Monday, September 22, 2014

Article Report: Sugrue

"The Damning Mark of False Prosperities": The Deindustrialization of Detroit --Thomas Sugrue

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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