Detroit — When Eva Nelson-McClendon first moved to Detroit’s Birwood Street in 1959, she didn’t know much about the wall across the street. At 6 feet tall and a foot thick, it wasn’t so imposing, running as it did between houses on her street and one over. Then she started to hear the talk.

Neighbors told her the wall was built two decades earlier with a simple aim: to separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land with plans to build.

“That was the division line,” Nelson-McClendon, now, 79, says from the kitchen of her tidy, one-story home on the city’s northwest side. “Blacks lived on this side, whites was living on the other side. … That was the way it was.”

That’s not the way it is anymore. But the wall remains, a physical embodiment of racial attitudes that the country long ago started trying to move beyond.

And slowly, in subtle ways, it is evolving into something else in its community, something unexpected: an inspiration.

To those in the know, it goes by different names. For some, it’s simply “The Wall.” Others call it “Detroit’s Wailing Wall.” Many like “Birwood Wall,” because it refers to the street and sounds like the “Berlin Wall.”

It’s still a half-mile long, interrupted only by two streets, much as a developer envisioned it in the early 1940s. It couldn’t separate people on its own — people and policies would see to that — but it was enough to satisfy the Federal Housing Administration to approve and back loans.

Aside from the mural that appears at the wall’s midpoint, much of it is easy to miss. In fact, it’s impossible to follow it completely as the wall disappears behind homes and in spots is overgrown by vegetation. Where it’s exposed, it’s whitewashed or a drab earth tone — and sometimes marred by gang graffiti. On one corner it says, “Only 8 Mile,” referring to the divisive road just yards to the north.

The wall never fell, but it didn’t really have to. The area became primarily African-American in the decades to come, as most whites and even many blacks left. The pattern was replicated across much of the 139-square-mile city that was built for two million people but fell to about 700,000 in the 2010 Census.

The story of the wall has been largely lost in larger narratives, such as the 1943 and 1967 race riots and Eight Mile Road. The wall ends, almost invisible, just shy of the thoroughfare that serves as the boundary between Detroit and its suburbs and symbolically represents the divide between black and white.

Race remains a flashpoint in a city beset by an interrelated stew of crime, corruption and high unemployment. And some accuse the state of further disenfranchising Detroit’s majority black population as Michigan’s governor recently declared a financial emergency in the city and the state took financial control.

Still, the wall is not forgotten. An artist descended on it several years ago with an army of about 100 fellow artists and community volunteers to create a vast, eye-popping mural with images and messages of equality and justice on a section overlooking a playground. And now, a faith-based nonprofit is giving work to men who have struggled to keep a job or a home, having them make sets of coasters that incorporate images from the wall and use materials from abandoned homes that were razed in the city. Every sale of a $20 set of coasters helps to make something good out of something bad.

“It’s recycling, giving jobs to people who are having a tough time with unemployment and, at the same time, creating a very nice piece of art that could and should lead to some great discussions about race in the city of Detroit and in our country,” says Faith Fowler, director of Cass Community Social Services and its Green Industries program.

In this 1941 photo, children are shown standing in front of half mile concrete wall in Detroit. The wall was built with a simple aim: separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land with plans to build in the neighborhood.
(John Vachon / Library of Congress, Associated Press)

Tightly clustered one-story homes dominate the neighborhood around the wall, which still has well-kept houses like Nelson-McClendon’s but also suffers from a rising number of vacant, gutted structures. More tear-downs in the making. And, perhaps, more wood for the coasters.

The homes on Birwood end at Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, where the eye is immediately drawn to the massive mural.

It’s impossible to take it all in at once, but certain images pop out in a slow pan: Rosa Parks boarding the bus that would make her a household name in the civil rights struggle, followed by a man carrying a sign that says, “Fair Housing.” Houses and more houses of all colors. A group of men singing a capella under a streetlight. Children blowing bubbles that pop up throughout the wall and contain various things, including an auto plant and words like “peace” and “flowers.”

“Bubbles are a form of creation. Children’s imaginations create the future,” says Chazz Miller, the artist who designed the mural and teamed up with the Motor City Blight Busters in 2006 on the community project. “Also, bubbles capture images and distort them and give you a new perspective.”

Creating a new perspective was part of Miller’s goal with the mural, but he knew the wall had to delve into the past for those who didn’t know history. He took them back to the early migration of blacks in Detroit, including to the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, which had been nearby and was named after the 19th century abolitionist and women’s suffragist. When the project opened, blacks moving in were harassed and assaulted, and many view the event as a catalyst for deadly riots the following year.

“Sojourner Truth is coming out of the underground railroad at the very beginning of the wall,” Miller says, pointing to the picture that’s now behind a fence on private property. “And in the very tiny corner there’s a Ku Klux Klansman that’s pissed because she got away, and he has a burning cross.

“Of course, she has a light — and the light symbolizes leading the way,” Miller says.

Not that the path forward would be bright and easy. Competition for housing and jobs between white and blacks was widespread in the city’s boom years. Many blacks had moved into the area in the 1920s and 1930s because there was so much vacant land — a far cry from the overcrowded, unpleasant conditions in the two black enclaves near the city center. But a lot of white housing developments started spreading north as well and “pushing up against this black enclave on the far edge of the city,” says Jeff Horner, a lecturer in Wayne State University’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

By 1940, the gap had closed. A developer of a proposed all-white subdivision managed to hammer out a compromise with federal housing officials: The loans and mortgage guarantees would come in exchange for constructing a wall. “This is the closest thing Detroit has to the segregated fountains or to the white-only swimming pools of the Deep South,” Horner says.

Nobody had to tell Nelson-McClendon, who moved to Michigan from Alabama in 1951. “It was the same thing,” she says. “Separation.”

In an old warehouse a few miles to the southeast, several men are busy working at Green Industries. Among them is Jason Garland, who says he does “mostly everything” related to making the coaster sets. On this particular day, he’s trying his hand at some of the final touches: spreading glue on the square pieces of paper containing images from the mural and affixing them to a small block of glass donated by a local windshield manufacturer.

Garland, 26, had been out of work for a year before coming to work for Green Industries in January. He says he had “gotten lazy at one point,” but in his new job he often comes in early and on days off. The former automotive worker says he and his co-workers look out for each other, and he never wants to leave.

Garland is also learning history. He used to live near the wall but had no idea about why it was built or the meaning of the mural. “I used to always say, ‘What is that?’” he says.

Cass launched Green Industries in 2007, after some clients couldn’t get jobs anymore because of the worsening economy and lack of reliable mass transportation. The nonprofit started with welcome mats made from illegally dumped tires, then added a paper-shredding operation employing people with developmental disabilities.

The coaster idea grew out of collaboration between Cass and the University of Michigan. A class for business, art, design and engineering students called “Integrated Product Development” was challenged to come up with a new product for Cass that could be launched quickly and cheaply, and made with materials that would otherwise go to waste.

After months of near-miss attempts, class professor William Lovejoy devised the idea of the Detroit-branded coasters and fashioned prototypes. He presented the idea to Fowler, who says the men have made about 200 four-coaster sets and sold about 100 so far. Anytime she takes a boxful to a speaking engagement or event, she usually sells out — and gets people talking about the wall and, sometimes, their experiences with it. For most, it’s a revelation.

“It gives them permission to have that kind of discussion — both black and white, young and old,” Fowler says.

For muralist Miller, who sees the vacant and trashed homes behind the concrete canvas he painted, the promise of a “new Detroit” is still possible. But it won’t happen, he says, without a continued push by those who remain in the neighborhood and others like it across the shrinking, struggling city.

“It’s really up to us to not cry on what’s gone,” Miller says. “Let’s focus on what we have. … We need to get people out to these kinds of projects so they can have conversations and get to know each other and find out who their neighbors are.”

A metaphor from his mural is within arm’s reach: A depiction of the city’s famous Spirit of Detroit statue is on a cut-out board that extended above the wall but since has fallen off and is propped against the wall. The original Spirit of Detroit is lifting up a family; Miller’s Spirit emerges from flames and rubble and holds up a migrant family to symbolize the migration of workers from the South to Detroit to fill its burgeoning factories.

“What is the Spirit of Detroit, and what does it motivate us to do? It motivates us to work hard and to persevere, and to keep going,” he says.

When it comes to the wall, Eva Nelson-McClendon knows about perseverance. For her, it was and remains the only option.

“Did it make me angry to see that wall up there? It was something you grow accustomed to seeing, you know, although you don’t like it. Getting angry over it is not going to solve anything,” McClendon says. “What was important to me was bringing up my kids and getting them to get an education so they wouldn’t have to be bothered with things like that in the future.”

She thinks about progress, and acknowledges some. But she knows there are still neighborhoods, mostly in the suburbs now, where African-Americans can move but they aren’t welcomed with open arms.

But on this day, she takes solace that people didn’t stay in place. Even if the wall did.

“It all depends on the people, the individual, the heart,” she says. “You’re not going to stop progress, don’t care how hard you try.”

In this 1941 photo supplied by the United States Library of Congress, a half mile concrete wall in Detroit is shown. (Library of Congress / AP)

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Has there ever been a more seductive view of the future? The 1930s might have been a time of global depression, but that didn’t stop the design industry in its optimistic rush toward that more abundant life just around the corner.

This glittering vision, in all its elegance and magnificent kitsch, will debut Saturday at The Henry Ford with “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s.” The show, originally curated by the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., runs through Sept. 2.

“Designing Tomorrow” covers six world’s fairs in the ’30s — the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, San Diego’s 1935 California Pacific International Exposition, the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas and Cleveland’s Great Lakes Exposition in 1936, and in 1939, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the New York World’s Fair.

At least viewed through the lens of the world’s fairs, it was an era of great confidence and can-do spirit. Nothing epitomized that better than the fairs’ dominant architectural theme, Streamline Moderne — a late version of Art Deco that followed industry in stripping away ornament in favor of curved lines and the aerodynamics associated with great passenger liners such as the S.S. Normandie.

But as Donna Braden, The Henry Ford’s curator of public life, notes, there was more behind streamlining in the 1930s than just catchy design.

“Streamlining came to equal progress,” she says on a walk-through of the exhibit. “Nothing could stand in your way. Everything was focused on speeding toward a bright future.”

It’s a field Braden knows well, having organized a show on streamline design for the museum in the 1980s. Indeed, she notes that the fairs promoted science and nifty consumerism — Streamlined toasters! — as a sure route out of the economic doldrums. In some respects, you could say the world’s fairs of this era were all about getting people to spend.

“The bottom line was that life may be lousy now, but the future is rosy,” Braden says. “With streamlining, designers promised people would buy their way out of the Depression.”

The late ’20s and ’30s were undeniably a gold mine of inspired design, whether we’re talking Frank Lloyd Wright, German’s Bauhaus or the skyscraper districts that had taken over New York and Chicago. “Designing Tomorrow” pays appropriate and respectful attention to a handful of these visionaries, including French-born industrial designer Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss. The latter designed New York Central Railroad’s most-celebrated luxury train, the Art Deco 20th Century Limited.

“Designing Tomorrow” is organized by topic, from “Building a Better Tomorrow” to “Electricity at Work.” (Those lucky enough to be in Dallas for its fair were doubtless thrilled by the “GE Talking Kitchen.” Who wouldn’t be?)

The National Building Museum show includes two panels on Ford Motor Co. and its presence at the fairs. Happily, The Henry Ford has expanded on this by reaching deep into its own archives to create six tall glass cabinets, arranged in a graceful streamlined curve, that go into much greater detail on Ford’s role.

Interestingly, corporate patriarch Henry Ford didn’t think the Chicago fair in 1933 was worth spending money on — until he saw how many people were jamming into the General Motors pavilion. That’s when Detroit architect Albert Kahn got a call asking him to throw up a Ford pavilion in a jiffy. The Art Deco result was the fair’s Ford Rotunda, built for the second half of the fair. The Rotunda was later moved to Dearborn, where a massive fire destroyed it in 1962.

‘Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s’

April 26-Sept. 2, 2013

9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. every day

The Henry Ford

20900 Oakwood, Dearborn

Tickets $17 adults, $15 seniors, $12.50 youth (5-12). Members enter free.

(313) 982-6001

www.thehenryford.org

Other art around town

The College for Creative Studies will open its fourth annual “Alumni Art Exhibition” with a Friday evening reception at the Valade Family Gallery (313-664-7400) at the CCS Taubman Center. Also Friday evening, Wayne State’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery (313-993-7813) will premiere “Hypertension,” a four-person multimedia show on the blurring of artistic disciplines. In Ferndale through May 11, Paul Kotula Projects presents “Setting the Table,” featuring yet more odd-and-intriguing soft sculpture by Iris Eichenberg and Stacy Jo Scott.

The post Optimism shines through in Henry Ford exhibit of World's Fairs of the 1930s appeared first on Michigan History.

It was not long after the first steamboat, “Walk in the Water,” docked in Detroit in the summer of 1818 that emigrants from Europe and New England, tourists, soldiers and other visitors began pouring into the small town.

By 1835 there were hundreds of newcomers daily; strange faces spending a night and disappearing for further destinations by the next morning, succeeded by waves of new arrivals with every boat. They all needed somewhere to spend the night.

The first hotel they usually saw was Ben Woodworth’s Steamboat Hotel, which advertised its “eligible position at the corner of Woodbridge and Randolph Streets.”

City historian C.M. Burton wrote that in those days the center of business grew around Atwater, Franklin, Woodbridge and Randolph streets (now the footprint of the Renaissance Center). By 1835, the Steamboat Hotel had expanded to include a dramatic 100-foot-long veranda that faced the river. It could accommodate more than 200 guests.

The first hotel visitors to Detroit saw in the early 1800s was Woodworth’s Hotel, which began as the home of carpenter Ben Woodworth. With the arrival of steamboats he changed the name of the hotel to Woodworth’s Steamboat Hotel. It was the most popular hotel in Detroit for decades, counting President James Monroe among its guests. (Illustration by Silas Farmer)

In addition to the daily throngs of travelers, many notable Detroiters kept their permanent residence at the hotel. It was the lodging for the steamboat captains and the unofficial headquarters for the Detroit shipping industry. Governor Lewis Cass and the city leaders held many of their meetings and hatched their political maneuvers in the hotel’s smoky parlors. Hotel carpets were commonly softened by a bottom layer of hay, which “gave rather frowsy odors to the rooms,” according to George C. Bates, newspaper columnist for the Detroit Free Press.

