Detroit City Is the Place to Be (24 page)

But there was a telling punditocracy disconnection when it came to Detroit’s stark example of the human cost differential between simple corporate profit and more general social welfare. The writer Malcolm Gladwell, for example, published a thoroughly entertaining takedown of Obama car czar Steven Rattner in the
New Yorker
, using Rattner’s own self-serving memoir to dismantle the myth of his outsized role in the heroic rescue of General Motors and Chrysler.
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The highlight of the article probably came with Gladwell not only pointing out that Rattner visited Detroit just
once
while overseeing the restructuring of GM and Chrysler, but that he actually bragged about this fact in his memoir.
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And yet, in his gleeful undoing of the myth of Rattner, Gladwell heaped promiscuous praise on ousted GM president Rick Wagoner, who, it’s true, seemed indicative of the double standard the Obama administration applied to corporate welfare recipients on Wall Street (who were allowed to keep not only their jobs but their bonuses) and their counterparts in Detroit (Wagoner being “the head that was rotting,” in Rattner’s words, atop GM’s otherwise resuscitatable body). Still, Wagoner’s “tremendous” (Gladwell’s words) accomplishments supposedly included slashing the workforce from 390,000 to 217,000, opening plants in China (GM announced it would be the first of the Big Three automakers to import Chinese-built cars to the United States, beginning in 2011), and renegotiating contracts with the UAW, creating a two-tiered system in which pay for new hires plummeted from between $28 and $33 an hour to between $14 and $17 an hour. Wagoner was also praised for essentially shifting pension obligations related to health care off the books. (Not surprisingly, Wagoner’s own pension of $23 million remained untouched after his forced departure.) The loathsome
Wall Street Journal
editorial writer Holman W. Jenkins even applauded Wagoner for his “steady, long-term gamesmanship perhaps unique in the business world”—a “gamesmanship” requiring the fortitude “to wait patiently for a generation of UAW workers and retirees to succumb to their smoking-related illnesses so GM could again become a normal company, with something like normal labor economics.”

Back in 2009, several months before the bailouts had been announced, Professor Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University, had prophetically told me, “What they’re calling ‘restructuring’ really translates into job losses—reducing models, closing plants. It won’t be the auto industry of yesterday. It will be a global industry, where a very large share of the operations and profits will take place overseas.” So, yes, the companies had made themselves more profitable through a process of “reinvention” that, in many cases, involved simply reducing payroll and cutting the salaries and benefits of union members lucky enough to have survived the latest round of downsizing. “A lot of the guys I know who got laid off are back to work now,” Ray Grimble told me. “But they’re not making nowhere near what they had been making. That’s how the companies are making their money now. The middle class is almost gone. A guy can’t support his family at fourteen bucks an hour.”

*   *   *

In 1932, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo spent several months in Detroit living at the Wardell Hotel on Woodward Avenue while Rivera painted a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Edsel Ford, Henry’s son, at the time the nominal president of Ford Motor Company (though his aging father still pretty much ran things from behind the scenes), paid Rivera just over $20,000 for the commission. Rivera and Kahlo arrived in Detroit at the peak of the Great Depression. The automobile industry, booming just a few years earlier, had been hit particularly hard. Unemployment in Detroit had risen to 50 percent, with two-thirds of the population living below the poverty line; just a few weeks before the famous international art couple’s arrival, police officers and members of the Ford Company’s private security team had fired on laid-off workers agitating for unemployment compensation outside of the Rouge plant, killing five men. Nevertheless, Rivera, a Communist, had romantic visions of “the dawn of a period of new splendors for the [North American] continent and for mankind,” in the words of his biographer Bertram Wolfe—a “free union of the Americas” wedding “the industrial proletariat of the North with the peasantry of the South … the factories of the United States with the raw materials of Latin America … the utilitarian aesthetic of the machine with the plastic sense that still inhered in the Amerindian peoples.”

