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  Fifty miles north of Detroit, and economically independent of the metropolis, the Vehicle City developed a culture distinct from the Motor City’s. Even in culinary matters, Flint had its own version of the Coney Island, the hot dog with chili and mustard served in every Michigan diner. Angelo’s, the twenty-four-hour hot dog stand, packed its buns with a dry chili that didn’t run all over the plates like that mess at Lafayette Coney Island in Detroit. Even the music was different. The Saginaw Valley spawned a thousand garage bands, which made sense in a place where everyone owned two cars. Grand Funk Railroad, which ripped off its name from Michigan’s Grand Trunk Railroad, camouflaged its musical sophistication (listen to the singing bass on “We’re an American Band”) with party-rock lyrics about shagging groupies and trashing hotel rooms. ? and the Mysterians recorded “96 Tears,” the definitive two-minute garage rock song, on a front porch in Bay City, with a whistling Vox organ that sounded as though it had been purchased in a pawn shop.

  The difference between Flint and Detroit went deeper than hot dogs and rock and roll. As the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, Flint took its unionism seriously. The sons and grandsons of the Sit-Downers believed that their labor had built General Motors and that in return, the company owed them high wages and benefits. Strikes in Flint took nearly twice as long to settle as strikes in other GM towns, but they were so effective that the company’s local nickname was “Generous Motors.” Unlike their union brothers in Detroit, Flint’s UAW members endorsed the civil rights activism of Walter Reuther, one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. Perhaps as a result, Flint never experienced a riot and is to this day equal parts black and white. Flint was segregated—blacks lived north of the river, whites lived south—but in 1966, the Flint City Commission chose an African-American, Floyd McCree, as mayor. McCree threatened to resign after the commission rejected an open-housing ordinance that would have banned racial discrimination in home sales. On February 20, 1968, the ordinance went before the public and passed by forty-three votes, making Flint the first American city to approve open housing in a popular referendum. And there were just as many rednecks, peckerwoods, ridge runners, hillbillies, and crackers working in Flint as there were in Detroit. The difference was that most of Flint’s Southern whites were from the Ozark Mountains, which had fewer blacks and less racial conflict than regions with a history of plantation agriculture. One Flint suburb has a neighborhood nicknamed Little Missouri, because so many residents migrated from the state’s boot heel, following the Hillbilly Highway from rural peasantry to industrial yeomanry. They brought their old-time religion with them. Baptist and Nazarene churches supplemented the 10 percent tithe with biscuits-and-gravy breakfasts, a meal otherwise unknown north of the Ohio River.

  Don Spillman was working in a North Carolina cotton mill in the mid-1960s—not the same one as Norma Rae, but close enough to sue her for stealing his life story. He started work when a light flashed on and stopped when it blinked off. There were no lunch breaks. Spillman brought his food to the job site and wolfed it when the work slowed down. If the boss had caught him with a union pamphlet, he could have been fired. Like Dale Earnhardt and every other young man in his hometown, Spillman owned a stock racing car, but he couldn’t afford to put gas in it, even though he had a side job driving a bulldozer on a road crew.

  Meanwhile, Spillman’s mother had married a guy who’d discovered this (Cadillac) Eldorado called Flint. Every year, Mom and Stepdad drove back south in a brand-new GM chariot. After witnessing several model changes, Spillman finally told them, “Get me one of them jobs up there.”

  The jobs were not hard to get.

  “They had advertisements in the newspapers,” Spillman recalled. “North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee. GM would hire you. It seemed like most of the people came from Arkansas and Missouri. Back then, we had people working in two GM plants. They worked one shift in one, had a lucrative job, then went across town at another one. Oh God, I’m telling you, you could quit a job one day and get a job across town in another GM plant. They needed workers. I was a skilled trades job in the cotton mill, and I tell you, I made good bucks compared to what you’re making down there, but when I came up here, I hired in at $3.90 an hour. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. And you had protection. You had union protection.”