The city’s informal host was Ben Woodworth, the hotel’s owner and operator. Born in Massachusetts in 1782, he arrived in Detroit in 1805, a carpenter by training. The hotel began as his house in 1807. Woodworth was described much later as a “broad shouldered, gray eyed, firm lipped man of sixty years, mild in outward seemings, but when enraged a perfect old volcano.”

President James Monroe stayed at the hotel in the summer of 1817. According to president’s written account, “In the evening a splendid ball was given to the President, at Mr. Woodworth’s, at which all the principal ladies and gentlemen, and the officers of the several corps, attended.”

Old Ben also provided very popular entertainment, advertised in the Detroit Democratic Free Press of 1842: “The Last Night of the Arabian Girl’s Exhibition takes place at the Steamboat Hotel this evening, when the rarest and most interesting performances may be expected.”

The dinner bell stampede

From about 1815 to 1848 the main hotels in Detroit were the Woodworth’s Steamboat Hotel, the American, the H.R. Andrews Railroad Hotel, the Mansion House and the Michigan Exchange. At that time hotels offered the “American Plan” — a room and meals combined. The alternative was called the “European Plan,” which did not include meals. The “American Plan” was popular in America because there were no restaurants, only small taverns.

However, a lot of travelers disliked the American plan, such as Amos Andrew Parker from New Hampshire. He described the free-for-all at the Steamboat Hotel:

“When the bell rang for dinner, I hardly knew what it meant. All in and about the house jumped and run as if the house had been on fire, and I thought that to have been the case. I followed the multitude, and found they were only going into the hall to dinner. It was a rough and tumble game at knife and fork — and whoever got seated first, and obtained the best portion of dinner, was the best fellow. Those who came after must take care of themselves the best way they could; and were not always able to obtain a very abundant supply.”

Parker was also not pleased with his accommodations:

“At night, I was obliged to sleep in a small room having three beds in it, take a companion, and a dirty bed.”

Not everyone hated the food. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a successful British writer when she decided to spend two years traveling in America. She wrote about her experiences in her book “Society in America”:

”We landed at Detroit, from Lake Erie, at seven o’clock in the morning of the 13th of June, 1836. We reached the American [hotel] just in time for breakfast. At that long table, I had the pleasure of seeing the healthiest set of faces that I had beheld since I left England. The breakfast was excellent…”

The American Hotel, on Jefferson and Randolph, was nicer than the popular Steamboat and offered parlors with attached bedrooms for families. Upon entering the American Hotel from the street you found the desk and office, the large sitting room and stairways that led to the ladies’ parlor.

Prominent in every hotel was its tavern, for men only. There you could get a wine glass of “pure Monongahela whiskey,” Jamaican rum, or brandy imported from Quebec with no adulterants in it. (The alternative brandies were described as “liquid Hell fire suitable for murders, suicides and maniacs.”) Drinks were frequently mixed with sugar and water. Everyone smoked cigars or chewed and spit pretty much wherever convenient.

Dancing with Ulysses S. Grant

While the Steamboat and American Hotel were more popular, the Mansion House was the fanciest, situated on the far side of the city edge at Jefferson and Cass Avenue.

Ulysses S. Grant was a lieutenant stationed in Detroit in the late 1840s. He and his wife attended dances and costume parties at the Mansion House and Michigan Exchange Hotel. (Ohio Historical Society)

The Mansion House and later the Michigan Exchange were popular for dances in the late 1840s, regularly attended by then Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant and his wife.

Grant’s regiment, the Fourth United States Infantry, was stationed in Detroit at the time. Many in the regiment and others that made up the crème de la crème of Detroit youth were part of an exclusive social club called the “400” that held cotillion (dancing) parties. U.S. Grant, it was said, preferred to stand back and watch. But others took lessons and learned the dances of the day, as proclaimed in this advertisement from 1840:

Dancing Academy: Mr. Couse would inform his friends and the public that he is ready to give instructions in his room, no.65 Jefferson Avenue, in every variety of Dancing and Waltzing. Also the Bohemian and Carolli’s Polkas as danced in the court of Vienna.

By the 1850s the Detroit 400 had moved from dance parties to costume balls. The costumes were elaborate, with some dressed as characters from Shakespeare plays, English royalty, Sir Walter Scott’s novels, or simply imaginative thinking — “Miss Sallie Webster was beautifully dressed as the Maid of the Mist.” It was reported that Grant came as himself.

Getting out of hand

Hotel dinner parties attended by men, especially soldiers, had a regular habit of getting out of hand; however, hotel managers such as Edward Lyons of the Michigan Exchange maintained a calm demeanor and steady hand. Lyons was described as the most “even tempered landlord that ever held sway over the fortunes of the hotel … no matter how gay or wild ‘the boys’ would get.” Damages were tracked in detail and the charges were expected to be settled the next day.

At one public dinner a man named Curtis Emerson was among the guests at the Michigan Exchange. As city social historian General Friend Palmer related in his book “Early Days in Detroit”: “After the wine had circulated pretty freely he became quite jolly and uproarious. Mounting the table he proceeded to promenade up and down, kicking the dishes left and right. His father, Thomas Emerson, was sitting in the reading room quietly reading during all this. … [The manager] entreated upon Mr. Emerson to go to the dining room and see if his son “Curt” could not be induced to simmer down.

“The old gentleman readily assented. … He saw his son Curt dancing up and down the table and raising the old ‘Harry’ with the crockery. He looked on for a minute, chuckling, and he said, ‘Yes that is my son Curt, sure enough. I used to do the same thing when I was his age.’ He returned to the reading room.”

Detroit in the Gilded Age

During the Victorian Age, Detroit began to parade its new manufacturing wealth. Among the most obvious changes to the city landscape were hotels which started to rise after the 1870s. Hotels like the Griswold House at Grand River Avenue and Griswold served 55,000 guests a year. They were fantastic structures. One writer said the new Detroit hotel “heralds the abrogation of provincialism and places our city full abreast with others of its kind in the line of American progression.”

The dining room of the Hotel Cadillac is seen around 1895. It was said the hotel contained three-quarters of an acre of marble. (Author’s collection)

The lavish Hotel Cadillac at Washington Boulevard and Michigan Avenue was expanded in 1891 (not to be confused with the Book Cadillac of the 1920s, its successor on the same site). The editor of the magazine Hotel World reported, “It is the finest hotel in the United States. There is nothing to compare with its completeness anywhere.”

It had white marble staircases, walls, floors and pilasters. It was said the hotel contained three-quarters of an acre of marble, immense vaulted ceilings, mosaics, and stone carvings. Enormous mirrors lined the dining room — at that time the largest mirrors in the country. It had crystal chandeliers with 3,000 electric lights, stained glass, brass work, fountains, fireplaces and magnificent tapestries.

At the hotel’s opening there was a crush of Detroiters lined up at the entrance and down the block morning, noon, and night to see the interior of the newly refurbished hotel. The crowds were in the thousands.

Detroiters were captivated by hotel life. Daily newspaper columns such as “Heard in Hotel Lobbies” or “In the Corridors” reported every person who checked into the major hotels as well as cosmopolitan society gossip, fashion, restaurant menus, and dramatic and humorous vignettes of travelers. The big hotels included the Russell House, the Wayne Hotel, Hotel Cadillac, Ste. Clair Hotel, the Pontchartrain and the Griswold House.

Dawn of the business traveler

These hotels were now seeing a new type of guest — the business traveler, frequently salesmen or “drummers” as they were called in the day. They came to Detroit to drum up business, pounding actual drums on the streets to generate excitement. Their visits to Detroit were seasonal, arriving in the spring and fall from New York, Boston and Philadelphia with their sample cases to descend on any and all forms of business, from manufacturers to haberdasheries. Detroit was used by many salesmen as a starting point for their western trips.

For the traveler, the first interaction with the hotel would be with the hotel’s clerk, who stood his post behind the counter. In 1900 it was Lucious Purtscher at the Hotel Cadillac, described in a newspaper article as a barrel-chested man with a resplendent mustache, a diamond in his shirt-front, an impeccable suit, and a daily shave and haircut clipped to perfection. As he manned the counter or sauntered about the lobby he was described as a “millionaire in disguise.” He was a stationary world traveler: shaking hands, conversing, and attentive to the needs of hotel guests from across the globe.

Purtscher remained unflappable as he assigned rooms, directed bellboys, and answered a thousand questions a day without strain. Many questions were about train schedules. This subject could be maddening since Detroit ran on its unique local time before 1916, while railroads used their own time, which was usually New York time. The United States established standard time and times zones in 1918 but until then, tracking times of arriving and departing trains took an experienced eye.

Here was a sample of Prutscher’s day:

“They want to know what time the train arrives and what time they start from everywhere to get there at that time; when the boats leave, where they run to and what time they get there; … who is playing at each of the theatres and whether the play is any good or not;… what church Rev. A is pastor of and what time service begins, who sings in such and such church and what is the best choir in town; what time the fight commences at the athletic club; will the parade come this way today, is there a yacht race tomorrow, where is the best place to have a dress made, where can he rent a bicycle for a couple of hours?”

The clerk kept a constant eye on the hotel annunciator, a technical wonder patented in 1829 as a signaling device. It was a complicated wooden panel with room numbers on it located on the wall of the front lobby near the clerk. When a guest needed assistance, he or she pulled a lever in the room that applied pressure to a wire that ran from the room to the lobby, forcing the room number on the annunciator to protrude. Many had a bell on an internal spring that jingled as well. Later electricity replaced the levers and wires.

Bellboys at your service

At the first class hotels, bellboys, also called bellhops, zipped through lobbies and raced up servant stairs wearing uniforms with brass buttons and gold braid. They ranged from teenagers to men in their twenties, kept in line by the bellboy “captain.”

When the annunciator jingled, a bellboy would take off, many times to bring drinks or cigars to a room. They knew the big tippers were “gamblers and sports.” Bellboys hauled luggage up marble stairs, ran errands, rocked babies, quietly helped drunks find their rooms, and if someone was short on cash to pay their bill, it was the bellboy who ran out and pawned a ring or diamond stud for the guest.

During lulls in business one group of bellboys challenged each other by balancing a tray of stacked champagne glasses while sliding down a marble staircase banister. A fall cost you your job.

Originally, bellboys were called hall-boys and they worked in both boarding houses and hotels. The Detroit hall boys had some guarded yet commonly shared secrets of their profession which were published in the Detroit Free Press in 1880. An excerpt is listed below:

“That cheap boarders give the most trouble,

That bachelors give much more trouble than married men in hotels,

That the average hotel detective is not worth his salt let alone his wages,

That the best clerks are those who have the least to say about themselves,

That Boston people always want a room where the carpets harmonize with the furniture,

That female boarders who laugh and chat with the servants are the kind who purloin soap and towels,

That country people’s amusement is ringing the electric bell and asking a variety of ridiculous questions,

That running up and down stairs materially shortens their lives.”

Intentionally set fires

One of the most important albeit highly discrete duties of bellboys at the turn of the century was to watch for fires. Hotel fires were not uncommon in hotels, and the New York Times in 1913 estimated about one-quarter were set intentionally; the number was suspected to be higher but the source of many fires was undetermined.

At the time it was called “Incendiarism” and it grew to an obsessive fear in the 1880s and ‘90s and continued through the early 20th century.

Some of the incendiaries were hotel guests, who might use something as simple as dropping a cigar in a waste basket. Fire chiefs claimed that most fires were set for insurance collection, but the motives for arson were various: gangs used it for extortion, thieves started small fires to rifle through suddenly empty rooms, and people who were called “firebugs” and later “pyromaniacs” did it for a disturbed thrill. Some fires were set for political reasons by such groups as the Anarchists. The bellboy’s job was to remain vigilant at all times.

Working with the bellboys to catch incendiaries, thieves, extremists and riff-raff were the hotel detectives. Stalking the halls and lobby of the Pontchartain Hotel in 1917 was Charles Finnucane, who claimed he had a “camera eye” when it came to spotting crooks. Another, John Caram, house detective at the Hotel Statler, tracked his man as reported in 1917 in the Detroit Free Press:

“Newspaper thieves are the latest pests to worry hotel detectives. One of them was caught red handed in Hotel Statler on Saturday afternoon. Well dressed, debonair, carrying a walking stick, and wearing a monocle, he has been known for the last two weeks at leading hotels as the ‘newspaper bird.’

“This petty thief well supplied with money but known to be a kleptomaniac has been in the habit of stealing penny newspapers from the hotel stands.”

When the man grabbed a paper and headed to the door, Caram grabbed him and took the paper out of his pocket.

“‘Why my dear chap,’ expostulated the thief. ‘This is a terrible outrage. I intended paying fifty cents for this paper, but quite forgot it, don’t you know.’”

Kitchen army

In 1899 the kitchens of the big hotels were spectacular; the Griswold House fed 11,000 to 15,000 people a month. In 1900 it sold 167,175 meals, with food costs of less than 24 cents a plate to the hotel.

The kitchens were many times located in the basement, once gas ranges were available. The hotels were moving away from the “American plan” although they typically offered guests a choice of either the American plan served in the dining room or the European plan served in the café. Correspondingly, the kitchens were designed with two staffs, one for each plan. Food was available 24 hours a day and the kitchens never stopped humming.

One of the most impressive kitchens was at the Hotel Cadillac, where a long row of heavy wrought-iron gas ranges stretched the entire length of the room. Each stove had a special task: The first two were used for oysters and eggs, the next for vegetables and roasts, and others for broiling.

Soup was kept in tanks, and pre-prepared food was held in a new invention called the steam table, in which vegetables were kept in “deep porcelain jars,” and the meat dishes were on “platters protected by a big metal lid lifted by means of a pulley.” Butchers worked off to the side in a partitioned area, cutting steaks and grinding meat. The food cooler at the Hotel Cadillac held seven tons of block ice.

