime Detroiters had left the city and were unlikely to return.2 Persistent high turnover rates, especially for entry-level positions, also plagued automakers. According to one manufacturer, after a day or two on the job, most new autoworkers said something along the lines of “Factory work is harder than I thought. I’ve got a few bucks saved up, so nuts to that kind of labor.”3 Turnover rates remained high, and possibly even worsened, when the economy heated up and jobs were plentiful. In March 1953 one auto company representative revealed, “We are afraid to say that we ever have enough workers.” In addition, although first jobs in the auto industry were usually on final assembly or parts production, in the years since World War II those positions were often unavailable, because workers with seniority claimed them during layoffs. This meant that many Detroit youths had little experience with auto work and were unlikely to meet the industry’s needs as production surged.4
The Detroit labor shortage never became acute enough to fully overcome the industry’s aversion to hiring more women, which, according to a Chrysler personnel director, would be an absolute last resort. “Women can do some jobs much better than men,” he conceded. “But married women, for example, are not too satisfactory. They usually are trying to raise a family and their attendance is not regular.” The MESC agreed that women were unreliable workers, largely because they had to stay home whenever their children were sick. Men’s absenteeism rates were just as high, officials admitted, but men generally missed work in a predictable pattern—Mondays to recover from weekend drinking binges, or the day after payday. In contrast, “Junior’s colds,” which kept women from work, followed no particular pattern. Chrysler management also argued that it would be too difficult to provide restroom facilities for women. In addition, since state law prohibited women from lifting more than thirty pounds on the job, management claimed that they were “not flexible enough in the plant.” Auto manufacturers insisted that most jobs they offered were so arduous that only men could do them, although if automation experts were to be believed, many positions were now less physically demanding than the defense jobs that women had handled well during World War II. A larger percentage of married women held jobs outside the home in 1952 than had done so at the peak of employment during the war. The UAW’s Women’s Department strongly encouraged automakers to hire more women, and the MESC asserted that resistance was based mainly on prejudice on the part of hiring personnel and among union members. Walter Reuther also encouraged auto companies to hire women, but this was never a major cause for top-level UAW officials. In any event, automakers mostly resisted any pressure. Rather than target potential women workers, they focused recruitment efforts on young, recently retired, and mildly disabled men.5
No doubt many women did not seek auto work, but a significant number would likely have jumped at the chance. Edith Arnold and Margaret Beaudry, both married, reentered the nonautomotive workforce in 1952 but hoped to be hired at auto plants. In the meantime, Arnold ground coffee at an A&P grocery store and Beaudry returned to a job she had held previously at Neisner’s, a local variety store. Undoubtedly many single women were also interested in exploring auto work, especially given the wage disparity between UAW jobs and the domestic service, secretarial, and clerical positions open to them. A GM experiment in Flint, Michigan, indicated that many women indeed hoped to be autoworkers. After advertising for two hundred women to fill “men’s” positions at its Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants, the company was “swamped” with applicants. Plenty of jobs in auto plants, including those reserved for men, did not require brute strength after all. Women in Flint cleaned car windows, polished auto bodies, installed rubber strips on doors, tested water seals, and also ran punch presses and other heavy machinery without trouble. Most of the new women hires were married, and most were parents. “I have two children,” responded Donna Nivers when asked why she took an automotive job. “We are buying a car and paying for a home. Aren’t those enough reasons for my getting a job?” Chevrolet local union president Anthony O’Brien remained unconvinced. “An emotional problem arises when women leave their housework to work on an assembly line,” he insisted. “They may work very hard in their homes, but it is different work in a plant where they are not their own bosses and have to meet production schedules set up for men.” A Chevrolet official, however, thought the plant might have no choice: “Within the next two months there will be openings for nearly 4,000 new workers. Our employment offices are open six days a week and are not able to get enough men for the jobs. We have to hire women.”6
Similar to the situation in Flint, when the new Lincoln-Mercury plant in Wayne, just west of Detroit, added a second shift, the company announced that it would hire women for positions previously off-limits to them and for more traditionally female jobs, such as working with upholstery trim. Four hundred women applied immediately. Sixty were hired, most of them married and between twenty-two and thirty-five years old. A number of them already had children. It made economic sense for these women to seek auto jobs, which paid close to two dollars an hour, far more than what they could earn in sectors of the economy traditionally reserved for them. But the trend concerned MESC officials, who argued that hiring women was bad for business. Women, the agency insisted, got more upset than men if there were any changes in their jobs and had to be “coddled” and “persuaded” to do new things. Using more measurable scales, MESC officials conceded that women had exceptional records concerning safety and production and generated less scrap on the job. Women had also proven themselves able to handle huge punch presses, lathes, and milling machines, which led some industry analysts to admit that the ability to do most factory jobs might not be related to sex at all. Extremely high turnover rates for men in entry-level auto jobs supported that theory. Some city leaders saw potential benefits in hiring more local women. During the next economic downturn, they argued, a laid-off woman could “go back to her kitchen and the family breadwinner is not lost.” However clueless about the circumstances that propelled women into the paid workforce, this kind of thinking had the potential to help them overcome barriers.7
