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Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Michael McCullough about his book titled Build Building a Social Contract. Modern Workers houses in early 20th century Detroit, published by Temple University Press in 2023. Taking us literally inside modern workers houses in, as the title suggests, Early 20th Century Detroit. Because this was a really key site for all sorts of things in this time period, not just for Detroit, but for a lot of places in the United States around what it was to be a worker, what it was to be modern, what that meant in terms of being American, what that meant in terms of family relations. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things here that is all kind of tangled up in, yes, like physical construction of some buildings, but also the people involved and how they got there and how they lived and what they did with those houses. It turns out by focusing on what sounds like a kind of very straightforward thing of like the houses that workers live in, we can unearth a whole bunch of ways in which people lived a decent number of decades ago. So, Mick, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you very much, Miranda. I'm glad to be here.
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I'm very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off with introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Mick McCullough and I am an architecture professor at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And I, you know, I've, I've, my career has been a sort of a, a winding path in the sense that I began as an architect and designer and only later became very fascinated with sort of urban and social history. And now today I get to teach in, in sort of both, both areas, in the areas of design and history. And you know, in terms of, you know, why I decided to write this book, it actually, it goes back to my days as an architecture student living in Detroit in the, in the late 90s. And you know, I, I loved my architectural history studies in, in that period, but it was definitely learning the canon, you know, and the modern canon, you know, taught me, taught me a, a great deal about what it meant to, to be modern in the early 20th century, 20th century. But it, it didn't really give me satisfying answers for why the city of Detroit where I lived sort of looked the way that it did with it, with its, you know, sort of heavy predominance of single family and duplex frame houses, closely spaced, it's sort of wide spread out area. And you know, and so in that context I, I was sort of looking for a more, you know, a more in depth social and urban kind of understanding of how the place came to be. You know, not least because the place was in a kind of a crisis and you know, there was a lot of concern both among scholars and within communities about vacant housing and arson. And so to try to understand the place and how it came to be, you know, fascinated me from those early days. And I, I ultimately by, by pursuing the Ph.D. in, in the early 2000s and, and writing this book was able to, to really dig into it.
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B
I always love it when books and whole projects come out of sort of. Hang on a second. What's going on here? Right. That kind of curiosity driven approach is, I think, so fruitful. So let's pursue that. Let's go back in time to the early 20th century. Why did so many people want to move to Detroit? And what were some of the paths and challenges that people had to navigate to get from those various places to Detroit in this moment?
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E
Yeah, and that was, that was a really important question for me because I believe that, you know, to understand the meaning of these houses, you really have to understand the paths that people took, the risks that people took making their way to Detroit in this period. And you know, I guess maybe as a, as a start, you know, it's important to say that, that Detroit was one of many industrial cities in, in late 19th and early 20th century that was receiving a lot of migration and immigration. And you know, this, this had to do with perceptions that the, that there was lots of economic opportunity in these cities, perceptions around the world of that opportunity, and also perceptions by persecuted religious groups like, like Catholics, Polish Catholics and, and Russian Jews, for example, who were seeking the, the possible freedoms that they could find in these cities. And so, you know, Detroit, even before the automobile industry began to take off in the 1910s, Detroit was already, you might say, a city of immigrants where three quarters of the population was either born elsewhere or their parents were. And then the influx of immigrants and then migrants from around the country to Detroit only accelerated in the 1910s when sort of mass, early mass production processes like the moving assembly line and so forth started to increase the productivity of the auto industry in an exponential way. And so there, there was a sense of great opportunity in this, in this particular place.
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B
And when we talk about people kind of, right, whenever we talk about movement, there's kind of push and pull factors. So we're, if we're talking about religious discrimination, that would be they're wanting to leave wherever they are. What sorts of is it that Detroit is kind of shiny and therefore it's worth the challenges to get there? Like, I don't know, maybe you can give us some examples of people moving to Detroit.
