This past weekend, when I was touring my book in Michigan, I had the first opportunity in a couple years to visit Detroit.
Of course, the city’s national and international reputation has been legendary for most of its existence, and most recently by its bizarre status as a sort of non-America within America; a disempowered place with almost a million residents, terrible statistics for crime, poverty, and abandonment, and so on. Naturally, the Great Recession and government bailout of the Detroit Three automakers has only solidified this reputation.
Additionally, however, the city looms large on America’s Gothic landscape, perhaps moreso than any other city in the U.S. (although New York and New Orleans will give anyone a run for their money).
From today’s vantage point, Detroit’s Gothic status is artistically-driven. Gothic inflections are visible in muscular but cavernous churches, factories, and mansions, many of them abandoned. In the public art and sculpture which evokes either an impassioned enlightenment and calculated power. And most eloquently, in the city’s music scene, which is as colorful and dynamic as the economy is bleak.
I will be reading and signing copies of Hungry Rats at Detroit’s Cafe Con Leche, this upcoming Friday, November 12th, from 6 – 7 PM. Cross the bridge, head up or down river, or cruise in on down Woodward and Michigan!
It all comes down to money, that money coursing in from Flint and Saginaw and Detroit. “Bring us lumber!” they bellowed. “Bring us lumber, and don’t trouble to worry for the welfare of those shanty boys, whether they work an honest day or lop the ends off the logs. The only thing is wood, wood, and bring it fast.” The trains ran in and out and the forests vanished. The people became enraged with us because they were a poor folk in a country of stumps, while we still took in our hundreds of dollars. Yet we paid out hundreds of dollars.
One of the most exciting parts of the Hungry Rats project was researching and writing about Michigan’s lumber era, a crucial facet of the Westward expansion that generated more capital than any American gold rush, and without which the auto industry would certainly have bypassed Detroit.
19th century Michigan had much more in common with the Old West than with its Great Lakes neighbors, and like the West, the “romantic” trappings of this time (from gunslingers and saloons to Indian camps and brothels) really existed in an environment of lawlessness, aggressive commerce, and the exploitation of immigrants and native peoples.
Lumber-era Michigan was, quite simply, a frontier that expanded faster than the growth of more “civilized” institutions. Set apart from its neighbors by the lakes, the waterways also provided a means for transporting huge stocks of lumber needed for a country exploding in population. In this it also abetted the rise of Chicago and the rapidity of Western settlement. Michigan was clear-cut from the 1860s to the 1890s, and grew from a cold and neglected outpost to the center of industrial enterprise in the U.S.
The middle third of Hungry Rats concerns itself with two historical serial killers based out of Clare County. They acted with near impunity and one of them earned the moniker “the devil of Hell.” But there are many real characters from the weird half-century that saw the logging-off of North America’s most extensive forestland. P.K. Small, the Ogre of Seney, was known for eating anything and everything in sight, Warren Bordwell’s Saginaw brothel masqueraded as an opera house, and Dan Seavey was a Lake Michigan pirate who escaped from jail in Chicago and commandeered a ship. The infamous Catacombs of Bay City would have given New York’s Five Points district a run for its money.
If Hungry Rats enjoys any success at all, I hope that it encourages a closer look at this compelling and vital phase of American history. Michiganders, especially, should know this stuff; it is significant, and just as importantly, it makes for great reading. I’ve provided a few links below, but (in keeping with the slight obscurity of this era) most research hasn’t made the leap to the internet. I’m happy to provide a Bibliography upon request. Some great books on the subject (almost entirely out-of-print) can be gotten cheaply through Amazon.
The articles above pretty effectively stake out the boundaries of my position. With possibly over three million jobs at stake, it isn’t with a lot of pleasure that I watch the Big Three work the nation over now as they’ve worked Michigan for decades. What do I mean by work over? I mean that they draw assistance from the government (whether in terms of tax breaks, incentives, and now a bailot) to rectify a mess they’ve made, and in exchange for which the best they can seemingly offer is a non-worst case scenario. If that. In Flint, throughout the eighties and nineties, GM continued to drink that city’s tax pool dry in infrastructural and fiscal accomodations as if they were dying of thirst at a desert oasis. And yet they persisted in the manufacturing strategy that has put them in dire straights. The cities and states which invest in these companies, essentially at gunpoint, rarely see such speculations realized. There is a risk of this being mirrored on a national level. The Big Three’s market share will presumably continute to dwindle in the near-future, albeit hopefully at a slower rate, they’ll close plants and hemmorage jobs, and if everyting goes perfectly, it will still be a long, long time before they can offer a fleet as well-adapted to the next global environment as their competitors.
It’s just like the Wall Street Bailout all over again. These were my original reservations with that bailout package, and here is the upshot after just two months.
Let’s learn a lesson from this very recent history and not be handing out blank checks.
Let’s encourage our representatives to cautiously support a bailout for the auto industry, but let us absolutely insist that it only come with serious and meaningful restructuring that will lead to an industry that can legitimately compete. Symbolic shuttling of executives will not be sufficient (and the Wall Street bailout didn’t even achieve that obvious step); any Company that requires taxpayer money to fight for profit is fair game for prudent meddling. It’s more than auto plants that will need restructuring; it’s the Big Three’s entire corporate structure.
