R. L. Duffus, "A City That Forges Thunderbolts," New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1943.

[The 1943 Detroit race riot erupted six months after this article was published.]

...The visitor who has spent a week in the city's war plants, streets and public places and who has talked to some of those who frequent them may still be puzzled. He is likely to see past, present and future in a jumble almost as chaotic as the sprawling pattern of the city itself, where towers testify to a peacetime grandeur, new factories to a present strength and determination, miles of jerry-built houses and thousands of families crowded into small rooms, shacks and trailer camps to an inability to solve a great problem over night, and acres of untenanted prairie to possibilities not yet realized.

Detroit, as they say, has changed over. The expression is not quite correct. Apart from what is going on in the plants there is still some surprise and confusion in the city itself, as people try to adjust themselves to a new congestion, new habits of working and living, and new problems of human relations.

There is no precedent for a thing quite like this happening to a city like Detroit. For that matter, there is no city like Detroit. There are no accustomed symptoms to look for. What one expected would happen has not happened. What one didn't expect has taken place.

The re-visiting traveler, descending from his train, doesn't get the full impact at once. The outward and visible downtown city hasn't altered much. Uniforms in the street crowds, American, Canadian, Australian, tell of the war, but so do they in every city nowadays. Motor cars, despite gas rationing, still move in comparatively greater numbers and with greater speed than they do in New York City. Neither the sternness of war nor the effervescence of a frantic prosperity is at first noticeable in Detroit.

These things are there, but you do have to look for them. You look for them in your hotel. You find that the bellboy who carries your bags is from Atlanta and has been on his job for two days. You know that within a month or so he will be in the Army or in a war factory. You find that the middle-aged woman who cleans your room would like to work in a factory, but has been told she can't because she has only her first citizenship papers. You learn that the room itself is under Army lease and that you can be turned out if the Army wishes to move in. The Army doesn't move in, but you feel precarious.

You hear that there are 20,000 newly arrived Federal employees in Detroit, and more on the way — representatives of a consumer who intends to receive just what he ordered. You become acquainted with a bartender, who tells you that munitions workers drink "shots and shells" — a double shot of rye whiskey and a shell of beer.

You hear all sorts of tales about "Hill Billies" (this term is said to include very one who has migrated into Detroit from south of the Michigan line, and hence might even, because of they way the line runs around Detroit, take in a few Canadians), who are not accustomed to wearing shoes, and whose wives buy them boxes of three-for-fifty cigars. Your taxi driver says he knows for a fact that one new arrival mailed a letter in a fire-alarm box before he had been in town half an hour.

You hear stories, but perhaps they tell more about the old settlers than about the new arrivals. You look for the reality. You don't find it at a theatre where a musical comedy is being shown. There are a few males in sweaters and with no ties in the orchestra, but half the seats are empty. You don't find much of it in saloons, expensive restaurants or the obvious night spots. You get a sense of it in a downtown drugstore, where you have to fight your way to get to the refreshment counter at midnight; in advertisements for help wanted; in department store crowds; in your inability to get a messenger to run an errand for you; in the recorded fact that one Detroit toolmaker reached the dizzy height of $2.75 an hour for his straight time, time and a half for overtime and double for the seventh day, and didn't mind working long hours; in a 30 per cent increase in trucking accidents, ascribed to green drivers replacing experienced men who had gone into the factories; in sixty-nine trucks out of one firm's fleet of 450 tied up on a Saturday night, not by a strike, but by lack of drivers.

If you simmer down what you see and what you hear and believe you begin to understand what has happened to Detroit. The great war migration into the city is a fact. Within two years, by Census Bureau estimates, the metropolitan area of Detroit has added 336,000 people to its population, to make a total of more than 600,000 engaged there in the war industries.

This is something, but it isn't enough. Detroit not only has to deal with existing congestion. It has to decide how much more congestion it can stand without having people stepping on each other's toes all over the place. Some authorities say that 100,000 more workers will be needed from outside the area, in addition to at least 40,000 Detroit women who have said they would take war jobs. Others say that immigration into the area will have to be discouraged because there will not be enough beds for the newcomers to sleep in or enough street cars, buses and automobiles (or gas) to carry them to and from their work.

There is one other contradiction in the Detroit picture. The area has about 200,00 Negroes. Negro leaders say their labor has not been fully utilized, and that those employed are often working below the level of their skills. "Idle Negro workers here," said one reliable spokesman, "are baffled by talk of a manpower shortage." There are some signs that necessity will take care of this situation.

High wages are a statistical fact. A union contract signed last August with a typical war materials company lists more than 130 jobs, of which the highest pays $1.88 an hour for tool and die workers, the lowest 75 cents an hour for some of the women. The unskilled worker under that contract gets 85 cents an hour.