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E
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so it's, it is, it's, it's a place of great economic opportunity, you know, and, and you know, some of the, one of the stories that, that I read was from an oral history of an African American man who came up from, from the American south. And he, you know, he actually wanted to keep his expenses low. So he, he, he sort of ended up riding on the back of a truck, you know, and, and jumping off as he, as he came in through, through Detroit. And, and so the idea was to, it was to get to a place where you could earn a lot more. And you know, but it wasn't, it wasn't determined yet for that man or for any, you know, or for, for, for many of these folks how long they would stay or what the depth of their commitment to the city of Detroit would be, because it was a, it was in many cases, as I say, the pursuit of an economic opportunity. You know, there are, there are a couple of Polish brothers who I mention in the book, and, you know, they both come to the United States seeking industrial work. One stays and one goes home because, you know, because one found more economic opportunity, the other found less. And, and so, you know, by studying migrants and their paths and immigrants and their paths to a city like Detroit, you, you start to realize that, you know, those who ultimately stayed in Detroit really did have to be won over, if you will, or to, to become convinced of, of, you know, that, that it was, you know, a good deal for them. Right. Because. Because there are many other industrial cities in the US that are competing for these workers and there's a lot of pull to return home, you know, if, if you can, for, for a lot of people. So, yeah, these. That gives us a bit more of a sense of those push and pull factors.
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B
Yeah, no, that's definitely key to emphasize. As you said, it's not like people definitively knew we're going here and we'll be here forever. Right. There was a lot of kind of unce or seasonal work or we'll see how this goes. Right. Which is helpful to understand. The other aspect, of course, is then these were people coming from many different places. Some of some people were coming from other places in the US they were already American. But you talk in the book that there were lots of people coming from outside the US and so there were efforts to, quote, unquote, Americanize the workers. Why was this a big deal for both the workers, but also the employers?
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E
Yeah, that's a great question. I should add just in passing that my own great grandfather came from a maple syrup farm in Ontario when ford announced the $5 day in Detroit. And so myself and a lot of other folks are tied to this legacy of being drawn, drawn to Detroit. But you know, the, the on, on the question of Americanization, I think this was, this was a period of, of, of, of, as I say, a city of immigrants, but it was also a prosperous city in the waning years of the progressive era. And so, you know, middle class folks, including, you know, some of the people that came to work in, in sort of corporate sociological work, you know, with, with Ford Motor Company and others, they, they had an earnest desire to uplift the poor and the migrants that, that they saw in their midst by introducing them to the sort of, the merits of their, of their sort of middle class perspective on American ways of life. You know, and, but, so, so there was that motivation, but on the other hand, there was also a lot of, a lot of fear and a lot of need on the, on the point, on the, from the standpoint of the employers who they were, they were building up their operations rapidly. They needed a lot of employees to sort of maximize the potential of these new operations and they were asking people to do very difficult jobs. And so, you know, it became clear with really high turnover in some of the auto factories in the early years that that more needed to be done to incentivize people to be committed to Detroit and to be committed to this kind of work. And so Americanization was in a sense a bid at what we might call social control, that is a bid to get immigrant workers on the side of the employer and this place, Detroit, and sort of committed to the work in that context. And so it ended up, it ended up offering, you know, in some, for, for many workers a kind of an offer they couldn't refuse in the sense that, you know, most notably Ford, but also elsewhere as, as employers began to rapidly increase the wages that they were willing to offer. And they, but they offered it with the catch that you have to engage with these Americanization activities if you're not a citizen and if you don't speak English as a first language, you know, and, and you also, you have to subject yourself to scrutiny by the company to see that you're spending the, the industrial wages that you're earning in a way that, that fits a sort of an ideal of a, of a thrifty and committed worker, you know, and so I don't, you know, I don't take the, the view that, that, that workers all sort of bought into this, you know, in a complete sense. In fact, you know, there's, there's funny examples in the book of, of workers trying to sort of outsmart the, the inspectors and make it look like they are married in order to get, you know, extra benefits that they wouldn't otherwise get. But in any case, you know, even though it was, it was intrusive or, or even though it was pushing them to, to spend their evenings in a classroom learning English language and learning, learning to be, you know, a quote unquote, real American. They you know, many did this because the, the benefit economically was enormous. And, and, and of course, you know, as I said, that primary driver for a lot of folks to be in Detroit.