  General Motors was such an engine of employment, consuming labor as gluttonously as steel, rubber, and glass, that it was actually difficult for Flintoids to avoid working in the shop. GM officials trolled the streets, seeking young men who hadn’t volunteered at the personnel office. Here’s a piece of Michigan lore right up there with Marquette dying in the wilderness or Berry Gordy Jr. impregnating Diana Ross. The year is 1972. The scene is a filling station on Dort Highway, which is to Flint what the Strip is to Las Vegas: the street that displays the city’s soul, a permanent greaser carnival of engine repair shops, biker bars, windowless strip clubs, tattoo parlors, rock and roll nightclubs, Coney Island stands, and oil-change emporiums. A GM executive rolls in for a fill-’er-up and asks the pump jockey, “Why aren’t you working in the shop?” The kid shrugs. The driver takes down his number. A week later, GM calls, summoning him for duty. Twenty years later, the kid—by then a father of three—is laid off when his plant closes and his job moves to Texas, but that’s a tale for a later chapter.

  Likewise, Bernard Egan Hamper III tried to avoid a life in the shop, but deep down, he knew it was as inevitable a result of his lineage as male pattern baldness. Only the names Buick, Chevrolet, and Durant had been associated with General Motors longer than Hamper: his great-grandfather had gone to work there in 1910, followed by both his grandfathers and his father, a work-averse alcoholic who treated GM as an automatic teller machine to hit up between drinking binges. The company was so desperate it put anything that breathed on the line—and didn’t care if that breath smelled like Canadian Club or registered a .15 blood alcohol content.

  “He would just go from plant to plant,” Hamper said. “He would always get a new job. But when I was growing up, my old man, who was a shoprat bum, used to instill in me that ‘Look, you don’t want to go into that shop. You don’t want to get lost in that place. You better study or you’ll end up just like everybody else in this town, knockin’ screws for the rest of your life.’”

  Hamper graduated from high school in 1973. There was no better time to be a young Flintoid. Too young for the draft, but old enough to enjoy the rights your older brothers had won in Vietnam—specifically, the right for eighteen-year-olds to buy beer at one of Flint’s many Arab-owned liquor stores. Grand Funk hit number one with “The LocoMotion.” Alice Cooper played at the Whiting Auditorium. Marijuana and cocaine were sold in the auto plants and passed between the vinyl seats of Chevys in high school parking lots. It was a party generation. Not only were two-hour motel rooms, acid caps, and Who tickets available to late adolescents, so were the jobs to pay for them.

  Hamper married his pregnant girlfriend right out of high school and spent his late teens and early twenties flailing around financially as a housepainter and a janitor. Finally, in a last-ditch attempt to save his marriage, he gave in and began pursuing his genetic destiny. After wangling an application from an in-law (even then, climbing the family tree was the quickest way into a General Motors plant), he got the Call on a Saturday afternoon, while holding down a bar stool. It was July 9, 1977.

  “The state of GM in 1977, it was hot,” said David Vizard, a former autoworker who was hired as the Flint Journal’s labor reporter that year. “It was rolling. In fact, the biggest problem in the plants was absenteeism. They were working around the clock. They were working these plants overtime. Three shifts. They had relief people on every line, just to cover people who didn’t show up. Even if you didn’t show up for work, they let it go for a long time. You got warnings, you got screamed at, but they needed people. Especially if you had experience. That robotic exercise of working on the line, it’s a very hard thing to maintain for a long per
iod of time.”

  Hamper was eventually assigned to the rivet line at Truck and Bus. There, he wielded a gun that looked like a giant letter G, shooting eight rivets into eight predrilled holes that connected a Chevy Blazer’s cross-member with its side rails. At that stage of automotive parthenogenesis, the truck looked like a metal bed frame. The $8 an hour, plus overtime, didn’t bring his wife back, so Hamper worked “the bachelor shift”—four thirty P.M. to one A.M. Also known company-wide as “second shift” or “the party shift,” it let the inmates out early enough for last call across the street at Mark’s Lounge and allowed them to sleep off the booze until the next afternoon. With no family responsibilities, Hamper spent most of his free time and disposable income on alcohol and punk rock LPs. Plus, he was occasionally able to escape to the bar after four hours of work, because he and a linemate had worked out a scheme they called “doubling up”—doing two jobs at once. GM would have loved to speed up the line, but the union contract specified that workers had to be notified of time studies. Whenever the efficiency expert showed up with his stopwatch, the shoprats began assembling trucks … much … more … carefully.

