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This article focuses on Frank Murphy, the liberal Mayor of Detroit, Michigan. Despite the opposition of the industrialists, the press and the politicians, the Mayor has preserved for the oppressed classes their right to use the City Hall steps as a forum from which to criticize or denounce capitalism and the government. The Mayor has made it a fixed rule to receive anyone and everyone who wishes to see him. The most serious opposition to the Mayor comes from the financiers and industrialists and from the local press. These people consider his election and administration a huge and costly mistake. These people try to convince the voters that Murphy is bringing socialism to Detroit.

It is informed that the twenty-fourth meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will be held at Detroit on August 11, 1875. Within the past fortnight has appeared the volume, of proceedings at the meeting held last year at Hartford. It contains a large number of interesting and valuable papers. It is also informed that an exhibition of revolutionary relics has been opened in Boston for this week under the best auspices. It takes advantage of the attraction of the Bunker Hill celebration, and the net proceeds will be placed at the disposal of the Ladies' Centennial Commission of Boston.

Presents letters to the editor on various issues. Democrats in disguise of tin peddlers to expose the McKinley Bill; New election law in Michigan; Fossils of mammals.

The article discusses the U.S. Social Forum, a five-day event that took place in June, 2010 in Detroit, Michigan. Aimed at providing a meeting place where members of the U.S. grassroots political left could gather and discuss ideas, strategies, and tactics, the Forum attracted some 18,000 people. Among topics discusses at the various workshops was how to respond at the grassroots level to police brutality, climate change, and a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from a well owned by petroleum firm BP PLC.

The author claims that Republicans plan to play upon widespread opposition to gay marriage among Americans to win votes in the 2004 election. As George Bush's poll numbers began seriously dwindling, Karl Rove and the White House political strategists decided to reach into their bag of tricks and come up with a good old staple of reactionary politics: homophobia. The decision to scapegoat gay and lesbian Americans was poll-driven by an antigay backlash that gathered steam in the wake of the Supreme Court's June 26 decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down laws making gay sex between consenting adults illegal -- the so-called sodomy laws. Just two days after Gallup released its poll showing the backlash, Bush unexpectedly used a Rose Garden press conference to announce that he'd assigned lawyers to come up with a plan to stop gay marriage. Since then, the Republicans have ratcheted up their anti-gay marriage crusade. At the state level, too, Republican antigay initiatives are snowballing. With 2004 shaping up as another close election, Rove & Co. want to energize the Christian-right base to which Bush is already so heavily indebted (it motored his 2000 primary victories against John McCain) and insure a maximum turnout among the AWOL evangelicals and other Christian traditionalists.The antigay bias that permeates the Republican Party can be clearly seen in Bush's judicial appointments. Among the unalloyed homophobes Bush has nominated for the federal bench: Jay Bybee, Michael McConnell, Charles Pickering, others. INSET: Judgment Day.

The article assesses the relevance of the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), for democracy. The concept of the term participatory democracy is the central focus of that document, which still appears as a live alternative to the top-down construction of most institutions. The Port Huron Statement was conceived at a winter meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1961, which aims to produce an organizing tool for the movement that they were trying to spread through SDS. The author asserts that participatory democracy and the priorities of Port Huron continue to offer clues to building a committed movement toward a society responsive to the needs of the vast majority.

Discusses the resignation of Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Swainson from the Michigan Supreme Court. Swainson's guilt of lying to hide a bribe; War hero credentials of Swainson; Consideration of U.S. president Richard Nixon's manipulation of the grand jury.

Presents editorials concerning articles and subjects discussed in previous issues of "The Nation." "Message from Michigan," which discussed the political implications of a special election in Michigan; "Aftermath of Kidnappings," which discussed political counterintelligence activities in the U.S.; "At the Justice Department," which discussed the U.S. Department of Justice; "New Energy," which discussed the Citizens' Energy Conference; "Haitians Are Different," which discussed the refusal of the U.S. State Department to give refuge to 400 Haitians who have come seeking asylum.

Focuses on first Afro-American Mayor of Detroit, Michigan Coleman A. Young. Information about political experience of Young; Role of Young in the labor organizations of Detroit.

The article presents information on the book "Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit," by Ze'ev Chafets. The social pressures of the 1920s had resulted from the boom of economic expansion; the bust that was to follow created unparalleled social upheaval. Detroit then became a worldwide code word for class, racial and religious conflict-the place that gave rise to the democratic socialist automobile-worker unionism of union leader Walter Reuther. Detroit represented the twentieth century's boom-and-bust business cycle, forecasting the national economy.

