So, we had been, while other towns built cars, we built lots of cars. Prior to 1900, the detroit area enjoyed a wealth of strong manufacturing. A lot of it, based in building carriage bodies, but iron stoves and building railroad cars, building railroad wheels. Detroit understood the manufacturing process, but also understood how to deal with steel, deal with iron, deal with wood, deal with rubber. Detroit had all of the talent and the designers and the toolmakers here, and the things it took to make an automobile. So why dont we go inside . Lets see the first car that traveled on the streets of detroit. What we are looking at here looks very much like an oldfashioned wagon. We just do not have a horse in front of it. In fact the horses are sitting inside the vehicle. It says a motorized carriage, a horseless carriage. This was the very first car to operate on the streets of detroit. Charles brady king, not henry ford, Charles Brady king was the guy who designed this car, designed the engine inside of it. It is an unusual engine, a fourcylinder engine, when most people were using single or double cylinder engines. So a real powerful little vehicle. Charles brady king anda buddy, oliver bartel, who helped him with the engine, drove this down the streets of detroit in 1896. Henry ford was there. He was on a bicycle about 25 feet behind chasing them. Starting in the 1870s and 1880s, people started to understand that you could take a steam engine or a nasa engine and apply it to an automobile. Eventually, electricity was used to do that. Electric cars existed before gasoline engines. But a gentleman from grand rapids, also here in michigan , since developed a gasolinepowered engine and took it to the colombian exhibition in 1893 in chicago. And he showed it off to everybody. And a lot of guys from detroit, from lansing, from chicago milwaukee, cleveland, all of , these people saw this gasoline engine. All of a sudden, the gasoline engine became the most popular way of powering cars. Probably the biggest problem that these early vehicles ran into was the lack of decent roads. The bicycle folk, people who had enjoyed riding bicycles had , started a movement called the good Road Movement to make the roads better. So the bicyclists kind of got some of the roads paved. But once you got outside of the the center, which here in downtown detroit would have been a mile or two outside the core of the city, you were back on country roads. And in detroit, it is mostly clay. If it rains, you are in trouble. That was probably the biggest challenge for early motorists. They were constantly getting stuck in the mud. Charles brady king, he started the King Car Company and put out a number of cars. Most of them, handbuilt. He had not adapted the Assembly Line yet. And eventually, he sold the company out and went on to other things. In fact with the 50th anniversary of his ride down the streets of detroit came up, he had this replica built so people could see him. He drove this car right down the middle of town on woodward avenue to show off what was his big invention 50 years before. So what you are looking at here is the 1903 olds curvedash runabout made in detroit. Ransom started a company, one of the first to get into the manufacturing business. Unfortunately, his factory burned down as he was about to go into production on several different models. And the only one that survived was the curvedash olds. Started producing it in 1901. And it really became the first massproduced automobile in the United States. He figured out the Assembly Line, something most people credit henry ford with. Both of those gentlemen learned about Assembly Lines from other products that were massproduced. In detroits case, we learned a lot from the chicago stockyards where they used Assembly Lines to disassemble meat. Ransom olds was able to get a patent on the Assembly Line. He brought it to detroit. Down there, belisle, he started massproducing the olds. It became the most popular and one of the most affordable early cars in detroit and in the United States. While ransom olds started his motor works here in detroit, he eventually lost the company, and it became an offshoot of the General Motors organization, which was being formed about this time. General motors renamed the company oldsmobile, which of course was a popular brand in the United States for many decades. Ransom olds, not to be outdone, returned to his hometown of lansing and started up reo automobiles. Ransom e. Olds, reo automobiles. Most people would recognize that from the Reo Speedwagon model he produced, and was later adapted as a name by a band in the 1970s. There were a number of companies trying to get going at this time. Charles brady king was trying to get his company going. There was a Company Called closure that was making beautiful luxury automobiles prior to 1910. Curiously both of those companies were out of business as the rest of detroits automobile business started growing and growing quickly. Henry ford stumbled kind of through it. He had three different companies. The first two kind of went out of business. The first one really went out of business. The second was taken away from him and eventually adapted into the cadillac motorcar company. So with his third company, Ford Motor Company, he started developing several different models not far from this museum over on the cat avenue. Patent avenue. Each one of them had a letter denomination. He was doing as, bs, and ns, eventually, he got to the model t. But it was a Long Time Coming before his Business Manager said, henry, you know, you have a good car, lets market it, lets sell it, and he did. They actually made most of the model ts in Highland Park north the museum here. North of the museum here. They were turning out thousands, millions of cars during that decade. There was a point, 1915, 1920 when half of the automobiles on the roads of the United States were made by the Ford Motor Company in Highland Park. By the time henry ford was making model ts, a lot of other companies were starting up. They decided this was a great idea. Some of them were companies that were not necessarily involved initially in automobile manufacturing. The folks who ran the detroit news decided to start their own company. The guys who had the biggest music store and piano manufacturer in detroit decided to start an automobile company. The Hudson Company, which was a, basically detroits Large Department store, think macys or marshall fields. The Hudson Company decided to start its own auto manufacturer. With the right shape at the lead of that. And hudson motors, for many years, was a real hardcharging leader of the automobile business here in detroit. In 1915, detroit had 42 Manufacturing Companies making automobiles and another 70some making