On Sundays, a hotel guest such as a traveling salesman would take the day at a more leisurely pace. He typically climbed out of bed late, bathed and visited the hotel barber. Or, he might try something more exotic. In 1891 the Hotel Cadillac had a fully equipped Turkish bathhouse. A news article from 1893 gives an excellent description of our Victorian businessman.

“A shave with a few hot towels adroitly applied will make him look like an Adonis. His clothes are neatly brushed and he buys a flower. His necktie is of the latest style with a small bow, flowing at the ends; he wears an elaborate scarf pin and his shoes are bright and shining, his trousers have no wrinkles and he carries a stick that is not too loud, just loud enough.”

Dinner Victorian Style

Dinner in the hotels became very elaborate as the hotels vied for business from not only travelers but also Detroiters. A popular trend in the late 19th century was to have holiday dinners, such as Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving at one of the hotels. Thousands of Detroiters reserved tables. Many times music was provided by hotel orchestras or local military bands; at the Hotel Cadillac they played from the musicians’ balcony above the entrance every evening from 6 to 7:30 and on holidays. Souvenir menus were given out to families to take home.

“At all of the hotels today special dinners will be served on account of Easter. … At the Griswold House beautiful menu cards, with the covers in purple surrounding a bunch of Easter lilies will be given to guests.” – Detroit Free Press, April 15,1900

Menus of the Victorian days were nothing short of breathtaking. Below is the Christmas menu for the Cadillac Hotel promoted in 1888:

Blue points on the half shell

Green Turtle A’l’anglais

Cream custard au consommé

Boiled Red Snapper A’ la Bolonaise

Fried Pampano Sauce Tartar

Potatoes, colbert

Celery, Radishes

Boiled Partridge with a Puree of Celery

Fresh Beef Tongue Sauce Piquant

Fowl Egg Sauce

Prime Beef Au Jus

Hen Turkey With Oyster Dressing

Young Pig, cranberry sauce

Loin of Lamb

Reed birds En Canapé A la Chasseur

Young Onions

Frog Legs on Toast, Sauce Béarnaise

Terrapin Stew, in cases, Maryland style

Squab with Chestnuts a’ la Crapaudine

Sliced Cucumber Omelette Celestine Delmonico

Kirsch-wasser Punch

Green Olives

Prairie Chicken sauce natural

New Jersey Bear apple jelly

Quail Stuffed with mushrooms

Opossum with fried bananas

Chicken en aspic

Fresh Lobster

Game Salad Boneless turkey

Lettuce and eggs

Baked sweet potatoes, Mashed and boiled potatoes

Sifted peas golden beans stewed tomatoes

Sugar corn, Spinach, Asparagus, Cauliflower

Christmas Plum pudding with brandy sauce

Sliced Apple pie, Homemade Mince Pie

Lemon Meringue Pie

Chocolate éclairs, Shavings, Angel Food

Meringues with Cream

Fruit cakes, Kisses, Macaroons, Lady Fingers

Nesslerode ice cream

Mexican Oranges, Pomegranates, Persimmons

Bananas, Apples, Malaga Grapes, Pears

Mixed Nuts, Layer Raisins, Figs, Dates

Confections, Orange Jelly

Hard crackers

Fromages

Edam, Pineapple, Swiss, Roquefort, Neufchatel

Champagne Cider

Café Noir

(See also: The Russell House menu of May 3, 1858)

1915, the next generation

This level of opulence and formality grew tiresome to the new generation; they were young and wanted to dance, not sit for hours being served course after course. In 1915 new hotels appeared like the magnificent Hotel Statler, 15 stories high on Washington Boulevard across from Grand Circus Park. At its grand opening it hosted more than 3,000 people who filled its halls and lobby and danced through the night in the ballroom.

In Detroit’s black community, the place to be was the nationally famous twin towered Gotham Hotel on the northern edge of downtown where Ford Field now stands. In 1943 it was purchased by local black businessmen and could compete with any hotel in the country for décor and service. It had nine stories with 300 rooms.

At its peak of fame it hosted 1,000 guests a week. Some of the regulars who lodged and dined at the Gotham over the years included Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, B.B. King, Jesse Owens, the Harlem Globetrotters, Langston Hughes, Louie Armstrong, Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Sarah Vaughn, Joe Louis and Adam Clayton Powell.

Tallest hotel in the world

At its completion in 1924, the Book Cadillac was the tallest hotel in the world. It was built by the Book brothers — James, Frank and Herbert — who envisioned Washington Boulevard between Michigan Avenue and Grand Circus Park as the “Fifth Avenue of the West.”

It was the tallest building in Michigan and the largest hotel in the world when the Book Cadillac opened in 1924, on the site of the previous Hotel Cadillac. Seen here in 1937, the Book Cadillac offered more than 1,000 rooms. (Detroit News archives)

The Book Cadillac had 1,035 bedrooms, 54 sitting rooms, 8 alcove rooms, and 38 sample rooms. This was an impressive modern building that could boast of “bathrooms in every room.” It was luxurious but more contemporary in style; hotels like the Book Cadillac spelled the end of the overly lavish Victorian interiors and five-hour dinners.

While the new hotels could feature the exotic in the dining room — in 1919 the Hotel Statler offered whale meat on its menu — they also advertised meat loaf and blue plate specials. The days of plate throwing, costume balls and Turkish baths were only memories.

The Book Cadillac is still with us. It is an excellent example of the neo-renaissance style by architect Louis Kamper. Among its features found on the building’s main Michigan Avenue entrance are the sculptures of notable figures from Detroit’s history — General Anthony Wayne; Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac; Chief Pontiac, and early French appointee Robert Navarre.

In 2006 the Ferchill Group agreed to renovate the structure into a mixed-use hotel and condominium building, including a 453-room Westin Hotel. As part of the renovation, some of the original decor of the Grand Ballroom (renamed the Venetian Ballroom) and Italian Garden was recreated. These rooms are beautifully restored and a testament to the grandeur of the building. The Westin Book Cadillac is worth a visit to get a taste of downtown Detroit’s glorious past.

Bill Loomis is the author of the book “Detroit’s Delectable Past,” available throughout the Metro Detroit area, through online retailers and Kindle.

Interactive map: Hotels of Detroit’s past

The post Grand hotels of early Detroit: Cotillions, celebrities and Turkish baths appeared first on Michigan History.

Could the world’s first abstract painter have been a Michigan fruit farmer and not, as art history has it, Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky? A recent gift of a Manierre Dawson abstract painting to West Shore Community College in Scottville, near Ludington, close to where artist-farmer Dawson had his house and orchards, raises that question.

“When we look for the symbolic date for the birth of abstraction, the one most art historians cite is 1911 with Kandinsky,” says Kenneth J. Myers, chief curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In that year, the Russian painted “Impression III (Concert),” generally thought to be the first time recognizable forms — people, houses, trees, etc. — completely disappear from the canvas. While Myers notes the art world had been moving in this direction for decades, the leap from figurative to pure abstraction was an intellectual and artistic landmark, long cited as proof of Kandinsky’s genius.

Yet in 1910, Dawson painted a series of nonfigurative works under the umbrella title “Prognistic.”

Dawson’s work was good enough to impress Gertrude Stein, the Paris-based collector who promoted a range of avant-garde artists. She paid 200 francs for a piece of his, also in 1910, that has since vanished. A few years later Dawson was invited to contribute a painting to the 1913 Armory Show in New York, a seismic event that introduced Picasso, Matisse and other modernists to a shocked America. But Dawson demurred, saying he had nothing worthy.

Later, however, one of the organizers, Walter Pach, prevailed on him to submit “Wharf under Mountain” when the Armory Show moved from New York to the Art Institute of Chicago.

It’s hard to imagine a more auspicious start to an art career. Yet after this hopeful beginning, Dawson, who trained as a civil engineer but moved to Ludington to take up fruit farming in 1914, promptly disappears from history. He made art the rest of his life, but almost never exhibited or sold anything.

“Manierre’s art was his No. 1 thing,” says Sharon K. Bluhm, professor emeritus at West Shore college and author of “Manierre Dawson: Inventions of the Mind.” Bluhm, an English professor, became interested in Dawson in 1976 after discovering she’d bought his farmhouse.

“Manierre didn’t sell a lot,” Bluhm says. “He did art for art’s sake.”

Dawson died in 1969.

Michigan farmer Manierre Dawson, shown in his studio, was invited to show his work in the 1913 Armory Show in New York. He declined, saying he had nothing worthy.
(Private collection of Peter Lockwood)

Dawson’s grandson, Peter Lockwood of Arlington, Texas, donated a 1912 piece, “Untitled Abstraction,” to the Manierre Dawson Gallery at the community college, bringing their Dawson collection to three works. Lockwood thinks his grandfather was just the rare artist uninterested in fame.

“The main reason he didn’t get recognized is that he didn’t move to New York back when modern art was becoming acceptable,” Lockwood says. “Instead, he decided to become a fruit farmer and raise a family. He enjoyed that.” Lockwood recalls a jovial man who told Paul Bunyan stories and gave out silver dollars to his grandchildren. Once he learned more about early 20th century art, he says, “I realized my grandfather was definitely an art-world pioneer, especially with nonrepresentational abstract art.”

So does it matter that a Michigan artist might have been the first to do pure abstraction?

The DIA’s Myers isn’t so sure.

“Looking at Dawson’s stuff now, I think a lot of it is interesting,” he says. “He’s important in being really early. But my sense is that because he rarely showed, he had little impact on other artists. If I were given one of his pieces, I’d take it in a minute,” Myers says. “But I’m skeptical whether I would buy.”

Museums that have collected Dawson’s work include the Metropolitan in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Muskegon Museum of Art.

Myers says his interest would be keener if we knew Dawson’s painting hung in Stein’s apartment, crowded with art of the brave new century and visited by some of the greatest names of the day. But that doesn’t appear to have been the case.

According to Dawson’s meticulous journals from his 1910 trip to Europe, when he handed Stein the canvas, she reportedly said to a bearded Frenchman next to her, “Wouldn’t this make a great gift for so-and-so?”

(Bluhm notes that some have speculated the bearded Frenchman could have been Matisse, though there’s no proof of that.)

“Untitled Abstraction,” a circa 1912 oil on wood panel, was recently donated to the Manierre Dawson Gallery in Scottville, Mich. (Manierre Dawson Estate)

Penn State art historian Randy J. Ploog, who lectured on Dawson at the Met and co-authored “Manierre Dawson (1887–1969): A Catalogue Raisonné,” traces the artist’s interest in abstract forms to his education in civil engineering and mechanical drawing.

“When the Milwaukee Art Museum bought a ‘Prognostic’ in the late 1960s,” he says, “Dawson wrote to the director to explain how these abstract 1910 paintings came out of his engineering courses.”

Ploog acknowledges he’s heard some dismiss Dawson with the old argument about the tree falling in a forest that nobody hears. “But if that tree is on the ground,” Ploog asks, “isn’t there an argument for figuring out how it got there?”

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, American-art professor Henry Adams is surprised there hasn’t been more of an academic rush to study Dawson.

“It’s funny art historians have shown such little interest in this,” he says. “Abstract painting gets a lot of attention, but no one’s very clear about how it started.”

For his part, Lockwood says he’s happy at the recognition his grandfather has garnered in recent years and notes that some essays about him — including Ploog’s “Catalog Raisonne” — are now floating around Europe.

“So hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before awareness about him spreads there,” Lockwood says.

“But I think they’ll fight it big time — ‘Just who was this American artist doing abstraction before Kadinsky?’”

The post Manierre Dawson: Michigan’s overlooked modernist appeared first on Michigan History.

When visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts park their cars in the Farnsworth lot behind the building, they walk by a curious brick building with a walled garden. The building is unadorned except for a Pewabic Pottery glazed scarab over the front entrance, a bronze sculpture at one end, and a Michigan historic marker beside the entrance.

It’s called the Scarab Club and about 15,000 people a year stop in for a visit. The “club house” is small compared to the other imposing cultural sites in the Midtown neighborhood, and most people don’t stop to look further, but they should, if just for a tour. For some it has changed their lives.

Entering the Scarab Club is like walking into a jewelry box: every wall, door, door knob, light fixture, window and ceiling is adorned with frescos, Pewabic tiles, carvings, stained glass, paintings, bas-relief or sculpture. While the 1928 building’s exterior seems subdued (it is actually an early modern masterpiece in the Northern Italian Renaissance style designed by Detroit architect Lancelot Sukert), the building’s interior is decorated in the American Arts and Crafts style. Colorful art engulfs you as you walk through halls, up stairs and into galleries.

According to the current energetic gallery director at the Scarab Club, Treena Flannery Ericson, it began as an exclusive club in 1907. “You had to apply and be approved by a committee to join the Scarab Club. (It) had a strong appeal to automotive designers, creative types from advertising agencies, and visiting artists. When Diego Rivera and his assistant Pablo Davis finished a day’s work on his famous DIA courtyard murals, they would slip over to the Scarab Club for drinks, cigars and dinner.”

The organization was founded by Detroit artists and originally was called the Hopkin Club, named for one of the club’s leaders, Robert Hopkin. Arguably Detroit’s most prominent 19th century artist, Hopkin was nationally known for his beautiful paintings of ships and maritime scenes on the Great Lakes, other bodies of water and some landscapes. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1837, Hopkin immigrated with his family to Detroit in 1843 and remained a resident of the city until his death in 1909. In all, he produced at least 390 watercolors and oils.

Like many artists, Hopkin was self taught. In major cities across the U.S., artists who were not formally trained had difficulty gaining acceptance by big city museums and finding buyers for their art. They formed groups and clubs to set up their own exhibitions and offer artists or art lovers a place to congregate, relax and make art; the Hopkin Club was just such a place.

Dung beetle inspires name

The name was changed to the Scarab Club in 1913 by a new director, John Swan. Swan collected artistic renderings of scarabs (an African beetle), which were used in many art forms, such as jewelry, as an iconographic Egyptian symbol of resurrection; real scarabs in Egypt lay eggs in camel dung, so larva and eventually new beetles emerge from the dung. Swan saw this as renewal through the arts in Detroit and changed the club’s name.

