While the nation experienced a recession in 1954, Detroit’s automakers responded to the difficult economic conditions in starkly different ways. Ford and GM ignored all warning signs and ramped up production, while Chrysler, Hudson, and Packard cut back auto assemblies and laid off large numbers of workers. Tens of thousands of these unemployed autoworkers resorted to their secondary support networks, yet many industry officials and civic leaders denied there was a recession, accused negative thinkers of causing any problems, and tried to convince all who would listen that volatility in the auto industry was normal and should not be of great concern. Seeking scapegoats for high unemployment, many Detroiters blamed Southern white migrants and working women for the industry’s difficulties. Concerns about the effects of automation also intensified as overall auto assembly totals remained high, mainly because of continued high production at Chevrolet and Ford, without significantly reducing the large number of unemployed workers. Some UAW members in the skilled trades, however, benefited from automation, because they helped design and implement the new machinery. Still, predictions that there would be a booming need for skilled workers seemed overly optimistic and ignored the racial and gender barriers to the trades. Jobs in the skilled trades were no solution for the vast majority of autoworkers, who continued to struggle and often resorted to desperate measures to survive. Although booming production continued from two of the Big Three, automakers could not figure out how to sell the cars they produced. One thing auto companies would not consider was increasing the wages of autoworkers to allow them to become new car purchasers. The demise of the independent automakers, particularly Hudson and Packard, further worsened the unemployment situation in Detroit. In addition, efforts by the Big Three to produce more of their own parts contributed to the demise of major suppliers, which resulted in thousands more layoffs. After a near total shutdown of the auto industry in the fall of 1954, production again began to increase rapidly, this time even at Chrysler. But with continued high levels of unemployment during this upturn, business and civic leaders discouraged anyone from moving to Detroit for auto jobs. Although autoworkers who were called back appreciated employment, many remained concerned about how long the upswing would last.
* * *
Conditions in early 1954 made the “gloomsters” seem prescient. In January there were at least one hundred thousand unemployed Detroiters, 7.4 percent of the area’s workforce, but most likely double that number for industrial laborers. Some twenty thousand workers at the Dodge Main plant were laid off, and thousands more Chrysler employees continued to experience short weeks, in part because of the unattractive styling of the company’s 1954 models. Many of the jobless had exhausted their twenty weeks of unemployment benefits, and most of the others were near that limit. Local union officials at Chrysler plants pleaded with finance companies to hold off on repossessing their members’ cars and appliances. Hudson sent home forty-five hundred of its twelve thousand Detroit workers, and grave concerns were expressed about the company’s viability. The same was true for Packard, which laid off seventy-eight hundred. Several thousand former Kaiser workers were still without jobs, and defense contracts continued to disappear from the Detroit area.1
Yet optimists did not concede defeat, because in early 1954 both Ford and GM were operating at nearly full throttle, trying to gain an early edge in the annual production contest between the leading brands. Certainly autoworkers at those companies appreciated their steady work, which was indeed evidence against a recession. Still, sales of new cars were sluggish. Ford dealers complained that they had to purchase far more cars than they wanted or risk being “de-franchised.” The company, however, insisted that dealers had to be more aggressive in pursuing purchasers. With color televisions entering the market at a thousand dollars apiece, a Ford official warned, “There’s competition for the pocketbook.”2
Hardly prospective new car purchasers, laid-off autoworkers had to figure out how to survive. “I have not worked more than three days a week for the last three months,” said George Hughard, who had eleven years of seniority at Hudson. Billie Alvis was part of the hiring surge in early 1953, arriving from West Virginia with his wife and young son. He had worked as a press operator at an auto parts plant but had been laid off since mid-December. “There’s no sense in returning to West Virginia,” he remarked. “The job situation is the same there.” Eduardo Vazquez had worked on the assembly line at Hudson. “It doesn’t look good,” he said, “but I have been laid off before. I think I can find something.” Henry Caldwell, also laid off from the Hudson assembly line, was as upbeat as possible: “I’ve got three children, but I have been able to meet the bills so far. But, I can’t miss too many paychecks. Unemployment compensation isn’t enough.”3 Many jobless autoworkers shifted quickly to their secondary support systems. Whenever he was laid off, Don Hester did construction work for an insurance repair company, getting paid in cash so he could continue to receive unemployment compensation. Thomas Nowak latched onto a construction crew putting finishing touches on the new Ford plant in Wayne. Margaret Beaudry still took shifts at Neisner’s. Unlike Billie Alvis, Emerald Neal left for West Virginia, as he always did when laid off, this time finding work in a machine shop until the owner abruptly closed it in response to a union organizing campaign. Gene Johnson, as usual, went back to driving a taxi. The split with the cab company, he remembered, was “fifty-fifty,” and a good day meant making fifteen dollars on a twelve-hour shift. Elwin Brown was discharged from the military during the 1954 unemployment crisis and looked for work in his wife’s hometown, Evansville, Indiana. Finding nothing, he contemplated taking a position with Halliburton, in the oil business, but decided against it because of his wife’s concern about the likelihood of constant relocations.