Edith Arnold left her job at an A&P supermarket for a position at Pontiac Motor during the early 1953 boom. She liked her job grinding coffee, but even though her husband, Don, was an electrician in an auto plant, she recalled that they “weren’t getting ahead. We were just breaking even, payday to payday. Like everybody else. I guess I wanted more.” Edith insisted to Don that it would be a good idea for her to hire in at an auto plant. “Paid better money,” she pointed out. But he was opposed. Indeed, he had disapproved of her decision to work outside the home at A&P. She eventually persuaded him about the merits of auto work, in part with the promise of more expensive cigars and “good whiskey instead of belly-rot.” He consented, and she reminded him of those advantages whenever he had second thoughts. Edith’s job became essential when Don was laid off for a year, but she had barely made it through her first morning. “The day I hired in,” she recalled, “it was so noisy in there, I thought, boy, one hour of this, I’m going home.” A coworker yelled at her, “and I couldn’t hear what he was saying.” She was miserable, she remembered. “But three hours later I was getting better at it. I thought, I guess I’ll stay until noon.” The hollering man, it turns out, “was breaking me in on the job, telling me what to do, how to do it. So about noontime, I thought, well, it ain’t so bad. I guess I’ll go to work the next day. And the next day I thought, well, I guess I’ll do another day. By the third day, I’m all broke in.” That first job was operating a drill press for rocket heads, part of a military project. “I liked the job,” Edith remarked. “These things were heavy, but I learned how to do it and not hurt my body doing it.” As she described her work, a rocket head would arrive on a conveyor line “and we’d grab the handle, pull it out, and just flipped it over, one at a time onto the drill press.” They’d fasten it in place “and push a button. The machine comes down, and drills three little holes on the side of it, and then automatically turns off.” The tricky part for Edith was grinding the metal burrs off the edges of the holes. “I’d take off more than needed to come off. I couldn’t stop it quick enough. I was not good at that. But there would be two people that would change off, back and forth, do this and then do the other. And they’d just leave me on the drill press.”8
Margaret Beaudry also had to overcome resistance from her husband to take a job in an auto plant during the 1953 boom. “He didn’t really want me to work,” she recalled, even at Neisner’s, where she already had a job, “but he knew that the money helped. He just didn’t want me to work.” She told some white lies to ease his anxiety, suggesting that she wouldn’t stay on the job for long. “I said, ‘I’ll just use all my money and we’ll get a brand-new car, and then I’ll quit.’ Oh, that sounded good to him. That was a way of getting him to let me go.” She secretly applied at Pontiac Motor in January 1953 but did not hear back for several months, even though a female friend of hers was hired on the spot. Beaudry grew tired of waiting and convinced another friend to accompany her to the hiring office. “We were in line at 4:00 in the morning,” she remembered. “And she never got called, but I did. I got called this time. So I got hired in on May 11th of 1953. Oh, I was happy.” Her husband, Marvin, felt otherwise. It helped that Margaret and Marvin were usually on different shifts. That way there was always a parent around to care for their daughter. As backup, Margaret’s brother and her sister-in-law, who stayed home full-time, lived in an apartment just below theirs, and both were willing to babysit if necessary. Margaret was impressed that Marvin looked after their daughter in the evenings, when she was at work, and assumed other parental duties. “I mean, he curled my daughter’s hair,” she remarked. “She must’ve been a good kid, because she just sat there and it took him an hour to do her hair when I was gone to work. Of course my husband was a perfectionist, so it was done right!” Margaret’s first job was on the final assembly body line. “Oh, god, what a job!” she recalled. But she was thankful for her union committeemen. “I used them, too! They were there whenever I needed them, because they didn’t treat us nice!” She hated, for example, being scrutinized during bathroom breaks, and she fought with her supervisors. Without union interventions, she conceded, “I would’ve never lasted. Because I couldn’t stand that when nobody respected me.” Some male coworkers caused trouble as well. “You could always tell how a man treated you if his wife worked,” Margaret said. “If his wife worked, he treated you nice. But if his wife didn’t work, he didn’t treat you nice. We could spot that.” A woman being harassed, the logic went, could be your own wife in a different department. Arnold and Beaudry were part of a wave that pushed employment of women in Detroit to a record postwar high of 372,000.9
