Simon & Schuster
September 2015
On Sale: September 15, 2015
464 pages ISBN: 1476748381 EAN: 9781476748382 Kindle: B00P434AUO Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
As David Maraniss captures it with power and affection,
Detroit summed up America’s path to music and prosperity
that was already past history.
It’s 1963 and Detroit
is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the
most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry
Ford II; influential labor leader Walter Reuther; Motown’s
founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his
daughter, the amazing Aretha; Governor George Romney, Mormon
and Civil Rights advocate; super car salesman Lee Iacocca;
Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a Kennedy acolyte; Police
Commissioner George Edwards; Martin Luther King. It was the
American auto makers’ best year; the revolution in music and
politics was underway. Reuther’s UAW had helped lift the
middle class.
The time was full of promise. The auto
industry was selling more cars than ever before and
inventing the Mustang. Motown was capturing the world with
its amazing artists. The progressive labor movement was
rooted in Detroit with the UAW. Martin Luther King delivered
his “I Have a Dream” speech there two months before he made
it famous in the Washington march.
Once in a
Great City shows that the shadows of collapse were
evident even then. Before the devastating riot. Before the
decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight.
Before people trotted out the grab bag of rust belt
infirmities—from harsh weather to high labor costs—and
competition from abroad to explain Detroit’s collapse, one
could see the signs of a city’s ruin. Detroit at its peak
was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by
the new world. Yet so much of what Detroit gave America lasts.
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