L. J. Scott left the military in 1954 and returned to layoffs at Pontiac Motor, but that was not his primary concern. While in the service, Scott, an African American from Alabama, had become friends with a white lieutenant from nearby Plymouth, Michigan, but things turned sour when Scott, a cook, refused to allow the lieutenant special dining privileges. The lieutenant retaliated, Scott said, with arbitrary chores and punishments, and for several weeks after being discharged Scott was obsessed with seeking revenge. “I was completely messed up,” Scott remembered, to the point where he purchased a gun and checked out locations where the lieutenant liked to go. “That’s craziness,” he recalled. “I could have been in all kinds of trouble.” Eventually he cooled down, but there was still the problem of making a living. He considered opening a television repair business, but he would have to pass trigonometry and chemistry tests to get licensed and he had not finished high school, so he had to tough it out, waiting for opportunities at Pontiac Motor and picking up odd jobs. Laid off at the Rouge plant, James Franklin managed to find a job at a Chevrolet factory in Flint, fifty miles north, and he lived there with his brother during the week. Franklin eventually quit his Flint job because of poor working conditions, especially for black men, lack of support from his local union, and the stress of being away so much. He and his wife held firm religious beliefs that the man was head of the household, yet his job in Flint kept him from home.4
Business leaders and boosters scoffed at news that workers were suffering. Henry Ford II insisted that “unemployment in Detroit doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.” Any layoffs, he said, would be “only temporary.” GM’s Harlow Curtice declared that pessimists were “planting fear in the minds of the public” and that “the result might be the very condition we seek to avoid.” MESC director Max Horton complained that of the one hundred thousand workers from outside Detroit who had migrated to the area during the 1953 boom, only seven thousand had left—although he did not explain how either number had been calculated or where he thought the recent migrants should have gone. Total employment in Detroit had fallen by ninety-nine thousand since June 1953, yet it was still higher than it had been in June 1952. The difference, according to Horton, had to be recent migrants. Without them, he claimed, there would be no recession in the Motor City. A Detroit News editorial indicated that mass layoffs were part of life in Detroit and nothing to get too worked up about. “Alternate periods of feverish activity and of lull are as old as auto manufacture,” the paper declared. Former GM president Charles Wilson reinforced that general view. “I would not worry about Detroit,” he said, while announcing the government’s rejection of defense contracts for Motor City manufacturers. “The business is never good in winter. Come spring and everything is going to be all right.”5 After the U.S. Department of Labor classified Detroit as a “distressed area,” the News defensively conceded what most autoworkers knew full well: “It is a fact, however unfortunate, that the industry is and always has been subject to violent fluctuations, both seasonal and otherwise. It has had need of a labor force that is readily expandable and contractile, and this need to a degree has been accommodated by the working habits of Detroit families. … An understanding of this is indispensable to understanding the peculiarities of life in Detroit.6
Most of the actual unemployed were unsatisfied with these interpretations. Ted Kaleniecki, for example, was tired of hearing responses to mass layoffs like “nothing to fear,” “nothing to be alarmed about,” “pretty normal,” and “we’re in better shape than some people think.” “In Heaven’s name,” he wrote, “how can anyone who is still drawing a paycheck have the gall to make and repeat such cheerful statements to 110,000 persons who are combing the City from one end to another in search of work? It really rankles me.” Kaleniecki had only recently lost his job, but since then his perspective on the security of auto employment had changed. “My eyes have never seen so many unhappy and worried people than in these two weeks,” he wrote.7 Desperation was apparent in MESC lines. Referring to his weekly unemployment benefit, Bill Barnes explained, “Half of my $27 is going for rent, have to pay it or out we go. I was earning $81 [weekly] at Briggs, shut down Dec. 4. … I’m three payments behind on car and furniture.” William Tannous experienced similar pressures. “I just can’t make out,” he said. “I have two children, one five, the other three.” He had borrowed nine hundred dollars since he was laid off in December, and fortunately for him, the rent on his public housing unit was reduced from sixty dollars to twenty-eight dollars a month. “But still, what can I do with this check?” he asked, referring to his twenty-seven dollars in unemployment pay. “We need that much for food alone. Besides the kids haven’t been feeling well. I owe the doctor money.” Dorothy Collins was laid off from Chrysler in January, two months after her husband lost his job with the same company. They and their two children relied on friends and relatives for food. Elva Hedbloom, unmarried with no children, had been laid off from Chrysler since November. “I’m on my own,” she said, “but I can’t live on $27 a week. It is a good thing I have dates who take me to dinner.” Walter Sneddon, laid off from Hudson for two months, offered some perspective. “At least things are better than the 1929 depression,” he said. “We didn’t get anything then.”8
Responding to a Labor Department survey that called unemployment in Detroit “moderate,” Alex Fuller of the Wayne County CIO Council fired back, “This thing is real, real rough. Nothing is moderate to a man who is laid off and stops getting a paycheck.” Conditions worsened when automakers reduced production goals for the first quarter of 1954 by 12 percent. Chrysler’s Plymouth plant felt the pinch, with 5,800 workers laid off out of a peak force of 11,500. Packard sent home another 3,800, and despite Harlow Curtice’s optimism, 9,000 Detroit Chevrolet workers went on short weeks.9 One of those who remained on the job at Packard through much of 1954 was Boyd Braxton, twenty-nine, who supported his wife, Lola, and nine children under the age of six, including four-year-old twins. The youngest were newborn triplets. Although Braxton was officially still employed, he worked only a day or two each week through September 1954 before being officially laid off. For most of the year his family faced eviction. Since their apartment was unheated, during the winter Boyd and Lola occasionally ran the oven for warmth, and by the summer their electric and gas bills were long past due. “Things will be better when they ever call my husband back to work,” Lola said, “but it’s awful tough going right now.”10