The Scarab Club generated a lot of coverage in Detroit newspapers very early on. The club’s first public exhibit was in 1910. At that time they had only a dozen members, but it was growing rapidly. As they grew they moved from space to space, including 80 Gratiot Avenue, 10 Witherell Street, and in 1916, “The Scarab Studio Building” at 292 Woodward Avenue.

Some of the early annual exhibits were quite popular and featured more than 100 works of art. From the very beginning the club awarded the Scarab Club Gold Medal, given to the best work of art at the annual exhibit and still awarded to this day. The medal was designed by Detroit sculptor and Scarab Club member Alfred Nygard, whose works can be seen at Detroit churches. His carved and painted scarab panel from 1922 is featured in the front lobby.

In addition to paintings and sculpture, the club held musicales, lectures, work sessions and “Ladies nights” when women members got together for “frolic and dance.” Before the current building was completed in 1928, the Scarab Club exhibited and held events throughout the city, such as Hudson’s department store and the old Hotel Ponchartrain.

From the start, the club was a great proponent of Detroit and Michigan artists. The Michigan Artist Exhibit some years received up to 600 submitted entries by regional artists. In 1914, the Scarab Club featured something completely new: women artists.

Women Are Admitted

“Another move that added interest to the exhibit was the admission of works by women. There was no hesitation on their part when the barriers were lowered.”

- Detroit Free Press, December 13, 1914

To this day the club continues to champion women artists.

Elaborate costume balls

In 1917 the Scarab Club held the first of what would become its most famous event of the year — the costume ball held in January. These were huge affairs attended in some years by a thousand Detroiters.

“The portals of the ‘Forbidden City’ were thrown wide open … in the ballroom of the Hotel Pontchartrain for the Scarab Club members and their friends and high carnival reigned until early the next morning,” read a report on the 1920 ball. “The fete was in a courtyard within the city of Mecca … Oriental lights flooded the gardens … In the garden were 600 guests impersonating types from every land and every period from the Medieval Knights to the sometimes unconventional costumes of today. … Chinese and Turkish costumes were favored. A large number of gorgeous Mandarin coats were noted. Many of the outfits had been purchased in the Orient by those who wore them.”

An undated photo of the popular annual Scarab Club costume ball, which began in 1917. (Detroit News archives)

What you’ll see today

Touring the galleries and rooms of the Scarab Club is unforgettable. The top floor is artist studio space and is not open to the public, but the second floor, called “the lounge,” is open and needs to be seen. On the ceiling are nine wooden beams that over the years have been signed by artists, some from Detroit, ome visiting. Once a year in September, in a special ceremony/party, an artist is selected to sign a ceiling beam, accompanied by a crowd of family, friends, colleagues, neighbors and club members. Some of the artists who have signed the beams are famous, such as Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera, Marcel Duchamp, Isamu Noguchi (sculptor of the Hart Plaza fountain) and Marshall Fredericks (sculptor of the “Spirit of Detroit”). Even Detroit’s own John Sinclair of the MC5 has signed the beam.

Running crosswise are 32 smaller beams that are hand painted with patterns and coded images. These small beams are all titled, such as the “Founder’s Beam” or “Round Table Beam.” To help sort through beams and artists the Scarab Club installed in 2012 a computer kiosk with a touch screen that allows one to touch a name to bring up a beam map showing the location of a signature and brief biography of the artist. The strange painted beams can be brought to the screen for details and history.

The lounge has a large, colorful mural from 1928 over the fireplace, titled “the Scarab Club Family Tree” by Paul Honore (Robert Hopkin can be seen in the tree), and in the lounge’s lobby, a gold ceiling fresco from 1928 by Philip Sawyer called the “Four Domains of Art.” The lounge is also a gallery for contemporary art and at this time the oil paintings of Lois Primeau are displayed and for sale until March 30.

Doors to the men’s and women’s restrooms have tiny stained glass images, as does a former working telephone booth. The stunning lighting fixtures are original New York Arts and Crafts; they are shaded with translucent mica and as gallery director Treena Flannery Erickson explains, “They were made more amber from years of cigar and cigarette smoke in the room.”

There is so much art in the building they still uncover things: one fresco was not discovered until a leaking water pipe began crumbling surface plaster to reveal another painted wall underneath. A beautiful fresco in the large women’s “powder room” on the first floor was covered in ugly silver foil and black frocked wall paper. It was discovered from an old photograph taken of a woman putting on makeup in a mirror at a counter in the powder room; the fresco was noticed in the mirror that reflected the wall over the woman’s shoulder. The wallpaper was carefully removed and the beautiful painted images can be viewed today.

Gallery shows and more

The main floor gallery is the Scarab Club’s largest space, with white walls that house major art shows. The room is also used for poetry readings, chamber music, jazz concerts and blues performances in a special series called “The Detroit Blues Heritage Series.”

The main floor gallery sometimes displays work from club members, including beginning artists. Other times art shows are more selective and curated, such as an annual exhibition of Michigan women artists. This year’s show is “Woman Image Hot,” curated by Zimmerwoman (also known as Marilyn Zimmerman, associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University). This exhibit features 13 women artists, including six artists from regional university faculties, as well as newcomers like Golsa Yagoobi, a young Iranian woman who taught herself English and recently came to Detroit. Her large oil portraits take up an end wall of the gallery.

Zimmerwoman described her take on a long-held Scarab Club core value: seeking out and promoting new artists. “Mingling established artists with lesser known artists who are just starting to exhibit builds confidence in young people and introduces them to a bigger audience. This is something the Scarab Club is good at.”

Woman Image Hot will be open until March 31.

When the weather is nice, the Scarab Club garden, which also holds events, is a well-tended space with beautiful brick work on an enclosing wall, sculptures and artfully arranged landscaping. Even the basement is used in the Scarab Club as a studio in which people at easels can sketch live models on Thursday evenings and Saturdays during the day.

So many have come to love the Scarab Club rooms that the club now rents out space for weddings. Some couples come from across the country to hold their wedding at the club, which can accommodate up to 125 people.

The future

Today, with Detroit’s exciting contemporary art scene that is daily gaining recognition, the Scarab Club is a little fearful that it may be left to its past. It is not a big organization, with 300 members. The club’s director, Scott Maggart, himself an artist and musician, is working with the board of directors, members and outsiders to change the century-old organization, reach out more to the public and find collaborations with other organizations.

“One of the differences between the Scarab Club and the DIA or MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art and Design) is that they are galleries for the most part, while the Scarab Club is also studio space for working artists, including the performing arts. We offer live model sessions for artists of any skills, beginners to veterans, for very little money; students can sketch or paint here for free. In the past the club was just that — a private, inwardly focused club. We are working to get the word out to more people.”

Working with Maggart is operations director Julie McFarland, who pointed out some of the changes the Scarab Club is making. “We are offering more open houses and events,” she said. “For instance, on ‘Noel Night’ in Midtown last December, 5,000 people visited the Scarab Club for catered food, drinks and a tour.”

The Scarab Club is a 501 C3 non-profit organization. Money is tight and while the beloved Scarab Club building is magnificent, it is also old and costly to operate and keep in good repair. Maggart smiles as he admits the Scarab Club is not a business and members at all levels are involved in determining the club’s direction. “I get both the ridiculous and sublime when I listen to people.”

He continued, “It’s important for us to balance the past with a strategy for the future. What do we preserve and what do we let go?”

In many ways a good question for the entire city of Detroit.

The post The Scarab Club: Detroit's artist hangout since 1907 appeared first on Michigan History.

Eighty years ago, the Detroit Institute of Arts debuted “Detroit Industry,” the monumental murals by Diego Rivera that he intended to be a tribute to Michigan’s innovative technology.

Many initially despised it. Politicians such as Detroit City Councilmember William Bradley, academicians including Marygrove College President George Derry, and scores of religious and social organizations representing tens of thousands demanded the art be destroyed.

Their complaints: It promoted class warfare. It mocked baby Jesus. It embraced racial equality. The Detroit News ran a scorching front-page editorial that concluded “the best thing to do would be to whitewash the entire work completely.”

It’s a good thing Rivera’s critics didn’t see the paintings created by the artist’s young wife, Frida Kahlo, during their 11-month stay in Detroit. Here she began to work on small paintings that captured painful moments in her life in a dream-like setting. Even by today’s standards, her works are considered graphic and groundbreaking.

Rivera’s murals and Kahlo’s Detroit paintings are now regarded as masterpieces. Kahlo, who died in 1954, is a cultural icon and one of the most popular artists in the world. Beside the biographical film a decade ago starring Salma Hayek as “Frida,” she is the subject of hundreds of books. In 2015, the DIA will host its own Frida and Diego exhibit.

To mark the 80th anniversary of “Detroit Industry,” The News looked into its archives to show some of the local places that shaped the two artists’ experience.

Michigan Central Station. Rivera and Kahlo arrive on the New York train April 21, 1932. A mob of reporters and supporters are on hand to greet the famous Rivera, 45. He just completed a one-man retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that broke attendance records. Ford Motor Co. President Edsel Ford commissioned Rivera to create a series of murals at the DIA.

Kahlo, 25, is unknown at the time. The press noticed her stylish wardrobe and swarmed her. In the crowd was Lady Sophia Frederica Christina Hastings, wife of British aristocrat Lord Francis Hastings. The two followed Rivera from city to city, just to be around great art. Kahlo likely had an affair with Lady Hastings in San Francisco in 1930. The press overwhelmed Kahlo and she fled to a waiting car. Detroit News reporter Florence Davies shouted one last question. “Are you a painter, too?” Kahlo replied: “Yes, the greatest in the world.”

The Wardell, 15 E. Kirby St., Detroit. Now called the Park Shelton, the couple lived in the apartment complex across the street from the DIA. The couple soon learned the Wardell banned Jews. Both declared they had Jewish heritage. An exception was made. Kahlo set up a space in their two-bedroom apartment to paint.

Edison Institute, 20900 Oakwood Blvd., Dearborn. Rivera, an avowed Marxist, and Henry Ford, second-richest man in America, start to bond over their shared love of manufacturing. Rivera spent 13 hours on the grounds now called Greenfield Village and The Henry Ford. Ford apparently secretly watched Rivera as the artist marveled at the large machinery. He was impressed Rivera was so impressed.

Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge Complex, 3001 Miller Road, Dearborn. Rivera was entranced by the largest, most technically advanced factory in the world. He called it the “Great Saga of Machine and Steel.”

Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, 1100 Lake Shore Road, Grosse Pointe Woods. In this lakeside mansion, Kahlo rebelled. At a dinner party, she allegedly swore at guests in Spanish, apparently angered by their nonchalance toward the plight of the poor.

Henry Ford Estate, 4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn. Kahlo and Henry Ford square danced at a dinner party in Ford’s private residence. However, she challenged him. She knew of his anti-Semitism, such as his past ownership of the Dearborn Independent newspaper that ran articles touting “The International Jew” conspiracy. Kahlo waited for a quiet moment and asked: “Mr. Ford, are you Jewish?” He allegedly burst out in laughter and called her a “little pistol.”

Henry Ford Hospital, 2799 W. Grand Blvd., Detroit. Kahlo’s first masterpiece is named after this hospital, where she had a miscarriage. In the many exhibits of her art around the world, this painting is often displayed prominently.

The Scarab Club, 217 Farnsworth St., Detroit. The artist social club behind the DIA was a favorite haunt. Besides the cozy ambience, the Scarab also had another great appeal: Booze flowed at a time when Prohibition was the law of the land. Related story:  The Scarab Club: Detroit’s artist hangout since 1907.

Belle Isle Casino, Belle Isle, Detroit. Rivera’s Marxist talk angered an upscale crowd of 200 during a YWCA banquet. Rivera’s English-language translator apparently walked off the stage after bristling at Rivera’s statement, “All progress is the result of class struggle.”

Houghton Elementary, 16745 Lamphere St. Detroit. This Detroit public school was where the Latino community hosted a dinner for the artists. Longtime Detroit Latino families tell stories of personal interaction with the two. The pair attended a meeting about the plight of Mexican immigrants at 4326 Toledo in southwest Detroit. The building no longer exists.

Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, 47 Watson, Detroit. Kahlo likely took a class to learn lithography, a form of print making, in this Brush Park building, which is now gone.

Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Rivera’s mural debuted March 21, 1933, according to several documents. The controversy faded as more people saw the completed murals. The artist considered it his finest work. Frida and Diego’s story is now the stuff of legend.

Detroit News editorial on the Diego Rivera murals, March 19, 1933:

A mural, such as the Rivera mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts, which actually becomes an integral part of the building in which it is located, should be a decoration harmonious with the structure and with its general embellishment and contents. The first impression on entering the courts of the Institute from the public lobby should be an invitation, not a shock.

It is disappointing to record that to many that first view seems one of something psychologically erroneous, coarse in conception and, to many women observers, foolishly vulgar. Where the first impression should be one to draw the observer on with eagerness to see and enjoy the rest of the pictorial decoration, here instead there is a false, or at the best incomplete impression of our day to be passed on impressively as a record to the generations to come.

Even if the public, expert or otherwise, accepts the unaccustomed patterns, apparent distortions and distasteful lack of color harmony, which already seem to have aroused a measure of shocked criticism, it is admittedly true and unfortunate that the murals are without meaning to the generally intelligent observer without the artist’s own interpretation.

Conspicuously, the figures in the two great panels must seem a slander to Detroit workingmen. Liberties of art aside, it is scarcely surprising if complaints are heard that they convey a false impression of the man and the influence of his work upon him; that this is not a fair picture of the man who works short hours, who must be quick in action, alert of mind; who works in a factory where there is plenty of space for movement, where heavy burdens are borne by mechanical lifts and conveyors of many kinds, where there is good ventilation and light and every facility to encourage efficient labor.

But the most serious criticism heard, and needing examination, is that the whole work and conception is un-American, incongruous and unsympathetic; that it bears no relation to the soul of the community, to the room, to the building, or to the general purpose of Detroit’s Institute of Arts. What must we expect the future generations, viewing this strange picture, will think of our men, our interest in them, our mad jumble of inefficiency? How will they estimate the industrial leaders, engineers, master mechanics, and fine types of workingmen who have contributed to such astonishing results? If Rivera were here giving us a true suggestion of a modern American industrial shop a modern Mexican prison workshop would shame us.

