Daniel J. Clark: Your Grandpa's 1950's Auto Industry

0:01 Hello, good morning. This is Arthur Busch. You're listening to Radio Free Flint. Thank you for joining me. On today's episode, we have guest uh Daniel Clark, who is an associate professor at Oakland University. Daniel is an author who's wrote a book called Disruption in Detroit, uh the elusive uh post-war boom. And we're gonna talk to Daniel about labor history, economics of uh the Southeast Michigan area. We're gonna focus on Flint and Detroit mostly uh to gain some lessons about the past and how there might be some parallels to today.

0:42 Daniel, welcome. A simple question. What's the myth? I've struggled trying to figure out how the collective memory came to be, but I think you put your finger on it with your idea about the difference between the 1960s even and the 1950s. Uh, the 1960s was a more prosperous decade overall for the auto industry than the 1950s uh were. And um, I think I grew up in in Midland, you know, just north of Flint. And I remember the waves of cars heading north on weekends and closing the famous Zilwaki Bridge, you know, the the drawbridge. I I remember seeing that prosperity when I was just a little kid, um, you know, growing up.

1:22 But I think that times in Detroit, times in Flint became so dire in the 80s and the 90s and beyond that there was a certain search for a golden age. Things had to be better, and things were probably better. Um, I do think that um uh there's a tendency to uh romanticize the 1950s and kind of blur it together with uh more prosperous, more stable times. Um I think that scholars, uh, for their part, um you know this gets you know maybe a little bit esoteric, but um, you know, labor historians have argued over the bargaining agenda of the UAW and Walter Ruther, and you know, a wave of scholars you know thought that was wonderful, the increasing wages and benefits that were in the contracts.

2:14 Another wave of scholars argued that that was selling out, that wasn't radical enough, there was more that the union could have done. That's you know, kind of a scholarly debate. But what I was looking at Well, it wasn't just a scholarly debate. You had guys like Victor Ruther writing books and crossing the nation talking about that. Absolutely, yeah. No, I I agree with you completely on that. It was a debate within the union about the direction, and but what what I was talking about is um kind of the uh another way that the the myth got established. I guess um, and and and and um but you're absolutely right, it wasn't just an academic debate, it was a fierce debate within the UAW. And what I was trying to do was um look at how uh uh ordinary workers, not leaders, not uh um you know people who we necessarily have heard of before, but how did they experience these years?

3:07 And and so when I looked at how ordinary auto workers experienced the decade of the 1950s, really 45 to 60, um, I found that it was marked much more by layoffs, much more, much more by insecurity and instability than it was uh by uh the this notion of prosperity and security. So I tried to work with that concept. I was curious about the 1950s because it was the golden age. I had worked with oral history in my previous research, my previous book I wrote on cotton mill workers. I thought, you know, what better way to try to figure out how these workers experienced the 1950s than to ask them? Oral history presents its own set of methodological difficulties with memory and nostalgia and all these sorts of things.

3:50 But on the other hand, it might be the only way that we can try to gain some entry into the world that uh that these workers experience. And I thought when I started the process that I would be learning about their stories of how they dealt with prosperity, you know, um, what was it like to uh um to finally, you know, not be scraping so hard to eat out a living, to be able to go on vacation to do these sorts of things. I didn't ask a question quite as blunt as um, how did you experience the 50s? Did you have stability or insecurity or whatever? I just did life history narratives and I talked about where people grew up, uh how they ended up in the Detroit area, you know, what they did, and just try to build sequentially through their lives.

4:34 And in so doing, that's when the instability occurred to me, you know, uh or it appeared in the interviews. And it really didn't sink in for me until I transcribed the interviews and I realized, wow, this is a recurring theme because I did not come into the project with that notion in mind at all. It was always my understanding that the auto industry was leading the post-war boom, it was on the cusp, the cutting edge of the economy was the center of the nation's prosperity. Um, there was any reason to think otherwise, especially if you looked at earnings totals, profit totals for the companies and the contracts and the wages and benefits that were embedded in those contracts that you could see. There wasn't any reason to doubt it.