Whenever times were tough, many looked for scapegoats, and Southern white migrants to the city were frequent targets. Martin A. Larson, president of the Small Property Owners of Detroit, called Southern whites “a fundamental threat to our community.” “Most of these people come up here from the south, without a dime and sometimes literally without shoes,” he complained. “Even though they come with large broods of hungry children, they expect to obtain cheap rental housing, free education and police protection, and, whenever an easy income gives out, to live on handouts from the community.” Moreover, he claimed, “these people are prone to violence and vandalism.”11 Although Welfare Superintendent Daniel J. Ryan also blamed migrants for the city’s troubles, he criticized manufacturers for luring them to Detroit in the first place. “I hate to say I told you so,” he said, “but as long as a year ago I said that if Detroit industry didn’t stop recruiting workers in every hamlet, village and crossroad in the country it would get us into trouble.”12
Married women with jobs also received much of the blame for the city’s economic troubles. “All my life I have been taught that the man is the breadwinner and sole support of his castle,” wrote an unemployed Detroiter. “Recently I was laid off from my present employment,” he claimed, because of “women who refuse to stay home like a good mother should and rear their offspring properly.” World War II veteran Walter Grogan also blamed women for his circumstances. “In my opinion it is the working wife who is partly the cause for present unemployment, high prices, juvenile delinquency and even disrespect for the marriage laws,” he wrote. “Bar any wife whose husband is working from the factory and let man again be head and wage-earner in his home.” Another angry Detroiter described working wives as “pathetic gluttons. How many working women could be replaced by men? Why should a family’s bills mount so high that both must work to pay them? … Maybe we would have less juvenile crimes and fewer divorces or broken homes if the mothers would stay home and the non-mothers would seek activities in the community to take up their spare time.” Bill Thomson, a UAW member at American Standard Company, was outraged that any wives had jobs while men were laid off and wanted Walter Reuther to know about it. “How many greedy and Godless ‘Working Wives’ are keeping jobs from these unemployed men?” he asked. “How many of these uncultured females are protected from dismissal by the CIO-UAW?” In response, the president of Bill Thomson’s UAW local, Henry Sommerfeld, voiced concern that Thomson’s views might be taken as the union’s official position. “We believe in protecting the job and seniority rights of all workers, including those who happen to be ‘working wives,’” wrote Sommerfeld. “If it were determined that married women do not need work as much as men, then it would naturally follow that single men do not need work as much as married men, that men with two children do not need work as much as those with six children, that older men who own homes do not need work as much as younger men who do not—and so on and on.”13
Working wives, of course, knew that their circumstances complicated any caricatures or wild generalizations. Even Fortune magazine noted that for a working-class family to achieve middle-class income status, it would most often require a “supplementary” earner, usually the wife, although the publication warned that counting on those wages as a constant “would be dangerous.” “The vast majority of women in the factories need those jobs for the same reason a husband does, to support a family decently,” explained a working married woman. “I know, because I am one of them and am mighty proud to be able to make good money.” A study by personnel departments at Detroit factories confirmed that many working wives were the sole support for their families. That was the case for Dorothy Sackle, who was divorced by 1954 and would have advised against counting on a husband to be a faithful provider. Anyone familiar with auto work in postwar Detroit knew that no one’s job was so secure that it could be taken for granted. Edith Arnold and her husband, for example, alternated between being on layoff or medical leave and usually lived on one income even though both were officially full-time autoworkers. Katie Neumann had to stay on the job at Pontiac Motor if she and her husband, who was frequently laid off from Dodge Main, were to make their modest mortgage payment. If a working wife had an employed husband and sacrificed by giving up her job to an unknown man, she might not be able to find auto work when her husband was laid off, sick, or injured. And what about good old American striving? “I can’t see why so many people protest when a woman becomes ambitious enough to try to supplement her families’ income,” wrote a working wife. “True, a television set might be considered a luxury, but there are other things that are really necessities, such as refrigerators and stoves, which really take a hunk out of savings.”14 Many women on layoff in early 1954 reported to MESC offices for unemployment benefits and waited for recall notices. When asked if she would prefer to remain at home, Geneva Yelland snapped back, “Not me.” She had worked for fifteen months on a small assembly line at Chrysler’s Eight Mile plant before becoming jobless. “My husband is a cushion builder at the Chrysler Mack plant,” she explained. “We were both laid off about two weeks ago. With rent and food prices as high as they are I cannot get back to work soon enough.” Alice Stovall, a laid-off riveter at the Chrysler Mack plant, said she wanted to go back to work “because I cannot afford not to.” Her husband, she explained, “is a gas company maintenance worker and is still employed but we have two daughters, 2 and 7, and need the money I earn to live.”15
While Detroiters argued about who should be working, statistics showed, counterintuitively, that rising unemployment was accompanied by high levels of overall auto production. Chrysler, which had purchased Briggs in 1953, was responsible for the largest percentage of Detroit-area layoffs, while Ford offered overtime on many of its shifts and everything in the Chevrolet and Cadillac networks ran full tilt.16 But fewer workers were required to meet that production in 1954 than in previous years. A major reason, it seemed, was automation, which continued at an uneven but relentless pace, especially throughout the Big Three’s plants. One of the year’s main developments, a “colossus” machine to produce engine blocks, came from the Cross Company. This innovation allowed a single operator to produce finished engine blocks from hunks of steel at a rate of one hundred per hour. The machine cost two million dollars, was 350 feet long, and contained 646 tools that performed 540 separate operations and 112 automatic inspections of each engine block in progress. It could replace anywhere from thirty-five to seventy-five jobs that had been reserved for white workers. In heat-treat departments, unprocessed steel now moved from step to step with a magnetic crane—ultimately to produce doors, panels, hoods, and fenders—thereby eliminating physically grueling materials-handling positions that had been reserved mostly for black workers. Bumpers were now dipped into chemical vats by overhead conveyors, instead of people, to achieve their polished shine.17
