Our city store visits detroit, michigan to learn more about its unique history and literary life. For eight years now, we have traveled to u. S. Cities, ringing the literary scene and Historic Sites to our viewers. You can watch more of our visits at the span. Org beauty store tour. Org cities air at the Detroit Museum and we are about to walk into an exhibit called americas motor city. Detroit has been. The motor city capital of the world since at least 1915 when there were over 42 Companies Making cars and another 75 Companies Making parts. While other towns build cars, we built lots of cars. The detroit area enjoyed a wealth of strong manufacturing, a lot of it based in the building of carriage bodies but also in building iron stoves, building Railroad Cars, realworld wheels and the rails that go with them. Understood the manufacturing process but also how to deal with steel, iron, rubber. They had all the engineers, designers and toolmakers and the tools they needed to make an automobile. Let us outside if the first car that troubled on the streets of detroit. What were looking at here looks very much like an oldfashioned wagon. We just dont have a horse in front of it. The horses are sitting inside the vehicle. There is a motorized carriage, a horseless carriage. This was the first car to operate on the streets of detroit. Charles brady king. Henry ford king was the guy who designed the car and designed the engine that went inside of it. There was an unusual engine, a fourcylinder engine, went at the time people were using a double cylinder engine. So it was a very powerful vehicle. Charles brady king and oliver martel, who helped him with the engine drove this thing in detroit. Henry ford was there in a bicycle about 25 feet behind chasing them. Starting in the 1870s and 1880s, people started understanding that you could take a steam engine and apply it to an automobile. Eventually, he was used to do that. Electric cars. Existed before gasoline engines. But a gentleman from grand rapids, also here in michigan, developed a gasoline powered engine and took it to the columbia exhibition in 1893 in chicago. He showed it off to everybody, and a lot of guys from detroit, chicago,ing, milwaukee, cleveland, all of them saw this gasoline engine and all of a sudden the gasoline engine became the most popular way of foreign cars. Probably the biggest. Of them these vehicles into was the lack of decent roads. The bicycle folk, people who enjoyed riding bicycles had started a movement called the good roads movement to make the roads better. For the bicyclists got the roads paved. But what you got outside the city center, which here in downtown detroit would have been just a mile or two around the city, you were back on country roads. And in detroit, it is mostly clay. If it rains, you were in trouble. That was the biggest challenge for early motorists, they were constantly getting stuck in the mud. Charles brady king went on and started the king automobile company, the king car company, and he put out a number of cars. Most of them handbuilt. He adapted the assembly that she hadnt he hadnt abducted the Assembly Line yet. He then went on to sell the company. On the 50th anniversary, he had this replica built so people could see him and he drove this car down the middle of town to show off his big invention 50 years before. So what you are looking at is in car made here in detroit. Ransom some sort of his company, one of the first to get into the business. Ing unfortunately, his factory burned down as he was about to go into production. The only one that survived was the curved dash. 1901. Rted producing it in it became the most massproduced automobile in the United States. He figured out the. Assemblyline. Something that most people credit. Henry ford with. Both of those gentlemen learned about us ambulance from other products massproduced in detroit. He learned from chicago stockyards where they used the Assembly Line to dissemble meat. He brought the Assembly Line to detroit and he started massproducing the curved dash car. It became one of the most popular and most affordable early cars in detroit and into United States. He started his old model works here in detroit, but eventually lost the company and it became an offshoot of the General Motors organization, which was being formed around this time. General motors renamed the oldsmobile, which of course, is a popular brand in the United States for many, many decades. Outdone, ransom returned return to his hometown realnsing and started a oldsmobile, most of them would probably recognize that from the produced, acord he name adapted from a band in the 1970s. There were a number of companies that were trying to get going at this time. Charles brady king was trying to get his company going. There was a Company Called. Mozier which is making beautiful luxury automobiles prior to 1910. Both those companies were out of business as the rest of the detroit auto business started going. Henry ford stumbled through it. The first two of his Companies Went out of business. The second one was taken away from him and eventually end up at into the cadillac motorcar company. So with his third company, Ford Motor Company, he started developing several different models not far from this museum over on pickett avenue. Each one of them had a letter denomination. And fsas doing as and bs and ns. Eventually he got to be there model t, but it was a Long Time Coming before his is this manager said, henry, youve got a good car here lets market it and sell it,. And eventually he did he made most model ts in hyde park. They were turning out thousands , millions of cars during that decade. There was a point in 1915, 1920, when half the automobiles on the roads in the United States were made by the Ford Motor Company in Highland Park. At the time he was making model ts a lot of companies decided it was a great