After spending weeks having the run of the Rouge and other factories, climbing into turbines and incessantly filling his sketchbooks, Rivera began painting what he would later describe as his greatest work, the
Detroit Industry
murals: twenty-seven separate frescoes on all four walls of the museum’s templelike courtyard, depicting both the awesome scale of the modern factory floor and an iconized Marxist fantasia of working-class solidarity and collective toil. For visitors today, the room still feels like a holy space, albeit one filled with imagery more bizarre than even your typical Catholic reliquary. Rivera drew inspiration from creation myth, Aztec statuary, the Mexican
retablo
(painted tin votive art), Soviet propaganda posters, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Charles Sheeler’s photographs of the Rouge (taken one year earlier).

Though the piece is dominated by workers bent like galley slaves over various stations of the assembly line, with the monstrous stamping presses and blast furnaces seething in the background, there’s also a creepy fetus (Kahlo had just suffered a miscarriage, the inspiration for her own canvas
Henry Ford Hospital)
and a panel depicting the vaccination of the child Christ (painted to resemble the recently kidnapped Lindbergh baby) and another pair of panels, flanking an entryway like caryatids, depicting, respectively, a brawny high-pressure-boiler operator holding a hammer, his work glove decorated with a red star, and Henry Ford poring over a blueprint.
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Local religious leaders, editorial writers, museum patrons, and politicians condemned the perceived revolutionary nature of the artwork, but to his credit, Edsel Ford defended Rivera, and the
Detroit Industry
murals emerged from the controversy intact, unlike Rivera’s next major commission, at the Rockefeller Center in New York, which was destroyed after the artist refused to remove a portrait of Lenin from the work.

Rivera’s murals remain a favorite stop for Detroit-area schoolchildren on field trips. I must have visited the Rivera Court, as it’s called, many dozens of times. It’s the one room in the museum you make sure to pass through on every visit, even if simply to luxuriate in the space for a quick, rejuvenating moment. But somewhat incredibly, the first time I ever really sat and stared at the artwork for longer than ten minutes or so came shortly after I moved back to the city, when one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Vic Chesnutt, performed an evening concert in front of the courtyard’s South Wall. Normally, there’s no seating in the room, aside from a handful of benches set deep in a few corners, but for Chesnutt’s performance, the museum had set up rows of folding chairs, and so during his set, I’d had the opportunity to study the mural for as long as I liked, as I’d never done before. One thing I noticed was that, despite all the manual labor taking place in the frescoes, you couldn’t actually see many of the workers’ hands, at least not in the foreground of the South Wall, where gloves or heavy machinery or the close-packed bodies of other men almost entirely obscured just about every laborer from the wrist up. Yet on the uppermost panels of the mural, an octet of enormous, bare, disembodied hands hovered over a volcano, clutching at the air and shaking angry fists.

Chesnutt’s own hands occasionally drew the eye as well, tugging spasmodically at his baggy pants and inert legs—he had been paralyzed in a car accident decades earlier—or else adjusting a lever on the side of his wheelchair with a frantic repetitiveness that seemed like the effects of an involuntary tick. I’d noticed his hands the last time I’d seen him play, several months earlier, at a Carnegie Hall tribute to his fellow Georgians R.E.M., where he had managed to transform the band’s maudlin antisuicide ballad “Everybody Hurts” into something raw and fractured and beautiful, his own vulnerability nakedly on display on the hallowed New York stage. About a month after his performance in Detroit—on Christmas Eve, actually, just over a hundred years to the date from Henry Ford’s first successful experiment firing up a motor in his tiny kitchen—I read on Facebook that Chesnutt had taken his life at his home in Athens, Georgia.

Chesnutt’s performance was also the first time I’d noticed, in the middle distance of Rivera’s South Wall mural, the small group of civilians in street clothes observing the workers from a catwalk, part of some factory tour, which I’d always considered (such tours, that is) a relatively recent construct, but of course in the twenties and thirties Fordism fascinated the public, and witnessing the bustle of the miniature city that was the Rouge would have been as exciting as a visit, in more recent years, to Cape Canaveral for a shuttle launch. One of the tourists, a stern-looking old man in a fedora, broke the fourth wall of the painting to glare directly at the viewer, one bourgeois spectator locking eyes with another from opposing shores of a river of workingmen. Only later did I realize he was standing apart from the others, and that he was actually supposed to be a foreman, which gave his look a different sort of pointedness.
Is there a reason
, he seemed to be asking,
why you’re not working, too?