This article focuses on the visit of the author to the campus of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend fraternity. About one in four of Michigan's undergraduates participate in this white exclusionary ritual each fall, according to Jo Rumsey, the assistant director of housing information. This year 779 new members were inducted into fraternities, almost twice the number that joined in 1975. "We lost 30 to 40 percent of the fraternities in the late sixties and early seventies," Rumsey said, but since 1975, at least nine chapters-including three which are predominantly Jewish have come back.

The annual paeans for organized labor's contribution to the society will ring forth next week from Detroit, Michigan's Cadillac Square and from the editorial pages of a thousand newspapers in the customary manner and in the volume consonant with an election year. Labor's statesmen will be cited; labor's political strength will be hailed. Union membership, continuing its descending curve, has shrunk to new lows for the last twenty-five years; still worse, perhaps, the enlistment of new members has ground to a frustrated halt on almost all fronts.

Although civic organizations tend to tire with age, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has rather been gaining vigor in recent years. It is particularly to be commended for its forthright statement urging college and university presidents to resist subpoenas by the House Committee on Un-American activities for membership lists of campus organizations critical of U.S. The ACLU statement arose from the circumstance that subpoenas were issued during the summer at two universities, Michigan and California.

Presents several letters to the editor. Discussion on the act of the Michigan Legislature in changing the method of choosing Presidential electors; Details of political affairs in Wisconsin; Comments on the seizure of California in 1846.

The article discusses the picturesque U.S. state of Michigan. Michigan is a pleasant peninsula, or peninsulas, for there are two of them-the only State in the Union boasting a spare part. It is a land of undulating hills, spendthrift in wild-flowers. Save for desolate stretches of cut-over timber land trees abound. On the east lies Huron, on the west Michigan with its yellow dunes, and on the north Superior-blue waters, cold and beautiful. Inland along the courses of many streams are little lakes and ponds estimated at from five thousand to fifteen thousand in number. The older residents love Michigan for these things, but the new find reinforced concrete more gratifying to their eyes; and the new constitute the State.

The article focuses on the reasons of the fiasco of bomber city, the war-housing development planned for Henry Ford's Willow Run bomber plant in Michigan. There were early indications that things were not going well but the excuse of military secrecy was invoked to avoid answering questions. The abortive Bomber City was designed project was designed to correct an extreme shortage in housing and transportation facility. As originally designed for 6,000 families, Bomber City would have comprised a town center surrounded by five neighborhood subtowns, each with 1,200 dwellings. The reduced plan called for a town center and three subtowns of 700 dwellings each.

The article focuses on Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham's contribution to the Republican Party. As the chairman of the Michigan grand old party for six years, Spencer was one of the trio credited with rebuilding the Republican Party in this once heavily democratic state. Spencer had previously made his mark in politics practicing a brass-knuckles school of electioneering that helped pull the party to the right. For example, in 1974 Spencer managed a vicious Congressional primary campaign against moderate Republican State Senator Bill Ballenger, who supported then controversial legislation to allow open display of condoms in drugstores.

This article presents information on the smuggling of liquor from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit, Michigan. The two cities face each other across the Detroit River. This stream, which is owned jointly by the U.S. and Canada, is eighteen miles long and a mile wide. It is one of the busiest pieces of water in the world; at this time of the year an average of 1,500 craft operate in it every hour of the day. Liquor has been crossing in every conceivable manner. Until recently about 4,000 cases were landed on the U.S. side every twenty-four hours. The liquor is delivered in wooden cases. Each case contains two handy packages of six quarts each, packed between heavy cardboard in square burlap bags.

The author gives an account of a typical day of job search in his days of unemployment. After about a week of such wandering around Detroit After about a week of such wandering around Detroit, Michigan the author picked up a job at the Packard Motor Car Co. as a ventilator assembler. While waiting to be hired he had plenty of leisure to note that the older men were being turned away just as they are still being turned away at Packard, Ford, Hudson and all the other auto factories. Here was the author, who had never, been inside a factory, hired, as a worker on the line while men whose hair had whitened in the service of the motor kings were turned away with a shrug. "No Loitering. Get out Production." This sign on the general foreman's desk symbolizes the whole system. The job was to put ventilators into bodies as they came along on the "line." They had to work swiftly, for if a body went through unassembled there was trouble and plenty of it.

Focuses on the financial crisis faced by the local government of Hamtramck, Michigan. Status of local taxes and the government funded obligations of the city; Reasons behind the economic conditions of the city; Changes in policies after election of mayor Raymond J. Wojtowicz.

