The Great Lakes

A WAVE prosperity seems to be rolling up to boom proportions in the basin of the five Great Lakes. Evidence of the boom can be seen most distinctly in the outskirts of the cities. Acres of parking lots have sprung up on factory sites which a few months earlier were pastureland. New furnaces along its fringes have made Chicago the steel capital of the world, toppling Pittsburgh out of first place. Around Cleveland, at a 30-mile radius from its center, three $100 million plants have just been completed, one for each of the major automobile companies.

A suburban shopping center built on wasteland 20 miles from Detroit is doing $90 million worth of business a year, a respectable volume for the downtown of a city of 300,000. Near Duluth the success of an experimental plant processing taconite, or low-grade iron ore, has guaranteed new life for the Mesabi Range.

In the Great Lakes states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, during the four most recent years covered by the Census Bureau, 1951 to 1954, $10.5 billion were invested in productive facilities. This sum was exactly one third of the total capital investment in manufacturing during the period in the entire United States.

The new boom psychology has hit residents of the entire basin so suddenly that they aren’t even sure how to react to their own state of mind. They are used to a solid sort of prosperity based on an unexciting combination of factories and farms. A genuine, rip-roaring boom is something that Great Lakers haven’t enjoyed since the Erie Canal opened up the territory more than a century ago.

Now, as their hopes for the future rise, they’re becoming cocky. From Buffalo to Duluth luncheon speakers and writers of letters-to-the-editor are casually using such phrases as “inland empire,” “our Great Lakes pot of gold.” and “the approaching revolution in our way of life.” The head of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry predicted that his home town was on the way to becoming the greatest city the world has ever known, probably within twenty-five years.

Whence comes this sudden bullish spirit? The biggest single influence is the prospect of the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The thought of full-scale ocean freighters from faraway places pulling into their harbors has had an intoxicating effect on the citizens of Ashtabula, Conneaut, Sheboygan, Muskegon, and Ontonagon.

Actually, the seaway is only one factor piled on top of all the rest of the determinants of economic geography. The water in the lakes looks more and more valuable in a nation whose thirst increases yearly. The central position of the lakes puts most of their cities within an overnight train or truck ride from the nation’s major markets. The growth of Canada, both as a market and as a source of raw materials, gives the lakes an even more strategic location. Aside from the seaway, the lakes themselves remain a 1200-mile waterway for the cheap transportation of the basic needs of industry — ore from their one extremity and coal from near their other. A stable and skilled pool of labor and a political scene dominated by moderates complete the rosy highlights of the picture.

THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY

Great Lakes boosters like to believe that when the 27-foot-deep St. Lawrence canals open in 1959, all the good things of the world will land on their lake fronts. The chief fallacy here is the idea that the seaway is something completely new. It will be merely an improvement over the present system of canals bypassing the rapids above Montreal. Small ocean-going ships with a draught of no more than 14 feet have been able to voyage into the Great Lakes for nearly a quarter of a century.

The change in 1959 will be that ships of 25-foot draught and 400-foot length will be able to make the trip. The larger ships will certainly operate more economically, faster, and with more regular service than the pocket-sized tramps now appearing irregularly in Great Lakes harbors. The present cost of shipping to Europe by small boat runs 10 to 25 per cent less than the combination rate by rail to East Coast ports and from there by ship. Technical experts estimate that the larger boats will double those savings.

On finished, packaged goods, this is a significant but not a revolutionary amount. The real importance of the seaway is its potentiality lor carrying bulk cargoes between the sea and the lakes. Iron ore from Labrador and Newfoundland, shipped via the seaway, will insure the positions of Chicago, Gary, Cleveland, and Lorain as the most economical spots in the world for the manufacture of steel. Traveling in the other direction, grain from both the Canadian and the American wheatlands will be able to compete more successfully on world markets. The opening of all the lake shores to direct shipments of bauxite, paper pulp, sugar, coffee, crude rubber, and bulk chemicals will make the region attractive to industries looking for a place to settle and interested chiefly in domestic markets.

BOTTLENECKS

Three factors limit the immediate potentialities of the new channel. One is the limited capacity of the old Welland Canal, which bypasses Niagara Falls between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. At most it can handle 46 million tons a year. About half that amount is now passing through it. The seaway won’t have to generate much new shipping to cause immense traffic jams in the Welland locks. So far the Canadian government, their owner, has made no move to increase their capacity.

Second is the bottleneck in the “connecting channels” — the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, the St. Clair River, the Straits of Mackinac, and the St. Marys River. The existing 21-foot depth of the upbound channel bars the way of the largest ocean ships into Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior. The Army engineers are planning a $150 million deepening project, but it won’t be done until at least 1962. Meanwhile Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Duluth will get comparatively little profit from the seaway.