While many in Detroit took advantage of the 1953 boom, Elwin Brown and Ernie Liles missed it because they had not yet completed their military obligations. Brown had entered the service the previous July, and Liles was drafted in February, so both were away on duty during this steady stretch of employment. Don Hester found hiring conditions so favorable in early 1953 that when he received a three-day suspension for participating in a wildcat strike, he quit. “Turned in whatever tools I had,” he recalled. “I punched out, and I went downstairs, went outside, went right up to the employment office. ‘You’re hiring?’ ‘Yes, sir, yeah, sure we’re hiring.’ ‘Yeah, I’d like to get me a job.’ ‘OK.’ Signed right back in. Next morning I go back to work, same place, ten cents an hour less.” At the time, he did not care that he had lost some wages or his seniority. He quickly made up the dime an hour, and he had seniority again after ninety days. James Franklin benefited from the hiring boom in 1953 after he lost his job at Kaiser-Frazer when the upstart automaker floundered. After seven years away, Franklin returned to the Rouge foundry, vulnerable for having lost so much seniority but happy to be employed.10
Although many African Americans continued to disagree, the MESC declared that racial discrimination at industrial hiring offices had essentially disappeared. It is likely that during this window of opportunity more blacks than usual were hired and that some—although not James Franklin—were offered jobs previously not open to them. For example, Ford promoted a black worker, Steve Ayler, from garage work to truck driver. Ayler was the first to break the color barrier for that position, but it took courage. White truck drivers threatened to strike if Ayler remained in his new job, while black workers in the garage warned that they would walk out if he was removed. African American women also finally broke through racial and gender barriers in the Rouge plant’s pressed steel department, in plastics, and in the axle and motor plant.11 There were indeed new opportunities, then, when labor was in short supply, but market forces hardly eliminated prejudice.
The labor shortage benefited middle-age Detroiters who were too young to retire but who had been largely shut out of factory employment. The MESC reported that the unofficial ban on hiring anyone over forty had “gone by the board.” Nevertheless, Detroit factories still needed more workers. A campaign to lure recently retired autoworkers back to their plants helped a bit. Some retirees resumed auto work because they could barely survive on their pensions, especially with the rising cost of living, but also because of high medical bills and, for some, boredom.12
Contributing to the labor shortage, migration to Detroit was not as heavy as anticipated. Southern recruiting grounds, the MESC said, were producing a “mere trickle” of migrants to the Motor City, and some areas were experiencing labor shortages of their own, prompting Tennessee, in the midst of a nuclear power plant boom, to ban efforts by employers to lure its residents to another state. Automakers, of course, had helped create the labor shortage in Detroit by building new parts and assembly plants in other parts of the country in order to be closer to emerging markets.13 The 1953 boom, which despite labor shortages resulted in second and third shifts in many Detroit plants, tended to mask the industry’s exodus from the Motor City. When asked, automakers insisted that decentralization would have no negative impact on either Michigan or Detroit. “The heart and the brain, and the bulk of the brawn, of the industry are here and will remain,” a local automotive official insisted. Plenty of evidence supported that view in the first quarter of 1953. Auto production was 54 percent ahead of the comparable period in 1952, and Detroit factories were humming.14
Concerned Detroit leaders, however, looked at their city and saw outmoded industrial facilities, often three or four stories tall, which would need to be single-floor factories with huge parking lots to meet future manufacturing needs. Only about a third of Detroit’s available industrial space (1,000,000 square feet out of 3,000,000) had any potential use, and all but 10 percent of it was already on the market, with no takers. Chevrolet’s decision to build a new plant in Livonia, a new suburb just west of Detroit, illustrated the problem. This facility, designed to build springs and bumpers for GM’s best-selling models, was slated for a 130-acre site, far larger than anything available in the city, with much of it dedicated to an employee parking lot big enough to hold two thousand cars. The construction of better roads and more housing in the suburbs, Detroit officials feared, would hasten the decline of the city’s industrial base. Many suburbanites, however, welcomed new plants. When Ford announced that it intended to transfer its main Lincoln-Mercury assembly operations from Detroit to a new plant in Wayne, enthusiastic townspeople harvested corn from the 50-acre site before construction began.15
More immediately, the health of the auto industry in Detroit was threatened by the possibility of an end to the Korean War, less than a year after defense and civilian production had become reasonably synchronized. By 1953 about 20 percent of autoworkers were not building civilian vehicles. Instead, they depended on defense contracts for their jobs, and it was not clear that the civilian economy could absorb them if their positions disappeared. In April the U.S. Department of Defense canceled Ford’s contract to produce jet engines for the navy. Packard had seen its jet engine orders reduced by a third, and Chrysler lost its jet engine work before manufacturing began. In June the air force withdrew over $200 million worth of contracts with Kaiser-Frazer, jeopardizing close to ten thousand jobs in the company’s Willow Run facility. When the government announced that defense spending in Detroit would be reduced by 75 percent, fears of job losses intensified, as did a sense of betrayal, because the secretary of defense in the new Eisenhower administration was the former General Motors president, Charles E. Wilson, who seemed to be turning his back on the city.16