While workers and union officials had profound reservations about the results of automation, many business leaders celebrated such technological innovations and discounted concerns about job losses. Speaking to the Society of Automotive Engineers, Dodge president William Newberg declared, “The economics of automation are harsh, but simple: Automate or die.” Sure, there were naysayers, Newberg noted, but he dismissed workers and union leaders who “regard automation as a nebulous bogeyman who is after their jobs.” Likewise, Henry Ford II accused critics of demagoguery. “If I were a union leader today, I too would doubtless be raising the roof about automation,” he declared. “If you want to stir people up, sometimes you’ve got to scare them.” But “obsolescence is the very hallmark of progress,” he emphasized. “The faster we obsolete products, machines and antiquated ways of working, the faster we raise our living standards and our national wealth.” Automakers, Ford suggested, should “concentrate on making obsolescence palatable to people.” Only then, he thought, would workers “cheerfully put up with the sporadic irritations and upsets that go along with the free competitive system.”18
While not necessarily cheerful about it, a number of skilled tradesmen benefited from automation. The Cross Company’s engine block machine, for example, was produced mainly by its workforce of skilled UAW members. Les Coleman’s job as a skilled worker also involved developing the technology that eliminated production bottlenecks—and jobs. “I felt sympathetic towards those people that would be put out of work if we did the automation,” he recalled, “but I knew that this was coming.” Some of the most challenging, stimulating union jobs involved designing machines that caused unemployment for other UAW members, which created a dilemma for individual workers and the union. “A lot of us were against it,” Coleman explained. “If you’re in the union, your heart is with these people!” The Automobile Manufacturers Association insisted that autoworkers would still be necessary in the future but that they would be “shifted progressively into jobs that require less muscle and more brains. The unskilled laborer is going to be less and less in demand in the automotive industry.” Automakers agreed that there would be a growing need for people to design and maintain the machines that were replacing so many unskilled and semiskilled workers.19
Counting suppliers, nearly 20 percent of Detroit autoworkers were in the skilled trades, but gaining the necessary qualifications to enter those professions was hardly easy. Despite what seemed to be constant demand for skilled workers, apprenticeship programs restricted entry. Union officials blamed companies for this, since managers ultimately determined who was accepted into these training programs. Automakers, in turn, accused the UAW of limiting the number of available spots, presumably to maintain the higher status and pay that skilled workers enjoyed. To be eligible for apprenticeships, which were usually four years long, an applicant had to be white, male, and a high school graduate. He also had to pass a mechanical aptitude test, display competency in mathematics, and be “generally intelligent.” World War II veterans were exempt from age limits, but, otherwise, men entering the trades had to be younger than twenty-one and not facing military service. Apprentices received eight thousand hours of on-the-job instruction in fields like toolmaking, wood or metal patternmaking, machine repair, welding, and electrical work. They also had to attend school several hours a week and were responsible for their tuition, which could amount to hundreds of dollars over the four years. Rarely could an apprenticeship seeker show up at a plant gate and be accepted into a program. Recommendations generally came from current tradesmen, and there were usually long wait lists.20
A Packard apprenticeship program official explained the pressures faced by prospective skilled workers. On the one hand, such jobs had a reputation for being relatively secure and could therefore help tradesmen avoid the financial traumas so common in their neighborhoods. On the other hand, the social prestige of skilled work had diminished over the years. “Parents are the greatest deterrent to an expanded training program for tool and die makers, a program vital to our future survival and our continued industrial prosperity,” bemoaned Herbert Murrer, president of the National Tool & Die Manufacturers Association, before a Detroit audience. “They fail to recognize the dignity of men working with their hands. They oppose their children entering into skilled trades like tool and die making or machine tool operation. They don’t want their sons to get their hands soiled or nicked. School teachers also aid and abet this intellectual snobbery by relegating high school students with lower I.Q.s into vocational schools as though they were some form of inferior person.” Moreover, established skilled workers often lacked enthusiasm for mentoring apprentices. Skilled work was not immune to layoffs, and it was common for those who trained others, as one apprenticeship official put it, to “fear for their own jobs” when training potential competitors. In addition, by 1954 skilled workers were grumbling about wage compression that had reduced the financial advantage for going through an apprenticeship. In 1947 tradesmen had enjoyed a 55 percent pay differential over unskilled laborers, but that gap had shrunk to 37 percent by 1953. As the wife of a skilled tradesman observed, all recent wage increases had gone “to the unskilled worker or young college engineer.” Indeed, most of the UAW’s bargaining energy had been expended trying to lift standards for the unskilled majority of its membership.21
L. J. Scott had fleeting hopes of becoming a skilled tradesman. Once while on layoff he took a series of career aptitude tests. “I made my best test on tool and die,” he recalled. That posed problems, however, because everybody in Detroit knew that blacks were not accepted into the skilled trades. Scott told the test administrator that he figured he had better not pursue an apprenticeship: “I said, ‘Tool and die—I can’t work at that because they ain’t got no black tool and die out there. It’s all white.’ Then he said, ‘I think you’re making the right decision.’” In contrast, Paul Ish was an underwhelming, white candidate for trade school but nevertheless became an apprentice in 1954. Although his work at Pontiac Motor had been satisfactory, his high school record was far from stellar, and trade school involved academic coursework as well as practical training. Ish conceded that his father-in-law “hounded” the head of the trade school, “trying to get me in. It’s who you know, not what you know a lot of the times. But after you got in, then it was up to you to cut the mustard.” In addition, being in an apprenticeship program offered a high degree of protection against layoffs, because training, unlike production, was not linked with fickle consumer demand.22
