New Podcast: Digging Detroit – Dodge, Detroit & Women in Industry

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 … Read More…

Labor Day: Created in Six Days from Collective Guilt and a Stubborn Landlord

This weekend, we’re celebrating the end of summer–the bookend to Memorial Day and a great Monday to have off.  Labor Day was created to supposedly honor the American worker but was  passed in record time in 1887 by a Congress and president with a guilty-conscience.

It began with a broken promise–probably one that shouldn’t have been made.  But it was made–and believed to be made for all the right reasons on one side and the more logical reason on the other side–the reason of profit.

George Pullman, like any great American businessman, found his niche.  He grew up near the Erie Canal and witnessed the importance of creating luxury transportation and adapted it to the newborn railroad system.

After transporting Lincoln’s body through 180 cities and seven states demand for Pullman’s cars grew, … Read More…