‘Lest We Forget,’ Skip Renker’s review of Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, David Maraniss, Simon and Schuster, 2015
David Maraniss, an associate editor at the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, knows the 60’s well — two of his books, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Stirred the World, and They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, deal explicitly with a single year of that decade, and his biographies of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi cover sections of that tumultuous time. This familiarity informs Great City as well; it focuses on events and people in Detroit from October, 1962, when John F. Kennedy campaigned there, until May, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson gave his Great Society speech in Ann Arbor. While everything in the book is Detroit-specific, its themes have a wider cultural resonance that takes us through the 60’s and beyond — race and class, urban renewal (which many black people sarcastically called “Negro Removal”), the role of mass entertainment, especially music, in American life, the coming globalization of almost everything, including the heretofore Detroit-based automobile market, and most poignantly, the continuing clash of idealism and pragmatism in American life.
Maraniss, born in 1949, spent his first 6 years in Detroit, and professes a genuine love for the city and all its vicissitudes — the book’s dedicated to “the people of Detroit.” It’s not a sentimental book, however, but a clear-eyed, if sympathetic, look at the city when optimism ruled but dangerous undercurrents, mostly undetected at the time, were soon to pull Detroit and many of its inhabitants under. So Marannis takes us on a Motor City ride through about 18 months in the City’s history, sticking mostly to the chronology but not neglecting historical context. In a fugue-like way, he returns to certain subjects and themes several times — Berry Gordy and Motown, Henry Ford II, Ford Motor and its advertising campaigns for vehicles like the Mustang, C.L. Franklin, Martin Luther King, and other Civil Rights Movement luminaries, as well as Detroit’s quest for the 1968 Olympics, the behavior of politicians like Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh, George Romney (Mitt’s father), Kennedy, Johnson, and others, and the seminal role of Walter Reuther both in the Labor and Civil Rights movements.
Marannis weaves in stories of less well-known Detroiters, such as a witness, Bob Ankony, to the Ford Rotunda fire, which burned down the fifth most-visited tourist site in the U.S., and chronicles the responses of several people, black and white, who participated in the Detroit Walk to Freedom, led by MLK in the summer of 1963, a peaceful march none of them ever forgot. King followed the Walk, which drew as many as 100,000 people, with a speech in which he first used his “I have a dream” phrase, to be immortalized in the March on Washington later that year. King, of course, dreamed of justice and eventual racial harmony. Maraniss evokes other dreams of the early and mid-60’s — Johnson’s dream of a Great Society free of poverty; the automakers’ dreams of the big money to be made through innovative cars like the Mustang; Berry Gordy, aided by his supportive relatives, and his dream, mostly fulfilled, of producing a fabulously successful Motown sound.
All of these dreams and plans led to complications and sometimes, after the time span of this book, disaster. King’s nonviolent vision was contradicted by more militant leaders such as Malcolm X. Even the planning for his Detroit march was hindered by clashes among various “Negro” factions and questions about the role, if any, that whites should play in the Walk. The dream of racial harmony in Detroit was soon dashed by the 1967 rebellion/riot, and white flight accelerated. Johnson’s Great Society hopes collapsed as the Vietnam war mired us for a decade of discord at home and the death of 50,000 American troops abroad. For this reader, seeing Detroit in the 60’s through the prism of history is sobering, yet I can’t help feeling nostalgic for the idealism of the era, and wish for a rebirth of intelligent solidarity and hope in these days of such deep divisions here in the U.S. and abroad.
Maraniss’s well-researched book provides some surprising factual bonuses. For instance, “The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated.” Pianos were available to middle and working class African-Americans because many had steady, automobile-related jobs and lived in single-family houses as opposed to high-rise projects. Perhaps just as important, Grinnell Brothers Music House was “the largest retail music emporium in the nation” and a “prolific manufacturer of pianos.” Grinnell had a powerful presence in the community, providing pianos for schools and churches, instruments to people of all races and incomes, and had some black employees, as opposed to Hudson’s, which feared the responses of its mostly upscale white clientele if it were to hire black people. Berry Gordy’s extended family had Grinnell-produced pianos.
Maraniss writes in an afterword how he listened to Motown songs as he wrote the book, and it’s full of musical references. In his chapter on C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, preacher and civil rights activist, he refers to the musicality of Franklin’s homilies. C.L. was theatrically effective, nationally known because of his radio show and recordings. Pastor of New Bethel Baptist in Detroit, he would hit a “pick-up” point in his sermons that carried him “from speech to hum to song.” Franklin would hum after every phrase, and finding “a comfortable pitch” would begin “preaching at the pitch of his hum,” a phrase Maraniss uses for his chapter title. One of Franklin’s admirers says “one experiences what might be called black opera…a spiritual art.” Aretha, of course, picked up on some of her father’s cadences.
The last chapter of the book, “Upward to the Great Society,” quotes Johnson’s speech using that phrase, and his description of the Detroit of 1964 as a “herald of hope.” As Maraniss says, “It all looked so promising,” and he gives an aerial view description of the thriving city, with its River Rouge complex churning out Mustangs, Gordy’s Motown studios, Walter Reuther’s Solidarity House, and other landmarks. Many are decaying now, or gone, as the epilogue chapter, “Now and Then,” makes clear. Once in a Great City is a book of contrasts. In the 1962–64 period, these contrasts seem to be held in balance, creative tension between black and white, politician and populace, the urge to preserve and the urge to grow. Looking back from the present, however, the principal contrast is between what might have been, if only we’d had the will and courage as a people, and what is.
David Maraniss is the keynote speaker for the 2016 Harbor Springs Festival of the Book.