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B
Yeah, that's really interesting to kind of imagine those classrooms late at night on top of an intensive workday. But what do these sorts of programs and efforts mean in terms of norms of housing?
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E
Yeah, so this is really interesting because I think, you know, when I first began to study this, you know, I assumed or I took sort of the language classes, the English language classes sort of as at face value as being primarily about teaching, you know, workers how to communicate well on the shop floor and so forth. But you know, as I started to dig into it, I started to realize that both in the Ford Motor Company's English classes and in the citywide classes, there were actually you find evidence of, of sort of American living standards and, and even sort of specific calls for the, the single family detached house as, as the proper type of house. You see these being threaded into the language class itself and into the, the, the citizenship manual itself. So you know, the, the instruction about what it meant to be American in this context was instruction about the value of a modern house and, and also about the value of ownership of a house. And so again, it, you know, it was, it, it was an opportunity to, to encourage a kind of an investment in the place and in the work. You know, I guess another thing that is, is sort of also worth spending a little time with is, is the, is the, the famous sociological department that the Ford Motor Company created. And this was, this was a group of illiterate workers who were tasked with making house calls to make sure that, that all of the workers that were receiving the special $5 day wage and, and, and profit sharing deal that, that they were all living according to the housing standards that were set forth in the program's manual. And the program's manual, you know, explicitly describes the kind of, the kind of house the, the sort of the detached house with the indoor, with the indoor three fixture bath bathroom. And, and, and you know, so this, this was the way that the wages were earned was by demonstrating that the money is going toward kind of a, a transformation of oneself into, into an American in a modern house.
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That'S interesting to see such a direct link between these goals of, you know, ideas of good worker and Americanization and houses. So thank you for helping us understand those connections. This isn't just happening in Detroit though. Can we do a comparison for a moment around sort of housing availability and quality and the importance of this for the success of Detroit, but also places like London and Berlin.
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E
Yeah, thank you for that that question. So you know, one of the things that that one of the greatest pleasures of writing the book was to to, to work on the kind of question of the transatlantic comparison of of interwar housing policies. And and you know, it was I I really learned a lot comparing London and Berlin to Detroit, especially in the context of of studying architecture and architectural history. Because what you see in in London in Berlin and but but less so much less so in Detroit is the rise of centralized planning and architectural design as as being a sort of a a central player in the development of workers housing in this period. In other words, architecture took up housing in this period as it, as it never had before. And in in places, places like the UK and, and like Germany, this this was, this was part of a larger. I mean, I should say this. You know, at the end of World War I, there, there was radical change on, on both sides of the Atlantic. You know, there were revolutions in Germany and Russia. There were soldiers returning home in England and, and the U.S. and, and in the U.S. there, there was a sort of a, a, there was this, there was the opportunity for this great industrial expansion and, and, but, but all of this, all of this potential change, you know, it calls into question the social contract. It calls into question, you know, what what do we, you know, what do we owe one another or you know, what does, what, what are your rights vis a vis housing as a citizen of, of one country in another country? And so you know, we see, we see for example in, in, in Germany in the, in the interwar period, the Weimar Constitution, the new, the new constitution that's established offers housing as, as a right of citizenship, which is, which is something that, that, you know, has never been the case here in the United States. In England you saw housing that that was, that was pursued through centralized planning designed by architects and it was offered under, under the, the banner of homes fit for heroes. And so the idea that in the post war period there, there was a sort of a new paradigm of the state taking a role in making sure that that housing was available in, in, in quality and in quantity. That was, that was fitting for, for, you know, for, for a modern nation and for, for returning soldiers in particular. You know, so all of the, so in, in, in each of these places there, there's a reconsideration of who's responsible for, for the modernizing of housing. And we can also say that in each of these places because the war had disrupted the construction of housing, each of these places was behind in terms of the development of housing, you know, because during the war years things had been disrupted. And so there's this, there's this sense of seizing the opportunity of the, of the secession of conflict to, to modernize and, and including in, in terms of modernizing the relationships between people, their government and, and the the, the, the kind of housing they can expect.
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B
So this is really interesting because of what you're explaining. There is very clearly some similarities in terms of the kind of political. I don't want to go so far as problems, right, Problems and opportunities, I suppose political changes that are happening in all three of the places. And yet as you described there, the solutions they come up with are really Different? Why?