parts. We also saw, in the latter part of the 1910s, we saw a lot of organizations coming together. General motors, at this time, was buying up other companies and incorporating them into the General Motors brand. Ford had kind of consolidated his plant in Highland Park and was developing the future, the rouge plant which became the , largest industrial manufacturing facility in the world. And we also had walter chrysler, who was picking up the maxwell and the frisco names, and coordinating those into the chrysler brand. So two or three of them really bubbled to the top. They eventually became the big three detroit is so well known for, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and chrysler. Detroits early industrial history, prior to the turn of the last century, brought in many immigrants, mostly from western europe. They settled here and they took good jobs and helped build the industries they were involved in. Following the turn of the 19th century, we had quite an influx of people from mediterranean countries, from Eastern Europe that really helped build detroit into this wonderful melting pot of various neighborhoods, very polish neighborhoods, serbian, lithuanian russian, hungarian. ,that were lots and lots of folks living amongst each other and working together in the car companies. In fact i have heard the rouge plant described as the tower of babel because there were so many different languages from cyrillic to arabic being spoken on the same Assembly Line. Many of those people who came here had settled and their families have worked in the plants for years, many generations, one after another. In the 1920s, 1930s, the great migration brought both white and black workers into the factory arena. Black workers tended to be in kind of the dirtier and tougher jobs in the foundries and the wheel works, things like that. The white workers tended to get the assemblyline jobs. During world war ii, much of this changed. A lot of younger guys took off to go fight in the war. And the whole process within the plant started to include older workers, started to include women, it started to include handicapped workers. It was a whole there was a real change in the dynamic on the factory floor. This dynamic is reflected today in the people who are still working in the business. We still have immigrants coming into detroit to work in the automobile business or working for many of the suppliers that either were started here or have satellite offices here because of the strength of the automobile business. Detroit is still a very dynamic town as far as the folks who live here and the different backgrounds. And it has really, its given detroit a stronger community. Sometimes there are some battles. Sometimes theres some lack of acceptance. But over time, we have worked to try to get through those problems. What we see behind me here now is an Assembly Line, a real Assembly Line. This is the body drop portion of the cadillac clark Street Assembly plant. When the plant was closed, cadillac donated this to us. And we brought it into the museum, set it up, and you can now watch an actual 1970s era body drop in operation. The Assembly Line was an idea that had already been established. Detroit manufacturers merely took advantage of it and they took advantage of it to a wonderful degree. When ford got going with his model t, he had efficiency experts that came in and made sure that his moving Assembly Line was the most efficient way to make a car. And i think they took the number of hours necessary to build an automobile from somewhere near 30 down to about two. I mean, it was a tremendous change. And it made it possible for henry ford, who had started selling his model ts at about 800, to bring the price down to about 500. So it made it much more affordable for the normal working man to be able to get an automobile. While the Assembly Line was great for the manufacturing process, for actually turning out a car very quickly, Assembly Lines were very very tough on , the workers who had to be in the factories. And the factories themselves changed. When the automobile business got started here, most of the factories were kind of built along the old New England Mills style of architecture. They found that just wasnt going to work for all of the oil and heavy machinery they needed. They needed a different kind of architecture. And albert kahn kind of became the foremost industrial architect in the United States by building a feasible floor plan for automobile plants. And they got big. And the Assembly Line kind of took over these big plants. And they would employ thousands of people. In Highland Park, we have great postcards where about every three years, the number of people working there goes up about 10,000 to the point where he has got 50,000 employees working in one major plant. And these people are working hard. And its dangerous work. Its very repetitive. Theyre doing the same thing every day. Today they kind of try to change up jobs. Theyve come up with ergonomic ways of designing the machinery. Back then it was none of that. Initially, these jobs paid living wages. But then henry ford decided one of the best things he could do if he wanted to get the best workers was to raise the wages. And in 1915 instituted what was known as the 5 a day. Not everybody got 5 a day. You had to be a very good worker. You had to sign some papers and agree to do some things. Ford would actually send people out to look at your house and make sure you were living in good conditions, and that you were taking care of your children and maybe even going to church. So the 5 a day wasnt for everyone, but it really did change the dynamics of working detroit. Once people heard about these jobs, they started flowing into job to take them. Initially the people who got those jobs were very often people who worked in other industries. They might have worked in the stove Manufacturing Industry or the shipbuilding industry which was big in detroit. Because the automobile jobs paid better, they were pulling workers away from those industries to the detriment of those other industries. Many of them went away. In the 1920, 1924 period, the federal government shut down immigration. They put kind of a closure on it. They didnt close it altogether, but they made it harder for Automobile Companies to get those valuable employees. And so, the Automobile Companies were starting to recruit down south. They were going to the appalachian area, recruiting whites, and they were pulling blacks off the hardscrabble farms down in georgia and mississippi, and bringing those folks up here. That very much changed the dynamic of the city of detroit. We had a large number of immigrants, many of whom didnt speak english or were firstgeneration english speakers. We also