DETROIT THE DYNAMIC
Because Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit are, in effect, situated upon
Lake Erie, and because they are cities of approximately the same size,
and because of many other resemblances between them, they always seem to
me like three sisters living amicably in three separate houses on the
same block.
As I personify them, Buffalo, living at the eastern end of the block, is
the smallest sister. She has, I fear, a slight tendency to be anemic.
Her husband, who was in the shipping business, is getting old. He has
retired and is living in contentment in the old house, sitting all day
on the side porch, behind the vines, with his slippers cocked up on the
porch rail, smoking cigars and reading his newspapers in peace.
Cleveland is the fat sister. She is very rich, having married into the
Rockefeller family. She is placid, satisfied, dogmatically religious,
and inclined to platitudes and missionary work. Her house, in the middle
of the block, is a mansion of the seventies. It has a cupola and there
are iron fences on the roof, as though to keep the birds from falling
off. The lawn is decorated with a pair of iron dogs. But there are
plans in the old house for a new one.
The first two sisters have a kind of family resemblance which the third
does not fully share. Detroit seems younger than her sisters. Indeed,
you might almost mistake her for one of their daughters. The belle of
the family, she is married to a young man who is making piles of money
in the automobile business--and spending piles, too. Their house, at the
western end of the block, is new and charming.
I am half in love with Detroit. I may as well admit it, for you are sure
to find me out. She is beautiful--not with the warm, passionate beauty
of San Francisco, the austere mountain beauty of Denver, nor the
strange, sophisticated, destroying beauty of New York, but with a sweet
domestic kind of beauty, like that of a young wife, gay, strong, alert,
enthusiastic; a twinkle in her eye, a laugh upon her lips. She has
temperament and charm, qualities as rare, as fascinating, and as
difficult to define in a city as in a human being.
Do you ask why she is different from her sisters? I was afraid you might
ask that. They tell a romantic story. I don't like to repeat gossip,
but--They say that, long ago, when her mother lived upon a little farm
by the river, there came along a dashing voyageur, from France, who
loved her. Mind you, I vouch for nothing. It is a legend. I do not
affirm that it is true. But--_voila_! There is Detroit. She is
different.
If you will consider these three fictitious sisters as figures in a
cartoon--a cartoon not devoid of caricature--you will get an impression
of my impression of three cities. My three sisters are merely symbols,
like the figures of Uncle Sam and John Bull. A symbol is a kind of
generalization, and if you disagree with these generalizations of mine
(as I think you may, especially if you live in Buffalo or Cleveland),
let me remind you that some one has said: "All generalizations are
false--including this one." One respect in which my generalization is
false is in picturing Detroit as young. As a matter of fact, she is the
oldest city of the three, having been settled by the Sieur de la Mothe
Cadillac in 1701, ninety years before the first white man built his hut
where Buffalo now stands, and ninety-five years before the settlement of
Cleveland. This is the fact. Yet I hold that there is about Detroit
something which expresses ebullient youth, and that Buffalo and
Cleveland, if they do not altogether lack the quality of youth, have it
in a less degree.
* * * * *
So far as I recall, Chicago was the first American city to adopt a
motto, or, as they call it now, a "slogan."
I remember long ago a rather crude bust of a helmeted Amazon bearing
upon her proud chest the words: "I Will!" She was supposed to typify
Chicago, and I rather think she did. Cleveland's slogan is the
conservative but significant "Sixth City," but Detroit comes out with a
youthful shriek of self-satisfaction, declaring that: "In Detroit Life
is Worth Living!" Doesn't that claim reflect the quality of youth?
Doesn't it remind you of the little boy who says to the other little
boy: "My father can lick your father"? Of course it has the
patent-medicine flavor, too; Detroit, by her "slogan," is a cure-all.
But that is not deliberate. It is exaggeration springing from natural
optimism and exuberance. Life is doubtless more worth living in Detroit
than in some other cities, but I submit that, so long as Mark Twain's
"damn human race" retains those foibles of mind, morals, and body for
which it is so justly famous, the "slogan" of the city of Detroit
guarantees a little bit too much.
I find the same exuberance in the publications issued by the Detroit
Board of Commerce. Having just left the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, I
sedulously avoided contact with the Detroit body--one can get an
overdose of that kind of thing. But I have several books. One is a
magazine called "The Detroiter," with the subtitle "Spokesman of
Optimism." It is full of news of new hotels and new factories and new
athletic clubs and all kinds of expansion. It fairly bursts from its
covers with enthusiasm--and with business banalities about Detroit's
"onward sweep," her "surging ahead," her "banner year," and her
"efficiency." "Be a Booster," it advises, and no one can say that it
does not live up to its principles. Indeed, as I look it over, I wonder
if I have not done Detroit an injustice in giving to Cleveland the blue
ribbon for "boosting." The Detroit Board of Commerce even goes so far in
its "boosting" as to "boost" Detroit into seventh place among American
cities, while the "World Almanac" (most valuable volume on the one-foot
shelf of books I carried on my travels) places Detroit ninth.