idea. Some of those companies werent necessarily involved initially if automobile manufacturing and that the folks who run the detroit news started to start own company. The guys who had the biggest music store and piano manufacturer in detroit decided to start on automobile company, the Hudson Company, which was basically detroits Large Department store. Like macys or marshall fields. To Hudson Company decided start its ottoman facture with red shafer at the lead. Chargingreal hard leader of the automobile business here in detroit. In 1915, detroit had 42 manufacturing Companies Making automobiles, and another 70 some making parts. We saw in the latter part of the 19 teens, a lot of organizations coming together. Was buying up a lot of companies and incorporating them into the General Motors brand. Ford had isolated his plant in Highland Park and had consolidated his plant in heaven park and it became the largest industrial manufacturing facility in the world. We also had walter chrysler, who was picking up the maxwell and briscoe names and coordinating those into the chrysler brand. Or three of them public of to the top and it became what detroit was on for. Detroit early Industrial History prior to the turn of the last century brought in many immigrants, mostly from western europe figured they settled here and took good jobs and helped build the industries they were involved in. Following the turn of the 19th century, we had quite an influx of people from mediterranean europe,s, from eastern that really helped build detroit into this wonderful melting pot of various neighborhoods, polish neighborhoods, serbian, lithuanian, hungarian, russian, lots of folks who were living amongst each other and working together in the car companies. In fact, i have heard the brooch plant described the rouge plant described as the tower of babel because of all the different messages being spoken on the same assemblyline. Many of those people who came here settled, and their families have worked in the plants for years, many generations one after another. In the 1920s and 1930s, the great migration brought both white and black workers into the factory arena. Black workers tended to be in the dirtier and tougher jobs, in the foundries, in the works. White workers tended to get the assemblyline jobs. During world war ii, much of this changed. A lot of younger guys took off to fight in the war and the whole process within the plant started to include older workers, women, handicapped workers. There was a real change in the dynamic on the factory floor. This dynamic is affected today in the people who are still working in the business. We still have immigrants coming into detroit to work on the automobile business or work for many of the suppliers that either started here or have satellite offices here because it strengthens the automobile business. Detroit is still a very dynamic town as far as the folks who live here in the different backgrounds. It has really given detroit a stronger community. Sometimes there are some battles, sometimes there is some lack of acceptance, but over time, we have worked to get through those problems. What we see behind me here now is an Assembly Line a real sm. This is a body drop portion of the cadillac Street Assembly plants. When the that some dilemmas closed, eight donated this to us and we brought it into the museum and set it up. N actual 1970s era body drop operate. The assemblyline was an idea that had already been established. The choice manufacturer is really took advantage of it to a wonderful degree. When forgot going with his model t, he had efficiency experts who came in and mature his moving assemblyline was of the most efficient way to make a car. Took the number of hours necessary for building on automobile somewhere from 30 to about two hours. It was a tremendous change and it made it possible for henry ford, who had started selling the cars at about 800, to bring that price down to about 500. It made it much more affordable for normal working man to be able to get an automobile. While the assemblyline was rate for the manufacture process, actually turning out a car quickly, they were very tough on the workers who had to be in the factories. The factories themselves changed. When the automobile business got started here, most of the factories were built along the old new england mill style of architecture. They found that that was just not going to work for all the foil, all the big heavy stamping machinery they needed they needed, a different kind of architecture. Albert kahn became the foremost industrial architect in the United States by building is feasible floor for automobile plants. And they got big. The assemblyline took over these big plants. They would employ thousands of people. Up in Highland Park, we got great postcards where every three years, the number of people working there goes up by 10,000. To the point where he has 50,000 employees working in one major plant. These people are working hard. And it is dangerous work. It is very repetitive, they are doing the same thing every day. To day they kind of change up jobs. They come up with economic ways of designing machinery. Back then, there was none of that. Initially, these jobs paid living wages. But then henry ford decided one of the best things he could do if he wanted to get the best workers was to raise the wages. And in 1915, he instituted what was known as the five dollar a day wage. Now, not everybody got five dollars a day. You had to be a very good worker, you had to sign some papers and agree to do some things. Ford would actually send people out to look at your house and make sure you were living in good conditions and taking care of your children, and maybe even going to charge. So the five dollar a day was not for everyone, but it really did change the dynamics of working in detroit. Once people heard about these