UAW officials voiced concern that the auto industry might be heading toward a recession no matter what happened with defense contracts. Production through the first four months of the year had been at such a frenetic pace, Walter Reuther argued, that it could not possibly be sustained. Ordinarily automakers hoped to assemble 55 percent of their annual production in the first half of the year, but in 1953 they aimed for 60 percent, a plan that Reuther called “economically unsound and morally wrong,” guaranteeing mass layoffs in the fall. In response, executives from GM and Chrysler insisted that high production was necessary to meet the backlog of demand for new cars. “As you know, the customer controls our volume of production,” GM president Harlow Curtice lectured the UAW president.17 Ultimately, the production bonanza’s biggest obstacle was indeed demand, in this case the inability or unwillingness of consumers to buy new cars. By late August the number of unsold vehicles on dealers’ lots reached 600,000, a post–World War II high, as opposed to 175,000 a year earlier. Consistent with that trend, automakers began to scale back their steel orders, which was generally a prelude to lay-offs. Nevertheless, the Michigan Association of Manufacturers insisted that there was nothing to worry about, that the biggest threat to the economy was “depression talk.”18
Despite troubling signs, the months-long boom helped the UAW succeed in reopening five-year contracts with the Big Three and extracting economic gains. Nineteen of the twenty-four cents an hour that autoworkers had received in cost-of-living increases since the program’s inception were rolled into their base pay, which meant that no matter how low the consumer price index might fall in the future—and postwar deflation was a possibility—those nineteen cents could not disappear. The annual improvement factor, compensating workers for productivity gains, was increased from an automatic four cents an hour to five. The contract reopening also addressed skilled workers’ concerns about wage compression by granting them an additional ten cents an hour, and it boosted pensions for retirees.19 Yet it remained uncertain whether or not auto industry employment would be stable enough to take advantage of these gains.
No one expected the next calamity to befall Detroit’s auto industry. On August 12, while welders conducted routine repairs on the conveyor line at GM’s transmission plant in Livonia, a spark hit a line of spilled oil, igniting a fire that tracked like a fuse until it hit a vat of cleaning chemicals, which exploded. Within minutes the entire factory, 1.5 million square feet, was in flames, with steel beams and brick walls twisting and melting as they collapsed. To Dorothy Pekala, “It looked like a tornado. There was black smoke all over the place.” A nearby businessman said it “looked like an atom bomb—a great mushroom of smoke.” Residents of Warren Township, twenty miles away, could see the plume. Amazingly, only four workers were killed. Two more were seriously injured, and nine were hospitalized for smoke inhalation and burns. Firefighters from every nearby community sped to the plant. Once there, they hesitated to enter because of underground oil storage tanks, and they were limited in what they could do from the outside, because water pressure in the new suburb was low. Housing and industry had outpaced infrastructure.20
GM tried to remain positive, but the explosion exposed the lack of safety precautions in auto plants, and the loss of Hydra-Matic transmissions imperiled the company’s assembly of midsize and luxury cars while disrupting employment for tens of thousands across metro Detroit. The year’s record-setting pace meant that few automatic transmissions were in stock at assembly plants. As a result, all eleven thousand Cadillac workers in Detroit faced layoffs, as did many of the seventeen thousand employees at Pontiac Motor, which installed Hydra-Matics in over 85 percent of its vehicles. A number of independent automakers, including Hudson, Kaiser-Frazer, and Nash, also relied on Hydra-Matics. GM scrambled to restore its productive capacity. It had just transferred the last of its Hydra-Matic operations from its old Riopelle plant in Detroit to Livonia. It now hoped to send that work back to the city, but not enough equipment had survived the explosion. Ford offered assistance to its rival, making available its former Lincoln-Mercury plant now that it had shifted operations to its new factory in Wayne. Packard indicated that it might be able to modify its Ultra-Matic transmissions to make them functional in GM vehicles. By adapting Buick’s Dynaflow transmission for Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles and Chevrolet’s Powerglide for Pontiacs, GM could soften the blow, but there was no way to ramp up production quickly enough to meet all of the company’s needs. GM eventually leased a huge part of Kaiser-Frazer’s Willow Run plant, which had formerly produced military aircraft, in hope of resuming production as quickly as possible.21
