Robert MacNamara - Part 1

Robert MacNamara, former head of Ford Motor, died July 6th, the same day the Detroit papers reported a judge in New York had agreed to General Motor’s accelerated bankruptcy plan.

The juxtaposition of the two stories reminded me of the last time the two were news. On July 23, 1967, a vice squad team raided the after-hours United Community League for Civic Action in Detroit and discovered it filled with people celebrating the return of two men from Viet Nam. They arrested 82, and five days of raw, undefined anger ensued.

George Romney, retired head of American Motors, was Michigan’s governor and he called in the National Guard. The next day, Lyndon Johnson sent army paratroopers from forces under the control of then Secretary of Defense MacNamara.

At the time, racism was identified as the underlying cause, and there was plenty of evidence to support that conclusion. However, I’ve always thought two other trends crossed that night at the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount.

The United States had always been a manufacturing country without enough labor. Engineers looked for ways to increase productivity with better machine tools, at the same time medicine made it possible for men to retire later. The two forces meant that, not only was the economy not producing as many new jobs, but it was opening existing opportunities at a slower rate.

At the same time corporations continued their efforts to reduce labor, baby boomers began entering the job market. The first wave, those born in 1944 and 1945 would have started looking for those shrinking jobs around 1962. If all the economy had to deal with was the miracle child born towards the end of the war, it might eventually have been able to absorb the surge.

But, couples didn’t stop with one or two children. In my neighborhood, probably a third of families had three and four. That increase would have been hitting the employment offices by 1967. Whenever scarcity is temporarily replaced with a surplus, men feel free to exercise secondary reasons in hiring. Latent bigotry resurfaced when men jockied for the remaining jobs.

The draft was one factor that delayed an awareness of the changing nature of the labor market. At that time, all young men were required to register, and many volunteered for two years in peace-time Germany or Korea. Those who were returning in July, 1967, were the ones who had enlisted just after Johnson had officially started the Viet Nam war escalation on January 31,
1965, but before the nature of that change was known. By 1967, opposition to MacNamara’s draft was increasing, and many were criticizing college deferments as unfair taxes on the poor.

We’ve spent a great deal of time and energy since 1967 trying to deal with problems of prejudice and manning the military, but no time wondering how a nation can survive with more people than it can employ. Even now, some still think that because General Motors and the other auto makers have eliminated so many union jobs, all they have to do is sell more cars, and the drag on the economy will disappear. They still refuse to recognize that going from a world of labor scarcity to one of superfluous people is a major cultural change.