5:14 But um, you know, in looking at the the actual lives of auto workers, I started to question it. But um much of the evidence that you just um uh mentioned came from my newspaper research. I realized that I could interview a thousand more former auto workers and probably still have a problem with trying to figure out if they were a representative sampling of the hundreds of thousands of people who passed through the auto industry in the 1950s. And so I decided that I would just read local newspapers, the Free Press, the News, the Michigan Chronicle, and see what kind of a story emerged. You know, in other words, would the newspapers reading day to day, would they convey a story of prosperity and security, or would they convey a story of um of what I was learning from the interviews um of instability and insecurity?

6:04 So, in other words, what what you mean by Detroit wasn't in sync with the nation uh as a whole, or the economy as a whole, was that there might be increased sales of automobiles, and there were periods of great increase during the 50s, especially after the Korean War. Uh, the employment in the region really either remained the same or in some cases even dropped. Right. It was the newspaper evidence that made me realize that Detroit really was out of sync with the national economy. The best years in the national economy in the 1950s were 1956 and 1957.

6:46 And those were terrible years for the auto industry, um, but more so for the auto workers than for the auto companies. One reason for that is that 1955 was indeed a boom year for the auto industry and for auto workers. The title of the chapter I devoted to the 1950s, or 1955, was called the 50s in one year, because it really encapsulates uh our enduring sense of what the decade was like. Auto uh plants were running full tilt, employment was secure through most of the year, not all of it. Um, people were taking out uh um higher mortgages on new homes or renting more expensive, spacious apartments, buying cars.

7:26 Um, it seemed like auto workers had finally achieved that boom. But as was the case throughout the decade, there was a limited number of people who could afford to buy a new car. The top 14% of the nation had enough resources to buy even the least expensive new car. And the supply of automobiles, the the production far outstripped the ability of Americans to consume, to purchase these new cars. The companies then flattened out uh production, employment dropped significantly. And so you see these articles about the nation entering its newest best year ever, while at the same time, Detroit is experiencing uh you know uh foreclosures, uh repossessions, um, you know, auto workers unemployed for much of the year in some cases, and moving back maybe to Kentucky where they came from and pulling up there until times get better.

8:22 The story on the ground for auto workers was completely out of sync with the national economy. So although big companies like JM and Ford uh you know continued to show profits at during those years. One of the things you you wrote about and and mentioned was that there at one point during this this boom, uh the so-called boom in the in the country, there were a million, I think you said a million brand new cars sitting on lots throughout the country waiting to be sold that couldn't be sold. Right. Uh that happened a few times, but uh the unsold inventory of new automobiles reached around a million in 1955, that that peak year.

9:05 So auto workers enjoyed the steady work and even overtime throughout much of the year. But then at the end of the year, there's this massive inventory that was about you know 10 to 15 percent of the number of cars that were built during the year. And so auto companies then ratcheted back their production for the next two years, causing all kinds of layoffs and unemployment. You described the blue-collar elite as being white men uh who buy new cars. Most people weren't able to buy a new car, who had good contracts with their UAW uh leadership. They had cottages up north, uh, they sent their kids to college.

9:49 How does that happen in the rest of the people aren't in the aren't on the ship? Well, I think that um if you look at that section again, um what I was writing about was um media portrayals of the auto workers, um often by people who hadn't done any kind of research on the ground and had no idea really about uh how auto workers were living their lives. There were an awful lot of pundits, uh economists, um uh syndicated writers who looked at the contracts that the UAW was negotiating and then uh um often, more often than not, decried the uh the greed of the auto workers and and um uh wondered how they could or how auto companies could survive paying these amazing wages and supporting these kinds of lavish lifestyles.

10:40 But other reporters would go on the scene into neighborhoods and see that that was not the case. There was no such thing as this separate blue-collar elite that was living the the American dream um and leaving their their fellow workers behind. The layoffs in the 1950s affected long-term high seniority workers as well as as newer lower seniority workers differently, but affected both, you know, very severely. But what I found out um was that um a lot of these auto workers were going up north for sure, and they were using state parks or they were putting up deer hunting shanties on someone's property who gave them access, not owning property.