That this one and only space in any of our public buildings available for a really great work of art should have been used in a manner to provoke such serious dissatisfaction among many fine supporters of art in Detroit is without question a matter of profound chagrin, and it is not surprising if these art-lovers now feel that the opportunity might have been reserved for the work of a great artist more instinctively in tune with the purpose and vision of things and emotions truly American.

The blame for this unhappy condition is obviously not on the patron who generously provided the money, but on those who hold this property in trust for the citizens of Detroit and assented to this equivocal undertaking, or it must rest on Dr. Valentiner, and, if so, he must be placed as an unsafe leader in the art development of Detroit; and it is probably inevitable that a doubt will be raised whether the Institute’s executives really comprehend the community which employs them.

If weird and grotesque qualities bring the curious, they do not and can not raise the standard and high purpose of Art in our State. It is feared that they tend rather to mislead inexperienced and ambitious youth to accept a dubious standard. It would be a grave misfortune if these much-discussed works should injure rather than raise the pride of youth in our City or raise in the minds of labor a resentment against the leaders in high places who, by carelessness or intention (they will not know which), have permanently placed what may be regarded as a cruel caricature for the world and posterity to behold.

Owing to the criticism of so many, as already expressed, and the impossibility of an artist altering his work merely to please the people of “less aesthetic taste” than Mr. Rivera, perhaps the best thing to do would be to whitewash the entire work and return the Court to its original beauty.

laguilar@detroitnews.com

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After four days, an excited Marshall took the evidence to the mill’s owner, John Sutter, who realized immediately he would lose everything, and he did. California was a lawless territory; if men decided to dig for gold on his property, he could do nothing short of shooting them to stop it. How could he guard 50,000 acres?

He told Marshall to keep it quiet, but the laborers saw what was going on and began picking up pieces of gold, too. Soon they threw down their shovels to pan for gold, and the word was out. In a short span of time, California would grow from 400 settlers to 90,000 gold seekers.

In San Francisco, 130 miles away, word reached the saloons and shipyards and, within weeks, pretty much the whole town of 15,000 rushed to the rivers to pan for gold. They used frying pans at first. Some bought Indian baskets as sieves to slosh the muddy river water. Many hacked at the rocks with kitchen knives.

Ships arriving in San Francisco anchored in the bay only to have all their deckhands, engineers, officers and captains desert the ship to go dig for gold. The bay became an eerie floating city of hundreds of empty vessels.

On Dec. 5, 1848, President James K. Polk eagerly announced to the 30th Congress the discovery, making it official. California gold helped Polk feel the cost of the Mexican War was justified; the Mexican government had signed a treaty giving the U.S. possession of Texas north to Oregon on Feb. 2, 1848, only nine days after James Marshall found the flecks of gold at Sutter’s Mill.

The news then spread from every newspaper in the country.

“The most exciting point to this California news is the fact, now placed beyond even the shadow of a doubt, that the deposits in gold are actually inexhaustible, and that new and fresh discoveries are made every day,” declared the Detroit Free Press on June 25, 1849. “Wonderful as these discoveries actually are, there can be no question that the wealth of California cannot be exaggerated.”

Michigan joins in

It is estimated that about 6,000 men from Michigan made the trip to California over the years. The first notices of gold being found in California appeared in the Detroit papers later than other cites, primarily because 1848 was an important election year for the state. Detroit’s own Lewis Cass was in a presidential contest with Zachary Taylor. Newspapers, especially those with a Democratic bias, devoted every inch of non-advertising space to politics. Once the election was over and Lewis Cass’ defeat thoroughly reported, argued and analyzed, news of gold in California began to appear.

A sample of gold was sent home by Detroit lawyer Anthony Ten Eyck. His correspondence was printed in the papers, and it spread the fever throughout southeast Michigan.

The delirium for instant riches heated up as editors in Detroit and other Michigan city newspapers such as the Marshall Statesman, Niles Republican and Ann Arbor’s Washtenaw Whig asked gold seekers to send letters so they could share their adventures; their readers all knew someone from town who was heading out West.

By December 1848, B. Bethune Duffield was advertising special life insurance in Detroit to all “candidates for California.”

The California Gold Rush was the first time anybody equipped with nothing more than a pick or a shallow pan could make a tidy fortune instantly; it was America’s first “get rich quick” scheme. More than 100,000 young men sought their fortune in California, mostly from 1849 to the mid 1850s, from all over the world. Many of the gold seekers came from Europe, China and South America.

Within one year, California had enough residents in the territory to become a state, but it was a man’s world: Only 2 percent were women.

The decision to go

Henry Ormal Severance in his book “Michigan Trailmakers” portrays the anxiety pioneer families from Farmington experienced when their young men announced plans to seek their fortunes. Many had never fired guns nor had experience guiding teams of six or eight oxen or mules.

“They had seen Detroit but California lay on the other side of the world. Little groups of the boys and groups of men at church discussed the proposition pro and con:

Edwin said: ‘It is a might dangerous trip overland and besides the distance is so great you could never walk it.’

Samuel said: ‘Yes, and if you should ride one of our horses and he should die on the way, what would you do, stranded in the western plains where the Indians would hunt your scalp and the vultures would wait for your body and the body of the horse. …’

William said: ‘I would say, boys, I wouldn’t go. We have good farms here, you all have excellent opportunities. …’“

Of course, they went. Many boys were under 18. It was the journey of a lifetime, and reports of incredible easy wealth simply enflamed them. At a wedding of a young miner and his new bride, the Detroit Free Press reported, “It was whispered about at the wedding the cake had chunks of raw [gold] inside it, instead of a gold ring.”

There were three ways to get to California. Some took an old whaling route that started in New York or Boston, went around Cape Horn and up the Pacific side to San Francisco. It was considered the safest but the slowest, taking five months.

Another route went from New Orleans to Chagres, Panama. Travelers then crossed the isthmus in dugout canoes and on foot through jungles and mountains for six days until they reached Panama City, where they boarded a ship to San Francisco. It was the shortest route but expensive and rife with yellow fever, cholera, dysentery and more.

Michigan men preferred the “overland journey,” which meant either the Santa Fe Trail leading to Southern California or the better known Oregon-California Trail. That route took them to Chicago, St. Louis and Independence, Mo., then to Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming and Fort Hall in what is now southeastern Idaho. Then it want south on the Humboldt River, which they followed into the valley formed by the Sierra Nevada on the east and the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers on the west.

The Wolverine Rangers

Very few men took this incredible journey alone. Some signed up for established traveling services, such as the Pioneer Co. of Fast Coaches, popularly referred to as the Pioneer Line, which for $200 offered a seat in its train of stagecoaches. Pioneer promised to “carry thro’ to reach San Francisco or Sutter’s Fort in eighty days,” provided victuals (passengers had to cook them), and as best as it could promoted a passenger’s comfort and safety.

But most Michigan men formed groups to travel and pooled resources; some groups were small and informally organized as they gathered in Independence. Other men drew up formal companies, such as the Central Michigan California Emigrant Co. of Jackson, the Monroe Pioneers, the Adrian Co., or the Pioneer Co. of Tecumseh. The most well known of the Michigan companies was the Wolverine Rangers from Marshall.

The Wolverine Rangers created a legal document with formal rules and bylaws titled “Articles of Association and Agreement” that each member had to sign. They began with 58 members who paid $100 to join. The company was organized into units they called “messes.” Jobs such as cook or team driver rotated. Leadership also changed monthly, but organizers held military officer ranks, and some members wore uniforms or at least badges.

The company specified equipment and supplies that Rangers were obligated to take; each man was allowed 40 pounds of baggage. They also took some cash; the average was $400 that many got from mortgaging or selling their homes. So many took hard cash out of the local economy that some newspapers began to decry the removal; in 1850 the editor of the Argus estimated that $30,000 was taken from Washtenaw County alone by gold seekers.

The Wolverine Rangers taught inexperienced young men how to drive teams of six or eight oxen or mules. Many of their members had never shot weapons, and there was a real fear of Indian attacks, so they mandated target practice at a firing range prior to leaving. Each man had to carry a Bowie knife, two rifles with 10 pounds of lead to mold into musket balls, and two holstered pistols; a common brand was the Wesson “pepperbox.”

Oliver Goldsmith of Detroit, seen in 1896, was one of perhaps 6,000 men from Michigan who joined the California gold rush. Decades later he would later write a book, “Overland in Forty-Nine.”

These traveling companies were a big relief to parents of the young men who knew their sons’ limitations and vulnerabilities. Some companies forbade alcohol. The Wolverine Rangers had a bylaw that stated they would maintain the Sabbath. (This actually would become a fractious problem as some in the company insisted there would be no traveling on Sundays even when the company was in serious trouble.)

In his 1981 book “The World Rushed In,” J.S. Holliday claims that these formally organized traveling companies fared better than the informal groups that inevitably fell into squabbling and sometimes even gunfights.

One of the Wolverine Rangers was Oliver Goldsmith from Detroit. Much later in life, he wrote about his adventures in a book called “Overland in Forty-Nine,” published in 1896. In 1849 he was 22 and working in a tobacco shop but managed to save $400.

A popular book for young men in 1849 was American explorer and military officer John C. Fremont’s “California Reports,” written 20 years earlier and filled with mountain men, the Platte River, Lake Tahoe, buffalo and Indians. It was well-known to Goldsmith and many others and formed their images of the great Wild West.

Stuck in Independence

The Wolverine Rangers left Marshall on April 18, 1849, by train to Chicago, steamboat to St. Louis, then on to Independence. That month, 20,000 men gathered with wagons and mules, horses and oxen, waiting to head out.

Men rigged wagons with gold smelting ovens, drilling machinery, even a bakery oven, and one wagon held an entire iron printing press drawn by alternating teams of 12 oxen.

Goldsmith described his clothing: “Our dress was somewhat varied. Mine was a green baize [felt] hunting jacket, red shirt, corduroy trousers and white soft felt hat.” He added that some of the young men were dressed like mountaineers or Indians. A friend gave Goldsmith a “ferocious bull dog” as a going away present, but it was stolen on the first day by a soldier; however, Goldsmith was reconciled to his loss when he learned that “no dogs ever survived the journey through the mountains.”

Using axle grease, Goldsmith and others painted “Wolverine Rangers” with their mess number on the covered sides of the wagons. The wagons were equipped on the hind wheel with odometers so they could track their rate of advance with accuracy. Many were handmade — carved wooden cogs calibrated to the turn of the back wheel.

One woman claimed to have made $18,000 selling pies to the gold seekers waiting to leave Independence. They were stuck there for weeks due to “the backwardness of the season,” as one Wolverine Ranger described it — cold and severe rains. They had to wait for prairie grass to grow so their draft animals could graze as they traveled. One of the consequences of so many gathered in one place with no shelter and little to no concern for sanitation was cholera. Cholera would menace the trains all the way to California.

Finally, they were ready to move out. Dr. Caleb Ormsby from Ann Arbor was in his 50s and another member of the Wolverine Rangers who joined in Independence. He had been a pioneer doctor in Tecumseh and moved to Ann Arbor but through several bad business decisions was now broke. He came with three young men who were dependent upon him: his stepson Edward Brown, in his late teens; his sister’s only son, 18-year-old William Mather; and a University of Michigan student, Cyrus Hamilton. Ormsby’s letters to his wife were published in the Washtenaw Whig.

Ormsby described the scene as thousands began to depart: “… the swarm of emigrants of men, women and children, of all characters and colors, with their thousands of mules, horses, oxen and cows, wagons, carts and spring carriages are now putting forward for the great El Dorado of the West.”

(The name of a fictitious country abounding in gold, El Dorado was believed to exist somewhere in South America.)

Life among the Argonauts

The ground was soft and the thousands of wagons and oxen left it a muddy, rutted quagmire, but they were on the Santa Fe Trail. The Rangers now had 18 wagons, 56 men and about 100 mules, and were making about 25 miles a day crossing the “Kanzas.”

At night they circled the wagons to let the animals graze without fear of wandering off. Goldsmith described their nights:

“We were too tired for games or sport of any kind. We smoked our pipes, talked when we felt like it, and did some guessing before we examined the odometer about the number of miles made during the day. That was the extent of our gayety (sic).”

There were three preachers in the company, and on Sundays they took turns holding services by standing on a crate for a pulpit. The crew listened as they cut each other’s hair, mended clothing, and washed a shirt or two, which aggravated the preachers, who saw it as disrespectful. Goldsmith agreed but countered that “they hardily sang all the hymns.”

The company also used Sundays to repair damaged wagon wheels and axles and to give their animals time to rest.

Cooks made up the week’s meals of beans and biscuits. There was no fuel, so they burned dried buffalo dung they called “chips.”

Goldsmith described a dinner : “Once, in the captain’s mess, when they supposed they were dining on fried buffalo steak, cut in small pieces, the captain — putting his fork into what he took to be a piece of steak — broke it in two, then asked the cook, ‘What the devil is this?’ The latter examining it, found it was a chip instead of a steak. He made no apologies but simply remarked, ‘I wondered what had soaked up all my bacon grease,’ as he tossed it away.”

These travelers were called the “Argonauts” during their day: wanderers journeying across the land in search of their golden fleece. The line of wagons continued for hundreds of miles. In June and July they crossed Nebraska, and Goldsmith wrote that they were “wild with excitement” at the sight of the enormous buffalo herds.

“Not only was the country around here wild and beautiful, but the atmosphere was remarkably clear. For two days before we came up to it, we could easily see Chimney Rock, a landmark in what is now Nebraska. We were at that time on the North Fork of the Platte River.” They broke lines to hike to Chimney Rock and carve their names in the soft sandstone; one wiseguy even climbed to the top, where he stuck a small windmill.

The cholera continued and they were passing between three and 10 freshly dug graves a day along the trail. They saw virtually no Sioux or Pawnee; it was said the Indians kept their distance due to the cholera. However, some came to trade and sell horses. Goldsmith, the city boy, had never owned a horse and bought his first from the Indians, being told riding a horse was much easier than riding in a wagon with no springs. For 20 silver dollars he bought a gray mare 6 or 7 years old with saddle sores.