In the end, the skilled trades were no answer for the vast majority of unemployed autoworkers, whose secondary support networks frayed as lay-offs worsened. The official number of jobless Detroiters hit 140,000 in early March. In April only 1,000 of over 30,000 in the Dodge Main workforce were still on the job, and 60 percent of those laid off would soon see their unemployment compensation eligibility expire. The Detroit Police Department blamed high unemployment for a 56 percent increase in burglaries over the previous year (1,869 to date in 1954). Most suspects, according to one detective, were either jobless men or teenage boys whose parents could no longer afford to give them allowances. Detroit experienced over twice as many robberies (629) as in the first two months of 1953, as well as a 22 percent rise in stolen cars (1,104 in 1954). Some of the robbers were caught at grocery stores and gas stations where they had been regular paying customers when employed. One unemployed factory worker shot a deer out of season to supplement his family’s diet, but he was caught, convicted, and fined $25. Sam Wood had arrived in Detroit from South Carolina with his wife, Jessie, and their six children during the early 1953 hiring boom, and he had worked steadily as a machinist until the fall. Beginning in November, however, sickness and layoffs had reduced the family’s $5,000 savings account to $150, and there was no indication that Sam would be returning to work anytime soon. He snapped, took a shotgun, threatened to shoot his two youngest daughters (ages four and seven months), then killed his wife while she was making lunch for the family. He shot himself as well but survived.23
Many other unemployed autoworkers also acted desperately, if within the law. Many wives of laid-off black autoworkers resorted, reluctantly, to domestic service. A couple of months after James Craft was laid off from his grinder job, he, his wife, and their six children, ages two to fifteen, were evicted from their rented house. Having nowhere to go, they spent three weeks living in an old hearse. James managed to find some odd jobs, like selling balloons, but he had not made enough money to pay for housing, assuming they could even find a landlord willing to rent to such a large family. Times were so tough that pawnbrokers stopped accepting television sets and radios. “You’d think the depression was on the way these people trot in there every day with heavy television sets to pawn!” reported one shop owner. “We can’t take any more. We’d have to go into the television business to redeem our loans if the pledgees didn’t return for their pawned goods.”24
While autoworkers struggled, the main problem faced by automakers was whether people would purchase cars off dealers’ lots, where inventories were parked at an all-time high. There was no doubt that the industry could produce record numbers of vehicles and could force dealers to buy them, but how many cars could those dealers sell, and at what profit margins? Research conducted by the nation’s leading independent auto loan company, C.I.T. Financial Corporation, showed that the average new car purchaser earned between $400 and $450 each month and made installment payments of $76.19. Even with steady employment, autoworkers making $2 an hour would earn well short of this income threshold and would still barely qualify as viable used car customers. Yet automakers were not inclined to raise wages to make their employees potential new car owners. If anything, manufacturers hoped to reduce wages, lower the prices of vehicles, and thereby help dealers boost sales.25
By far the largest of the Big Three, GM established the size of the new car market and pricing for the industry. The company’s economists determined what they would charge for their various models, with a goal of a 20 percent profit. Then they estimated the national demand for their products at those prices, with enough flexibility that profits would be ensured even if plants ran at less than two-thirds of capacity. Ford and Chrysler priced their cars according to GM’s benchmarks, knowing full well that if they tried to compete on price, GM could easily undersell them and put them out of business. The only thing holding GM back from doing this was fear of federal antitrust suits. GM consistently and intentionally set new car prices that were well out of the reach of most blue-collar Americans, including UAW members, who were among the best paid in the working class. The Big Three’s transportation solution for their workforces was captured in a slogan attributed to GM: “A good used car is the answer to the American public’s need for cheap transportation.” In 1954, however, it was evident that the automakers had miscalculated demand for new cars, and many disgruntled Chevrolet salesmen, who, unlike GM, had to compete on price, called for serious cutbacks in auto production, with some advocating a two-month shutdown of the industry. Automakers realized that they had to reduce the burdens they placed on franchisees, because many dealers had overextended their credit lines and simply could not pay for any more cars. But of course that meant slowing down or stopping assembly lines.26
Many dealers coped by “bootlegging,” the term used for the unloading of unwanted new cars by selling them at cost, or marginally above cost, to out-of-town used car dealers. These used car businesses, then, could offer the same products as franchised dealers in their communities but at lower prices, in part because they avoided corporate “destination charges” that inflated prices of vehicles in the official selling system. Although some bootlegging had occurred during previous booms, it became rampant in 1954, and automakers had little control over the situation. “We’ve gotten down on bended knees to the dealers, begging them not to sell their new models to used-car dealers,” explained a Big Three official. “And they tell us, when we trace a car back to them, that they sold it to a school teacher or some legitimate person who took it to a used-car dealer right away.”27 This sparring between automakers and their dealers underscored the reality that not enough Americans had the money, or the inclination, to purchase new cars, which forced dealers to move their inventories any way they could. Each bootlegged car, of course, had already been counted as a sale by its manufacturer and had been fully paid for by a dealer, if only on shaky credit. Automakers made money while autoworkers and auto dealers dealt with a recession of crisis proportions.