Even before the charred remains of the buildings were cleared from Detroit, Michigan's riot-torn 12th Street area, urban planners were passing out hundreds of questionnaires among residents to learn how they would like to see the neighborhood rebuilt. Along the same time, Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh's prestigious citizens' committee, called "New Detroit," asked the Michigan Civil Rights Commission for advice on mobilizing action programs. The civil rights people advised an immediate review of the master plan to insure involvement of inner-city residents, and said frequent public meetings would foster an exchange of ideas with the man in the street. Cavanagh continued the theme when he somberly appraised the riots for U.S. President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.

This article demonstrates the diversity and the dimensions of the race riots in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, the symbol of hope in race relations in the U.S., turned into a nightmare of shattered illusions on Sunday, July 23,1967. Seven days later its people were still dazed from the shock of its conflicts and devastation, like a city recovering from its first bombing in war. The shock was greater because it wasn't supposed to happen here, at least not the way it did. Detroit had more going for it than any city, so everyone knew, it had a dynamic and talented liberal mayor who had more federal funds and programs going than any other urban area. Its police commissioner had the respect of most of the African-American and white liberal community.

Michigan's problems include a cash crisis, a tax crisis and most important, a political crisis involving, among other things, the future of the state's educational system and the personal political fortunes of Governor G. Mennen Williams, once considered a serious contender for the 1960 Democratic Presidential nomination. Political analysts look upon Williams as a lame duck who is bowing out of state politics after 1960. The irony of the savage attack on Governor Williams is that this year no one except some Grand Old Party pundits was taking him seriously as a 1960 candidate.

The National Labor Relations Board held an extraordinary session in Detroit on May 21, 1958. For the first time since 1954, the full five-man body headed by chairman Boyd Leedom, left Washington to conduct an on-the-spot hearing. The consequences will affect not only the current auto-labor crisis, but craft and industrial, union relations, throughout the country. Unprecedented also was the fact that General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and the United Auto Workers union postponed contract negotiations at a critical stage to appear side by side to make a joint plea before the board.

This article focuses on labor layoffs in automobile factories in Detroit, Michigan. As a union official, one knew why the layoffs were coming-and their special nature. But it is difficult for one to tell the people, already wearied by bad news since the 1959 model had gone into production. This time, the badges were being taken away and the laid-off people cleared from the rolls. When the rank and file learned that, they would grasp the terrible significance of what was happening to them. They would know that once they left the plant, they would be lucky ever to see the inside of it again. Patience has its limits, and neither the foremen who must give out the layoff slips, nor the men who expect them, can wait.

This article focuses on the political developments in the U.S. A new development of election frauds has been reached in Michigan, where it appears that two amendments to the Constitution, voted upon in different years, were reported as carried, although in each case a majority of the ballots actually cast was against the proposed change. There is more trouble over the color line in Ohio. Six years ago the Legislature repealed the laws discriminating against African Americans, and opened the public schools to white and Afro-American children alike.

The article focuses on the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has completed the first half century of its legal existence. The University of Michigan is regarded as one of the most prominent higher educational establishments which derive a large part of their revenue from popular taxation. It is informed that the University has received about a million of dollars from the State treasury during the last two decades.

The author says that since 1932 public-spirited people in Detroit, Michigan have been manifesting sharp interest in slum conditions. Social workers have exposed painful facts concerning the misery and degradation of Negro families living in Detroit's East Side slum district. Public indignation has been further stirred by the statistics from city-wide social surveys which show the results of unsanitary and shameful housing conditions. The ceremony over, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt returned to Washington, confident that all was well.

The Mechanics' Educational Society of America (MESA) has just coasted to easy victory in a strike in the Detroit, Michigan, tool-and-die shops, is conducting a militant strike of skilled automobile workers in Cleveland, Ohio, and is involved in a bitter strike of skilled and production men at the Michigan Stove Company in Detroit. One of the largest unions in the country outside the ranks of the American Federation of Labor, the MESA has a membership of 25,000 tool-and-die makers, key men in the industry, and 6,000 production workers. It has 11 organizers in the field and is enrolling workers in its ranks as fast as it can efficiently do so.

The article focuses on the political and economic conditions of the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's pronouncement to the World Economic Conference was described in the first dispatches as a "bombshell," and it certainly bore a similarity to one in that his statement seemed to fly off in every direction and that it may be found actually to have blown up the conference. Wholly apart from its content, its summary and scolding tone was extremely unfortunate; such a tone can only provoke foreign resentment. Charges of a most sensational nature have been placed before Judge Harry B. Keidan of Detroit, who is inquiring into the causes of the Detroit bank panic of last February.

