Tara Duffin
This week's reading entailed Thomas Sugrue's chapter on the deindustrialization
in Detroit, Michigan in the1950's. Sugrue is currently a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania in the departments of history and sociology.
Sugrue predominantly focuses on the urban and social history of the 20th
century and has many published articles on the topic. He attended graduate
school at Harvard, where he explained studying 20th-century urban history to be
very unformed as there weren't any senior historians on the subject's faculty.
Therefore, he has structured a lot of knowledge on 20th-century urban history
covering poverty, politics, and race relations. The chapter assigned comes out
of Sugrue's very successful book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis
published by Princeton University Press in 1996. Some of the awards he received
for this book include the Bancroft Prize and the Social Science History
Association's President's Book Award.
In this chapter, Sugrue takes us to the city he grew up in during the
responding changes in employment, wealth, and societal distribution from the
deindustrialization that occurred in the 1950's. He structures the chapter by
depicting four main reasons for Detroit's rapid downfall in industrial
prosperity: capital mobility, automation, labor and tax costs, and federal
policy. Each of these individually can cause a negative impact on an economy,
but when all four worked together to tackle Detroit's industrial success from
the inside out, it not only put an end to Detroit being the main automobile
powerhouse city, but it damaged the city's overall economy and left behind
thousands of unemployed workers, much economical distress, and huge gaps in
racial equality.
With advances in information technology, economic
downswings, and the expansion of low-wage regions in the South, capital
mobility became a major reason Detroit's prospering industries plummeted.
Automation caused workers' positions to be replaced by machines and almost all
entry-level positions no longer existed. As capital mobility and automation
took its toll on Detroit, the city could only raise their property taxes and
lower wages to help try and boost the economy. And furthermore, federal
policies encouraged decentralization to keep large industries out of central
cities in case of air-attacks in the postwar years. All four of these reasons
that fueled economic failure in Detroit, in turn, caused massive societal and
racial gaps in the city as almost everyone was negatively affected, but much
more significantly, the African American population. Sugrue makes these gaps an
important focal point in this article because it helps explain how the large
racial disparities that he grew up with originated and came to being. In the
chapter he writes, " the transformation of Detroit's economy is best
understood from a long-term perspective" (127) and he portrays these
explanations to help justify the structural roots to Detroit's urban poverty
and inequality.
Many significant historians and professors, such as Kenneth
Kusmer whom has taught American history in Pennsylvania, Germany, and Rome, not
only accept Sugrue's perspectives on racial and class divisions, but fully
admire his research for "demonstrating conclusively that many of the
problems of racial and class division that mar today's postindustrial city
existed much earlier, and were far more complex than many other historians'
accounts contend for".
Sources:
http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/sugrue.html
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/reviews_in_american_history/summary/v025/25.4kusmer.html
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