11:20 And most auto workers had cars, they had used cars. Uh, you know, they were considered uh imperative to the success of GM and Ford and Chrysler because GM and Ford and Chrysler counted on those um high earning 14 percenters to uh buy new cars every year or every other year. In order for them to do that, they had to be able to sell their existing cars in the used car market. So auto workers were instrumental in terms of uh um uh marketing. But um GM famously said that uh um they weren't aiming for auto workers in the used car or in the new car market, not even for Chevrolets, you know, um uh that uh auto workers could be satisfied with used cars.

12:02 It evoked a response that I was completely shocked by. Because there are people uh who look back at those 50s advertisements. I don't know if you looked at any of that stuff that's out there, especially about Flint. But General Motors essentially uh presented a side a society that was completely, I don't know how to describe it. I think you could describe it maybe. But it's tail fins, you know. Um yeah, but they the people looked at it and said this wasn't, you know, they described this in the General Motors uh hype, which was which was paddled in the newspapers and in the mass media once it emerged, the TV, as creating a a society that didn't exist, you know, a wonderful society, you know, this dreamlike thing.

12:53 I mean, it was almost like Soviet propaganda when I look at it now. Any reaction to that? What I found was that um representatives from GM and and and Ford and and Chrysler was a little bit of an outlier in the big three, but they they would constantly complain about the high wages that their workforces were were getting. Uh, on the one hand, um, you know, objecting to uh the the benefit the benefits, the increased wages, these sorts of things. But then um at certain points in time would try to take credit for providing such a tremendous standard of living for their own workers. But uh behind the scenes, they're also acknowledging, um, not in the advertisements that you're talking about, that they're acknowledging that uh there's no way in the world that their own employees, even if they were employed 52 weeks a year, could actually afford even their lowest priced car.

13:46 Or they could as long as they had no kids, no wife, you know, no mortgage payment, something like that. Um, and so they're really of two minds. They're they're they're selling this American dream uh of home ownership and new car ownership to the public while knowingly um uh cutting their own workforce out of that bargain and complaining about how much those workers earn to boot. So um uh the workers' salaries or their their wages, you know, even under the more lucrative contracts that that were negotiated in the decade, weren't going to be enough to provide that level of of middle class status. And and those companies knew it.

14:28 When in the 50s, I didn't realize there was such uh an um as I you use a word, precarious, a precarious employment situation with the with the auto workers, that that there were ups and downs. Uh you know, the economy didn't work in cycles of five or ten years. It was working more like one or two years. Is that right? Where the dips would come well, even even month by month, week by week, um you know, we can look at the larger macroeconomic trends. Um the recessions of 1954 and 1958 were devastating for the auto industry. Uh, the Korean War was terrible for the auto industry because Detroit and Flint did not become the new arsenal democracy again.

15:14 You know, almost Korean War production went elsewhere, and the materials for producing cars were rationed and largely unavailable. So there are these kinds of macro trends, but there are all kinds of micro trends as well, ranging from um supply shortages. You know, if coal miners were upset and went on strike, then steel mills would have to close and the auto industry would have to close. There were these kinds of domino effects that happened a lot, especially in the late 1940s. There was a cold snap one time where it was really cold in Detroit, but there was only one natural gas pipeline coming up from uh Oklahoma and Texas. And so uh the auto industry had to shut down for three three weeks uh so that hospitals and schools and homes could have gas, the ones that weren't still heated by coal.

16:01 Um there could be all kinds of reasons why um uh why there would be layoffs uh every time that there was a strike uh in the auto industry, you know, in Detroit, it would have huge ripple effects. And that could be um uh a small-scale strike in one department, say in a Fisher body plant or something, or um, you know uh a Chrysler stamping plant or something. And um, if that lasted any kind of duration, it could cause backups uh uh up and down the supply chain and could quickly cause 10,000 to 100,000 layoffs. And even though sometimes those were of short duration, they still contributed to the instability and insecurity.

16:41 And I'm not saying that those strikes weren't justified, I'm just saying that the result of them uh was often uh unintended layoffs for many people who weren't directly involved. I mean, unemployment was built into the production schedules for the auto companies, um, you know, in that uh they tried to put well over 50% of the annual production goal into like the first four or five months of the year. So that it was built in that they were going to have um uh a lot of layoffs, um, even if they met their annual production goal. So management had a lot to do with it. Um you can't say that's a responsible technique of management is to start splurging on the on a production to the tune of a million extra cars.