Significant shifts in the auto industry also worsened Detroit’s unemployment situation. Between 1953 and 1954 independent automakers, such as Hudson and Packard, lost nearly half of their remaining market share as well as sizable defense contracts. They could not afford much of the newest technology and could no longer compete with the Big Three, especially with the end of materials quotas that had effectively guaranteed them a certain portion of auto sales. In 1954 the only way for the independents to survive appeared to be through mergers. Hudson and Nash-Kelvinator combined in January 1954 to form American Motors Corporation, which had a negative effect on Detroit employment. With five plants on the east side of the city, Hudson had recently employed over 15,000 production workers, but that number had dwindled to 8,000 by the time of the merger. Nash-Kelvinator produced automobiles, mainly in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and in 1953 the company had sold about twice as many cars (150,000) as Hudson. Four months after the merger, American Motors announced that it would be consolidating all auto operations in Wisconsin, which meant layoffs for about 4,600 additional Detroiters. A despondent Walter Reuther described the UAW leadership’s reaction to the company’s announcement: “We just sat and listened while they explained.”28
No one knew what would become of the remaining Hudson workers, including those who had been laid off the previous year. Because there had been so many cutbacks, especially affecting those hired in the 1952–1953 surge, only the most senior Hudson employees were still on the job, and most of them were over fifty years old. “This is a terrible thing,” remarked Henry Flowerseed, who had thirty-one years of seniority. “So many of us are older men who thought we were safe.” “This is rough on me,” said David Penner, fifty-eight, with eight years of seniority. “For the last seven months, I’ve been working only three days a week.” “Some of the workers have homes half paid for and are buying a car,” noted Joseph Boyd, fifty-four. “What is going to happen to them? How will they find new jobs?” Andrew Busuttil, with eight years of experience at Hudson and two young children, lamented, “I couldn’t possibly leave Detroit. When my wife and I heard it over the radio at the breakfast table, I said to her ‘Well, it looks as though I’ll have to go out and get another job.’ But I don’t know where to go.” Kay Grence was a widow with sixteen years at Hudson. “I’m terribly worried,” she said. “Most of us women in this department have worked here many years. We’re getting along in years and are going to have a bad time trying to find work anywhere else.”29
Detroit’s Packard workforce was also threatened. At its postwar peak the company had employed about twenty thousand people in the city, but by 1954 layoffs had reduced that number to eleven thousand, comprised of the oldest and most senior of the workforce. Still, the company hoped that transferring operations to an efficient, one-story plant in Utica, a northern suburb, would reduce operating costs and help it compete in the midsize market. Packard completed its long-range plan in June by merging with Indiana-based Studebaker, and its workers were wary. “Jobs are scarce in Detroit,” said John Capello, a Packard worker since 1924 who had been laid off for nine weeks. “You have to be a tool and die specialist just to run a drill press. Skilled hands are doing unskilled labor.” “I lived on my savings and unemployment compensation for nearly six months,” reported Albert Church, twenty-seven, who was hopeful that the merger would preserve jobs in the area.30
Chrysler’s takeover of Briggs marked another significant shift in Detroit auto work. Motivated by a desire to redeploy employees who had been assigned to vanishing defense work, and to control supply chains, automakers decided to make more of their parts in-house, which resulted in reductions at many parts makers. The F. L. Jacobs Company, for example, cut its workforce from twenty-four hundred to eighteen hundred. Rockwell Spring & Axle closed its Detroit plant and consolidated operations in Chicago when automakers began to produce more of their own seat cushion springs.31 This trend proved fatal for Detroit operations of a large, east-side employer, the Murray Corporation. Murray’s Detroit plant had long supplied auto bodies to Ford, which decided in the early 1950s to make them itself. In 1953 Murray had employed nine thousand workers in the city, two thousand of them women. By mid-1954 the company’s workforce had dropped to twelve hundred. Charles Phillips, sixty, with a wife and five young children, had worked at Murray for twenty-six years. “Where in the world will I go?” he wondered. “I’m able-bodied; can do a job. But they don’t even have to ask my age. They can tell by looking at me.” Worner Jacoby, fifty-six, lost his right arm in a press accident shortly after starting work at Murray in 1922. “No one will hire me, either because I’m too old or because I’m handicapped,” he said. “It was my painful experience to say good-by to several hundred of my friends with whom I had worked for over 25 years,” remarked Art Willcocke. “Some were broken in health, some had fingers, hands or legs missing—sacrificed to Murray production. Hundreds were too young to cash in on the pension plan, but 10 years too old to be hired at another plant.”32
There were indeed few viable employment alternatives in 1954. Despite the heated competition between Ford and Chevrolet, overall auto production fell well below 1953 levels in the first half of the year (from 3,893,369 to 3,514,000). That trend was not uniform. Ford set all-time production records during that period while Chrysler did poorly. But even though the performances were uneven, they added up to serious problems. As Walter Reuther declared in July, “The figures cannot hide the tragic fact of mass unemployment in America’s basic industries and in the nation’s major industrial centers.”33 The lack of jobs in Detroit had a profound impact on young people. Although almost anyone could get a factory job in Detroit during the employment boom in early 1953, those who were just starting out had the lowest seniority and were the first to be let go when conditions worsened. In 1954 most of those hired the previous year were on layoff, and it was almost impossible for young Detroiters to find positions in the auto industry. As a consequence, gang activity, mostly involving whites, increased. “With the employment situation the way it is right now, a young man doesn’t stand a chance of getting a decent job, if any job at all,” argued Detroiter Phyllis Robinson. “When a boy—or young man, to be more specific—can go out and get a job, you’ll have your cure for young hoodlumism.” An older Detroit man echoed that reasoning. “What is happening to us?” he wrote. “I had to start work when I was 14 and I had no time for teen-age hoodlumism, but today, with our modern production system, there aren’t enough jobs for the breadwinners, let alone the teen-agers. Imagine what would happen if all the boys in service were home.” A. M. Moakley discussed the job crisis with a group of Korean War veterans, all of them out of work, one of whom had a “kid brother,” a “June graduate from high school. He’s tired too with a bitterness that will grow worse with every negative shake of the head, and every forgotten employment application. He hasn’t been in the army yet, but when he goes, he has a lot to fight and hope for, hasn’t he?”34
