Motor City Breakdown

If you grew up in or around Detroit, as I did in the Eighties, attending the Detroit auto show was basically mandatory. It made no difference if you liked cars or not — I didn't — or if your family worked for one of the automakers. My father sharpened knives and sold restaurant equipment; still, we never owned foreign cars. No one in our neighborhood did. When I moved away and bought a used Corolla, my father, in his thick Italian accent, noted mockingly, "They must be good cars — all the smart people buy them."

My family came from Italy, our neighbor from Tennessee; my dad's friends were other immigrants from Poland, Lebanon, Mexico — all drawn to Detroit, if not explicitly for the auto industry, then because of what the auto industry had come to represent. The cars rolling off the assembly lines were a tangible manifestation of the American Dream, so it was only fitting that the people building those cars would also take on symbolic value. At my Catholic grade school, we made dutiful field trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts to admire Diego Rivera's famous "Detroit Industry" mural, which depicted a Marxist workers' paradise on the floor of a Ford plant. And it wasn't even pure myth. Henry Ford had famously paid his workers an unheard-of $5 a day, and historic benefits concessions wrung by the United Auto Workers had arguably created the modern American middle class.

For this reason, local support for the auto industry, which only seemed to intensify as the Detroit carmakers' fortunes continued to plunge, was more than just home-team loyalty. It was existential. No matter how badly they screwed up, the Big Three — Ford, Chrysler and General Motors — continued to exercise a psychological hold on residents, thanks to their place of importance in the city's history and a sense that, for all of their faults, they had made Detroit great, once, and might do it again.