17:22 No, the the the management, um the the some of their thinking was just absolutely laughable. Um, you know, they thought that if they would send a motorized circus around the country that that would uh um unleash the latent demand. They were certain that if they looked at savings totals in um in banks and all this, that there was plenty of money out there. And one time uh uh someone recommended that all these unemployed workers just go out and buy cars and and that will solve you know the unemployment crisis. So um, you know, they were completely out of touch with the reality that they were helping to create. But one of the things you you do to prove your thesis that the 50s wasn't necessarily the golden age that we think.

18:03 That was during the the Korean War, I'm pretty sure. Um, you know it showed how out of sync uh again Detroit was even in a time of war, let alone in the time of peace with the national economy. Wartime spending uh you know did rev up many sectors of the economy during the Korean War, but there wasn't the same demand for tanks and you know the the uh the trucks and and and the things that that Detroit could could convert to fairly quickly. So, yeah, uh that was the thing that that um you know it it it concerned uh industry leaders, it concerned local officials, you know, a whole lot. They were aware of this, you know. They they they were not unaware that unemployment was so high in Detroit, but they couldn't figure their way out of it.

18:46 Why did General Motors leave Flint? Why did they leave Flint? You know, you look in Detroit, you don't see, you know, we're one trick pony in Flint. You know, we got cars, we got cars, and we got more cars. Now we got trucks. But in Detroit, you have plastics, you have other related industries. And Detroit, while it's fallen bad, it hasn't fallen flat. So why did they leave? And and I heard one economist say, well, the reason they left was because they weren't a big enough city to and there was some version of what you just said, the footprint of the city itself needed to be larger so they could grow.

19:28 But in the suburbs of Flint, you could build as far as the eye could see a factory. And in fact, that's exactly what happened in Mount Morris Township. They built the the Chinese or that Chinese Japanese came in. Some have argued that uh the big three, including GM, were just trying to escape unionization. And eventually that's true uh with um the move uh of GM to Mexico, for instance, which was a big deal in the 1980s. Um but uh even before then, it wasn't even so much. That uh that auto companies were escaping unionization because they often um had unionized workforces generally in their new locations, but it was um um for new plants to seek uh you know enough land to build a state-of-the-art plant, looking for lower taxes in many cases, again, uh trying to create some efficiencies in their model.

20:22 If you have a growing population in California, should you be manufacturing cars in Detroit and shipping them to California, what if you just manufacture them there? Would that create some kinds of uh of inefficiencies? There are all kinds of reasons. Trying to avoid unionization is certainly um a motivating. The year they declared they were going to close Buick City, they made the car of the year, the highest quality car in America or the world, or whatever that standard is. That was the year that was a car of the year, and they used the most advanced labor management models that were known in the labor uh relations business. You know, they were trying to copy the Japanese in terms of uh quality.

21:04 And they took this, and and closing a Buick City is not closing just some little you know parts plant with a few thousand people. I mean, this factory had you know in excess of 30,000 people at one time, maybe more. Are there human factors here involved? I mean, maybe the management got pissed because they couldn't get the contract they wanted exactly. I I don't know what it is. Why is it that people in your profession haven't pursued this angle? I mean, guys, Roger Smith, the only guy that ever went and rode a horse against the General Motors management was Michael Moore in the movie Roger and Me. You know, that's an astonishing thing. You know, okay, you can say Michael Moore is, you know, from Davison and, you know, uh, he's a provocateur and all this.

21:48 But you you what you've done with your book and your research is essentially lay out a case that there's bad management and it hasn't didn't just start recently. That's what I see. I mean, I it maybe Yeah, I I I'm not uh um I don't know that you were trying to do that, but uh that's what there are a lot of different questions than what you just asked. I can't speak as to why uh historians are choosing one topic over another. Uh, it is a lot harder often to get access to corporate sources, you know, like a GM internal documents if you're really trying to prove a case about what what they what they did. We can see the effects. I was able to um get govern or uh corporate sources, company sources for my my first book.