“Different members of the company had purchased ponies and my mare was the subject of many jokes among them. They ridiculed her style, doubted her endurance and guyed [teased] me about her on every score and occasion.” Through Goldsmith’s care and love of the Indian pony he would be offered $200 for it in the mountains when other horses had died. He never took the money.

Overloaded wagons

What was growing obvious to everyone by the time they reached Fort Laramie in July was that they had overloaded their wagons, which were falling to pieces, and killing their animals through exhaustion.

Ormsby wrote to his wife: “The destruction of property is immense. Tons and tons of pork are seen by the side of the road. Tools, wagons, harness, in fact property of every description is strewn almost from one end of the road to the other. Horses and mules let loose, worth nothing and unwanted. A gentleman told me that his company had thrown away a sawmill after drawing it 500 miles. …”

Indian attacks never happened, so hundreds of pistols and rifles were tossed away, and entire wagons abandoned as travelers decided to pack the mules and walk.

Tragically, people were dropped off as well. Part of the reason cholera persisted was because as soon as someone died of it his or her bedding was thrown off the wagon onto the trail. As miles went by, grave digging ceased and dead bodies were dumped with little ceremony. Ormsby would visit injured travelers left behind by their companions in small tents, sad and solitary against the immensity of the Western landscape. He observed many men “shot to pieces” either from drunken fights or accidental shootings.

“Just two miles from the fort I visited Mr. Hodge from Jackson [Michigan] left by his company with no covering but a little tent.” Another man nearby was attended by his wife, who told Ormsby, “Why, sir, a wagon ran over his head. …” Farther out and alone was another tent with two young men in it, one on each side resting on blankets.

“This was my second visit to these truly unfortunate men, and they were overjoyed to see me. The same wagon had run over both of them. One had been severely cut through the groin — lacerating everything to the arteries. … His wound is in bad condition. … The other had the wheel run square over his back, producing palsy of the lower extremities. …

“These men were both cultivated and refined gentlemen. … One was a collegiate and designed to qualify himself for the ministry on his return from California at Harvard University. Of a sudden, one of them cried out like a child and sobbed convulsively. I turned toward the other, and the tears were coming down his bright, handsome and intelligent countenance. … All we could do was let sympathy have its scope.”

Starvation, dust, disease

By Wyoming in July, the boredom and exhaustion had taken its toll on both people and animals. They were down to eight miles a day. Those in the rear of the seemingly endless line (the Wolverine Rangers estimated they were in the center) found the wagons and livestock in the front of the lines had foraged anything green and there was nothing to eat; men were obligated to walk the animals two, three or five miles off the trail to find anything to graze. Draft animals, horses, cattle and mules brayed incessantly for water and food, making sleeping nearly impossible. Sometimes livestock would stray miles away, get lost and die.

By August as the wagons neared the Salt Lake, the land became highly alkaline, as Goldsmith wrote: “The thick powdery alkali dust on the roads through these lands was terribly hard. …. It was so thick that the drivers kept as far from the cattle as possible and often could not see them though less than ten feet away. The poor creatures coughed constantly, their hair became matted and so filled with dust that you could only guess their color.”

Ormsby also described the carnage. “An immense number of cattle have perished within the last 200 miles. We have counted lying by the road-side as high as 46 in a day. The hills and valleys are strewn with them. Occasionally we find a dead horse or mule. This fatality of cattle is owing to the mineral water so common on the route.”

To keep on the trails the companies used guidebooks, the most popular being Edward C. Wase’s “Emigrant’s Guide to California.” It was a small handbook published in St. Louis in the spring of 1849. It was considered the most reliable even though Edward Ware had never been to California; he claimed to have written his guide from Fremont’s “Report” and talking to those with experience.

However, none of the guides was perfect. Goldsmith reported crossing one barren desert that Ware described as 40 miles long only to find it nearly 90 miles. He reported copies of the Ware Guide discarded everywhere, from apparently disgusted travelers.

El Dorado a disappointment

Goldsmith, like many others, was nearly spent as he trudged through the mountains. He decided to quit the Wolverine Rangers because it was moving too slowly. He was given some food and went on his own. He walked instead of riding his pony, knowing that to ride the animal would break it down. Walking mile after mile at night when it wasn’t so hot, he would drop in his tracks and sleep for two hours. He joined others who were by this time out of food, so they tried to buy anything they could, sometimes begging, sometimes stealing it.

A ’49er peers into the silt of California’s American River in 1850 as he pans for gold. (L.C. McClure)

The horror story of the Donner Party of 1846 in which travelers were trapped in the mountains and had to resort to cannibalism was well known during that time. When it was rumored that traveling companies were breaking apart, people were struggling without food, women and children were dying, and many were entering the Sierra Nevada late in the season, there was real concern that a disaster was in the making which might dwarf the Donner catastrophe.

In response, $200,000 was raised in Sacramento to send the Army out with food, shelter and supplies. They were ordered to help only women and children — men were on their own — but they did share food where needed.

Goldsmith, near starvation, ran into the relief train as he entered the Sacramento Valley:

“A day or two after leaving Deer Creek we met the last section of the relief train. I got two big handfuls of broken hard bread from them, which lasted us through the twenty miles we had to travel.”

For Goldsmith, the romance of travel in the West was long gone. As soon as he was out of the Indian country, “I took my rifle by the barrel and knocked the stock off against the wheel of an abandoned wagon; then putting the barrel between the spokes and gave it a wrench that bent it badly and left it there — glad to be rid of the burden.”

On Oct. 13, 1849 — with 340 miles yet to go over desert and bad roads — the remaining Wolverine Rangers agreed to dissolve the company and divide up the supplies. It was now every man for himself.

Ormsby and his young companions made it and began their search for gold, disappointed that it was not as easy as they were led to believe. Already by summer of 1850 the gold was difficult to mine. Ormsby wrote to his wife, “That there is a great abundance of gold in California I think is very certain, that it is very difficult to access is equally certain.”

Gold fever short-lived

The territory was ruled by “lynch law.” In six weeks, Ormsby had heard of 20 murders. Men had completely changed from their previous lives. Ormsby wrote, “The state of society here is wretchedly bad. To know a man in California, you can rarely judge what he was before he left home.”

Detroiter Delos Davis wrote to the Detroit Free Press in 1851: “In view of the state of things existing here, the uncertainty of success, the almost certainty of disease … I would earnestly advise that no person, having any way of living at home, should think of coming to California.”

The gold rush was short-lived. As Holliday reports in his book “The World Rushed In,” by 1857 $500 million in gold had been dug from the hills, valleys, mountains and rivers of California. It financed the making of the state. By 1860 the value of California’s manufacturing sector exceeded that year’s gold production, and more than 20,000 new farms produced food that year. San Francisco boasted more newspapers than London.

Ormsby spent seven years in California but never made much money. Of the three young men he traveled with, one died of “mountain fever,” one returned home in a year and one went to dental school and set up a practice in Nevada. Ormsby decided to head back to Michigan but died on his return in a shipwreck near Havana.

Goldsmith returned to Detroit and later in life built a fortune as a founding investor in the Detroit Copper and Brass Rolling Mills. He stated in 1907 on his 80th birthday: “I returned from my wealth hunting experience with a five dollar gold piece and a five cent piece … but the experience, hardships, and rough jolts of those days in the mountains were of invaluable benefit to me later in life.”

Young Henry from Farmington and his companion George struck it rich. They were cautious and sensible, stayed clear of the gambling dens, and kept their distance from others. As the author Henry Severance said: “Henry and George buckled around them their specially constructed leather belts filled with their gold dust, with pistols and cartridges protruding from the front.”

Severance described them as they returned to Michigan: “… they arrived on an early spring afternoon. The frequenters of the Detroit hotel, where they intended to stay overnight, were curious and unduly interested in the returned ’49ers.

Henry to George: ‘Did you see that fellow look at us askance? I don’t like his looks. Let’s go.’

George: ‘For home?’

Henry: ‘Yes, We are safer on the road than we are here if we can steal away, and keep our powder dry.’”

Like so many others, they were fundamentally changed by the experience. During the Gold Rush a popular expression of the ’49ers heard over and over was, “I have seen the elephant!” which generally meant I have suffered an ordeal, I have seen something that has shocked me to my core, I know a new truth, and I am no longer the same person I used to be.

Detroit News illustration | Source: Detroit Free Press, January 19, 1849

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By Michael Hodges / The Detroit News

The procedure was designed to look as ordinary as possible.

In the years before the Emancipation Proclamation, a wagon full of what looked to be free black laborers would on occasion pull up to Mariners’ Church at its old location on Woodward Avenue close to the Detroit River. The group would dismount and start carrying goods back and forth from the wagon into the church sub-basement.

Had a spectator at the corner of Woodbridge and Woodward watched carefully, says Mariners’ rector emeritus the Rev. Richard Ingalls Jr., reached at his home in Florida, he or she might have noticed that at some point all the workers disappeared into the church — and never came out.

What that witness couldn’t know was that a door hidden in the sub-basement opened to a tunnel that led to the Detroit River and formed one of the last links in the Underground Railroad. Once they’d pushed through the shrubbery that hid the tunnel’s mouth, women, children and men bent on escape would get into boats and push off for Canada and freedom.

“The Mariners’ connection to the Underground Railroad was largely forgotten till 1955, when they moved the church from its original location and discovered the tunnel,” Ingalls says.

He thinks there had been stories over the years about the church’s involvement, but with no documentary evidence, those faded over time.

Until, that is, the massive urban-renewal project that created Hart Plaza moved the church 900 feet to the east, to its present location at the mouth of another, far larger tunnel to Canada.

Perhaps reflecting Anglican modesty, Mariners’ role in the Underground Railroad hasn’t been much advertised. The Rev. Jesse Roby Jr., the first African-American priest to serve at Mariners’, thinks most black Detroiters are probably unaware of the church’s link.

The Rev. Jesse Roby Jr. was the first African-American priest to serve at Mariners’. (Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News)

“I don’t think it’s widely known,” Roby says. “But it’s an honorable connection — very much so.”

Interestingly, Ingalls notes the original tunnel, long-since demolished, would have run right underneath the Underground Railroad monument in Hart Plaza.

By any measure, it was Second Baptist Church of Detroit, a black congregation, that masterminded local efforts, says Bob Smith, vice president for education and exhibitions at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit.

Ingalls points out that runaways were in constant danger of seizure by bounty hunters under the federal Fugitive Slave Act, even in a free state like Michigan. The law required local officials to return slaves to their owners. Helping slaves escape was a federal crime.

“Tracking down fugitive slaves was a big business before the Civil War,” Ingalls says, “and Second Baptist knew they were under scrutiny. They had to get the runaways from their sanctuary to the river in secret.”

But Second Baptist, where fugitives were often temporarily housed, was located at least half a mile from the water’s edge, first on Fort Street and, after 1857, at its present location in Greektown.

“Mariners’ was perfect because of its proximity to the water at the narrow part of the river,” Ingalls says.

Mariners’ also was perfect because it had been built, surprisingly, with rental space in the basement one floor beneath the sanctuary, and a sub-basement below that. For years before the Civil War, a grocer occupied that space. As a consequence, workers carting provisions in and out of the church roused little suspicion.

Detroit, of course, wasn’t the only crossing point. Runaways also escaped through Port Huron, Smith says. Nor was the Mariners’ tunnel their only possibility. Smith notes that when the river froze solid in hard winters, fugitives could try to make their way to Canada on foot.

Smith says many scholars peg the number of slaves who escaped through Detroit at about 40,000, though that number is in some dispute. Historians often have relied on historical counts of African-Canadians living in Ontario near Detroit, he says, but to assume they were all escapees may be wrong.

“Some argue they weren’t all runaway slaves and that many might have been free blacks who fled to Canada to escape the restrictions they still faced in the U.S.,” Smith says.

For his part, Ingalls is still a little astonished of the risk Mariners’ and the grocery took in helping the slaves.

“Those lily white businessmen running that store cooperated to get those people away from oppression,” he says.

When Mariners’ Church was moved to its current location in 1955, a tunnel was discovered at the original Woodward Avenue spot that was part of the Underground Railroad. (John T. Greilick / The Detroit News)

Learn more about the Underground Railroad

Two Detroit museums have outstanding exhibits on the city’s role in the Underground Railroad.

Detroit Historical Museum

5401 Woodward, Detroit

9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, closed Mondays.

Admission: Free

(313) 833-1805

www.detroithistorical.org

Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

315 E. Warren, Detroit

9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; 1-5 p.m. Sundays

Admission: $8 adults, $5 seniors, $5 kids (3-12).

(313) 494-5800

www.thewright.org.

The post Detroit’s Mariners’ Church helped sailors, guided escaped slaves to freedom appeared first on Michigan History.

“It is always the big thief who shouts the loudest about the little thief.” — Hazen S. Pingree

In the book “The American Mayor” published in 1999, Hazen S. Pingree was identified by U.S. scholars as one of the Top 10 mayors in U.S. history. As mayor of Detroit and later governor of Michigan, Pingree was not just responding as a businessman to the needs of citizens and the dysfunctional organization of city government, he was changing the social foundation of Detroit, forcing the city out of a 19th century socially rigged order toward a progressive, socially just 20th century.

In his four terms as mayor, Pingree got private corporations to lower the price of natural gas, telephone service and street car rates. He reconstructed the sewer system and improved Detroit’s horrible unpaved streets that were considered among the worst in the country for a big city. He constructed public schools, the first public parks, and free public baths. He exposed corruption in the school board and bribery at the private lighting company. He initiated the first publicly owned transit company and city-owned electric company after he found that Detroit was paying nearly double the rates charged in Toledo, Cleveland, Grand Rapids and Buffalo.

He implemented equal tax policies for the city, and he forced down the rates for river ferries. He started competitive bidding for street car companies and he brought about electrified rapid transit. He did away with the old toll roads and began his nationally famous potato patch plan that helped feed thousands through a devastating economic depression.

Although 120 years later many would find themselves on the exact opposite side of Pingree in their beliefs about the effectiveness and purpose of the public sector versus the private sector, credit Pingree with devoting his sole focus on the betterment of Detroit and its common people.

Detroit in 1889

To understand Hazen Stuart Pingree’s character, iron persistence, blunders and achievements, it is important to see the city that elected him in 1889 as its 43rd mayor.