In the meantime, former transmission factory workers lined up by the thousands for unemployment benefits. In all, GM laid off 25,800 workers after the explosion, but the company tried to help by keeping 35,000 on the job to conduct unscheduled, and most likely unnecessary, inventories in various plants. Walter Reuther challenged governments at all levels to treat the incident like a natural disaster. Republican senator Homer Ferguson convinced the Federal Housing Administration to relax foreclosure requirements for anyone out of work as a result of the Livonia inferno. Within a month of the disaster about 800 of the 10,000 transmission plant employees had found jobs with other companies. About half of the factory-less workers remained on unemployment benefits and wondered if their jobs would reappear. A couple of thousand of those displaced were new hires who had not yet completed their probationary periods. According to Local 735 president Michael Loverich, they would have to “wait their turn,” as priority for recalls would go to the 5,500 workers with seniority. A number of jobless workers left the state. Others exhausted their savings and found whatever work they could—for example, in a nearby tool plant, brickyard, or box factory. Many expected the Livonia plant to be rebuilt, but obviously that could not happen quickly. If their jobs moved temporarily to Willow Run, they would face commutes of fifteen to twenty miles, significant by 1953 standards, which undermined decisions to rent or buy homes in Livonia. Few were willing to contemplate what they would do if for some reason the transmission jobs never returned.22
James McGuire hired in at the Livonia transmission plant days before the explosion. Before then he had pieced together a living. After the 1952 steel strike he had found work at both a Fisher Body plant and the Ford Highland Park facility, violating the UAW contract by simultaneously holding two union jobs. At Highland Park, McGuire worked on half-inch-thick steel bomb casings, making sure they were balanced. At Fisher Body he helped install headliners, the fabric on the car’s ceiling, in what would become Chevrolets and Cadillacs. He did not dare give up either job, because no one knew when or where layoffs might occur next. Indeed, before long he was laid off from his Fisher Body position, but he managed to land a new second job at Dodge Main during the early 1953 boom. At Dodge he used refrigeration skills he had acquired through earlier training to install air-conditioning equipment in new models. McGuire remembered exactly how many air-conditioning units his crew installed, 356, because he kept count until he received a layoff notice that summer. He was able to stay just long enough to train his replacements, who had higher seniority but no experience with air conditioning. Feeling vulnerable with only one auto job, McGuire hired in at the Livonia transmission facility. Then came the explosion. Back to one full-time job, he decided to follow transmission work to the new GM Willow Run operation, and to make things geographically manageable, he transferred from Ford’s Highland Park plant to its Ypsilanti factory, keeping two full-time positions, undetected, for the better part of four years.23
When GM announced in November that it did not intend to rebuild the Livonia plant, workers had difficult decisions to make. Some with significant seniority took jobs at GM’s alternative transmission facility at Willow Run, despite the distance. In their view they would be risking too much by starting over somewhere else. “We moved here last Thanksgiving from Detroit so my husband wouldn’t have to drive so far,” explained Mrs. Andrew Johnson. “But several of the employes have a share-the-ride plan working so it makes it easier. We expected that the plant was going to be rebuilt. This certainly is a blow, but there is nothing we can do about it. My husband is 54 and he can’t just quit like younger fellows can.” Many others, however, left GM, hoping to find work closer to their Livonia homes.24 When GM formally purchased the Willow Run facility, ending any hopes of a rebuilt plant in Livonia, emotions were still raw. “GM has shown disregard for thousands of workers living in Detroit,” charged UAW Region 1 codirector Mike Lacey. “Daily transportation to Willow Run costs our workers from $1 to $2. That’s a good chunk out of their hourly wages.” The UAW’s GM director, John Livingston, complained that the Willow Run purchase would hurt “hundreds of workers who are faced with heavy mortgages on homes they bought near the Livonia plant based on GM assurances of ‘permanency.’”25 Perhaps the angriest workers in the region were laid-off Kaiser Motors employees (Joseph Frazer left the company in 1953), who had been displaced earlier because of the loss of military work. They had bitterly protested that government decision, and now they opposed GM’s takeover of their former plant, which effectively made their layoffs permanent. Local 142 officials sent a telegram to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson: “Do you have a few little old defense contracts lying around that you could give to the thousands of laid-off Kaiser Motors unemployed workers, now that you are taking care of your bosom buddies, General Motors, with all of the Government facilities at your command?” At a minimum, laid-off Kaiser employees wanted priority for temporary jobs moving aircraft machinery out of their former plant, and they blocked the process until they won that demand.26
Former Kaiser employees had few alternatives, because the boom was fading. The Livonia explosion had occurred in the midst of, and had obscured, a general reduction in auto production. Although total unemployment remained low compared with the worst stretches since World War II, it was trending in the wrong direction, and hiring in Detroit plants had virtually stopped.27 A month after the Livonia blast, Plymouth and Briggs, which had no connection to the GM transmission plant, announced the “indefinite layoff” of twenty-two thousand employees, supposedly because of a shortage of interior upholstery. UAW leaders considered the excuse a ruse to deflect attention from declining production. The plants had pushed employees to reach record output early in the year, charged Norman Matthews, director of the union’s Chrysler department, and since then “tens of thousands of workers have been working only three or four days a week, some of them less than 16 hours.” Chrysler did not deny the accusation but pointed to market forces during the first half of 1953. “We cannot afford for ourselves or for our employes to fail to do all we can to supply a market when it exists,” explained a company vice president. “And we obviously cannot afford to let competition supply that market instead.”28