The article discusses about the collapse of automobile production in Detroit that has resulted in extreme suffering. Municipal relief has been woefully inadequate. Even when this relief was at its height it did not approach a solution of the problem. Prior to the depression the pay and the standard of living of automobile workers compared favorably with those of workers in other industries. The average yearly earnings of all the auto workers in the U.S. in 1929 were $1,639. A rapid reduction was reflected in the year 1931. 75 per cent of the workers interviewed by the Labor Research Association were: in debt; many had lost their insurance policies, homes, and furniture. Bank failures in the Detroit metropolitan area have accounted for loss of small savings of perhaps 50,000 workers.

This article presents information regarding the book "Collected Poems," by Robert Hayden and edited by Frederick Glaysher. At the time of his death in 1980, Hayden, who was a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the first black consultant on poetry to the Library of Congress, had finally begun to receive the recognition he deserved. But most of his writing life was spent in relative obscurity. Freedom is the great subject of Hayden's work, his poetic touchstone. He considered the need for freedom a constant beyond history, "the deep immortal human wish, the timeless will," as he said in "Middle Passage," but understood that the struggle for freedom takes place inside history.

The article presents information about various political activities taking place in the U.S. or at international level. The Gun Stock `95 rally was held at Freedom Hill County Park, in Michigan's Macomb County, in may 1995. At Freedom Hill the right of the people to bear arms most certainly was upheld by lusty cascades of rhetoric, but the mood was amiable and the crowd of some 2,500 keenly enjoyed the speeches. Last year's Gun Stock rally, the first, had been much larger. Oklahoma City, it was clear, had kept people away. Conversations with several of the organizers disclosed that Gun Stock `95 was really a coalition between Second Amendment zealots and Libertarian Republican dissidents from the corpo-Republican mainstream, looking for political recruits.

This article presents information on a pre-election survey in Michigan on those contests which are of more than local interest and which are likely to affect national policy either immediately or in 1964. Political candidate George Romney's unorthodox campaign methods and maverick personality have given Michigan's gubernatorial campaign a fresh excitement and is leaving an imprint on this state's politics that will survive the outcome of November race. Many signs point to the conclusion that the big upset of the race for governor would be the re-election of the incumbent, Governor John B. Swainson.

Frank Murphy, was elected as Mayor of Detroit on September 9, 1930. Murphy is liberal, humanitarian, champion of the rights of the masses. Significantly, he was chosen in a popular upheaval after the recall from office of Mayor Charles Bowles, and he was elected in the face of a vitriolic attack from the conservative press and the big-business elements of the city. The article also described the enlightened scientific methods employed by Murphy. For Murphy, the big issue of the time was the general economic distress and the attendant widespread unemployment in the city.

The author was walking on the ever-beautiful summit of Mackinac Island. A shower of rain a few hours before had swept away a trifle of limestone dust the only soilure that ever stains the foliage along its paths and driveways, where the insistent automobile, with its malodorous fumes, is barred, the heavy wagon has no call to come, and only the light carriage with its smiling group of tourists now and then flashes into sight around some curve and melts away again among the trees. The author had strolled up from the little town through the old fort, and then through the short rifle range. For years no sound of target practice has startled the birds flitting among the cedars and balsams, which densely line its sides.

After six months of futile effort to obtain recognition of their union, approximately 400 employees of Harper Hospital in Detroit, Michigan went on strike early in November 1948. The story of their strike has the quality of a fine documentary film, for it reveals, from different but always convergent points of view, many aspects of Detroit, arsenal of democracy. In Detroit's three municipal hospitals salaries are nearly double those at Harper. Harper Hospital is partly supported by funds from the Community Chest. With this fact in mind, fifty leading citizens of Detroit appealed to the management to bargain with the union.

Lafayette Park in downtown Detroit, Michigan, is a serene but startling city-renewal protect. It is the antithesis of the dull housing monuments of today, those flat pyramids, those massive clusters in which tall slabs have been sliced off the standard apartment house cheese, then grouped together to cast their shade on stretches of limpid lawn, undeviating example of architectural logistics which lack the design grace of a saltine. Instead, Lafayette Park, or Lafayette Plaisance, as the proprietors sometimes murmur it, is a combination, so far, of one simple but handsome vertical apartment house slab, in front of which a group of 185 row houses and courthouses are arranged subtly in twenty-one separate horizontal structures.

As a recession of indeterminable length and indeterminable magnitude grips the nation, many eyes are fixed on Detroit, Michigan. Having sold the American public 19,000,000 ears in the past three years, the automotive industry appears to have run into a solid log-jam of consumer resistance. Manufacturers turned out fewer than 500,000 cars in January 1958, a decline of more than 25 per cent from January 01, 1957. Sales in January slipped to 380,000, the lowest level since 1952. The failure of the 1958 models to excite consumer interest is a bitter pill for Detroit; the industry had been looking forward to this year as another 1955, when the sale of 7,200,000 new cars broke all records.

