ONCE IN A GREAT CITY
A Detroit Story
By David Maraniss
Simon and Schuster
441 pages; $32.50
Detroit in the early 1960s was a symbol not of urban decline and Rust Belt blight, but of high hopes and youthful dreams. Coveted cars didn't have model numbers then but names that spoke of flight and fantasy and raw animal power - the Ford Galaxie, Thunderbird and Mustang, the Plymouth Barracuda, the Chevrolet Impala - and they were rolling off the Detroit assembly lines at a record pace. The country was dancing to the beat of Motown's irresistible pop-soul groove, and with hit after hit by Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Four Tops rolling off his assembly line, Berry Gordy would proudly proclaim Motown "the sound of young America."
On a trip to the University of Michigan to deliver his "Great Society" speech in 1964, President Lyndon B Johnson would stop in Detroit and call the big labour city "the herald of hope in America": "Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit," he intoned in his famous drawl. "You folks in Detroit put American citizens on wheels, you have the American economy on the move. Unemployment in Detroit is down, profits are up, wages are good, and there is no problem too tough or too challenging for us to solve."
In his elegiac and richly detailed new book, David Maraniss - the author of biographies of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Roberto Clemente - conjures those boom years of his former hometown with novelistic ardour. Using overlapping portraits of Detroiters (from politicians to musicians to auto execs), he creates a mosaic-like picture of the city that has the sort of intimacy and tactile emotion that Larry McMurtry brought to his depictions of the Old West, and the gritty sweep of David Simon's HBO series The Wire.
People's experiences intersect or collide or resonate with one another, and Mr Maraniss uses them as windows on the larger cultural and political changes convulsing the nation in the '60s: the struggle for civil rights; LBJ's faith in the government's ability to address the country's biggest challenges, like poverty; and the tumult wrought by rapid social change and the rise of the boomer generation.
Except for an epilogue, Once in a Great City remains deliberately focused on the 18 months between the autumn of 1962 and the spring of 1964 - a period that emerges as one of the high points in Detroit's history as well as a pivotal moment containing the seeds of its coming disintegration. The book would have benefited from a little more context, like the causes and consequences of its devastating 1967 riot and an analysis of the role that the city's reliance on a single industry would play in hastening its fall.
But Mr Maraniss does not aim to break a lot of new ground here or to delve too deeply into any one aspect of early - '60s Detroit; his goal is something more impressionistic and zeitgeist-y. And at this, he succeeds with authoritative, adrenaline-laced flair. He gives us "the musical luminescence of Detroit," explaining its "unmatched creative melody" by pointing not only to its gospel and blues heritage (thanks to its many migrants from the south, who brought with them "an oral, life-singing tradition") and the vitality of a local black-owned radio station, WCHB, but also to the public school system's inspiring music programs and the availability of pianos for working-class families (a result of "steady auto jobs, disposable income, single-family housing" and the reach of a remarkable music store and piano maker called Grinnell's).
Mr Maraniss cuts among story lines about the auto industry, the civil rights movement and City Hall, and among subplots involving Ford's development of its top-secret new car (the singular Mustang), the police commissioner's efforts to get the goods on the mobster Tony Giacalone and Berry Gordy's construction of a hit factory with Motown.
By the close of Mr Maraniss's book, dreams of hosting the Olympics have been scuttled; urban renewal has uprooted many traditional, predominantly black neighbourhoods; police reforms that might lead to greater racial harmony have stalled; and efforts to transform the city through the Model Cities and War on Poverty programmes have run aground, fuelling tensions that would explode in the 1967 riot.
That riot would accelerate white and middle-class flight to the suburbs and bring a radical contraction in the city's population. The United States Census in 1960 had put Detroit's population at 1,670,144; by 2010, the city's population had fallen, shockingly, to 713,777. This shrinking tax base, along with auto industry woes, growing deficits and startlingly inept leadership would force the city to declare bankruptcy in 2013 and turn Detroit from Johnson's "herald of hope in America" into a symbol of vulnerability and decay.
Mr Maraniss's evocative book provides a wistful look back at an era when those cracks were only just beginning to show, and the city still seemed a place of "uncommon possibility" and was creating "wondrous and lasting things."
©2014 The New York Times News Service