jobs, they started flowing into town to take them. Initially the people who got those jobs were very often people who worked in other industries. They might have worked in Stone Building or the shipbuilding manufacturing industry, which detroit. N but because ottoman fracturing paid better, they pulled workers from those industries. In the 19181924. Period4, the federal government kind of shut down. It made it harder for Automobile Companies to get those runnable employees feel we had so they started to recruit down south. Going down to the appalachian area recruiting whites and they were pulling blacks out of the hardscrabble farms down in georgia and mississippi and bringing those folks up here. It very much changed the dynamic of the city in detroit. We had a large number of immigrants come many of whom didnt speak english or were firstgeneration english speakers. We also had a number of blacks and whites from the south who brought their own baggage with them. Some of it was good the music, the food was wonderful. Some of the other baggage not so great. The south had a long history of racial discrimination. And in the 1920s, the whites who would come out of appalachian states brought about with them. And detroit had a huge contingent of the ku klux klan here, probably second only to the southern states. We were the northern stronghold. They would have marches down woodward avenue that would include 10,000 people in white robes. They burned crosses on the front lawn of city hall, on the front lawn of the courthouse. They helped get a really bad mayor elected. There was some serious baggage that came up with those folks. It took many, many years until well after world war ii to really start to address those issues. And some of those issues we are still living with today. Voice, aunions are a source of protection. Joel the formation of unions within automobile factories and plants came relatively late. There were enough immigrants here in detroit and people coming in constantly that it was pretty easy to replace either for workers or workers who fought the corporation for pay and days off, things like that. Most workers work six days a week and sometimes would even go in the seventh day for the extra money. It was during the depression when times were toughest in detroit that really the automobile manufacturing workers started pushing back. It was in the 1934, and a 2, growthme period when the of the uaw, the growth of the Teamsters Union in a detroit changed attitudes within the plant. The big strikes were the sitdown strike, but soon after that, there were strikes that kelsey hayes, s chrysler, ford being the last one to go was really quite a contentious change. This was not happy times. Union workers were fighting hard automobile management who didnt want to give up in a control in the plant. They wanted worker bees who would get eight and go home and back. Lk the union guys thought they had a pretty good feel of what was wrong some of the manufacturing, both from the injury standpoint, the pay standpoint and from doing things better. These things turned into battles, fights that involved clubs, actually. We had a couple of clubs loaned to us by the Walter Luther library across the street. These were basically automobile parts that were coopted to be weapons. These were the things that the union guys who were fighting back, who were shutting down these plants, saying, unless we get what we need, you are not going to get your cars. Eventually, cooperation became the byword. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Automobile Union started working with the corporations. The automobile workers the union started supporting both africanamerican and white workers in the same plant. They started getting cooperation from the corporation as to how things were going to run better. Corporations are asking how this could happen. Today, the u. A. W. Folks, the teamsters, the people who work in the plants and the executives are now working together. Unions are now partners in the process. Ring the Auto Industry today in detroit is so much different than it was even 50 years ago. 50 years ago, almost all the cars in north america were built in northeast michigan. Now they are built around the world, in other countries, in other states. There are other countries building. In this area, many other companies that now reside in detroit are from japan or germany. They bring their technology here. Of the big three, ford, General Motors and chrysler, chrysler is now owned by an italian company. There has been a real change in the nature of the business as far as manufacturing goes. The Profit Margins are so thin in design,ency efficiencies in manufacturing, in seo practices, all those things have to be in sale practices, all those things have to be refined for a company to remain viable. Detroit has always had ups and downs. We became a onetrick pony as far as what we hung our hats on for the economics of the city and of course, when there is a recession, the first thing people dont buy is an automobile. We always say if a country catches cold, detroit catches pneumonia. The last recession was really tough on detroit. Ford Motor Company had kind of ceded and consolidated and they were able to ride it out. General motors and chrysler both had took claim bankruptcy to survive and get a bailout from taxpayers. That was really to off on both the eagles and the outlook of people in detroit really tough on both the egos and the outlook of people in detroit. Detroit is doing quite well. Detroit is a different animal. We have dealt with these ups and , incredibly resilient. People who love cars really love cars. And there is an ingenuity, kind of an intuition about how an automobile ought to be made. What it can do for you. This return to either hybrids or electric is really exciting. So it is an exciting time to be in the automobile business, and t