When nearly sixty-four per cent of Detroit, Michigan's voting citizens marked their ballots on April 5 for a city-owned traction system, they won two notable victories. They not only triumphed in a bitter, 25-year fight for municipal ownership, but they defeated the organized public utility interests of the United States after those interests had fought the passage of the municipal ownership ordinance with an intensity, a profligacy of expenditure, and an unscrupulousness possibly never equaled in the history of an American city. Detroit's victory is a national event. In the six weeks preceding the election, the city was the battleground for the nation in a test of strength between organized privilege and the public weal. Under the leadership of a fighting mayor, and with the aid of a fighting newspaper, the public won. The day after election steam shovels began excavating for a municipal system which will consist of 163 miles of new track, plus 55 miles of additional track on which the private company's franchises have run out. The private company will remain for a time, but only on the expectation that the voters will be ready to take it over in 1924, when its last important franchises expire. After that date, it is expected, all the surface lines in the city will be operated as a unified municipal system.

Three months after their arrest in mass raids conducted by the Dept. of Justice, 150 Detroit aliens are still held in an old army fort in Detroit, Michigan, with no information available from Immigration Bureau officials, who are in charge of them, concerning when or whether they will be deported or freed. Reports in press dispatches that deportations to Russia have been indefinitely suspended make it appear that the men finally marked for deportation face indeterminate imprisonment. Only Liberty Bonds are accepted as bail, which runs from $1,000 to $10,000.

On January 2, 1920, Arthur L. Barkey, chief agent of the Department of Justice in Detroit, Michigan, received an order from Attorney General Palmer instructing Barkey, according to his own statement, to raid the headquarters of a group of interdicted organizations, principally the Communist party, "as long as they continue to meet," in a "supreme effort to break the back of radicalism" in Detroit. As a result, eight hundred men were imprisoned for from three to six days in a dark, windowless, narrow corridor running around the big central are away of the city's antiquated Federal Building.

It has always been characteristic of the Socialist movement that it has been able to adjust its tactics to changing circumstances. These adjustments have not been notable for their timing, but neither have the conditions which necessitated them been easily recognizable. At its recent convention in Detroit, Michigan the Socialist Party of the U.S. adjusted its tactics and prepared to meet eventualities which it bad never before thought close enough to warrant consideration. It did not abandon any of its fundamental principles. It did not embrace communism. It did not direct its followers to throw up barricades and start shooting. The new declaration of principles, which is the relevant document, was passed by the substantial margin of 10,822 to 6512.

The article focuses on the strikes in various companies in Detroit, Michigan. There are between 10,000 and 14,000 workers on strike at the four plants of the Briggs Manufacturing Co. and at the Murray Manufacturing Co. plant. Some of the motor companies like, Ford and Hudson Motor Co. have shut down. The story of these strikes is the story of how manufacturers seeking "low production costs" slashed wages, disregarding or dismissing the possibility that the victims might revolt, and of how unorganized workers spontaneously struck at a time when, according to the estimate of the Mayor's Unemployment Committee, there were more than 175,000 jobless in Detroit.

The article presents information about the voting trends in three important states of the U.S. From the Civil War until 1932 Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan had been pretty securely Republican. Ohio had left the party fold only in 1912 and in 1916. Illinois had voted twice for other political candidates. Michigan had never gone Democratic in a Presidential election since the Republican Party was formed in 1854. The U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt carded all three in 1932 and four years later increased his majorities in them. Ohio gave Roosevelt only 74,000 more votes than Herbert Hoover in 1932, but in 1936 cast 619,000 more votes for Roosevelt.

This article presents information on recent political developments in the U.S. A constituent wrote to Senator Rush Holt asking for a copy of a radio speech Holt had just made. He received the speech but noted that his name was misspelled on the envelope. The Alien Registration director in Michigan recently got an inquiry from a woman asking whether she had to register. She hoped she wouldn't have to, she said, because she was an Englishwoman and was simply on a visit. The William Allen White committee isn't politically monolithic, a lot of its members are pretty conservative.

The article presents the author's views. The automobile business is booming everywhere. In several cities, especially in Cincinnati the local agents cannot fill their orders and that some are saying that they cannot supply cars until April. The delay is due in part to the die workers' strike in Detroit, but orders are still way ahead of last year. One agent wired in from a Dakota town that he wanted a thousand cars at once and when asked to explain, said that farmers had been getting government money from two sources and that he proposed to get it away from them.