Digging Detroit’s Tom Reed and Pete Kalinski discuss the early days of Detroit’s automotive history with historians Bailey Sisoy Isgro and Madelyn Rzadkowolski.
Topics include:
- Advertising’s current portrayal of the Dodge Brothers
- Dodge’s famous dependability—and fix-it-yourself car kits
- General Patton and the Dodge military contract
- Women and Detroit’s cigar industry as a vehicle for entry into the workforce (and why Detroit was a cigar center)
- Using campaigns of conscience to get women into the workforce during WWI
- Detroit’s African American 600% population boom between 1910-1920
- Detroit as the “Paris of the Midwest”
- More campaigns of conscience to force women out of the workplace after WWII
- Dodge’s role in the arsenal of democracy
- Fear of women earning too much–and gaining political clout)
- Promoting the myth of the non-communist “nuclear family” in the nuclear age
Left to Right: Bailey Sisoy Isgro, Madelyn Rzadkowolski, Pete Kalinski and Tom Reed
For more information on the Dodge Brothers go to MeadowbrookHall.org.
For more information on Bailey’s Detroit History Tours go to DetroitHistoryTours.com.
Produced by Kevin Walsh of MMD Productions (www.mmdphotovideo.com). Recorded January 10, 2015 in Royal Oak, Michigan.
