The Packard Plant is in the news again, its demolition moving forward. In truth, Packard sent me a postcard back in 1957, when I was too young to understand it. Here, in brief, is the story of that first postcard.
My father was civic-minded. Having bought his first house, a small brick bungalow in the Detroit suburb of Garden City, he soon became active on the local School Board and, later, the campaign to establish Schoolcraft Community College. Although he worked for Ford, it was through Garden City, the 1944 GI Bill, the subsequent suburban boom, and his membership of the school board that our history would brush that of Packard.
Born in 1925, Dad graduated from high school in 1943 and went to war. As a veteran, he was able to complete his education with help from the GI Bill, obtaining a business degree, and soon thereafter, his first job with Ford Motor Company. In 1954 (the year of my birth), Dad purchased the newly built Garden City house priced at $11,950, with a 30-year mortgage at 4 percent interest. So we moved from Henry Ford’s Dearborn to a rapidly growing box house suburb less than 20 miles west of Detroit. Our new home consisted of 940 square feet of living space set on lots 60 feet wide and 110 feet deep, the backyard plots demarcated by chain link fencing.
The GI Bill had introduced a new form of veterans’ compensation in the provision of long-term, low-interest mortgage loans. The construction industry was the immediate beneficiary and soon began adopting Fordist mass-production strategies. The Levitts, perhaps the best known of the postwar developers (Levittowns), perfected an assembly-line approach to house-building that at its peak meant the completion of 35 houses per day, the equivalent of a new house every 15 minutes. Between 1950 and 1970, America’s suburban population doubled, and the 1970 census showed (for the first time) more suburbanites than city-dwellers or farmers.
What, you may wonder, has all this got to do with postcards from the old Packard Plant? To which, I am tempted to answer, “Follow the money.”
You may recall that in the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, this line was uttered by “Deep Throat” in an underground car park meeting with Bob Woodward, one of the Washington Post journalists seeking to unravel the Watergate mystery. The implication was that a trail of dirty money leading to higher and higher echelons of the federal government would eventually reveal the powerful source of the Watergate conspiracy and a deeply entrenched culture of government corruption.
It’s an endlessly serviceable line. What happens if you apply it to suburbanization? If you think about the suburban boom of the 1950s and ‘60s as a kind of conspiracy? As in most conspiracies, there is no one truth that can be grasped, no single plot to be discovered and accused. A conspiracy is not so much the product of articulated intent, but more an outcome of actions that appear to need no conscious coordination - because those actions are undertaken by disparate, nameless partisan interests. The co-conspirators never really know one another. Their wishes are fulfilled through a series of interlocking and overlapping moves, acts, and seemingly random events. At times, they sense they are guilty, part of some problem. But most of the time, they experience themselves as simply reacting to historical events or to the market.
They follow the money; the money follows them. Capital “flows to wherever the rate of return is highest.” (David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, 1973) Or listen to a description from the ground: speaking of his life in postwar Detroit, Auburey Pollard Sr., father of one of the young black men murdered by police in the Algiers Motel (July, 1967) remarked: “You can see the money moving.” (John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident, 1968 & 1998)
Malcolm X once said that “it’s impossible to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.” (See Robert L. Allen, A Guide to Black Power in America, 1970) Like Harvey and Pollard (in their different accounts), Malcolm X is linking the operations of both. If then, we follow capital, follow the money in order to map the spaces of metropolitan Detroit in the postwar period, we arrive at a more complete realization that suburbanization had a great deal to do with northern geographies of racism. Here, practices of redlining, zoning, and white neighourhood resistance provide the detailed backdrop to a story that can only be titled Disinvestment. What does that mean?
We may recall that, in the aftermath of the 1950s suburban boom, the radical geographer, William Bunge, wrote that the suburbs had sucked money out of Detroit “like lamprey eels suck the juices out of Michigan lake trout.” (Bunge, Fitzgerald: The Geography of a Revolution, 1971). In Bunge’s account, disinvestment was the draining of the city’s industry, commerce, and residence, and indeed the shrinking of its tax base, as all of these flowed to the (white) suburbs. This is a spatial enactment of the ‘follow-the-money’ thesis. To make sense of the postwar history of Detroit (and other U.S. cities), disinvestment must be understood as a redistribution of funds, resources, rights, political power, and cultural authority along racially segregated lines.
Garden City was perfectly positioned to benefit from postwar industrial and commercial suburbanization, in other words, from the processes described above. (See Chapter 7 of Amy Kenyon, Dreaming Suburbia) With its proximity to Dearborn, and with other manufacturing plants and warehouse facilities relocating from Detroit to nearby industrial corridors, Garden City’s growth was assured. Complementary metal and machinery industries and retailers developed around these plant sites. Here, in numbers, is the impact on Detroit during that period:
“Between the late 1940s and the early 1980s, Detroit’s share of the region’s manufacturing employment dropped from 60.3 percent to 25 percent, retail trade from 72.6 percent to 15.4 percent, services from 75.3 percent (in 1958) to 23.6 percent…’ See Joe T. Darden, Richard Child Hill, June Thomas, and Richard Thomas, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development (1987).
In Garden City, some gains were straightforward and expected, such as the award of a $1 million contract to a local electrical parts company by the Chrysler Corporation. Other benefits were more like small, sad commentaries on changing times, such as the school board purchase, in 1957, of the opulent boardroom furniture from Packard, by then, a failing Detroit car company:
“Superintendant O’Leary, hearing that the Packard Motor Company was in a state of liquidation, arranged for the massive board-of-directors table, with a goodly number of carved chairs, to be purchased for our board meetings. The set of chairs and tables was originally said to have cost $700, a substantial sum back then.” (John Macfie, Garden City Chronicle, 1976)
And so came my first postcard from Packard. I was three years old, unaware that my father was sitting at that table, on those carved chairs, and certainly unaware that these had come from a Detroit car company on the skids to a suburb on a roll.
In the 1950s, Garden City funded school after school, state-of-the-art one-story facilities with flagpoles and large blackboards, slide projectors, gyms, hundreds of little chairs and desks, shiny lockers, and yellow-painted Ticonderoga pencils. Empire builders always make the mistake of assuming it will last forever.
When I returned to Garden City in the 1990s, an affecting silence had settled on the old classrooms and playgrounds. The baby boom was a distant memory, as long ago as tail fins on cars and strap-on roller skates to carry us along the sidewalks.
As for Packard, its latest postcard brings the news, this month, of that long-expected demolition.
We give the final word to Philip Levine, poet of working-class Detroit once described as “a large, iconic Whitman of the industrial heartland” (Edward Hirsch). Levine contributed to the 2014 film Packard: The Last Shift. He died a year later. Here is the stunning video/poem, the most poignant of Packard postcards, as part of the film’s preview: