In the early twentieth century, Detroit was a boomtown. The city’s population exploded from 285,704 people in 1900 to 993,678 in 1920, and then to 1,568,662 in 1930. Fueling this influx was Ford Motor Company’s now-legendary announcement on Monday, January 5, 1914: each worker would receive the generous payment of five dollars per day. Within twenty-four hours, ten thousand men appeared at Ford’s employment office in nine-degree weather.
By that time, the Motor City had already become a magnet for immigrants. As David Allan Levine documents in Internal Combustion, a 1915 report commissioned by the Detroit Board of Commerce found that 74 percent of the city’s population were either foreign-born or the children of foreigners. And 43 percent of the population were either born in non-English-speaking countries or the children of parents who didn’t speak English. A significant number of Detroit’s immigrants came from poor backgrounds.
To understand the scope of this immigration, consider that immigrants and their U.S.-born children make up about 29 percent of the American population today, and about 22 percent of U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home.
How did Detroit respond in 1915? Private industry cooperated with local government and civic organizations to accomplish the monumental task of absorbing huge numbers of non-English-speaking immigrants. For Detroit, the goal was assimilation into American society and the economic mainstream. This private-sector program shaped productive workers and citizens.
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