Despite warning signs, industry leaders and boosters declared that all was fine. “People will have automobiles,” declared GM’s Harlow Curtice, who saw no possibility of dwindling demand for new cars. Benjamin Fairless, chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, insisted to the Economic Club of Detroit that he could not see a recession, “even with a telescope.” The only economic danger, he insisted, was pessimism that could “predict” the economy into a tailspin. Ford vice president Ray Sullivan reinforced that message. “It’s no secret that a good many businessmen find factors which disturb them in the current economic outlook,” he told an audience in Cleveland. “But this is no time to lose confidence or courage.” There was a simple explanation, he said: “We’ve left behind the somewhat hectic and unhealthy flush of the postwar market, and are moving into more normal, competitive conditions. This actually should be good news to all of us who believe in the private enterprise system.”29 In October, Detroit News business writer Ralph Watts declared triumphantly that Walter Reuther’s predictions of mass unemployment in the auto industry had “failed to come true.” Indeed, he emphasized, the five millionth passenger car of the year had just been built. A few weeks later, however, Watts reported that automakers planned a 25 percent reduction in output.30
Despite business leaders’ assurances, the auto industry appeared to be heading toward another crisis. Unsold inventories of new cars continued to rise. When unemployment in Detroit approached eighty thousand, Max Horton of the MESC put a favorable spin on the development by noting that this was still below the post–World War II average. One industry analyst observed approvingly that “for the first time in the postwar period these car makers are letting up on production of their own accord” rather than because of materials or parts shortages. But no matter how the situation was portrayed, tens of thousands of Detroit autoworkers were once again laid off, and there were no recalls in sight. The Detroit Board of Commerce’s John Stewart acknowledged that production was scheduled to be reduced in 1954, down to 6.5 million vehicles from 1953’s 7.5 million, but he insisted that conditions would “not in any way resemble a recession.” He was not concerned, he said, because those most likely to be laid off were “housewives” and other “marginal workers,” not part of the “normal” labor force.31
The “normal” labor force, however, had increased by tens of thousands—some estimated the total to be in the hundreds of thousands—from late 1952 through mid-1953 in response to the high demand for autoworkers in Detroit. New migrants strained the already inadequate housing supply, and when layoffs mounted in mid- to late 1953, homelessness and desperation increased as well. In the summer of 1953 anywhere from ten thousand to eighteen thousand Detroit families were evicted from their apartments. The lowest rents in the city were about sixty dollars a month for a single room without a kitchen or a bathroom, and often without a window. Unexpected layoffs, more mouths to feed, and medical emergencies were common reasons for missing payments. Constantly rising rents contributed to evictions, as many landlords thought they could get more money from someone else. In addition, the beginning phases of highway construction through the city and the Gratiot Redevelopment Project leveled vast tracts that included many rental units, disproportionately affecting African Americans.32 Public housing was scarce and of limited help to those who still had jobs but had difficulty finding affordable apartments. Robert Lee Jones, a well-paid worker at Briggs ($2.05 an hour), was evicted with his wife and children, ages five and two, from the Brewster-Douglass public housing projects because he earned too much money. The only affordable apartment he could find, at fifty dollars a month, was a side building, probably once a barn, that had one sink, in the kitchen, and a toilet but no bathtub. “I’ve only been in here a couple of days,” Jones remarked. “They said they’d put in a tub pretty soon, and maybe a washbowl in the toilet room. I found this place through friends and some of my wife’s relatives. It isn’t as good as the project, but it was the best we could do. There’s no ice box yet. I have to get one mighty quick for the children’s milk.” Ford worker Cotty Mott lived with his wife and five children in the second floor of a condemned house that had a leaky roof and a single gas burner for heat. They had been there for six years because the space was affordable, only fifteen dollars a month paid to the city, and they could find nowhere better on their budget. But they were evicted as part of the slum clearance program in the Gratiot area. “All who qualify can be cared for in permanent public housing,” insisted Detroit Housing Commission official Mark Herley. “I guess maybe they’re trying,” responded Mrs. Mott. “With our five children, no one wants us very much. One thing for sure. We’ll have to get out by cold weather. The windows all are broken out. We have only that one little gas heater, and that won’t keep the children warm.”33
