A modern tale of two cities

Some cities are wondrous things, organisms at once propagating and receding, a single entity with parts living and others dying. We don’t often experience whole cities where success and despair are partners, growth and decay lie side by side, and history’s tumult remains visible.

I grew up in such a place — Butte, Mont. Last month, I visited another — Detroit, Mich. I had never been there, but my friend Brian, who grew up south of Detroit, invited me to visit.

I had earlier shown Butte to Brian, and he reciprocated by taking me around Detroit. We both appreciate cities with profound pasts and hopeful futures. Both cities are the products of immigrants, proclaim architecture of the Gilded Age, have ethnic studded populations, and enjoy a history of revolving migration. In almost all criteria, with the ironic exception of numbers of people, Detroit and Butte are urban.

Early dependence upon trade and agriculture, the states of Montana and Michigan had these two cities of excitement and ferment, international centers which were the potter’s wheel for much of their state’s commerce and production.

Both cities were dependent on day laborers and a single industry — automobile production in Detroit and mining in Butte. Their economic heydays spanned most of the 20th century, and during World War II both cities were a vital piece of democracy’s arsenal — Detroit with its prodigious production of tanks, planes and trucks, and Butte, one of the largest mining districts in the world, was America’s paramount copper supplier during World War II. The soft metal was essential to ammunition as well as the sinews of ships, radio equipment, planes and tanks.

Workers built both cities by hand, and organized labor owes much of its early national success to Detroit and Butte. The early autoworkers unions began in Detroit. Butte, “The Gibraltar of Labor,” was the home of Miners Union No. 1. Henry Ford revolutionized production everywhere with the creation of the automobile assembly line, and in Butte the development of new and safer mining technologies changed the hard-rock mining industry around the world.

The yesterdays of these two cities are evident in the remains of vacated buildings standing among the new. The promise of their tomorrows shines bright in the resiliency of the people and in the optimism inherent in the greeting of every commercial opportunity.

These cities, although far different in size, share those rare characteristics of real cities — a history that sticks to the ribs, an unwillingness to forget, and an eagerness to persevere and succeed. Such cities are bastions of both memory and hope whose residents hold much more than fondness of place — they need their city. It feeds them, secures the memories of their youth and their sense of well-being. Although wind whistles through the skeletons of a few of the homes and buildings, the cities themselves are stable and comforting. Hard times, survival and optimism have their uses.

Both cities now have less than half the population of their “once upon a time,” but such places beat both the odds and the obits. Detroit’s recovery — its comeback — I am assured is well underway. As for Butte, those of us who know the old girl insist on saying, “Come back, hell, she never left.”

Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and taught at the University of Montana.