Detroit Flight

People like to blame the decline of Detroit on the movement of Blacks from the south during and after World War II. However, Ford and Dodge had left for Highland Park and Hamtramack before World War I when the state’s Black population was 17,115 and less than a third, 5,741, lived in Detroit. In 1910, Blacks constituted only 1.2% of the city’s population and probably a number worked as servants and menials.

Ford’s move from Mack Avenue to Piquette and Beaubien in 1904 can be explained as the need for a larger tract of land to build the Model T, but it’s hard to believe he couldn’t find something available inside the city when he needed to expand in 1910. It’s also hard to understand why Highland Park and Hamtramack resisted annexation so strongly once Ford and Dodge had relocated unless large tax payers did not want to be part of the city.

There may be two sides to the flight from the city: the things Ford desired and the desires of men who controlled city politics

We know Dearborn and the area around River Rouge were not known for their open democracy in the 1930's when Harry Bennett ran Ford’s security or after the war when Orville Hubbard was mayor. For that matter, we also know Flint’s mayor, Harold Bradshaw, and his police chief, James Wills, were more responsive to Buick’s demands for union busting in 1936 than was appropriate for civic officials.

However, an unwillingness to provide or tolerate paramilitary corporate security were probably not important in 1910. Longer standing conflicts between Detroit area investors and local entrepreneurs may have been more important.

In the 1860's, Eber Ward was experimenting with the Bessemer process at a steel plant in Wyandotte. When he wanted to expand operations, his Detroit investors refused. He moved to Chicago, and his plant there eventually became a founding part of United States Steel.

In the same years, a local butcher, George Hammond, bought the patents for refrigerated rail cars. He too relocated his operations to the outskirts of Chicago in northern Indiana. Later, when cattle from the Great Plains were available, that move would have been logical, but in the 1860's animals still came from places like Ohio.

Detroit lost the steel, meat and some of railcar businesses because of a dysfunctional investor culture in the city. The same kinds of problems plagued Henry Ford. Similar problems may explain why General Motors and Chrysler avoided the area, or why the small companies that remained in the city failed to grow even when they had good product ideas.

I don’t know what was going on when rival automotive speculators were betting against Ford and Durant, but I suspect it drew on long standing cultural traditions that were more important to creating the distaste people held for the city than the later demographic changes.

Notes:
Metzger, Kurt and Jason Booza. "African Americans in the United States, Michigan and Metropolitan Detroit," Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 2002.