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E
Yeah, it's a great question. So, so you know, in the, in, in the German case and in the UK we see as I say, the embrace of, of centralized planning. That is to say, you know, the, the, the London city government develops an architect's office that is able to, that's able to acquire land and to, and to propose designs over a large area. I look at the, at the case of one of the earliest developments called ro and and so the, the idea that, that, that through government planning and design this, the better, this better kind of modern housing can be provided over a large area and that, that by planning the, the, the benefits of this housing can be so much greater. You know, the idea that we can preserve park space, that we can integrate things like garden allotments or a place for a school or you know, small, small community parks, that we can be more efficient with the distribution of roads and utilities and so forth, that we can make the environment more beautiful. You know, especially in the spirit of sort of the garden city and the sort of, the, the continued influence of sort of arts and crafts, you know, vernacular architectural references, these kinds of things were brought to bear in Roehampton to make a sort of a cohesive and sort of aesthetically pleasing environment that also we can say through its sense of cohesion also sort of spoke to the fact that this was a social project. This was about the kind of housing that could be broadly expected. You know. And by contrast, you know, in, in the German case we see a lot of the same principles of planning by quasi governmental entities design over a large area in order to, to integrate green spaces and shared common amenities, you know, shared laundries and so forth. But in Germany it's the case I'm looking at, it's happening a little bit later on account of the later sort of economic recovery from the war. And it's also happening with a lot more of the influence of capital M modernism. And so you begin to see rather than the sort of row houses that we see in the London case, we see larger multi story walk ups that are set in, you know, not in sort of along romantic winding streets but instead along an almost a grid like array of housing blocks. And then, then by contrast with both of those where planning was central in the United States, we actually see a turn in the other direction, which is to say in the Post World War I era in the United States, policymakers turn away from direct government involvement in housing design and construction, which you know, they had done some of during the war, but they turn away from it in the 1920s under the theory that. That it would promote, you know, sort of the. The independence of. Of individual households and promote the the sort of the economic activity of private actors. If if the government, you know, quote unquote stays out of the way of the. Of. Of the. Of the modernization of. Of housing in cities and let's, and, and lets speculative building sort of solve the housing shortage, if you will. And so that, so, you know, in the broadest sense, you might say that in, in these, in these European cases, we're seeing, you know, as sort of a, an embrace of housing as, as a sort of a social project. Whereas in, in the case of Detroit, which is representative of American policy in the period, you see a sort of an embrace of the individual household's pursuit of. Of their. Of their house in a. In a market system.
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B
So interesting to have this comparative perspective because it is such kind of very different sol or initiatives for the same kind of goals, which is really interesting. Is there anything further we need to understand then about why this kind of post World War I, 1920s moment is a boom period for housing in Detroit?
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E
Well, you know, it's, I think it's important to, to sort of look at it in, in sort of a global economic perspective that when we come out Of World War I, the United States is on an exceptionally fast economic growth trajectory and Detroit and other major industrial places where, where sort of new mass production methods and so forth are being used, these places have an extraordinary economic momentum in this period. And so one of the things that, that, you know, for all, for all the flaws that. That many, that many have observed in Detroit's sort of speculative housing from this period, you know, for the, for all the lack of coordination, let's say, you know, as compared with what we saw in England and in Germany with these other cases, the, the. The Detroit home building and speculative real estate market really did perform in the sense that they were able to accelerate their. Their, their production of houses very rapidly. And, and you know, this is accounted for, among other things by the, by the extraordinarily robust economic growth that, that provided the, you know, the capital and the, and also the, the. The population growth, you know, and so on and so forth. And so it was, it was a moment of. Of of huge opportunity as these new technologies around production were sort of supercharging the economy. And so it allowed this, this speculative building project to really take a boom, a boom sort of character of rapid growth.
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B
So that obviously explains the supply side of things building all the houses. But Then there's, of course, the question of convincing workers to move into them. So how did that go?