Third is the question of tolls. The building of the seaway is provingmore expensive than the estimates, perhaps by as much as 50 per cent. The Atlantic Coast cities are banding together to influence Congress to set seaway tolls high enough to amortize these building costs. The Great Lakes lobby is already fighting to establish a low level of tolls, which would leave the government in the position of subsidizing the seaway. The toll level will determine for many shippers the desirability of using the new route.

THE SHADOW OF NEW YORK

Regardless of the gains in productive capacity, the Great Lakes cities haven’t kept up in the fields of management and finance. Wherever two or more firms join forces for the sake of efficiency, the merged management seems to settle in Manhattan. The reason appears to be that top management no longer has to be located near the point of production. The telephone and the airplane have brought New York into the shadow of every factory smokestack in the country.

Of the American cities east of the Mississippi, only New York and Pittsburgh have managed to hold on to their positions as corporate capitals. And only Pittsburgh has had a downtown building boom comparable to New York’s.

Toronto, across the international border, has enjoyed a true commercial boom which is reflected in three new downtown bank buildings and a new subway. On the American side of the lakes the downtown building activity since World War II has been almost nonexistent. Chicago has had a handful of new major office buildings. Cleveland has two under construction. Detroit has its civic center, financed by bond money and Ford donations. Aside from these, the Great Lakes cities have no important new office buildings, hotels, or department stores.

Their downtown areas are visibly aging. They lack excitement. Their prosperity is based on payrolls, not on rents or dividends. From an economic point of view, the Great Lakes region is nearly as much a captive area as the traditional West Virginia coal mines, all of whose profits flowed eastward to Bronxville and Brookline. It is, to be sure, a lush sort of captivity.

THE RACE PROBLEM

Between 1910 and 1950, Chicago’s nonwhite population grew by 10 times, Cleveland’s by 19, Buffalo’s and Milwaukee’s by 25, and Detroit’s by 64. New York’s in the same period climbed by 8 times, Pittsburgh’s by 5, Philadelphia’s and Boston’s by 4. In 1950 Philadelphia’s 379,000 Negroes formed the largest percentage of any northern city population — 18 per cent. Close behind were the major Great Lakes cities: Detroit and Cleveland with 16 per cent and Chicago with 14 per cent. Nonwhite populations of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco formed 10 per cent of the city totals; of Boston, 5 per cent.

Since 1950 the figures in the Great Lakes cities have continued to grow, and fast, but no one knows for sure just how fast. Sociologist Philip Hauser has predicted that by 1980 Chicago will be a city of 7.9 million persons, a fourth to a third of them Negroes.

Considering this growth, it is not surprising that the major race crises outside the South have occurred around the perimeter of the Great Lakes. There have been housing incidents in Detroit and Chicago, a nasty race riot in Buffalo on board a Lake Erie cruise ship, and a mayoralty election in Milwaukee in which the chief issue was whether the Socialist incumbent had been encouraging southern Negroes to migrate to the city.

One pattern of Negro life is common to these cities. Partly by their own desire to cluster together, and partly by extralegal confinement, the Negroes are concentrated in ghettos. As their numbers increase by births and by immigration, they are constantly expanding the borders of these ghettos. The steady pressure is hastening the flight of white citydwellers to the suburbs.

As the ghetto expands, the central city faces a lowering of real estate values and a loss to the tax rolls. 1he exodus of the more prosperous elements in the community damages the interests of downtown merchants, and this in turn threatens the city’s tax income. Urban rehabilitation projects cannot keep up with the growth of the slums. In Detroit, for instance, the city bought and cleared a run-down area and then found no builders willing to bid on housing projects, even with a subsidy.

The picture is not all so gloomy. Fifteen years of steady employment have given the Negro a financial stability he has never before enjoyed. In Cleveland in 1954 the median disposable income of Negro families was $4600. This doesn’t compare with the white median, including suburban families, of $7200. But it does mean that the Negro family has money to spend. Merchants are becoming aware of the Negro market, and many of them aim a share of their advertising at Negroes.

There is no quick or easy solution to this northern version of segregation and the race question. The real problems these cities face are not those of riots and strife, but of a continuing tension that they must learn to live with and to deal with. In the most difficult position today is the growing class of young, educated Negro professionals. By income and by taste, the colored doctor, lawyer, or architect, and his wife, fit into a pattern that calls for a suburban ranch-type home, with a little land around it. From this sort of living they are barred. The key to an eventual solution of the general problem may lie in their gradual breakthrough into the charmed circle of the white suburbs.