CITIES: Midwestern Birthday

Harry Truman will speak, bands will blast along Woodward Avenue, 20,000 marchers will clump past Detroit’s smoke-smudged City Hall. From the steps, governors, Senators, dignitaries from Britain, France, China, Ethiopia will watch and applaud. One of the paraders will be costumed as Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who paddled through place du detroit—the narrows between Lakes Huron and Erie—and picked a spot to start the furtrading post that became Detroit. In a brisk, well-organized way, this week, Detroit is observing its 250th birthday.

Two hundred and fifty years is a ripe age for a midwestern city. For almost 200 of those years, Detroit slumbered. First a fort, then a town, by 1896 it was a contented city of 285,000 which brewed a little beer, made a few families wealthy through lumbering and mining, turned out carriages and stoves and let its arteries harden in dignity. But beer and dignity were not its destiny. Charles Brady King chugged down a street in a horseless carriage. Three months later came Henry Ford in another ugly contraption. A young inventor named Ransom E. Olds scraped up capital to underwrite the revolution. The explosion of the internal-combustion engine woke up slumbering Detroit. The engine put a nation on wheels, tracked the nation with highways, filled the countryside with flashy billboards, hot-dog stands, gas fumes, and, in a climactic outpouring of weapons, tools, vehicles and planes, won World War II.

Radiator Art. Detroit is unique among American cities. Paradoxically, it could stand as a symbol of America.

It is brash, ingenious, emphatic and go-getting. It has given to the world Charles (“Boss”) Kettering, genius of production, Joe Louis, onetime genius of the clout, and Edgar A. Guest, genius of the jingle. One of its showpieces is its Institute of Arts, containing Diego Rivera’s monstrous panorama of machines, gears and allegorical nudes. But the acme of its important art is the elegant chrome design of the automobile radiator.

Detroit is casual, rough-&-ready, informal—a city of bright neckties and T-shirts, bowling alleys, towering commercial hotels, overstuffed clubs buzzing with shoptalk and big deals. It is a city of salesmen, technicians and craftsmen, mechanics and makers of chemicals, furnaces, tools, dies and household appliances. Almost half of its employed population are the 320,000 workers who perform the automaton labor of the auto plants. They speak to the world through such trumpet-voiced agents as red-haired Walter Reuther—and speak so loud they are now among the best-paid workers in the world.

Patchwork. Engines, weapons, wealth and mass production were not the only things that King, Ford and Olds created. They created the social problems which for two decades have harassed the city. Behind the present good wages of the auto industry lies a history of some of the worst violence in U.S. labor. Today, Detroit’s labor is comparatively peaceful, casually shifting jobs with the shifts in Detroit’s production pattern, getting over the slumps with the help of unemployment-compensation checks.

Today, the Detroit of Henry Ford is a great patchwork of races and nationalities—Hungarians, Poles, Greeks, Negroes, Chinese. To this polyglot gathering, in World War II, were added workers from Kentucky and Tennessee, dubbed “hillbillies” by their neighbors. Oldtime Detroiters blame them for some of the ugly race tension which erupted once and might again. Restive and dynamic, Detroit has all the problems of a city which, in a half-century, has increased sixfold.

But it sprawls there proudly, minding its enormous business. It has little of orthodox beauty. What beauty there is has to be sought out, along the shores of Lake St. Clair, behind the trees of the luxurious suburbs. It has another kind of beauty, which is to be found in the upthrust stacks and belching blast furnaces of the Ford plant, in the great assembly lines of glittering vehicles and machinery.

It has no hoary history. But its squatting skyline, the great structures of the General Motors Building, the Fisher Building, the Detroit Edison power plant, are symbols of history still in the making.