the Hogwartian uniforms of parochial academies

It is difficult, in a place like Detroit, to avoid thinking about the past. The city is still associated with an industry that peaked in the middle of the last century and has since succumbed to all the familiar culprits of urban decline—globalization, automation, disinvestment, and a host of racist public policies. Perhaps it was destined from the start to collapse beneath the weight of the metaphorical import placed on its shoulders. During the Depression and throughout the years leading up to World War II, the city stood as a symbol of national strength, a thrumming life force pumping blood into the economy—associations that persist in the city’s epithets (the “arsenal of democracy”) and its industries’ ad campaigns (the “Heartbeat of America”). For decades, the auto industry boasted the highest-paid blue-collar jobs in America, making Detroit a magnet for working people from all over the country.

Among the first waves of migrants was my great-grandfather, who in the twenties abandoned his family’s tobacco farm in southern Kentucky to build Model Ts for the wage of five dollars a day. His son, my grandfather, grew up on Warren Avenue during the Depression, shoveling coal for nickels to help with his family’s expenses. These men, father and son, remained lucid and hale well into my adolescence. Between the two of them, plus a coterie of uncles who had given their best years to Chrysler, my childhood was steeped in nostalgia for the city’s glory years. Hardly a family holiday went by when my siblings and I were not made to remain at the table after the food had been cleared to listen to their recollections of the city. “They used to call us the Paris of the Midwest,” my grandfather would say. These were men who spoke of Henry Ford as a demigod, and for whom work, with all its attendant Protestant virtues, was a kind of religion. Their stories expressed a longing for a time when the country still relied on the brawn of men like themselves who had, despite coming from humble origins and not going to college, managed to lift their families into the middle class. But they were also meant for us children, the beneficiaries of all that hard work, whom they perhaps feared were growing up a little too comfortably in suburban exile.

The bucolic romanticism of Ford's day

Here in Michigan, it’s hard not to sense that something fundamental shifted, or perhaps snapped, during the recession—not necessarily at its nadir, but during the years that followed, when the news touted the “recovery” of the market while people throughout the state continued to lose their homes and their jobs. Any lingering belief that Detroit stood as a symbol of the nation—that its prosperity and the rest of the country’s were intertwined—was shattered in 2013 when the city declared bankruptcy the same week the Dow Jones and the S&P closed at record highs. The city had been through hard times before; but if the crisis had a particularly demoralizing effect this time around it was because it undermined, in a way that even the Great Depression had not, the populist myths that have long animated the region. There is an uneasiness here, a needling suspicion that the fruits of the economy do not correspond to the exertions of the nation’s labor force; that prosperity, once envisioned by Diego Rivera as an endless collaborative assembly line stretching into the future, is now a closed loop that ordinary people are locked out of. From such desperation, the natural tendency to reflect can evolve into a misguided effort to restore.