Problem
Readings: Dunbar & May, Ch. 21, 22
No one knows exactly why the auto industry established its capitol in Detroit. While the city was strategically placed to take advantage of the raw materials coming from the Upper Peninsula, the water transport to other Great Lakes ports, and the numerous rail connections, so were many other places where the industry did not take root.
However, Detroit seems to have offered early automobile innovators one thing that they could not find in abundance elsewhere: money. The new automotive industry could draw on capital reserves in Detroit--fortunes made from timber, mining, and other activities--that they could not find in other parts of the country and that were eager to buy into automobile manufacturing. It was available capital, more than anything else, that made Michigan synonymous with the automobile.
Much of this capital began to accumulate in Detroit in the decades following the end of the Civil War. A prime example was the business of Pingree and Smith, who manufactured shoes in Detroit beginning in 1866. Hazen Pingree was a Civil War veteran (he had served in the Second Battle of Bull Run and was held in the notorious Andersonville prison for some months) who came to Detroit after the war's end. By the 1880s Hazen Pingree and Smith had become one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the Midwest. In 1889 Republican friends of Pingree urged him to run for mayor of the city of Detroit. During the eight years Pingree held the office he became one of the nation's foremost Progressives--a group of politicians who promoted social and economic reform at the turn of the twentieth century.
Hazen Pingree went on to become governor of Michigan after leaving Detroit, What do Dunbar & May say his accomplishments were? What do they say his motivations were?