  “It was a great functioning relationship while it lasted,” Hamper said. “It was boring, it was stinky, it was shitty, but where in the hell else was I gonna get every Thursday night a check for four hundred dollars? Every time I had a toothache, my foot hurts, doesn’t cost me a dime. I said, ‘Man, this is a wonderful trade-off.’ I think I’m a real product of Flint. You’ve pretty much got a town that’s built on, it’s almost inbred that I’m gonna go sacrifice a bunch of monkey motions in order to have my bills paid, and so there’s not a lot of need for outside thinking. I think it’s just a town of simple folk. I think that’s the result of the nature of the beast and the prevalent dormancy attached to factory life. You don’t use your brain a lot.”

  Hamper belonged to GM’s last great recruiting class. After the stampede of 1977, the personnel offices of Truck and Bus, Fisher One and Two, Chevy in the Hole, and ACDelco were locked with triple-wrapped chains. Not only was GM refusing to accept aspiring shoprats, it was throwing the existing litter out of the den. No city was hit harder by the recession of the early eighties than Flint. The local unemployment rate reached 25 percent—a “brother, can you spare a dime” level.

  Don Spillman’s Local 599 had the largest membership in the entire UAW. Its monthly newsletter, the Headlight, began a “Hard Times” page, featuring articles entitled “Dealing with Creditors” and “Economic Experts See a Recession Until Spring.” On Labor Day 1982, the union set up an “Unemployment City” in Flint Park, where workers spent the night in tents. Evangelist Robert Schuller was lured to Flint from his Crystal Cathedral in California to give a speech titled “How to Cope With Unemployment.” His answer: Flint’s attitude toward unemployment is “Yes We Can!!” That Christmas, a movie theater threw a party for the children of workers on permanent layoff. A Local 599 meeting on unemployment promised advice on benefits, utility bills, wage garnishment, veterans’ rights, as well as “dealing with substance abuse, depression, emotional trauma during unemployment.”

  The recession struck right after the UAW had negotiated its most generous contract ever. Signed in 1979, it gave workers twenty-six paid personal holidays—a day off every other week—bringing the union closer to its goal of a four-day workweek. Less than three years later, with a third of the UAW’s membership on layoff, GM pressured the union into reopening the contract by threatening to close seven plants. The UAW gave up its cost-of-living increase and nearly half its paid holidays, concessions costing each worker $3,800 a year. In exchange, GM spared four plants and agreed to a two-year moratorium on further closings.

  “As we are all aware of the economy not getting better, the second shift on Engine Cradle has been laid off,” Spillman, by then a shop committeeman, wrote in the January 1982 newsletter. “These members will survive because they are plenty tough … we all hope the overinflated salary of GM President Roger Smith is cut more than just a little bit so as to reflect he is as serious about saving the Corporation as well as the UAW is.”

  Roger Smith was a local villain. So was Ronald Reagan, who had dismissed as not newsworthy “some fellow in South Succotash” losing his job and suggested the unemployed blighter relocate to Texas or California. Although it occurred on his watch, Reagan can’t be blamed entirely for the recession of ’82, which had its roots in the disruption of the oil supply caused by the Iranian Revolution and the anti-inflationary interest rates set by President Jimmy Carter. Americans could not afford the gas to fill a big car or the loan to buy it. Reagan refused to loosen the money supply until inflation declined. As a result, car sales hit a twenty-year low. In the fall of 1982, the national unemployment rate was 10.8 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. The president urged his gloomy nation to “stay the course,” promising that the policies that had extended the recession—reducing taxes and government spending—would eventually end it. Reagan’s Cold War shopping spree resulted in $1.3 billion in defense contracts for General Motors—its biggest bonanza since Vietnam. Reagan also forgot about his free-market principles long enough to strong-arm the Japs into limiting auto imports to 1.65 million vehicles a year.