In 1889 Detroit’s population was 205,000 and growing steadily; the majority of Detroiters were foreign born and had arrived after the Civil War. The census of 1890 reported only 42,000 of Detroit’s population were born of native parents; 78,000 were born of foreign parents and 80,000 were foreign born. Germans far outnumbered Irish Americans or other nationalities; the city supported eight German newspapers.

Detroit was 89 square miles (it is now 138 square miles), and it was divided into 16 ribbon shaped “wards.” Each ward elected two aldermen to represent them on the Common Council for two-year terms. On the day Pingree was inaugurated, seven aldermen out of 32 were indicted by a grand jury for accepting bribes from public contractors.

Public projects such as the purchase of Belle Isle or the development of the new Grand Boulevard, located on the city outskirts at that time, were viewed as recklessly extravagant, privately motivated boondoggles and met with deep suspicion and frequently violent opposition.

The tax codes made public improvements such as paving streets difficult. When a street was paved, owners whose property abutted the street were taxed higher than the rest of the city; therefore, few wanted their streets paved or improved. Paving as well as other public utilities were run by “rings,” contractors who paid “boodle” — bribes to aldermen on the Common Council. Pingree’s predecessor, Mayor John Pridgeon, was linked to scandal after scandal involving the Common Council, city commissioners, grand jury investigations, and prosecutions for bribery and graft.

Mayors did not run Detroit at that time; the city was controlled by a “corrupt political machine, in the hands of a small group of men,” as city historian George Catlin described it. The nomination of 32 aldermen was dictated by this machine; some of the characters nominated were capable, but many “were notorious for past political malfeasances and corrupt practices.”

Detroit was politically a city of Democrats, but despite their lock on the ethnic wards, differences in nationalities, especially Germans and Irish, kept the council in a state of war. A large number were German saloon owners and bartenders, led by President John Chris Jacob. “Boss Jacob” was a cynical and tough-minded ward boss. His German accent was heavy and his language profane. If someone threatened to cast an adverse vote he would drown them out with his booming voice, physically intimidate them or make up some parliamentary rule to send everyone to a rule book and stall the process.

Jacob was quoted in the Detroit Evening News in 1889 as saying, “Dose Irisher altermanns what is always gombining against der Germans.” Many Germans who by this time were socially rising in Detroit had nothing but contempt for the newly arrived Polish or other immigrants. Council’s only concerns were with city contracts, rewarding allies with jobs, and hammering enemies.

These alderman candidates were seldom known by the general public. Caucuses and any political business were held in the back rooms of saloons. Some of the wards, such as the First Ward, were in dangerous slums like the “Potomac” that ran along the river. Many of the inhabitants of the Potomac were veterans of the Civil War who were now dock workers or day laborers; some were “floaters” — flop house bums.

The slum’s odd name came from a popular song of the Civil War, “All Quiet Along the Potomac.” (It is said the song inspired the translated title for the World War I epic novel and movie, “All Quiet on the Western Front”.)

Boss Jacob was accused of using “floaters” in his re-election campaign by his Republican challenger for alderman of the Fifth Ward. In a fit of fury Jacob beat his accuser, choked him, and pitched him over a stairway railing.

The arrival of Pingree in Detroit

Hazen Pingree was nearly 50 when he ran for public office for the first time. He was born to a poor family in Maine in 1840. He worked on a farm, had little education, and got a job in a shoe factory as a leather cutter. In 1862 at age 22 he and others in the town enlisted in the Company F, First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, to fight in the Civil War. He saw a lot of action.

Pingree first heard of Detroit when he was a prisoner at the Confederate Andersonville prison in Georgia for six months. (Problems with his stomach that started with the starvation diet at Andersonville would trouble him all his life.)

He listened to a few fellow homesick prisoners from Detroit who enthusiastically loved their city and extolled the business opportunities for young men. During Gen. Sherman’s march to Atlanta, Pingree was transferred to another prison but managed to escape. He returned to his unit and continued fighting and was even present at Appomattox Court House and Lee’s surrender of the South.

On Aug. 15, 1865, Pingree was mustered out and a few months later came to Detroit. He began as a cobbler for R.H. Fyfe on Jefferson Avenue, then took a sales job with another shoe company, H.P. Baldwin. He was unhappy there and soon quit. He met Charles H. Smith, an accountant, and they formed a partnership buying and selling produce.

In 1866 it was announced that H.P. Baldwin was going out of business, so the two men bought up the old shoe manufacturing machines. Pingree rebuilt them and the partners formed the Pingree and Smith shoe firm with $1,360 and eight employees, which in 20 years grew to 700 employees making, in 1886, 490,877 pairs of boots, shoes and slippers for men, women and children. The company brought in nearly a million dollars a year, and was the second biggest shoe manufacturer in the U.S., according to Silas Farmer, Detroit’s city historian.

During the 1870s and ‘80s, while Pingree built up his shoe business, he stayed to the side of politics as a donor. He was part of the group called the “Big Four”: wealthy businessmen in the state who donated large sums to the Michigan Republican Club.

Republicans were searching for a man to run for mayor in a race they didn’t expect to win in 1889, because Detroit was in the hands of Democrats. Pingree was not their first choice, but through consensus they hoped that a level-headed yet forceful businessman might have some appeal, so they nominated him. These same men, among whom were U.S. Sen. James McMillan, former Mayor William G. Thompson, and Michigan Central Railroad lawyer James F. Joy, would later become his most implacable, bitter enemies.

Candidate Pingree

Pingree refused at first. “Mayor? Why? What the hell do I know about politics? I’m too busy making shoes.”

Then, after pressure from the Republican Club members, he reluctantly accepted. He had no experience but he had ferocious energy, which is how he built his shoe empire. He was well dressed in his black silk top hat and full-length black frock coat. Newspaper reporter John C. Lodge, who later became mayor in the 1920s, wrote that Pingree “was always the last word in attire.”

He was portly and strong like a Maine farmer, with a high-pitched voice and a bald round head with pale, somewhat pinkish skin. Historian Catlin said Pingree’s blue eyes gave him a vacant stare which reporters described as either dreaming of the future or vacuous, depending on where they stood with him.

Candidate Pingree got coached by some political old hands who saw he had potential; he seemed sincere, friendly and likeable, and once he threw himself into a challenge he was relentless. They showed him tips on how to give a speech and very soon he drew crowds. He liked people and spoke directly to them. He referred to himself as “just a plain shoemaker — old baldheaded Ping.” However, Lodge added that “Pingree fairly blew up as he always did when his sense of justice was outraged.”

In his 1965 book “Reform In Detroit,” Melvin Holli explained that on a deeper level, what Pingree saw and exploited was Detroit’s new immigrants who had arrived after the Civil War. They made up the largest percentage of Detroit’s population but many felt unrepresented, particularly the Polish. He acted on that and used that strategy throughout his political career.

He courted the Poles with a translator at his side, and drank red eye whiskey with the Irish voters, squashing rumors he was a temperance supporter. He spoke to German societies. He fraternized on street corners, asked his shoe customers to vote for him, and enlisted his shoe factory employees to get out the vote. When he didn’t get favorable reviews in the English language daily newspapers, he secretly bought a German paper, Sonntags Herold, replaced the editor and immediately got the paper’s enthusiastic endorsement.

Pingree won the election by a slim majority.

The first year

Pingree wisely had hired Alexander I. McLeod, an easygoing former newspaper writer from Mt. Clemens, to act as his secretary and right hand man. McLeod wrote his speeches and smoothed feelings when Pingree “had blood in his eye.” McLeod typically entered the council chamber first, smiling and greeting aldermen and others. The Common Council chambers were at times jammed with as many as 200 people: businessmen, corporate lawyers, reporters, citizens with complaints, spectators, and policemen. Shouting, horn blowing, brawling and even riots were not uncommon. Everyone smoked cigars and the air was gagged with blue smoke.

Pingree entered Chris Jacob’s Common Council for the first time as the elected mayor. He spoke directly without the flowery introductions and asides that characterized Victorian speeches. He listed five reforms he wanted to address, starting with the streets. Detroit streets in 1890 were among the worst in the nation with only four paved streets and miles of rotting cedar block.

Secondly, the public franchises, such as the street cars which were privately owned, were poorly maintained and the fares too high. He also complained of contracts with gas and electric companies showing Detroit’s rates far exceeding even smaller cities such as Grand Rapids. He finished with a list of jobs he needed filled in his office and recommended who he saw as the most fit for each job.

Council was stone silent. Just as silent were the Republican businessmen and lawyers sitting in the gallery, investors in the lighting, paving and city street cars, listening to Pingree’s every word.

“Ya, vell,” Chris Jacob said. “Vee dink about this den.” He adjourned the session.

As George Catlin wrote, each alderman retreated to his respective ward saloon, determined to bring down this dreamy new mayor.

Taking it to the streets

Pingree soldiered on. He took the hidebound aldermen, cynical newspapermen and others to the street to look at what he was talking about. Four streets were paved with brick and what was then called asphalt: Jefferson, Lafayette, Second, and Cass. Other streets, like Grand River or Woodward, were made up of cedar block, paving material that first appeared in 1836.

The Detroit Journal described the streets as “150 miles of rotting, rutted, lumpy, dilapidated paving.” In summer, sections of streets oozed pitch and resin and occasionally caught fire from discarded cigar butts.

Graft and corrupt contractors resulted in the sewer scandal of 1890. Pingree took a group of aldermen down into the sewers where he showed them concrete as soft as mush, bricks falling from the wall at a touch, crumbling mortar, mud and effluence pouring through the walls. Pingree declared that the fault lay with the city’s cement supplier, who sold unsuitable cement. The contractor threatened to sue. Pingree turned his office into a concrete testing lab with jars and bottles with sand, brands of cement, water, pressure gauges, and tensile testing equipment. The contractor backed down when Pingree showed that the contractor’s cement crumbled in his fist.

Pingree led the entire common council plus newspaper reporters on junkets to other cities to see electric powered street cars. In 1890, Detroit continued to rely on dusty horses pulling cars on old worn oak stringers (rails) topped with strap iron — basically no different from the rails of the 1840s.

He attacked the pavement tax laws, offering to issue a bond to pay for the improvements, then spread the payment out across the city and over time. Conservatives, many of them his own neighbors, opposed it, saying it would encourage wasteful spending. However, like the good businessman that he was, Pingree showed that similar tax code changes in other cities did not do that and that cities with more than 50,000 citizens had much better street quality.

But his efforts for reform went nowhere. Even his appointees were rejected and the positions filled with council cronies. Boss Jacob outmaneuvered the inexperienced mayor, calling special late night “rump” sessions of the council to reject the mayor’s proposals; it was completely illegal and the Michigan Supreme Court ordered them stopped, but Jacob simply disregarded the order.

Arresting the school board

Exasperated, Pingree threatened to expose “boodling” (bribery) and those who were “raking off” percentages from contractors’ bids. He went directly at the boodlers. One was the Detroit school board, which was notorious for graft. Pingree learned they awarded lucrative contracts at secret school board meetings which the state said were illegal, but they ignored state law.

When they dismissed Pingree’s legal mayoral veto of their contracts, he arranged a special board meeting. He called for the guilty parties to resign and save the city from disgrace. When he heard nothing in return, he took out a list of their names and read the charges to each and a warrant. He then called in a squad of police officers from the wings and had them all arrested and taken to jail. Earlier he had set up private detectives to pose as salesmen and recorded their demands for bribes using a stenographer hidden in an adjacent room.

Two were sentenced to prison, one jumped bail, one was acquitted, and one committed suicide. Pingree was praised for the result but also sharply criticized by many Detroiters for what the Detroit Free Press called “his ‘grand stand play’ manner of executing the warrants for the arrest.”

Beginning in 1844, private turnpike companies attempted to fill a void in public roads with a network of toll roads, portions of which were constructed with wooden planks. At various points along a toll road, such as Grand River Avenue, travelers were charged a fee. By the 1890s most private toll roads were out of business, but a few lingered in Detroit. Pingree attacked the companies that collected tolls from people traveling down the main streets of Detroit. He saw it as an antiquated remnant of a time long past. Some of these toll companies were owned by personal friends of Pingree. He went at them nonetheless.

He had paving teams tearing out cedar block and replace it with brick for long hours, seven days a week. But things were still moving too slowly for Pingree until a riot of thousands, including J.L. Hudson, played into his hands.

The street car riot

In February of 1892 the journal Street Railway Review called Detroit’s horse-drawn street car system “one of the poorest equipped street railway cities in the country.” In his opening address to the Common Council, Pingree demanded rapid transit and expansion of the lines.

The Detroit City Railway was privately owned by George and Strathearn Hendrie of Ontario, who were determined to keep their horse-drawn lines. They would convert to rapid transit only if the city renewed their 30-year contract, which was coming up for renewal in less than a year, and they refused to put in writing when they would convert from horses to electricity.

In April of 1891 a strike was called by transit workers, which pushed Pingree into the center ring and brought him the attention of the national press. Twelve union members were fired by the Hendries for organizing the Street Car Employees Association and the support of a 10-hour work day. The drivers and conductors were working 81 hours a week and wanted it reduced to 72 hours a week.

It was a three-day riot made up of mobs of workers and citizens in a vengeful mood, set on destroying the City Railway’s cars and tracks. On Jefferson Avenue crowds grew with other union members who walked off the job from stove and shoe manufacturers and surrounded the rail cars. The Detroit Tribune reported the strike leaders shouting, “Break out the windows. Give them a volley of anything you can lay your hands on. And if you happen to hit the cops and the scabs it’ll be all right!”

The Detroit Free Press quoted Cameron Currie, treasurer and secretary of the line, saying, “The city is in the hands of a mob. And we can do nothing until sufficient police protection is assured.” He then ran to Field’s store, where he purchased a number of revolvers and cartridges, and passed them out among the employees.

The mob threw bricks and stones at the street cars. They began ripping up rails. Strathearn Hendrie, described as “wild with rage,” leaned out of another street car, screamed, shook his fist at the crowd and pulled out a revolver. From the crowd at least a half a dozen men pointed shotguns and pistols directly at Hendrie. He took cover but the crowd was now shouting, “Kill the Cannucks! Kill the Cannucks!”

