Detroit’s collapse into bankruptcy has been held up by conservatives
as a synecdoche for America’s future under Barack Obama. In its literal
sense, this is totally wrong — Detroit’s troubles are unique in their
severity. In a broader sense, though, there is some truth here. Detroit
is a synecdoche for America — not America’s future, but its past.
Everything that happened in the United States in the middle of
the twentieth century happened in and around Detroit, but moreso. The
enormous mobilization of industry during World War II (“Detroit is
winning the war,” said Joseph Stalin in 1945); that industry’s creation
of the world’s first mass-affluent working class, a place where families
lacking high school diplomas routinely had nice things; and finally the
collapse of that economic paradise and the racialization of American
politics that split the New Deal coalition.
The 1967 riots were an event so traumatic they still hovered over
the city when I grew up there in the eighties. The city burned down,
and kept burning for years and years. The owners of its huge stock of
abandoned, worthless properties would set arson fires, usually using the
cover of “Devil’s Night,” a night-before-Halloween folk holiday of
pranks and vandalism that as a kid I thought was observed everywhere but
turns out to be mainly a Detroit thing. The city would have hundreds of
fires of Devil’s Night, up to 800 a year at its peak.
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