had a lot of blacks and whites from the south who brought some of their own baggage with them. Some of it was good. The music, the food was wonderful. Some of the other baggage not so great. Of course the United States south has had a long history of racial discrimination. And in the 1920s, the whites who had come out of the appalachian states brought that with them. And detroit had a huge contingent of the ku klux klan here, probably second only to the southern states. And we were the northern stronghold. And they would have marches that down woodward avenue that would include 10,000 people in white robes. They burned crosses on the front lawn of city hall, on the front lawn of the courthouse. They really helped get a really bad mayor elected. There was some serious baggage that came up with those folks. And it took many many years , until well after world war ii to even start to address some of those issues. Some of those issues were still living with today. Labor unions are a voice, a bargaining agent, a source of protection. The formation of unions within automobile factories and plants came relatively late. There were enough immigrants here in detroit, and people coming in constantly, that it was pretty easy to replace either poor workers or workers who fought the corporation for pay and days off and things like that. Most workers worked six days a week and sometimes would even go in for the seventh day for the extra money. It was during the depression when times were the toughest in detroit that really the automobile manufacturing workers started pushing back. And it was in the 1934, 1935, 1936 time period when the growth of the uaw, the growth of the Teamsters Union in detroit really kind of changed attitudes within the plant. The big strikes or the flint sit down and there were some others in chrysler and floored being ford being the last one to go was really quite a contentious change. These were not happy times. Union workers were fighting very hard against the automobile management that didnt want to give up any kind of control within the plant. They wanted worker bees to get paid, and go home, and not talk back. And the union guys thought that they had a pretty good feel for what was wrong with some of the manufacturing, both from the injury standpoint, from the pay standpoint, and just ways of doing things better. And these things turned into battles. They turned into fights that involved clubs. Weve had a couple of clubs that were loaned to us from the walter ruth library across the street. These were basically automobile parts that were coopted to be weapons. And these were the things the guys, the union guys, who were fighting back and shutting down these plants, saying unless we get what we need, youre not going to get your cars. Eventually, cooperation became the byword. During the 1950s, 1960s, the automobile unions started working with the corporations. The automobile workers started the union started supporting African American and white workers in the same plant. They started getting cooperation from the corporations as far as how things could run better. Corporations were actually asking how this could happen. And today the u. A. W. Folks, the teamsters, the people working in the plants, and the executives are all kind of working together. Unions are now partners in the manufacturing process. The Auto Industry today in detroit is so much different than it was even 50 years ago. 50 years ago, almost all the cars in north america were built here in southeast michigan. Now, theyre built around the world. Theyre built in other countries. Theyre built in other states. There are Foreign Countries building in this area. Many of the companies that now reside in detroit are from japan or germany, that bring their technology here. Of the big three, ford, General Motors, and chrysler, chrysler is now owned by an italian company. Theres been a real change in the nature of the business as far as manufacturing goes. Of course, the Profit Margins are so thin that the efficiencies in design, deficiencies in manufacturing, efficiencies in sales practices, all of those things have to be well refined for a company to remain viable. Detroit has always had ups and downs in the automobile business. We became kind of a one trick pony as far as what we hung our hats on for the economics of the city. And of course, when theres a recession, the first thing people dont buy is an automobile. We always say that if the country catches a cold, detroit catches pneumonia. The last Great Recession was really, really tough on detroit. Ford Motor Company had kind of seen it coming and they consolidated and were able to ride it out. General motors and chrysler had to claim bankruptcy in order to survive and get a bailout from the United States taxpayers. That was pretty tough on both the egos and the outlook of the people in detroit, so tied to the automobile industry. Of course, there has been a tremendous rebound, and detroit is really doing quite well. Detroitres are kind of a different animal. Weve dealt with these ups and downs, incredibly resilient. People who love cars really love cars. And theres an ingenuity and a kind of an intuition about how an automobile ought to be made, what it ought to do for you. Of course, this whole new world with Autonomous Vehicles and kind of a return to either hybrids or electric is really exciting. So its an exciting time to be in the automobile business. And theres no better place to watch the automobile business than here in detroit. Announcer 1 verbal with us to historic sites. Sunday at 6 00 p. M. At 10 00 eastern on our weekly series american artifacts. This is American History tv, all weekend on cspan3. The house will be in order. For 40 years cspan has been providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from washington, d. C. And around the country so you can make up your own mind. Created by cable in 1979, cspan is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. Your unfiltered view of government. Carter i am a cold war historian, different ideologies and so forth. Friends of mine emailed and say why do you want to tackle this issue . Marriage and family, you are jumping into the culture war. Knouncer 2 author paul sunday. Ll be our guest his latest book is the divine plan. Others include the crusader as well as books about the spiritual lives of ronald reagan, george w. Bush and hillary clinton. Join our conversation with your phone calls, tweets and facebook questions or watch indepth with fromuthor sunday, july 7 noon to 2 00 eastern on book tv, and watch next month with author lee edwards. Book tv, every weekend on cspan 2. Tv,on American History we talk about historian Carter G Woodson who founded the study carter g author of woodson in washington, dc, the