RECESSION IN DETROIT

Chronic Aches Hurt Badly in Hard Times

At intersections along northwest Detroit's Eight Mile Road Negro workmen begin to gather at 6 a.m., waiting in faint hope that somebody will come by and offer a few hours' work. "It's like the numbers game," one man says. "The odds is way against you. But what else can I do? I been out of work since last fall."

WITH the auto industry braked down, Detroit is the U.S.'s most recession-ridden big city (metropolitan pop. 3,650,000). Across the nation unemployment averages 6.7% of the labor force; in Detroit the figure comes to 15.1%. Some 230,000 Detroiters are jobless, and 40,000 of them have run out of unemployment benefits, with the low-seniority, generally unskilled Negroes getting the worst of it. The monthly relief bill runs to $740,000, triple the year-ago outlay. Unemployed workers in debt for cars, furniture and appliances usually find that stores and finance companies are willing to stretch out the payments, but even so, repossessions in the Wayne County Common Pleas Court ran to 1,061 in the first three months of 1958, 18% ahead of last year.

Signs of the hard times are inescapable. A movie house proclaims cheaper admissions for holders of unemployment-compensation cards. Another recently started staying open all night, reviving the Depression custom of letting movie houses serve as places for shelter and a nap. Groceries advertise another depression standby: day-old bread. Restaurant men who used to have trouble finding enough dishwashers and porters now turn away lines of eager applicants. The police report a sharp upsurge in burglaries, thefts, armed robberies. On the other side of the law, a lot more young Detroiters are eager to wear a police uniform. Six months ago the police department had to advertise for recruits; today there is no need for ads--the academy is full.

Amid signs of recession, paradoxical streaks of prosperity show up. Beauty parlors and landscaping firms are thriving. Car sales are radically down, but boat sales are radically up. Movie attendance is skimpy, but the Tigers report brisk preseason sales of baseball tickets.

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Widespread in hard-hit Detroit is a bleak pessimism that contrasts sharply with the city's traditional Midwestern spirit. Detroiters do not count their city as especially beautiful or rich in culture, but they treasure its name for thrust, energy, confidence. Their favorite adjective: "dynamic." For generations young men leaving farms and small towns in the Midwest and the South have headed hopefully for bustling Detroit. One of the city's most cherished residents is a relentlessly optimistic versifier, Edgar Guest.

Today discouragement lurks in the Detroit air. Says a Chrysler veteran who skidded from a full-time skilled job to part-time work on an assembly line: "I come up here from Ohio 20 years ago, and I thought this would be a good place for me. But now I'd tell a young fellow this is one of the poorest damn places in the country for your future."

Detroit's pessimism, like its unemployment, is more than merely a symptom of the U.S.'s current recession. The recession only made chronic trouble acute. Memories of dead or departed auto companies--Hudson, Packard, Kaiser-Frazer--remind Detroiters that trouble in the auto industry can have something to do with bad management. "You know," says a businessman, "when we were the arsenal of democracy, there was a great premium put on inefficiency of operation. The more payroll a company had, the more profit it would make on the cost-plus arrangement. And when the war ended, there was tremendous pent-up demand for what Detroit could produce, and wartime business became even bigger." A University of Michigan economist recently warned that even after the U.S. recession is past Detroit will still have a serious hard core of unemployment to worry about. Basic reason why Detroit is in trouble, apart from the current auto sag: the auto companies have been gradually moving out of Detroit for more than a decade, and not enough new industry has moved in to fill the gaps. And in the remaining auto plants automation is steadily shrinking the need for workers.

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For the city's failure to hold on to the auto industry or attract replacements, many Detroit businessmen blame United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and his close ally, Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams. Reuther, the arguments run, discourages industry by pushing labor costs higher and higher, and Democrat Williams discourages it by committing himself to Big Labor and the ever higher taxes of the welfare state. Says outspoken Harvey Campbell, vice president of the powerful Detroit Board of Commerce: "Businessmen won't talk about it in public. They are afraid of reprisal. They stand behind me and cheer, but that's about all they do."

The hard, glaring fact is that Detroit needs new industry, both to balance the auto industry's piecemeal emigration and to make the city less vulnerable to auto slumps. In February Mayor Louis C. Miriani created a high-level citizens' panel, the Detroit Industrial and Commercial Development Committee, dedicated to "maintaining and improving the economic climate," and its basic aim is to attract new industry.

In trying to persuade businessmen to open plants in Detroit, the newborn committee can point to some valuable assets, notably a pool of skilled labor and a waterside location with access to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence Seaway. Perhaps the only additional asset that Detroit needs is a renaissance of the spirit expressed in the city's double-barreled motto, adopted after a fire nearly wiped out the little town of Detroit in 1805: Speramus meliora. Resurget cineribus--"We hope for better things. It will rise from the ashes."

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