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E
Yeah, well, so, you know, went. It went well for, for a time. Right. And so the, the. The one of. One of the really kind of interesting stories to tell and to think through in in with the book is, is the real estate basically. The the kind of the marketing language and the kind of. The kind of stories that that, you know, developers and. And real estate agents were. Were offering to sort of help encourage people to take up their products. Right? And I mean, of course, with a, with a rapidly growing population and a housing shortage, you know, everyone needs a place to live. And so there's, there's that. That helps to drive demand. But this was definitely a moment when because of this, this sort of the rising wage in the context of Detroit there and, and all of these sort of new messages about, about the modern house being. Being possible, being something that, that, that a worker could and should aspire to. You know, workers were invited to and they did become savvy consumers, if you will, of, of this. Of the speculative housing landscape. And so, you know, some of the, one. Some of the stories I love from the book are the, the various ways that. That, that real estate developers and their agents sought to encourage workers to, to buy a house in Detroit. For example, you know, taking, taking families from rural Appalachia who just. Just appear in the city and taking them for a fancy dinner at a hotel in downtown Detroit before bringing them out to the, to the sort of the muddy outskirts where the development is being built to sort of. To demonstrate that this house was a way to get a foothold in this, you know, sort of dynamic and aspirational place, you know, or in the, in the, in the mid-1910s, when automobiles were still, you know, relatively rare, picking up prospective buyers downtown and taking them for a drive out to the subdivision and sort of the thrill of. Of, you know, of getting in a big car with, with an agent and going and looking at a possible future there. So there was, there was a, there was a lot of excitement and there were also. There were a lot of. Of sort of sometimes contradictory messages. You know, there were messages offered in the Polish language press that specifically were encouraging Polish workers to. To live in. In the Polish district around Hamtramck and Northeast Detroit and to, to live among their countrymen and to, to gain, you know, to gain wealth and independence living among their countrymen. Whereas others were making the case that you shouldn't be too worried about living with your family. You should look actually instead for a, a place of a higher social caliber in another neighborhood. So you know, don't stay in the old neighborhood, move further out where your children will be surrounded by, you know, higher class influences and so forth forth. So there, there was you know, there were, there were, there was various ways in which you know, a better life were could be imagined and, and, but, but definitely a sense of of, of sort of social betterment or climbing the ladder of sort of the of of upward mobility was was on offer. And and I should say, you know, not least among among these these sales pitches was the possibility of sort of if you will, gaming the dynamics of the real estate market to buy a property at a low price at the periphery with the expectation that as growth continues outward the value of your proper and that you might in a sense break the cycle of being reliant on wages by building wealth through real estate appreciation.
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- [39:34]
B
This is very clearly being set up then as a dream, an accessible dream and shiny and glamour. I mean, I love the idea of kind of come eat a fancy restaurant and then we'll take you to the mud. But was this offered to all workers or was it only certain kinds of workers that were being sort of courted in this way?
- [39:54]
E
Yeah, it's a good question. And so that one of the things that is, is very important to understand about, about the development of Detroit in this period is that, is that this real estate market was one that, that saw racial segregation as, as of primary importance and, and you know, was very openly embracing as a matter of professional ethics the idea that, that, you know, real estate agents would not seek to, to create racial integration in neighborhoods. You know, and so there, this was this, this is one of the sort of the tragedies of Detroit's growth in this period is that the city needed the work of both black and white workers and drew both black and white workers from, from, you know, from the American south, for example, to its city. It, it only offered the sort of the full social contract with, with the modern house to white workers, you know, and, and only, only in, in rather rare cases did African Americans find a way into these spaces and create spaces of their own in this, in this fashion of the modern, modern subdivision in.
- [41:26]
B
Terms of making spaces their own. That's kind of something else I wanted to ask about because obviously having read the book, I got to see some of the images included. But even in this purely audio medium, I think listeners can have a pretty decent sense of the sorts of things we're talking about when we're looking at kind of mass build subdivisions, a sort of row upon row of the pretty identical looking houses. So for any of the workers who got these houses, could they make them their own? Like how much agency did the workers have to kind of go yes, this is my house now and I'm going to show that somehow.