Like Cleveland, I find that Detroit is first in the production of a
great many things. In fact, the more I read these books issued by
commercial bodies, the more I am amazed at the varied things there are
for cities to be first in. It is a miserable city, indeed, which is
first in nothing at all. Detroit is first in the production of overalls,
stoves, varnish, soda and salt products, automobile accessories, adding
machines, pharmaceutical manufactures, aluminum castings, in
shipbuilding on the Great Lakes and, above all, in the manufacture of
motor cars. And, as the Board of Commerce adds significantly, "That's
not all!"
But it is enough.
* * * * *
The motor-car development in Detroit interested me particularly. When I
asked in Buffalo why Detroit was "surging ahead" so rapidly in
comparison with certain other cities, they answered, as I knew they
would: "It's the automobile business."
But when I asked why the automobile business should have settled on
Detroit as a headquarters instead of some other city (as, for instance,
Buffalo), they found it difficult to say. One Buffalonian informed me
that Detroit banks had been more liberal than those of other cities in
supporting the motor industry in its early days. This was, however,
vigorously denied in Detroit. When I mentioned it to the president of
one of the largest automobile concerns he laughed.
"Banks don't do business that way," he declared. "The very thing banks
do not do is to support new, untried industries. After you have proved
that you can make both motor cars and money they'll take care of you.
Not before. On the other hand, when the banks get confidence in any one
kind of business they very often run to the opposite extreme. That was
the way it used to be in the lumber business. Most of the early fortunes
of Detroit were made in lumber. The banks got used to the lumber
business, so that a few years ago all a man had to do was to print
'Lumber' on his letterhead, write to the banks and get a line of credit.
Later, when the automobile business began to boom, the same thing
happened over again: the man whose letterhead bore the word
'Automobiles' was taken care of." The implication was that sometimes he
was taken care of a little bit too well.
"Then why did Detroit become the automobile center?" I asked.
The question proved good for an hour's discussion among certain learned
pundits of the "trade" who were in the president's office at the time I
asked it.
[Illustration: In midstream passes a continual parade
of freighters ... and in their swell you may see, teetering, all kinds
of craft, from proud white yachts to canoes]
First, it was concluded, several early motor "bugs" happened to live in
or near Detroit. Henry Ford lived there. He was always experimenting
with "horseless carriages" in the early days and being laughed at for
it. Also, a man named Packard built a car at Warren, Ohio. But the first
gasoline motor car to achieve what they call an "output" was the funny
little one-cylinder Oldsmobile which steered with a tiller and had a
curved dash like a sleigh. It is to the Olds Motor Company, which built
that car, that a large majority of the automobile manufactories in
Detroit trace their origin. Indeed, there are to-day no less than a
dozen organizations, the heads of which were at some time connected with
the original Olds Company. This fifteen-year-old forefather of the
automobile business was originally made in Lansing, Mich., but the plant
was moved to Detroit, where the market for labor and materials was
better. The Packard plant was also moved there, and for the same
reasons, plus the fact that the company was being financed by a group of
young Detroit men.
It was not, perhaps, entirely as an investment that these wealthy young
Detroiters first became interested in the building of motor cars. That
is to say, I do not think they would have poured money so freely into a
scheme to manufacture something else--something less picturesque in its
appeal to the sporting instinct and the imagination. The automobile,
with its promise, was just the right thing to interest rich young men,
and it did interest them, and it has made many of them richer than they
were before.
It seems to be an axiom that, if you start a new business anywhere, and
it is successful, others will start in the same business beside you. One
of the pundits referred me, for example, to Erie, Pa., where life is
entirely saturated with engine and boiler ideas simply because the Erie
City Iron Works started there and was successful. There are now sixteen
engine and boiler companies in Erie, and all of them, I am assured, are
there either directly or indirectly because the Erie City Iron Works is
there. In other words, we sat in that office and had a very pleasant
hour's talk merely to discover that there is truth in the familiar
saying about birds of a feather.
When we got that settled and the pundits began to drift away to other
plate-glass rooms along the mile, more or less, of corridor devoted to
officials' offices, I became interested in a little wooden box which
stood upon the president's large flat-top desk. I was told it was a
dictagraph. Never having seen a dictagraph before, and being something
of a child, I wished to play with it as I used to play with typewriters
and letter-presses in my father's office years ago. And the president of
this many-million-dollar corporation, being a kindly man with, of
course, absolutely nothing to do but to supply itinerant scribes with
playthings, let me toy with the machine. Sitting at the desk, he pressed
a key. Then, without changing his position, he spoke into the air:
"Fred," he said, "there's some one here who wants to ask you a
question."