It wasn’t only the working men destroying property in the street, it included some respected citizens, such as future mayor and U.S. Senator James Couzens. Joseph L. Hudson sent out clerks from his department store to collect money to support the strikers. City bakers provided free lunches. The Detroit Free Press wrote: “The railway company is reaping the harvest of its indifference to popular sentiment.”

The railway company ordered Pingree to call the governor and bring in state militia to force the end of the melee at rifle point. Pingree refused, saying that city forces were adequate. He rode his chestnut mare into the middle of the strikers and tried to speak amid the deafening shouts. He smiled and waved.

“Tell these men to break up and go home,” shouted the chief of police to Pingree.

“Why?” he smiled looking around. “They’re not doing any harm, are they?”

“Yes, they are destroying property and attacking City Railway employees!”

Pingree moved a bit further and was surrounded by hundreds of rioters, who quieted down. The mayor counseled order and good behavior and the mob dispersed but the violence continued elsewhere.

Pingree convinced the railway company to arbitrate with the strikers, a revolutionary strategy. They did and the strike ended.

Pingree in his book “Facts and Opinions” wrote that calling U.S. soldiers to suppress or harm American citizens for a private corporation or trust was morally contemptible. Interviewed sometime later, George Hendrie confided that when the mayor of Detroit refused to call in state soldiers to defend his railway, he knew the corporation as he and his brother had maintained it for years was not defensible.

Hazen Pingree served four terms as mayor of Detroit, 1889-1897, and was governor of Michigan from 1897 to 1901. (Detroit Publishing Co.)

Making enemies

The victory over the privately owned city railway didn’t actually come for several months, when Pingree’s veto of the 30-year contract for the Hendries was unanimously sustained by the Common Council, a humiliating defeat for Chris Jacobs. It cost powerful men in the Republican Party a lot of money, especially Michigan. Sen. James McMillan, as he was a major stockholder in the railway. He was head of the Republican Party and was quoted as saying he wanted “to run him (Pingree) into the ditch.”

Other wealthy Detroiters began to close ranks on Pingree. He lost his place on the board of Preston National Bank. His family was denied its traditional pew at the Woodward Avenue Baptist Church. The family was being isolated by the church, by neighbors and even business colleagues.

Pingree remarked, “It takes a lot of pluck to see your old associates pass you by without speaking and not get disheartened and want to give up the fight,” reported the Detroit Tribune on Nov. 4, 1893.

Pingree had little regard for the church after that. He said the “goo-goos’” (a derogatory name for Christian do-gooders) efforts at reforming society through temperance and closing whore houses was a waste of time; it was part of human nature. Pingree believed the only way to reform men was to change the structure of society through popular support. As one plumber shouted to him at a rally: “The Detroit 400 may be trying to down you but there are 40,000 to stick to you.” The Free Press wrote in 1894, “There are thousands of plain, thoughtful citizens of Michigan who love Mayor Pingree for the enemies he has made.”

The potato patch solution

The panic of 1893 and the depression that followed in 1894 had a severe effect on Detroit’s financial and banking sectors. All manufacturing entities laid off workers to the point that the state census of the time estimated male labor force unemployment at 33 percent. Especially hard hit were the foreign born, who were 50 percent unemployed.

A Polish mob forced a street repair gang to throw down their shovels and give them a chance at work. Police put the mob down with clubs and drawn revolvers. Another 500 men armed with shovels attacked Sheriff C.P. Collins and two deputies who emptied their revolvers into the charging mob, but soon shovels came down on them and beat them into a “senseless bloody mass,” according to the Detroit Tribune.

Foreigner turned against foreigner. The Michigan Catholic asked for “severe punishment against a savage mob of howling Poles.”

Pingree applied pressure to bakeries to reduce the price of bread, which at that time sold for a nickel a loaf. He eliminated trucks at work sites to allow for the hiring of more men to hall stone by wheelbarrow. In the second summer of the depression Pingree initiated his novel idea of urban farming, turning vacant city land into garden plots. The city’s poverty commission was exhausted so Pingree took his idea to the churches to raise money for tools and seed.

“Most of the unfortunate would be glad to raise their own food,” Pingree argued. “They are willing to work, and we ought to give them a chance to do it.”

The Detroit newspapers mocked Pingree and the big churches treated the idea with sarcasm and contempt; in all he raised an insulting $13 from the churches. (Soon after Pingree advocated repealing the churches’ tax-exempt status.) Undeterred, Pingree sold his prize horse at one third of its worth to kick off the potato patch program, and got access to farm 430 acres of city land.

In 1894, 3,000 families applied to work on the plots but there was only money for 945. In the first year those families grew $14,000 worth of produce, so much it was a surplus. In 1895 the number of farm plots grew to 1,500 and in 1896 to more than 1,700. The value of produce exceeded $30,000, more than the outlay of the city poverty commission.

It was an unquestionable success and Pingree became a national hero. The potato patch scheme was copied in such cities as New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Denver. But Pingree’s vision of social justice became keener; he doubted the long-term effectiveness of charity. In 1896 he told the Terre Haute Benevolent Society, “Charity, in short, is the handmaid of economic oppression.”

On to the governorship

However, Pingree grew more convinced that it was the state Republican politicians’ support for the railroad trusts that was the real problem for the public, so he ran for governor. It took him some time, twice failing to obtain the gubernatorial nomination in 1892 and 1894, but in 1896 he was elected. The Republican controlled state house viewed Pingree as an enemy. A New York Times editorial voiced a common view:

“Considerable anxiety is expressed, even by the men who voted for him, over the probability that he will use the powers of his new office to put into execution the many eccentric schemes of which he is known to approve. Mr. Pingree’s ability is denied by none, but he is said to have an insane hatred of railroads, and on many social and economic subjects to be far more heretical than the Populist gang whose financial absurdities he opposes.”

He was at the time still mayor and wanted to hold onto the office to ensure passage of key programs he had started; however, the state Supreme Court refused to allow him to be both mayor of Detroit and governor of Michigan, so Pingree resigned as mayor. Unfortunately for Pingree, Sen. McMillan and the Republican Legislature and the railroad lobby in the state were too dominant, and their hatred of Pingree was unremitting. They blocked every effort Pingree made to tax the railroads. Many consider his governorship ineffective.

Embittered and in need of rest, he decided to travel. In 1901 he went to England, Europe and Africa, riding the steamer Melbourne on a continental tour that included an elephant hunt in South Africa. With him were longtime friend and political ally Col. Eli R. Sutton and his son, Hazen Pingree Jr., known as Joe. Joe had been a star halfback on the University of Michigan football team, class of 1896. His photograph on the Egyptian pyramids or posed with hunting gear and rifle were carried on the front pages of Detroit newspapers.

As the tour was coming to an end, Pingree suddenly became painfully ill and was rushed to a hospital in London. King Edward VII, Pingree’s famous look-alike, even sent his own physicians to London’s Grand Hotel to assist in his recovery. Unfortunately, he died in London at age 61 with his son at his bedside.

A huge crowd gathered at the Michigan Central Depot for the return of his body, and an estimated 60,000 to 75,000 people filed by his casket. His funeral in Detroit stretched for many blocks and included both friends and political enemies. It was considered the most remarkable funeral which ever took place in Detroit.

Today his memorial statue can be seen in Grand Circus Park, sculpted by Austrian artist Rudolph Schwarz and unveiled in 1904. Many of the 5,000 donations received for the monument came from common people who survived by farming his potato patches. The monument reads : “The citizens of Michigan erect this monument to the cherished memory of Hazen S. Pingree. A gallant soldier, an enterprising and successful citizen, four times elected mayor of Detroit, twice governor of Michigan. He was the first to warn the people of the great danger threatened by powerful private corporations. And the first to awake to the great inequalities in taxation and to initiate steps for reform. The idol of the people. “

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On May 28, 1940, the phone rang in Bill Knudsen’s office in the General Motors Building. Knudsen, a Danish immigrant who had made parts for Henry Ford’s Model T in a bicycle factory in Buffalo before working his way up to become president of GM, heard a voice familiar from newsreels and radio broadcasts on the other end.

It was President Franklin Roosevelt. “Knudsen?” the voice said. “I want to see you in Washington.”

France was collapsing under the Nazi blitzkrieg. Great Britain was slated to be next. Imperial Japan’s sun was rising in the Pacific.

America had the eighteenth largest army in the world, not much bigger than Holland’s, and no defense industry — it had been dismantled after World War I, “the war to end all wars.”

What FDR needed from Bill Knudsen, one of the fathers of mass production, was to tell him how to convert America’s economy from making cars, refrigerators, radios and farm machinery into making tanks, artillery shells, and even airplanes.

Knudsen’s answer when he got to Washington was to convince FDR that Detroit’s auto industry — then the country’s biggest employer, employing one out of every twenty Americans — could lead a production effort that could create the weapons of modern war in quantities no one had ever imagined.

Knudsen’s term for it was an “arsenal of democracy” (FDR later borrowed the phrase for one of his most famous fireside chats). And from 1940 to 1945 the Motor City became the center of the greatest industrial production miracle in history. It transformed the city and sparked a race riot in 1943 that left 34 people dead and 670 injured. But it also enabled the United States to win the world’s biggest war, and still leaves its legacy to the city.

Knudsen started things rolling soon after he got to Washington with a phone call to his friend K.T. Keller, president of Chrysler, to see if he thought Chrysler could build tanks. The result would be the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Warren, where some 25,000 Grant and Sherman tanks would be built, more tanks than Nazi Germany built during the entire war.

Another call went to Knudsen’s old employer, Henry Ford, to see if he could convert part of his River Rouge plant to make aircraft engines for Britain’s Spitfire fighters. Ford said no (in 1940 the old man was still in the throes of isolationism) but Alvan Macauley at Packard Motors said yes.

Macauley and his engineers welcomed the challenge. Soon the Packard Plant on Grand Boulevard became the site of a new facility for making the 12-cylinder, 1645-cubic inch Rolls Royce Merlin engine, and for employing the thousands of young women Packard hired to make them. In the end, Packard would build more than 55,000 Merlins, not just for the Spitfire but for America’s own P51 Mustang.

Then on Oct. 29 Knudsen set up a secret meeting of auto executives at the New Center Building, where he and a then-unknown Army Air Corps Major named Jimmy Doolittle showed them the aircraft parts they needed to have made in record numbers and in record time.

Four weeks after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the men at that meeting formed the Automotive Council for War Production, under a dynamic young executive director. His name was George Romney. He and the ACWP pulled together a production plan that wound up making 75 percent of all the aircraft engines, one-third of the machine guns, two-fifths of the tanks, and 100 percent of the trucks and motor vehicles America used during the war, not to mention hundreds of other implements of war from artillery shells and bomb fuses to steel helmets.

Production on this scale demanded far more workers than the auto industry had ever seen.

By D-Day, total employment in the Detroit area had more than doubled and the city’s demographics had changed forever. The 1944 Census showed that of the city’s quarter million newcomers, fully 40 percent were from the South, both black and white. That spawned a popular local joke: “How many states are in the Union? Answer: Forty six. Tennessee and Kentucky are now in Michigan.”

But the racial tensions that resulted were no joke. A riot swept across the city on a hot July weekend in 1943, leaving parts of the city in flames, with 25 blacks and 9 whites dead. America’s Arsenal of Democracy found itself shrouded in disgrace.

The city soon recovered, as did the war production effort. There was simply no holding back the torrent of creativity and energy Detroit untapped when it agreed to arm America. Those who came to the city to escape rural poverty and make a new life included thousands who took trains from their towns in Kentucky and Pennsylvania out to Ypsilanti where Henry Ford, now fully on board the war effort, and assistant Charlie Sorensen had constructed a massive plant to build B-24 bombers for the Army Air Force, and soon employed more than 42,000 people.

But besides the immigrants and the big companies like Ford and GM (which wound up making 10 percent of everything America produced to fight World War II) what made Detroit so vital to the war effort were the smaller companies and suppliers dotting the area, which turned out parts for trucks, artillery pieces, and airplanes, as well as freelance entrepreneurs like consulting automotive engineer Karl Probst.

It was Probst who got a call at his office in the Boulevard Building from a company called American Bantam asking if he could help with a design for a scout vehicle the Army wanted. Once Probst finished with his drawings, it became the Jeep.

There was Henry Krueger, the Detroit machine tool maker who set up the Cadillac Tool Company in 1904 even before there was a Cadillac car company.

There, Krueger had quietly built the precision tools that made possible the modern auto assembly line, even though he himself went broke twice in as many as decades, nothing left but the clothes on his back.

When war came, manufacturers across Michigan came to Krueger’s shop on East Grand Boulevard to ask for help. And when the Winchester Company needed a master tool-maker for the M-1 Garand, the car companies told them in one voice, “Call Hank Krueger.” Krueger would build no less than 40 brand new machines for Winchester, and devised a new way of drilling gun barrels that would carry over to larger calibers like the 20 mm anti-aircraft guns Pontiac was making and 75 mm gun for Chrysler’s Shermans.

Then there was Tom Saffady, the Detroit-born son of a Syrian immigrant who invented in his garage a device for measuring the smoothness of metal surfaces that cost one-tenth of the standard gauge. Saffady built a plant at 875 Eight Mile Road to manufacture it along with another device he had created for grinding metal surfaces. By war’s end, Sav-Way Industries had six hundred employees and was doing annual business of $4.5 million.

What Saffady and Krueger and the rest proved was that the secret to Detroit’s success in the war effort wasn’t its assembly lines and huge plants. It was the creativity, ingenuity, dedication and drive of those who lived and worked there.

Together they proved what Bill Knudsen’s had first told FDR, “we can do anything if we do it together.”

Ingenuity and vision transformed Detroit 70 years ago, and changed America. Perhaps they can do it again.

About the author

Arthur Herman is the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II” (Random House), which The Economist magazine named one of the Best Books of 2012.

The last B-24 Liberator Bomber rolled off the line June 25, 1945. The plane was to be christened “The Henry Ford,” but Ford asked that his name be taken off and the plane be named after the workers who had built it. (Detroit News archives)

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