22:29 I was able to uh to to uh get a hold of them and and and and you know I can give you a better answer for a cotton mill town in North Carolina than I can specifically. I'm interested in that because I don't think Michigan is the only place in this country where bad management resulted in a lot of human suffering and at the scale of human suffering. You know what I mean? Um and and look at a lot of this in our society and say, well, we don't give a shit about some poor guy from Kentucky or Arkansas, Paraguay, Arkansas. What the hell we care about him coming to Flint and he drinks leaded water. So what? Uh is it is it in our culture in America that causes us not to want to go back and look at who's responsible for stuff historically?

23:13 Or is it, I mean, I don't know. I'm not a historian. I'm just certainly over the course of many decades, uh, you know, the the society has come to privilege corporate elites in their perspectives over the perspectives of ordinary workers. Um, just like uh, you know, we're battling still the racial legacy coming out of Reconstruction and all. Um there are all kinds of things in our culture that haven't been completely addressed or addressed at all or or resolved. Uh so you know, uh I don't know quite how to answer that. Do I think that uh um that's fair enough? You don't, I mean, if you don't know the answer, that's okay with me. Uh well I don't know if I can solve uh um you know all of the ills that corporate America has produced in in a in a book or in in in a pithy phrase right now.

24:00 But I think what I was gonna say is that um you know, even in the 1950s, there were so many plant closures, especially on the east side of Detroit, that it was creating the the equivalent of flints right at the time, hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, um, businesses leaving, and the carnage was was severe at that point in time. Um, and if you look at uh all the different towns in Michigan right now that used to have foundries that help provide parts for the auto industry, they're decimated. Um, you know, we haven't even talked yet about um the disparate impact on African Americans in Detroit and how they did not generally have access to the new plants that are being constructed, even just outside the city limits of Detroit, and had a far less access to secondary jobs that could help them survive uh during their layups.

24:52 There are all kinds of problems. But one thing that came out of the 50s is that um um a company like GM, a company like Ford that moves operations out of Detroit have no obligation to the citizens of Detroit. Local 600, um, and this is covered in Tom Sagrew's book, Origins of the Urban Crisis, but Local 600 tried to sue Ford for all the jobs that they were moving to a new plant in Ohio. Okay, um, the case was thrown out of court. What came out of this had started really in the 19th century, in that property rights uh had, you're the lawyer, but property rights had legal standing and workers' rights were secondary if acknowledged at all. And so that comes in a long uh out of a long tradition of privileging property rights and um company ownership uh over the rights of people who sell their labor.

25:42 That that's that's a really old story. No doubt that these companies were tired of having to negotiate with unions, having to deal with grievances on the shop floor. Uh, why not move to a place like Mexico where we think we can have a more docile workforce? That was the same reason why so many industries moved to the southern state. But what I did notice as well is that in the 1950s there was great demand for small, fuel efficient cars, especially coming out of the 1958 recession. Uh, and the uh the managements that you're talking about uh said, no, uh, you know, that's a passing fad. Um, you know, no one's gonna want those things. But they also said, um, given our business model, we can't make a profit selling a small fuel efficient car.

26:23 So we're not going to bother. They made half-assed efforts, of course, um, with the Falcon and stuff. But um, but that was a problem that uh bedeviled the the You made an interesting observation, which I found fascinating. You interestingly, uh, in your research discovered uh one of those gems that I think you know could spawn at least another couple books. Uh, and that is um automation. I think your premise was that automation actually masked uh the surge uh that was masked by the surge in hiring in these factories, so that in essence the country was going to hell in a handbasket, and the auto industry, I mean.

27:08 And at the same time, workers thought, wow, it couldn't be better. And at the same time, it actually could have been way better. Well, one thing I was pointing out is that um automation or the trend to try to mechanize as much as possible uh was ongoing, you know, throughout the decade. It was uneven in its applications, but that the quest was ongoing. But with employment totals fluctuating so wildly, it was hard to know what unemployment was being caused by a lack of demand for cars and what unemployment was being caused by the technological uh uh um you know destruction of jobs. And so there are times when um there would be mass layoffs, like at Chrysler, for example, um, you know, 80,000 people laid off for several months, and no one quite noticed that when there were callbacks, there are only 60,000 people called back.

