My mother was born in 1930, an event recorded in the financial journals with an entry in the debit column: “Cigars: $3.25.” The family soon moved from a downtown rental to a modest two-story house with a cherry tree in the backyard, just a few blocks from Kearsley Park and Homedale School in the working-class East Side. They would never move again, despite my grandfather’s success as a real-estate agent. My grandparents generously exported a lot of the money they made in Flint back to Iowa, helping numerous relatives stay afloat with “loans” that they knew would never be repaid. When my grandmother’s brother couldn’t come up with enough cash to purchase a farm of his own, my grandparents bought one for him. Several Iowa relatives journeyed to Flint in search of work, staying in my grandparents’ spare bedroom for long stretches. A few moved in to attend high school in Flint, which was considered a better option than their rural schools back home. This reminded me of immigrants in San Francisco who sent money back home and helped others make the journey to a better life. It was a reminder that Flint wasn’t always a place people longed to escape.
My mother showed me black-and-white photos of my grandparents from their early years in Flint. I remembered my grandma wearing modest house dresses she had sewn herself, accented with blue canvas Keds when she worked around the house. But here she was with her hair in a stylish bob and dressed in full flapper mode. My grandpa was decked out in a tailored suit with wide, peaked lapels and a fedora set at a rakish angle. They were both smiling, their arms around each other, gazing straight at the camera. They looked like Bonnie and Clyde, not the low-key couple I remembered. America was making the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and my grandparents seemed happy to be a part of it all, eager for what might happen next. Flint and my family had a far different history than I had imagined.
Without any facts to back it up, I’d always assumed that Flint experienced ever-increasing economic success once the auto industry got up and running. A little research revealed that this wasn’t the case. Flint was harder hit during the Great Depression than many other cities around the country. Plummeting nationwide demand led to unemployment rates in the city that hovered around 50 percent in the early 1930s. By the time my mother was a third-grader at Homedale Elementary in 1938, more than half of all Flint families were on some type of relief. And although the population dipped as the jobless returned to their original homes in other cities and states, Flint continued to face a chronic housing shortage and abysmal public health standards. There were high rates of infant and maternal death, typhoid fever and diphtheria. It was hardly a workers’ paradise.
In this atmosphere, union organizing culminated with the Flint Sit-Down Strike during the bitterly cold winter of 1936–37. It was still a legendary event when I was growing up, and I knew of it despite having scant knowledge of Flint’s history. For many it was the city’s greatest achievement, and it was spoken of with pride, if not reverence. For forty-four days, workers aligned with the recently created United Auto Workers occupied the massive Fisher Body No. 1 plant on the South Side, the smaller Fisher Body No. 2, and the Chevrolet No. 4, located at the sprawling Chevrolet manufacturing complex along the Flint River, which came to be known as Chevy in the Hole. (The charitable might attribute the nickname to geography—the factory was situated in a valley—but it’s more likely that it stemmed from the less than ideal working conditions inside.)
Typical of a populace apparently incapable of half measures, this was no ordinary labor action with picketers chanting defiant slogans on the sidewalk and management complaining in the press. This was war. In what the strikers dubbed the Battle of the Running Bulls, local police attempted to reclaim Fisher Body No. 2 on the night of January 11, 1937. The strikers were in no mood to leave. “The tide of battle ebbed and flowed outside the plant,” wrote Sidney Fine in Sitdown: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937. “Hurling cans, frozen snow, milk bottles, door hinges, pieces of pavement, and assorted other weapons of this type, the pickets pressed at the heels of the retreating police. Undoubtedly enraged at the humiliation of defeat at the hands of so motley and amateur an army, the police drew pistols and riot guns and fired into the ranks of their pursuers.”
Gunshots and tear gas weren’t enough to deter the workers or their family members, who often supplied the strikers with food passed through the factory windows. The strike ended when GM agreed to recognize the UAW and engage in a limited form of collective bargaining, leading to better wages and working conditions in Flint and, ultimately, the rest of the country as the union launched a national organizing effort. It also set the pattern of contentious negotiations between labor and management that were as much a part of life in Flint as drinking Stroh’s beer and rooting for the Detroit Tigers.
A few years after the strike ended, production at the auto factories shifted to M-18 Hellcat tank destroyers and other armaments during World War II, but it was just like the good old days in Flint when the fighting ended and a postwar economic expansion swept the nation. In 1955, Flint held its centennial parade and two hundred thousand boisterous spectators showed up to take in the marching bands, admire the colorful floats, and perhaps catch a glimpse of GM spokesmodel Dinah Shore or Vice President Richard Nixon. (It’s hard to imagine a whiter, more unhip couple than Dinah and Tricky Dick.) There was good reason to be festive. “An industrial marvel,” wrote one historian, “Flint was home to more GM workers than any other city in the world.” There were close to thirty thousand at Buick; Chevy in the Hole and AC Spark Plug employed nearly twenty thousand each; and another eight thousand punched the clock at Fisher Body. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago succinctly captured the essence of the place when Ike Eisenhower was in the White House: “The Flint economy, probably to a greater extent than that of any other city of comparable size, can be described in a single word. That word is automobiles.”
Flint’s population was near its peak of nearly 200,000, and confident local leaders envisioned 350,000 prosperous citizens residing in what was being called “Fabulous Flint” and the “Happiest Town in Michigan.” Flint’s per capita income was one of the highest in the world, and it had perhaps the broadest middle class on the planet. The American dream was alive and well in Flint. You could even argue that it was born there.
And what would a thriving industrial city be without a strong-willed, wealthy industrialist to animate it? More than any other citizen, Charles Stewart Mott shaped the character and feel of Flint as it became an American success story. Known as Mr. Flint, or, more informally, Charlie Sugar for the gifts he bestowed on the Vehicle City, Mott had moved a family wheel and axle business to Flint from Utica, New York, in 1906 after being courted by Billy Durant, who needed a local parts supplier. Mott sold his company to GM in 1913 in exchange for stock, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder. Talk about getting in on the ground floor of a company with growth potential. Mott went on to serve on GM’s board of directors for sixty years. Showing a personal knack for economic diversification, which never caught on in Flint, he created the United States Sugar Corporation in 1931.
Mott became one of the richest men in America, and he certainly looked the part. Balding with a thick white mustache and bushy eyebrows, the three-time mayor was a familiar figure in Flint with his dark suits and ramrod-straight posture. He had a reputation for thrift, sleeping on a cot-like bed with no headboard and tooling around town in a modest Chevy Corvair. Despite a kindly smile, he could be a distant, imposing figure. He signed notes to one of his sons “Very truly yours, C.S. Mott” and employed a coach to teach the kid how to ride a bike.
Mott was an enthusiastic Republican “who believed deeply in the virtues of self help, privatized charity, and laissez faire approaches to social welfare.” This often put him at odds with many of Flint’s left-leaning citizens. Reflecting on the Sit-Down Strike, he told journalist Studs Terkel that the workers deserved to be shot for illegally occupying the auto factories.
He created the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in 1926 to help ameliorate the problems that accompanied Flint’s rapid growth. It was also an excellent tax write-off that might help blunt the appeal of unions and government programs, but it’s obvious that Mott sought to improve Flint through his philanthropy.