One Where the Weak Are Killed and Eaten It really wasn't intended to be a prophecy. It was just a smart-alecky T-shirt worn for years by local teenagers to annoy their parents and show their perverse pride in the Motor City's tough-town image. It said: detroit: where the weak are killed and eaten. But the menacing message seemed all too appropriate in the bleak winter of 2008--2009, when signs of weakness--indeed, desperation--erupted everywhere in Detroit. One bankrupt car-components company economized by servicing the bathrooms in its suburban headquarters only every other day. Some of the bathrooms ran out of toilet paper, prompting employees to hoard it or bring their own from home. In the city itself employment prospects were so bleak that some prisoners begged to stay in jail to get food and shelter--"three hots and a cot," in the local parlance. The city's battered economy was reflected on the football field, where the University of Michigan was enduring its first losing season in forty years, and the Detroit Lions were plummeting to pro football's first 0--16 season. During their 47--10 drubbing on Thanksgiving Day 2008, fans unfurled a banner reading bail out the lions. It was a gallows-humor reference not only to the football team but also to the weakest teams in town--General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Since the beginning of the century America's Big Three car companies, bleeding from more than $100 billion in losses in four years, had shed more than 333,000 employees, enough to populate the city of Cincinnati. In November 2008 GM's stock closed below $3 a share for the first time since 1946, when Harry Truman was president. To conserve cash, the company ended its nine-year endorsement deal with golfer Tiger Woods, who was making more money than GM anyway. That same month Detroit's automakers went to Washington to beg Congress for a bailout--in a last-ditch effort to avoid another b-word, bankruptcy. Their potential demise marked a shocking reversal of fortune for companies that had been defining forces in shaping America and indeed the world. Detroit's manufacturing muscle had helped win World War II and underpinned U.S. economic hegemony in the postwar Pax Americana. The companies had made Detroit the Silicon Valley of the mid-twentieth century, a place of economic opportunity, where hillbillies from Appalachia and sharecroppers from the South could break out of poverty and grab a piece of America's bounty. Ford had invented mass manufacturing and, with it, the car that had put the country on wheels, bringing mobility to the masses and freeing multitudes of American farmers from the drudgery of rural peasantry. Henry Ford's Model T had been the first people's car and had indirectly inspired the development of another people's car: the Volkswagen Beetle. General Motors, in turn, had pioneered mass marketing, with a ?hierarchy of brands ranging from the practical Chevrolet to the ?prestigious Cadillac that fit Americans on all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. GM also had developed the organizational principles--decentralized operations subject to central financial control--that would underpin virtually every corporation in America and the world. GM scientists had invented the room air conditioner and the mechanical heart pump. And in 1955 GM had become the world's first company to earn more than $1 billion in a single year. That General Motors could go bankrupt seemed as unlikely as, say, America's banks going broke or a black man being elected president of the United States. But in fact all three of those things--one a historic breakthrough, the other two historic breakdowns--would happen in the mind-numbing months between late 2008 and mid-2009. In the end the bailout of America's banks Excerpted from Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster by Paul Ingrassia All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