- [42:04]
E
Yeah, I love that question. I mean this is one of the things that for me was one of the great pleasures of exploring the book was you know, because, because the you know, the forward sociological investigations and in some of these stories they, they're often told and you know, with good reason as a kind of a top down story of the powerful shaping the culture. But what's been important for me in in studying this was to take. To take seriously the idea that, that you know, while workers did not they, while they had limited agency, limited autonomy, they they definitely had room to navigate different opportunities, different kind of narratives for what the good life looked like. And, and, and so to, to include the, the agency of workers themselves in the shaping of this place has been. Has been really important for me. I mean from maybe connecting this conversation to the question of ownership. That was one of the biggest. One of the big questions that many workers faced is, you know, whether or not to try for ownership in this context of a, you know, a world in which the, what you know, today is the, the ubiquitous 30 year amortized loan. This was not available in this period. So you know, a work, a work. A working class household could choose to rent and to get themselves into a sort of a better social context or and maybe a more comfortable and better made house without getting involved in ownership. Whereas on the other hand some workers, you know, lacking the funds to to get that idealized modern house and to own it, they they found ways of. Of through self building and or through. Through buying much more spartan and unmodern houses at the, at the periphery. They they went that route preferring ownership over sort of maximizing the, the, the modernness of their house. There are, and so there are those sort of economic strategies. There's also a lot of cultural choice and cultural strategy around the way that we see. We see a sort of a patchwork of cultural affiliations in these neighborhoods. Some are strongly ethnic in their orientation. Detroit has in this period had two large and quite cohesive Polish districts, for example. And so you know, a question that, that, that a working working class household would ask themselves is whether to. Whether to stay within the sort of co. Ethnic enclave as it expanded out and as, as modern housing became a part of it or whether to move into, let's say more of a multi ethnic peripheral community that, you know, a more, more of a quote unquote American community that that that had more of an association based on class than on. Than on ethnicity. I also, I also would, you know, want to. Want to zero in on the house and the, the sort of the, the grounds around the house themselves as sites where a lot of satisfaction and agency can be. Can be seen in in oral histories and other documents from the period. You know, of course there's a, there's a variety of cultures of, of the care and the outfitting of the home and, and there's wonderful stories in the book about, you know, the, the kind of. The care that some families took to plant flowers in the spring or to keep. Keep the, the. The yard tidy, you know, or to grow vegetables of a certain kind in the yard. The, the. This is borne out of course, you know, as, as cameras are becoming. Becoming more common, you start to see the sort of. The ubiquitous family photograph honorifically made in front of the house, right? With a, with the well tended front of the house being. Being a sort of an honorific location to sort of record the family together for posterity. You know, maybe one last thing I could, I could go on about this, but the, you know, these houses, while the, while the, the sort of. The speculatively built Detroit Detroit subdivision has relatively few different types of bungalows and duplexes, they're actually in terms of their outfitting and their technologies and what's inside, there's actually a lot of a la carte, if you will, difference between what one household has and what another household has. You know, if you think about, if you think about the Roehampton development in London or the, the Hazel Horse development in Berlin, these, these other cases I was talking about earlier, the, the intention, the, the sort of. The social intention was to provide everyone in these developments with good basic amenities like indoor bathrooms and you know, good ventilation and comfortable air, including. Including often central heating and so on and so forth. In Detroit, houses could be outwardly very similar to one another, but you know, some are still relying on stove heat and others have been upgraded with a central heating furnace system that you, you shovel coal into in the basement. You know, some may have that three fixture bath which was becoming the standard and, and others did not. You know, so this was a period when you could have a family who had, you know, a, A, a refrigerator or an ice box as it were. You know, maybe a used Model T in the front yard, but they still don't have the indoor bathroom, you know, because they, that that piece hasn't been upgraded yet. And so there's a lot of choice around the use and the outfitting of the interior of the house. You know, new modern furniture bought on installment payments or should we make do with the old stuff, should we buy something that, that is used and fix it up, you know, etc. Etc. So these houses were places where, where people could really invest in, in making them their own in those ways.
- [49:35]
B
Those are some really great examples. I know I could keep you here for hours telling us more, but thank you for giving us a sense of the way in which workers engaged with their houses to bring this all together. Then what does this mean for the social contract between hard work and home ownership that we've been talking about Once Maybe times aren't so great going into the 1930s. Does everything you've told us about fall apart?
