Magic bullets are kind of like imaginary friends. We all have them in our past, but most people deny they exist.
MONTAGE: I don’t think fiscal stimulus is a magic bullet//There’s no magic bullet here//I’m not sure that inflation is a magic bullet…
BACALIS: There was a magic bullet when I was young and they called it an automobile.
George Bacalis is 80, born in Detroit. The auto boomtown has lost a million people since its heyday. More than half its population. So can magic bullets work?
BOYLE: Yeah, sometimes they work. But it’s a rare thing and it has consequences as Detroit today I think really shows.
Kevin Boyle is a history professor at The Ohio State University and the author of Arc of Justice, about 1920s Detroit. I asked him for a very abridged history of the Midwest magic bullet. So, number one: A city or town thinks it’s found that one key industry it can build a whole economy on.
BOYLE: So Detroit had its auto industry, Akron had the tire industry, Sheboygan had toilet production.
He says the problem is the Midwest grew a lot of single industry towns…
BOYLE: … that really got hit hard when that one industry, that first magic bullet, when that failed for them. And so you get a certain desperation to try to find the way back to where we once were.
Which can lead to a magic bullet number two. “If you build it, they will come.”
ARCHIVAL TAPE, BLANCHARD: Today, July 4, 1984, is the first day of the rebirth of the great city of Flint.
That’s then-governor James Blanchard at the opening of AutoWorld. It was an 80 million dollar theme park in the birthplace of GM. AutoWorld closed months later, reopened briefly, then ended up a punchline in a Michael Moore film.
Sfx demolition
Then there’s magic bullet three:
BOYLE: The great event.
DALEY: The 2016 Olympic Games will grow our economy.
Former Chicago mayor Richard Daley.
DALEY: Create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Generate billions in new economic activity. The impact will be enormous and most of it will be concentrated in Chicago neighborhoods.
Actually in Rio neighborhoods. Despite an 80 million dollar bid Chicago lost the games to Brazil in 2009. If it’s any consolation, bidding expert Rob Livingstone says Detroit tried for years to get the games … in 1944, 1952, then 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968…
LIVINGSTONE: And the final bid was for the games in 1972. DAVIDSON: That’s a lot of bids. LIVINGSTONE: It is a lot of bids. It’s not uncommon, but I think they actually do have the record for the most consecutive unsuccessful bids.
Historian Kevin Boyle points to one last magic bullet, maybe the most complex. Urban renewal: the massive postwar effort to transform cities by eliminating blighted housing and building public housing for the poor. Reverend Horace Sheffield says black neighborhoods in Detroit were devastated.
SHEFFIELD: It took all of old Black Bottom away. The freeways were built through the heart of black businesses. Gotham Hotel and Hastings Street. I mean all of that was lost.
ADAMS: Just remember me baby, when I’m in six feet of cold, cold ground…
This is blues singer Alberta Adams, who got her start on Hastings Street, which is now the Chrysler Freeway. It’s a mixed bag, these magic bullets of the past. But what about the magic bullets of today and tomorrow? We turn to those next. For Changing Gears, I’m Kate Davidson.