Then the little wooden box began to talk.
"What does he want to ask about?" it said.
That put it up to me. I had to think of something to ask. I was
conscious of a strange, unpleasant feeling of being hurried--of having
to reply quickly before something happened--some breaking of
connections.
I leaned toward the machine, but the president waved me back: "Just sit
over there where you are."
Then I said: "I am writing articles about Buffalo, Cleveland, and
Detroit. How would you compare them?"
"Well," replied the Fred-in-the-box, "I used to live in Cleveland. I've
been here four years and I wouldn't want to go back."
After that we paused. I thought I ought to say something more to the
box, but I didn't know just what.
"Is that all you want to know?" it asked.
"Yes," I replied hurriedly. "I'm much obliged. That's all I want to
know."
Of course it really wasn't all--not by any means! But I couldn't bring
myself to say so then, so I said the easy, obvious thing, and after that
it was too late. Oh, how many things there are I want to know! How many
things I think of now which I would ask an oracle when there is none to
ask! Things about the here and the hereafter; about the human spirit;
about practical religion, the brotherhood of man, the inequalities of
men, evolution, reform, the enduring mysteries of space, time, eternity,
and woman!
A friend of mine--a spiritualist--once told me of a seance in which he
thought himself in brief communication with his mother. There were a
million things to say. But when the medium requested him to give a
message he could only falter: "Are you all right over there?" The answer
came: "Yes, all right." Then my friend said: "I'm so glad!" And that was
all.
"It is the feeling of awful pressure," he explained to me, "which drives
the thoughts out of your head. That is why so many messages from the
spirit world sound silly and inconsequential. You have the one great
chance to communicate with them, and, because it _is_ your one great
chance, you cannot think of anything to say." Somehow I imagine that the
feeling must be like the one I had in talking to the dictagraph.
* * * * *
Among the characteristics which give Detroit her individuality is the
survival of her oldtime aristocracy; she is one of the few
middle-western cities possessing such a social order. As with that of
St. Louis, this aristocracy is of French descent, the Sibleys, Campaus,
and other old Detroit families tracing their genealogies to forefathers
who came out to the New World under the flag of Louis XIV. The early
habitants acquired farms, most of them with small frontages on the river
and running back for several miles into the woods--an arrangement which
permitted farmhouses to be built close together for protection against
Indians. These farms, handed down for generations, form the basis of a
number of Detroit's older family fortunes.
[Illustration: The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet
old town into a rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the
old days it has superimposed the romance of modern business]
To-day commerce takes up the downtown portion of the river front, but
not far from the center of the city the shore line is still occupied by
residences. Along Jefferson Avenue are many homes, surrounded by
delightful lawns extending forward to the street and back to the river.
Most of these homes have in their back yards boathouses and docks--some
of the latter large enough to berth seagoing steam yachts, of which
Detroit boasts a considerable number. Nor is the water front reserved
entirely for private use. In Belle Isle, situated in the Detroit River,
and accessible by either boat or bridge, the city possesses one of the
most unusual and charming public parks to be seen in the entire world.
And there are many other pleasant places near Detroit which may be
reached by boat--among them the St. Clair Flats, famous for duck
shooting. All these features combine to make the river life active and
picturesque. In midstream passes a continual parade of freighters, a
little mail boat dodging out to meet each one as it goes by. Huge
side-wheel excursion steamers come and go, and in their swell you may
see, teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud white yachts with shining
brasswork and bowsprits having the expression of haughty turned-up
noses, down through the category of schooners, barges, tugs, motor
yachts, motor boats, sloops, small sailboats, rowboats, and canoes. You
may even catch sight of a hydroplane swiftly skimming the surface of
the river like some amphibious, prehistoric animal, or of that natty
little gunboat, captured from the Spaniards at the battle of Manila Bay,
which now serves as a training ship for the Michigan Naval Reserve.
A good many of the young aristocrats of Detroit have belonged to the
Naval Reserve, among them Mr. Truman H. Newberry, former Secretary of
the Navy, about whom I heard an amusing story.
According to this tale, as it was told me in Detroit, Mr. Newberry was
some years ago a common seaman in the Reserve. It seems that on the
occasion of the annual cruise of this body on the Great Lakes, a regular
naval officer is sent out to take command of the training ship. One day,
when common seaman Newberry was engaged in the maritime occupation of
swabbing down the decks abaft the bridge, a large yacht passed
majestically by.
"My man," said the regular naval officer on the bridge to common seaman
Newberry below, "do you know what yacht that is?"
Newberry saluted. "The _Truant_, sir," he said respectfully, and resumed
his work.
"Who owns her?" asked the officer.
Again Newberry straightened and saluted.
"I do, sir," he said.