*   *   *

Ford still offered tours of the Rouge facility, so one afternoon a couple of days after I met John Zimmick, I drove out to Dearborn and bought a ticket at the Henry Ford Museum. I was the only one to board the tour bus when it arrived; likewise, I found myself sitting alone in the theater where, prior to taking an elevator to the catwalk overlooking the factory floor, visitors watch an informational film about the Rouge, the so-called First Wonder of the Industrial World, which, to my surprise, acknowledged the Battle of the Overpass alongside the expected touting of Henry Ford’s canny perfection of vertical integration and the assembly line (though Ford’s long-standing and deeply personal hatred of unions received somewhat of a gloss).
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Upstairs, a video warned us against waving at workers on the factory floor or otherwise distracting them.

The first thing that struck me about the Rouge, or at least the Dearborn Truck Facility, the portion of the Rouge we were allowed to see on the tour, presumably spit-shined for public consumption, was the lack of chaos, how
orderly
it all seemed, especially compared with descriptions from the earliest days of the plant (e.g., Ferdinand’s futile struggle in
Journey to the End of the Night
to resist the “furious din” that “shook the whole building from top to bottom.… [I]t’s hard to despise your own substance, you’d like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but it’s too late for that. This thing can never stop”) and the grimy, documentary photographs and films dating from the same era.

From the catwalk, you could peer down onto the open floor and watch each point of the assembly line where workers put together the popular F-150 pickup truck. The colors of the bodies were White Platinum (white), Royal Red (burgundy), and Blue Flame (an almost neon blue). At one part of the line, just the front sections of the trucks, riding on individual palletlike stands called skillets, according to a placard, slowly rolled past a woman in a red sweatshirt, who stuffed something foamy-looking behind the seats, and then past a balding guy wearing a Red Wings T-shirt with a spider tattoo on his left forearm, who screwed in the headlamps using a pneumatic drill hanging from a long air tube, and then past another guy, who sat on a chair at the end of a long, swiveling arm, almost like the arm of an adjustable lamp, only moving sideways, allowing him to slide into the backseat to screw in some part I couldn’t quite make out and easily slide back out again all by pushing himself on this cool arm-seat. At least this particular technological advancement seemed like a vast improvement for the workers—actually encouraging employees to sit down on the job!—something you’d assume certain bosses just on principle would deny, perhaps even insisting on having the guy laboriously climb into and out of every backseat, regardless of its cutting into productivity.

Video monitors at various points along the catwalk displayed faces of Ford workers cheerily explaining, in layman’s terms, the specifics of the work taking place at the particular station below. According to one of the docents on hand, these were actually actors portraying Ford workers. At Windshield Installation, the actor-worker on the video, “Kevin,” introduced visitors to Bumper and Blinker, his robot-arm coworkers—or “teammates,” as “Kevin” called them—an especially lame attempt to anthropomorphize away the general Rouge tourist’s unease at the idea of salt-of-the-earth assembly line employees being displaced by automation, said unease no doubt stirred by the frankly eerie cleanliness and absence of heaving multitudes at what was, after all, supposed to be the First Wonder of the Industrial World.

The assembly lines advanced at a strolling pace, just slightly faster than the part of a rollercoaster ride where the cart goes uphill. There were also truck parts dangling on conveyors all around me. Suddenly a shadow would wash over the catwalk, and glancing up, I’d see a truck body pulled along by car-wash-type chains on a track running above my head. The calm banality of the plant seemed unexpectedly peaceful at first, but then I began to feel unsettled by the constant, creeping movement everywhere, which, alongside the natural sounds of the factory, by no means cacophonous, though constant and slightly disorienting—the sharp needling whir of pneumatic drills, the hollow clanking echo of hammered metal, the occasional shrill safety alarm—combined to produce a sense of slow-motion vertigo.