Robert and Margaret Veitch and their two girls (fourteen and five), recent arrivals from Alabama, also had difficulty finding a place to live. It had proved much easier for Robert to land a factory job. “This is the best we could find,” Margaret said, opening the door to their ten-by-ten-foot apartment above Jefferson Coney Island Lunch and Lincoln Credit Jewelry. “We eat, sleep, cook and live, if you can call it that, in this one room.” The apartment came without running water, or a bathtub, or a toilet. It included a window view of another building six feet away. “We pay $15 a week for this,” Mrs. Veitch said. “Of course, that’s furnished,” she mentioned, pointing out a chair, a dresser, a bed, and a stool. A hot plate served as a kitchen, a bucket as a sink, to be filled from the bathroom down the hall that they shared with three other families. “I hope this isn’t going to be for long. But it doesn’t look too good. I’ve been hunting for another place ever since we got here. There just isn’t a thing. My husband brings home better than $75 a week, but we can’t find anything we can afford.”34
For working-class Detroiters, having children in the midst of the baby boom continued to make it very difficult to find housing. “Can’t something be done about landlords who refuse to rent to people with children? Also about those who ask exorbitant rent that it is impossible to pay? How can anyone save to buy a home and raise a family when landlords raise the rent as often as they please?” asked one angry resident. “We’ve applied 15 different times at vacancies, but when they see our two babies they say ‘no.’”35 “My daughter, who has one child and is expecting another shortly, is looking for a place,” explained another frustrated Detroiter. “Will she have to do something desperate before some ‘kind’ landlord will take pity on her? Every ad she answers is the same—no children.”36
One way to avoid no-children policies, of course, was to own one’s home, but precarious economic circumstances made that increasingly difficult. Most autoworkers, especially new hires, could not save enough money for the down payment necessary to obtain a traditional mortgage. If they wanted to be homeowners, they often had to buy houses on land contracts, which required lower down payments and higher monthly installments for much shorter periods of time than did conventional loans. The seller retained ownership of the property until the buyer paid off the contract, with the final installment often being a large “balloon” payment. Meeting those obligations seemed possible when workers had steady paychecks, especially when plants ran overtime. And when government rent controls were in effect, landlords often converted leases into land contracts so they could receive higher monthly payments. When layoffs mounted in late 1953, however, many home-buying autoworkers found themselves falling behind and the Detroit Circuit Court saw significant increases in foreclosures. “Until recently we rarely got more than two or three land contract foreclosures a day,” reported Court Commissioner A. Tom Pasieczny, “but now it’s not unusual for me to get as many as 35 in a single day.” Pasieczny observed that those facing foreclosure were disproportionately black Detroiters. “Nobody would rent to them with children,” he explained. “The husband got out of work and no money came in sufficiently to pay food bills, clothing costs and big monthly notes.” Sellers were not required to foreclose on delinquent buyers, but much depended on how pressing the seller’s financial needs were and on how easily a paying tenant or different purchaser could be found.37
Even fully-employed skilled workers could experience housing difficulties. The Looten family—with six children ages one to thirteen—was evicted in August 1953, despite having a tool-and-die maker as its breadwinner. “The landlord wanted his place, and there wasn’t much we could do,” Mrs. Looten said. “We put our furniture in storage and tried to get a furnished place after we couldn’t get anything else by the time we had to get out.” They found a short-term solution at the city’s temporary housing shelter. “Last Sunday, we went all through the ads. The best we found was one with eight rooms that sounded about right. But the rent was $125 a month,” she said. “We can afford up to $85, but that’s our limit. Meanwhile, we’re here. I suppose we should be grateful but the place is horrible. I try to spend as much time across the street in the park with the children as I can.”38
Circuit Court commissioners handled an increasing docket of eviction cases. In one example, a couple and their four children were kicked out of a one-room apartment, with a bathroom shared by five other families, for which they had paid twenty-one dollars a week in rent. Their landlord had found new tenants, a family with six children, who agreed to pay twenty-five dollars a week. Judge William Krueger determined that this was fully legal. “With rent controls killed,” he said, “there is no protection for the tenant. Rents can be and are as high as the traffic will bear. Even if the rent is paid, a landlord can evict any tenant any time.” An evictee outside Krueger’s court-room described his circumstances: “Sure I got a job. And I got a wife and five kids, too. I make good dough, but making that rent ain’t easy. I get sick. I lose a couple of days. Maybe the shop is down a couple more days. I’m late on my rent. Do they wait? Not much. If I can’t pay on the button, they’ll get somebody who can.” He had paid his rent on time for two years, he said, was late the next month, and was told he had “seven days to get out.”39 Several tenants, including laid-off Chrysler worker Albert Butler, won reprieves after they testified that their landlord had not provided heat for the past year. Their dilapidated building had been cited more than thirty times for inadequate plumbing, faulty wiring, and lack of fire escapes. Originally designed as a duplex, the house had been subdivided into thirty-three units, most of them single rooms, with several families sharing each toilet. Although the tenants won, their building was slated to be razed.40