An industry survey suggested that conditions were not likely to get better over time, because auto-related jobs in Detroit were indeed disappearing, for reasons other than automation. In 1954 only 30.8 percent of American cars were assembled in the area, down from 35.8 percent only a year earlier. Although this statistic appeared to confirm that decentralization had resulted in a permanent shift in the industry away from its birthplace, Detroit boosters argued that automakers were also investing billions of dollars in southeastern Michigan for new plant construction, plant expansions, and machinery upgrades. The most optimistic of Detroit officials even predicted a return to the city of wayward factory operations that had moved to the suburbs. However, no examples of such movement could be found.35
With the auto industry so erratic, it seemed nonsensical to outsiders when workers interrupted rare stretches of employment by striking. Nevertheless, wildcat walkouts occurred repeatedly throughout 1954 and one of them, concerning workloads in the Dodge Main trim department, set off intense public debate. At first the conflict attracted no more attention than any of the dozens of ordinary wildcats. About 5,500 workers were sent home after three men were disciplined for, as the company put it, “failure to carry out their work assignments.” The workers considered themselves victims of the company’s efforts to de-skill their jobs and then demand excessive workloads on the newly repetitive tasks. Supporting the three who were disciplined, trim department coworkers walked out, then refused to return the next two days. Soon Chrysler’s Detroit auto production was shut down and 45,000 of the company’s workers were laid off. Together with the long-term unemployed, the total number of jobless Detroiters suddenly approached 170,000.36 In response, the Free Press voiced exasperation. “What troubles us most gravely,” an editorial read, “is the long-term damage to Detroit as a place to prosper, whether you are a production worker, management man or merchant. Accumulatively, affairs such as last week’s strike hurt Detroit’s reputation. And when its reputation goes, hope of an ever-building prosperity goes with it.”37 Overlooked in the editorial was a Chrysler announcement, which appeared during the wildcat, of a model changeover process that was expected to last six to seven weeks. Since World War II, however, automakers had learned how to reduce changeover times to a week or even less. This plan more closely resembled the prewar pattern of prolonged summer layoffs to retool, but it was in response to slow sales, not technological complexity. Although layoffs would be staggered, Chrysler insisted, all of the company’s employees would miss several weeks’ worth of pay.38 The Free Press editorial staff appeared not to care about the loss of income from this model changeover, which dwarfed the impact of the Dodge Main wildcat strike and stemmed from overproduction and slack consumer demand. Autoworkers and their sympathizers pointed this out. “You make no mention of the layoff to come in August,” reminded W. A. Gallimore. “No tears for the lost time then,” and apparently no damage done to the city’s reputation either. “During the three years I have lived in Detroit there has been considerable clamor raised about the man-hours lost during strikes,” commented Buddie Tidwell, who was drawing unemployment benefits while laid off. “According to the noise, great damage has been done [to] the American economy because of these strikes. If this is true, how about the man-hours lost during the widespread layoffs that are in progress right now? … Don’t tell me there is a difference, for in both situations production is halted, amounting to the same thing.”39
For autoworkers, non-strike layoffs were the bigger threat. In late August, Chrysler’s lowest seniority workers had been laid off for over a year, and twenty thousand of them had seen their status reclassified as “permanent.” The News editorial staff noted that as long as unpredictable consumer demand drove the auto industry, there was no way to avoid boom-and-bust cycles in the Motor City: “The resulting ups and downs of industry employment constitute an agonizing human problem, and a painfully inconvenient one for the automotive centers.” There could be no expectations of predictable employment or income.40
Despite these larger economic forces, many people considered unemployed autoworkers to have been responsible for their own fates. Speaking in Detroit at a press conference prior to a hundred-dollar-a-plate Republican Party fund-raiser, secretary of defense and former GM president Charles Wilson chided those who had relied on unemployment benefits during the recession. “I have lots of sympathy for those without jobs,” he said, “but I have always liked bird dogs better than kennel-fed dogs. The bird dog is one that will go out and hunt for its food. The kennel-fed dog is one that waits until it is brought to him.” Clearly, he implied, a large number of Detroiters during the year had simply lacked the initiative to find jobs. In response, Walter Reuther demanded that the secretary resign if his comments accurately represented his views. The UAW leader took Wilson’s words to mean that the secretary would have unemployed autoworkers “abandon life-long savings invested in homes, take their children out of schools and wander like gypsies over the face of the United States seeking jobs that do not exist.” In any event, the sixteen hundred in attendance at the banquet apparently felt like bird dogs as they cheered the secretary’s announcement that $42 billion in defense contracts remained to be awarded and that many could go to Detroit firms.41