28:00 20,000 jobs have been eliminated. But it would have looked different if it was a full employment time, 80,000 people at work and then 20,000 people were fired one day. Do you understand what I'm getting at here? But uh it's kind of hidden because uh it's it's uh reappearing once the callbacks take place. And all of a sudden 20,000 people are like, wait, wait, where's where's my job? You know, um, and they find out that they've been laid off permanently. And then it, you know, it's hard for people to understand exactly what was happening, exactly what was was going on. Um in my interviews, I found some other ironic aspects of automation in that um, you know, the skilled workers who are involved with creating these new machines, they're union workers, they're skilled workers.

28:44 And it was some of the most challenging, exciting work that they ever were involved with in their lives because of the the challenges, the engineering challenges of that work. But several of them I talked to felt really badly about it this fall because they knew that if they succeeded at their jobs, they were going to be costing jobs for fellow union members whose jobs would be uh automated away. So there were that that's a tension I hadn't thought about before. Um and uh um um well automation in the 50s was definitely geared towards materials handling, those big bottlenecks, and those were the heavy, um, you know, physically demanding and exhausting and injurious jobs that were largely held by African Americans. And and Thomas Greek pointed out that uh automation did eliminate all kinds of jobs that were held by um by African Americans.

29:31 There were also a whole lot of jobs that were lost by by non-African-American workers, um, but they had uh more options potentially for uh uh for finding different jobs within the auto industry. But they there was a culture in Flint not to speak badly about General Motors, and that that was absorbed even by the by the ordinary work. Did you discover that in any of your research? Tell me the most important takeaways from your book that would help us uh understand what's happening in our uh society today. One takeaway um that may be the most important in my sense of things is that uh we shouldn't uh believe the macroeconomic economic indicators as um uh an accurate depiction of how people are living.

30:24 Um, because you know, the gross national product, um, the um total amount of income in the Detroit area, you know, the the contracts, everything pointed towards prosperity. But if we scratch beneath the surface, we could see in the 50s that uh that that things were were often dire for the people who are supposedly prosperous. For today, maybe the analogy is that uh um uh a prospering stock market is not indicative of uh how most people are living and doesn't really speak to the the the pressures and the challenges that the people are facing in their lives. Um and related to that, I guess uh would be um this one I really feel like I'm um tilting against windmills, uh but uh um don't believe everything you hear, you know, uh question and and and look for evidence that can support uh um um your your your your notions.

31:18 I mean, I I was um the only thing that made this book possible is that I just bothered to ask uh people what their lives were like, uh didn't accept the truth that was given to me. Um I would hope that that kind of advice wouldn't lead to ungrounded conspiracy theories and questioning the truths that that are passed down to us, but uh uh you know, I guess um being more patient, being more inquisitive, being more curious about um uh how people uh really live their lives and what they needed and what they wanted is uh is important. And then also um, you know, realizing that you know, as I uncover this story of insecurity and instability in the 1950s, it's not as if everyone I talked to in my interviews who lived through this period were miserable during those years.

32:04 They didn't know that these were supposed to be prosperous years that historians and other people would look back on fondly as a golden age. They were living their lives. And um, I think the resilience that you could see, the creative ways that people solved their problems and dealt with uh with the issues in their lives is really inspiring to the point where people are actually proud for having fought through uh uh the difficulties, for uh engaging uh um you know with uh with all that life could throw at them. I didn't talk to anyone who wanted to go back and relive that decade, but most people actually found more pride in the struggle, in um uh in having uh made it through difficult times than um um than perhaps they would have if things had really been like the myth suggested, uh, if they've been all comfortable and easy.

32:54 Daniel Clark, thank you for joining me. And uh your book is a fascinating read. It's called Disruption in Detroit and the elusive post war boom. Uh I'll leave links on our on our show notes here and on uh social media on how to buy that book. It's available at uh Borders, I believe, and Amazon. And it's published by the University of Illinois Press. But uh, thanks so much. Uh um