Some shops run an average payroll of $80 to $90 a week. The average working week is close to fifty hours and would be higher if it were not pulled down by individual absenteeism, shortage of materials, changes in production plants, such as the current shift from tanks, guns and ammunition to planes and ships, and the unavoidable delays of the not quite complete changeover. It will surely run higher as the new production lines get rid of their "bugs." The average Detroit war worker now gets something like $50 in his weekly pay envelope, and when he works longer he will naturally get more.

This isn't hay. Neither is it fantastic wealth for those accustomed to the automobile industry. The fantastic element is introduced when this much money comes into the hands of rural newcomers who have been accustomed neither to much income nor to large cities. The veterans trot along about as they always did when times were good. They live, by and large, where they have always lived.

It is the late arrivals who change Detroit and are changed by it. Add to their numbers the regiments of newly employed women and of men drifting in from other occupations and you have something to think about. Inject into the situation the tension between white migrants from the South and the new and old Negro workers (there were about 25,000 in the automobile and allied industries at the peak of civilian production), and there is more to think about.

This tension is felt in the shops. When you visit the plants you usually see Negroes working by themselves, or engaged in pushing, hauling or lifting occupations which differentiate them from the whites. The Negro forms about 10 per cent of the population of Detroit. The problem isn't simple for him, nor for those who wish him well. It ties in with housing, because he has always been the worst housed in Detroit.

There are trailer camps — maybe miles of them altogether. They are pretty well organized. One such camp has a trailer with a front porch, very neat, permanent-looking and homelike. This camp also has an air raid shelter. Across the road, a few hundred feet away, were houses which looked as though they had cost between $15,000 and $25,000. Outlying Detroit is pretty well scrambled — no doubt about it.

Rows and rows of little houses, mostly white-painted or unpainted wood, but sometimes faced with brick, bloom at intervals over the flatlands. Between the groups are occasional farmhouses and fields where corn grew last Summer.

You see signs urging you to buy a share in America at so much down and so much ever after. Some of these signs are new. The little houses don't cure the housing shortage. The plan to turn vacant stores into apartments holds out some promise. Another proposal is to make use of country clubs.

Linked to housing is transportation. Many a Detroit worker is accustomed to driving from ten to as much as twenty-five miles to work, alone or in company. The great parking lots around the larger plants are astounding, even with gas rationing in force. If the worker falls back on street car or bus lines he finds scant remedy. The city-owned Detroit street railways are carrying nearly a third more passengers than they did a year ago, which means that 200,000 new passengers are making round trips daily.

But even bad housing and congested public vehicles and all the other troubles that are intensified when a city has to take care of 15 per cent more people than it is equipped for are endurable when there is full employment, and a stir of something worth working for.

Detroit's working population tastes the joys of being very much wanted. The first effect of this state of affairs, especially on the new residents, was to cause a good deal of restless shopping around for the ideal job among all the jobs offered. The labor turnover in many instances has been remarkable. One Detroit manufacturing corporation hired 2,700 employees in a recent month. It lost 2,000 for various reasons, chief among them the lure of other jobs, although dislike of city life, dissatisfaction with working hours, and "vacations" also figured. A 10 per cent turnover monthly has been no rarity. It may be too early to determine how much the stabilization order of Manpower Director Paul V. McNutt will do to relieve this situation. Some action of the kind was undeniably needed.

The old hands don't shift. They know what seniority means in slack times, and they know what slack times have meant in the past and can mean in the future. But the drifters, the new hands, are not necessarily idlers. They have been shopping, as often as not, for more work and longer shifts — for more overtime.

The whistles blow, by day and by night, and the crowds come surging out. Some are dog-tired. You get that way in a long shift. They want food and sleep. If they seek amusement they are likely to turn to neighborhood move houses, beer saloons, dance halls. The Southern whites have brought the square dances with them. Halls where these can be performed are crowded, with waiting lines stamping feet to the music within.

What does this army of workers think about? Is it aware of the great issue it is helping to determine? It probably does think about that issue, and it is probably as serious about it as the men who are doing the fighting. Soldiers think and talk about their personal affairs, their relatives, their girls, their food, and so do workers in munitions factories. They are embarrassed by heroic generalities. When they talk about the war they are likely to mention their own buddies who are in it. Or they scrawl something about Hitler and Tojo on a tank and let it go at that. Generally they appear to give more attention to the Japanese than to the Germans.

But they do want to get on with the job. They may stop working for a minute or two when visitors appear, especially if one of the visitors carries a camera and seems about to use it, but they want that overhead crane brought over, they want that forging — quick. They lean over precise machines, with something like affection in their eyes. And they complain of things which stop or interrupt the work — not of the work itself. There is no oratory in their natures. They do want to get the stuff out.

Against the night sky are the chimneys of great factories. Lights blaze. Machinery roars and thunders. A democracy at war has its troubles and its weaknesses. But the work gets done. It does get done. And this is Detroit at the beginning of 1943 — a city amazed and often confused, but a miraculous city, a city forging thunderbolts.