Although it was devastating for autoworkers, the near total shutdown of the industry in the late summer facilitated the industry’s rebound later that year. One way or another, dealers were able to clear most of their remaining 1954 models to make room for 1955s. With new body styling, automatic transmissions, V-8 engines, superchargers, power steering, air conditioning, automatic windows, and three-tone paint jobs available in their new offerings, each of the Big Three expected booming sales in 1955. Chrysler began the production surge in late September and expected to exhaust its recall list and hire new workers by November. Pontiac Motor spent millions expanding its facilities and hoped to dominate the midsize car market. Ford hoped to solidify its position as the new number-two automaker behind GM. It would take some time, however, for the automakers’ ambitious plans to be fully realized. Supply lines had to be filled before assembly lines could run full tilt.42
Detroit officials hoped that the estimated 40,000 people who left during the 1954 recession, and any potential migrants, would not be lured back to the city by news of increasing production. The Free Press declared that the area had a “labor surplus that cannot be successfully absorbed in the near future” and that unnecessary labor had to be “distributed to localities where it can be effectively utilized.”43 Any migration to Detroit, according to this view, could jeopardize the city’s already tenuous employment situation. In November, Mayor Albert Cobo warned anyone considering such a move that they stood “practically no chance of finding employment in Detroit in the foreseeable future.” When unemployment remained at 120,000 in mid-November, despite production increases, Detroit Board of Commerce official Harvey Campbell suggested that many of those still without jobs should leave town. He wanted to know how many of them were “actual citizens,” and not merely those who had filled the demand for labor during the 1953 boom.44 The campaign to discourage migration to Detroit rankled many recent arrivals. “I wish someone would tell exactly why we came here,” wrote one Southerner. “We didn’t come here with the idea of being a burden on the state of Michigan. We came here to work.”45 It remained difficult to define who was an “actual citizen” of Detroit. If one came to Detroit when the auto industry needed workers, did that make the person a Detroiter? Did it make that person an autoworker? Such questions remained significant, because in late 1954 thousands of people, including Emerald Neal in West Virginia, ignored the pleas of Detroit officials and streamed into the city. “Looking for a job, I stood in line at Dodge’s for hours,” wrote a disgruntled resident. “I’ve paid taxes in Detroit for over 10 years,” he complained, but a new migrant from Alabama was hired before him. And there were still plenty of instances of whites, possibly new arrivals, being hired before blacks, possibly Detroiters since World War II or earlier, especially at Dodge Main, Cadillac, and Great Lakes Steel.46
As auto production rebounded in late 1954, layoff-weary Chrysler workers debated whether or not to strike over a variety of issues, ranging from speedups, discrimination against women with seniority, and the removal of lockers, to grisly losses of hands and fingers at the DeSoto plant.47 It was an advantageous time to threaten a strike, because Chrysler management feared interrupted production. The entire industry was on a frenzied pace, and industry observers salivated over the prospect of producing to capacity, perhaps ten million or even twelve million cars a year.48 A sizable number of disgruntled UAW members, however, were in no mood to miss anymore days, no matter the severity of the grievances, and especially if they were in plants indirectly affected by possible walkouts. By 1954 a substantial majority of autoworkers had not been part of the organizing campaigns of the 1930s and had experienced anything but steady work since World War II, often for reasons they hardly understood. It was difficult to know, for example, what was really going on in a body plant when facing a domino-effect layoff at Plymouth assembly—or vice versa. In 1951, before the enormous influx of new workers to Detroit in 1953, Walter Reuther had told the union’s executive board that “reaching our membership” was the “most serious problem we have. Half of the membership … are people who came into our Union after its original struggles were over, and they do not appreciate what it used to be like in these plants before we had a union.” In 1954 one such UAW member called himself one of “30,000 pawns” in his union’s struggle with Chrysler. Union leaders, he insisted, had “forgotten what it is like to be out of work and have bills pile up all around you until you are frantic with worry.” This union member wondered what his organization stood for. “Instead of worrying that the company may not provide work for us,” he pointed out, “we now have to worry about OUR union keeping us on the street. … Grievances, they tell us. Is this reason enough for you to leave your jobs and go out on the streets for only God knows how long? Is it possible that we might not think that the so-called grievances are worth what we shall all lose?” A worried wife could not understand the strike votes either. “A short time ago the unions were crying ‘Give us work!’” she recalled. “Now they want to strike.” Many of those directly affected by the brewing conflicts, including those with longer seniority, tried to explain what was at stake. “‘Who wants a strike?’ Certainly not we men who voted for it,” responded Robert McGill. “But we were using the only weapon we had to try to right some of the wrongs in our plant.” Nevertheless, such justifications often failed to convince those who were either unemployed or recently had been recalled. “I went in the service before World War II—came back a married man and ran smack into union trouble because I had no seniority,” an angry Detroiter complained. “How well I remember the strikes during World War II. The excuse given was to assure us that we would return to something decent—what a laugh!”49
No matter what people thought about the possibility of strikes, a number of Detroiters questioned whether or not the high rate of production, even after a year filled with layoffs, was ultimately good for autoworkers. Walter Reuther cautioned that the record output was unsustainable as long as the country had “an unbalanced economy in which a few are prosperous and the many are in need.” It was obvious that the United States had the technology and the labor necessary to produce unprecedented wealth, he noted, but the problem was how “to get purchasing power in the hands of the people to consume that wealth.” After months of layoffs and short weeks, more autoworkers than usual were in no position to buy what they made. “We are working from nine to 12 hours a day. We don’t mind the extra loot as we have lots of fun spending it,” admitted Jim Basden of Local 212. “But I shudder to think what is going to happen later on. A saturation point is inevitable.”50