Producing Detroit: Narratives of Space and Place in the 1932 Ford Hunger March and Funeral Protest

ABSTRACT

This paper explores competing narratives of the Detroit community after a deadly labor protest against the Ford Motor Company in 1932. Both mainstream and radical newspapers negotiated the meaning of violence through rhetorics of place. Mainstream papers defined protestors as a mob unduly influenced by Communist outsiders, which set up redemption for the police as Detroit’s protectors. Radical journalists re-mapped Detroit to emphasize genuine working-class radicalism and set Henry Ford at the center of a transnational conspiracy. Considering place in the newspaper coverage allows rhetoricians to explore intersections of identity and materiality in labor rhetoric and understand the clashing rhetorical forces of worker solidarity and anti-communism.

Notes

1. I report the names as they appear on death certificates in the Maurice Sugar Papers at Wayne State University (Box 53, Folder 9, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs). Other sources list the names differently. For instance, the March 20, 1932, edition of the Ford Worker eulogizes them as “Joe York, Joe Bussell, Joe DeBlasio, and Coleman Leny.” A pamphlet published by the Young Communist League entitled “The Youth in the Ford Hunger March” identifies Bussell as “George Bussell.”

2. Both mainstream and radical papers used this name as early as the day after the march. While mainstream papers sometimes diminished its power by referring to the “so-called hunger march” (see the Detroit Times, March 8, 1932) or by referring to it as a riot or battle, the name “Ford Hunger March” circulates frequently throughout the Detroit press.

3. Scholars of social movement protest have recognized the rhetorical significance of bodies organized in material places as a resistance strategy (Cisneros 2011; DeLuca 1999; Endres and Senda-Cook 2011). However, the absence of a deeper discussion of space and place in labor rhetoric specifically is noteworthy given that labor organizes bodies in space and labor movement advocates often seek to change material organization of work (for exceptions that nonetheless do not theorize space rhetorically see Steudeman 2015; Triece 2003). I build on these scholars’ attention to the occupation of place in the rhetorical process of resistance and add attention to how industrial capitalism and its proponents rhetorically shift the dynamics of space with attendant implications for workers.

4. The union of rhetoric and critical geography requires moving beyond seeing place as static context for rhetorical activity and investigating how rhetoric shapes space and place and is shaped therein (Shome 2003, 40). Rhetoricians recognize, in Kundai Chirindo’s words, that place is “both a condition and an outcome of rhetoric” (2016, 50). Rhetoric’s engagement with critical geography spans inquiry into public memory places (Blair, Dickinson, and Ott 2010; Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki 2005; Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki 2006; Wright 2005), the architecture of public life (Dickinson 2002; Ewalt 2019), the environment (Paliewicz 2018; Peeples 2003; Schmitt 2015), immigration (Rowe 2004; Shome 2003), and geopolitical conflict (Barney 2013). I approach journalism on the protests with attention to how rhetors both described the unique place of Detroit alongside how their rhetoric perpetuated “spatial thinking” related to capitalist production (Endres and Senda-Cook 2011, 260).

5. As Edward Soja (2011) notes, “we must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (6).

6. As Robin D. G. Kelley (1990) explains in his study of Alabama’s Communists, “Because neither Joe Stalin, Earl Browder, nor William Z. Foster spoke directly to them or their daily problems, Alabama Communists developed strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances that, in most cases, had nothing to do with international crises. Besides, if Alabamians had waited patiently for orders from Moscow, they might still be waiting today” (xiv). This study is influenced by this perspective, which grounds Communist protest in local action.