- [50:00]
E
Yeah. So the, so the book, as you suggest the book ends with the period of struggle that emerges in the early 1930s amidst the global depression. And my framing of this period in sort of social and economic history in Detroit is captured in this idea of the social contract, which is to say that during the, during the growth years of the 1910s and 20s, you saw a real reshaping of what a working person could expect out of their role in society and the implicit understanding that a sense of security and upward mobility in modern houses, whether they were bought or rented, that if you worked hard, you could move into those paths of upward mobility. And one of the things that is demonstrated by the fallout of the Depression in the early 1930s, when so many workers in the city lose their jobs and unemployment is widespread. And is that the prosperity and the, if you will, the terms of the social contract made, made in the, in the preceding couple of decades, they came under, under great stress and came, came under question. It, it, it was determined in this period, we can say that, that they were built on weak foundations. And so when, when employers all, you know, begin to lay off the workforce, as I, as I, as I explain in the book, the city government steps in and, and tries to, you know, step into the breach, as it were, and to provide welfare, to outfit unemployed workers with small jobs like selling apples to create what they called thrift gardens where workers could, you know, plant staples and, and, and, and develop, you know, a line of, of subsistence produce that they could, that they could, that they could eat. But also, you know, importantly for, for the city leaders who created this program that amidst this mass unemployment where people, you know, who have, who have given, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 years to this project of hard work for upward mobility are suddenly without work. And so these, these gardens were places that were meant to sort of keep people working, keep people invested in, in, you know, however modest a way to keep them invested in this notion of, of work and its rewards being the path forward. And so, you know, one of the, in the, in the longer term, one of the biggest changes that comes out of this period of crisis is the rise of the industrial labor movement and demands on the part of organized industrial workers that they're, that, that the, the upward mobility that they work for the, you know, the houses they work for, that they, that those are insured in, in the sense of, you know, things like unemployment insurance, things like labor contracts that, that, that make it more difficult to hire and fire, you know, at will that secure decent wages, Social Security to protect workers as they age out of certain professions. So the, this, this I, you know, the, the sort of, the experiment if you will, of the social contract of the 1910s and 20s demonstrated that, that this formula of hard work leading to upward mobility in modern houses only works if the risks of that, the downside risks of that are protected by, by workers actually having not just wages, but political power and, and, and, and therefore the ability to, to share in the risks of the, of the larger economy.
- [54:57]
B
That's a very important lesson to understand from this history. Thank you for summing up, concluding our discussion about the book with that. I do, however, have a final question. The book, as I mentioned right at the beginning, came out in 2023, so it's been off your desk for a little bit. Is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a brief sneak preview of, even if it's not a book?
- [55:18]
E
Yeah, thanks so much for that question. It's true. I have the pleasure at, at this moment of sort of beginning to build up a new longer term research project while still being able to, you know, reflect on and share the Detroit research. So my new, my new project is, is actually taking a look at a question that, that maybe sort of begins with my 1920s Detroit research, but, but sort of pulls on a different thread and that is, you know, where do the materials that go into the mass production of something like a Model T come from? And, and what is the larger sort of social and environmental significance of, of the use of those materials? And so the, the thread that I've been pulling on lately is to follow the timber that was actually that that was harvested in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan by the Ford Motor Company. And to trace the the a much longer history of, if you will, the commodification of the land in, in rural northern Michigan for, as I say, logging, but also for mining. And so I've become very interested in the sort of the 19th century period of American colonization of this sort of remote northern region and the work of missionaries and government agents and fur traders and so forth in sort of preparing the land to become real estate, if you will, and to become, to become something that could be commodified and then fed into industry in the, in the latter half of the 19th and then into the 20th century.
- [57:17]
B
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Hopefully it becomes a book and you can come back and tell us more.
- [57:23]
E
I'd love to. Thanks so much.
- [57:26]
B
While you are working on that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Building a Social Contract, Modern Workers, houses in early 20th century Detroit, published by Temple University Press in 2023. Mick, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [57:41]
E
Thank you, Miranda.