  Flint’s most belligerent anger was directed toward the Japanese. The same sneaks who’d bombed Pearl Harbor had now blindsided America by building fuel-efficient subcompact cars that did not explode when rear-ended or rust out their floorboards after driving through a puddle.

  One of the UAW locals held a fund-raiser, inviting Flintoids to batter a Toyota with a sledgehammer at five dollars a whack. Even the congressman attended. Less publicly, foreign cars were scraped with keys, sabotaged with sugar in the gas tank, and spray-painted with slogans whose racial implications had last been acceptable in polite company during the Second World War. “ASSHOLES BUY JAP CARS” read a graffito on an I-69 overpass between Flint and Lansing. Signs outside UAW halls declared “Non-North American Cars Will be Towed at Owner’s Expense.” If a schoolteacher or a city employee was seen driving a Nissan or a Honda, the UAW would call his boss to complain. On a popular T-shirt, Uncle Sam hoisted Fat Man and Little Boy, the weapons that had ended World War II, above the legend “Two Bombs Were Not Enough.” Having lost the shooting war, the Japanese were now winning a trade war that would eventually make Flint resemble Hiroshima without the radiation.

  Only two years into what he’d expected to be a stable, thirty-year relationship with the world’s largest industrial concern, Hamper was laid off. In 1981, right after Reagan clamped down the money supply to stop inflation, he was laid off again. He tried to keep busy with a daily and nightly regimen of alcohol, but as the months of unemployment dragged on, even drunkenness got boring. As a short, unathletic high schooler, Hamper’s only reprieve from the black-and-white anonymity of the sophomore photo gallery had been winning honorable mention in a Detroit News poetry contest. So he borrowed his mother’s typewriter to peck away at the monotony. One afternoon, after Card Sharks and Family Feud, Hamper was so bored he wrote a review of an album by an Illinois rock band called Shoes. As the owner of a large collection of vinyl by the Stooges, the Troggs, and Black Flag, Hamper felt music was the one topic on which he was qualified to rant. So he mailed his screed to the local alternative newspaper, the Flint Voice. A few days later, he received a phone call from its editor, Michael Moore. They had never met, but Hamper knew who Moore was. Everyone in Flint knew who Michael Moore was.

  Ever since he was a teenager, growing up in the Flint suburb of Davison, Moore had been developing the talent that would one day make him world-famous: getting attention by pissing off the establishment. As a Boys Stater, Moore won an Elks Club essay contest on Abraham Lincoln with a speech on what Lincoln might have thought of the Elks’ “Caucasians only” policy. It caused such an uproar that the CBS Evening News asked for an interview and Michigan senator Philip Hart invited Moore to testify on a bill to outlaw discrimination by private
clubs. Embarrassed by his acne, the sixteen-year-old declined both invitations. Nonetheless, CBS ran a story, and the Elks experienced so much political pressure they began accepting blacks. The pimply young man soon got over his bashfulness. As a high school senior, Moore took advantage of the recently ratified Twenty-Sixth Amendment to run for a seat on the Davison School Board, his candidacy motivated by a paddling from an assistant principal. Moore’s victory made him the youngest elected official in the United States. A generation younger than any of his fellow trustees, the long-haired Moore was a volatile element in small-town politics, sitting barefoot on the floor during meetings. He moved to name an elementary school after Martin Luther King Jr. (The motion was not seconded.) He forced the schools to open for extracurricular activities on Wednesdays, against the wishes of Baptists and Methodists, who considered that a church night. (Moore, who had considered becoming a priest, at least had the support of his fellow Catholics.) When the board refused to let Moore tape-record its proceedings, he called the county prosecutor, claiming a violation of the Open Meetings Act. After that, the other board members began holding secret, Moore-less meetings at the president’s house. When Moore found out, his fellow members organized a recall election to get rid of him. Moore beat the recall but failed to win a second term. During his four years on the board, though, he did get that assistant principal fired.