City shelters again overflowed with hardship cases. The Stone family of eight (with a ninth on the way) had lived in the city’s Scotten Shelter since early 1951. Mr. Stone, a press operator, was laid off from Ford in 1948. “He’s 53 now and he’s hard of hearing,” Mrs. Stone said. “It isn’t easy for him to get a job. And most of the jobs they offer pay only $70 a week. That isn’t anything these days.” Mr. Stone hired in with Packard in October 1952, but after four months, his wife noted, “he got laid off and it was the welfare again. No, we never tried to get into the city projects. There just isn’t any use trying to find a place. If you make a week’s pay, they all jump you for what you owe. What’s the use of trying?” Mr. Stone searched for odd jobs every day. “Once in a while he gets a job washing dishes in one of the restaurants along Fort,” Mrs. Stone said. “Then they let him bring some food home. None of the kids has had breakfast yet,” Mrs. Stone admitted, at 11:00 a.m. “School? Yeah, the twins, they’re the oldest, they’ll go to school for the first time this fall. But they’re not going ’less they have clothes. And they sure ain’t got ’em now.” Mr. Stone’s hearing impairment, which was common for press operators, had not been a liability during the hiring surge in late 1952. In the tight labor market of late 1953, though, a disability made it very difficult to find work. When personnel departments could be picky, job seekers with a physical problem rarely passed medical examinations, even if the disability had no bearing on the job in question. In tough times a missing eye, a nonfunctional ear, or a lost limb generally eliminated chances of industrial employment, despite a study of Michigan factories showing that workers with physical disabilities, compared with the able-bodied, were higher performing, more efficient, had lower absenteeism rates, and were generally more loyal to their employers. The study concluded that “the physically handicapped person is a second-class citizen at the employment gates.” This was an especially critical issue given the number of disabled veterans, from both World War II and the Korean War, and the frequency of serious accidents in industrial plants. Many of the lighter jobs that would have been well-suited for someone with a physical impairment were reserved for high-seniority employees nearing retirement.41
As an increasing number of autoworkers faced hardships, experts continued to disagree about the future of the industry.42 Of course Walter Reuther had been warning for months that a recession, possibly a depression, would result from what he saw as the irrational burst of early-year production. Citing high dealer inventories, Senator Paul Douglas (D-Illinois) predicted in November that an industrial recession would soon reach Detroit “in full force.”43 Chrysler president L. L. Colbert, however, saw things differently. “The whole economy is at the beginning of a great era of growth, not at the end,” he insisted. Millions of prewar cars were being scrapped, he noted, and new car buyers reentered the market every three to four years.44 Henry Ford II predicted that 1954 would be the greatest year ever for the industry, and President Eisenhower promised that there would be no “boom-and-bust America” during his administration.45 Free Press financial reporter Kenneth Thompson agreed, citing rosy predictions by leading economists and dismissing people like Reuther and Douglas as “gloomsters.”46 The gloomsters pointed to contradictory evidence. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported in December that unemployment in Detroit had recently increased by fifty-five thousand. Even the Detroit Board of Commerce predicted that forty-five thousand more Detroiters would soon lose their factory jobs. But the board discounted its data by reinforcing the developing view that those affected would be “marginal” workers, not primary breadwinners, but rather “youths, oldsters and housewives who took jobs during the abnormal employment bulge last spring and summer.” Another affected group, it noted, would be recent migrants, mostly from the South. “A large part of this group is continually on the move,” the board reported. “When jobs grow scarce, they go elsewhere or return to their home communities.” Economic prospects for skilled workers, those on salaries, and professionals looked solid. The demand for skilled office help—stenographers, typists, office machine operators—also remained strong, as did forecasts for those in retail sales. In this optimistic projection, then, everybody could expect to do well except for unskilled and semiskilled autoworkers, the bulk of the industrial workforce in the Motor City, few of whom considered themselves to be “marginal.”47
Times were indeed getting more difficult for working-class Detroiters. When Chrysler laid off another ninety-two hundred workers just before Christmas, it was actually a relief for many of the newly jobless. As the UAW’s Norman Matthews remarked, Chrysler workers’ savings “have been reduced to nothing by virtually continuous short work weeks since July of this year.” For those who had been scheduled for fewer than fifteen hours a week, unemployment benefits, while they lasted, were likely to be more lucrative than their jobs. Business leaders preferred to emphasize the Detroit Board of Commerce’s aggregate data, which showed that in 1953 the “average” Detroit factory worker earned eighty-nine dollars a week and kept well ahead of cost-of-living increases. Although the figures claimed to account for overtime pay and shift premiums, they remained uninfluenced by layoffs, short weeks, illness, injury, rising rents, or many of the other factors that affected “average” earnings and expenses for autoworkers. Walter Reuther offered examples of two Detroit plants, one in which workers had been on the job only ten days in a month and another that had operated only six days. Everyone on the payroll at these two factories was considered “employed.” If one multiplied their hourly wages by forty hours a week, one would come up with statistics like those provided by the Board of Commerce, but for the workers in question those numbers bore little resemblance to their lived experience.48