It is a melting pot of 70 different cultures. Situated on the northern coast of the United States close to the Canadian border, Detroit’s fame rests, among other things, on Henry Ford, the father of the American automobile industry. This industry employed a variety of cultures — from Romanians, Filipinos, Africans and Europeans to the Arab community which is concentrated in Dearborn. The cultural mix has thrown up some interesting sidelights in terms of museums as I found out during my recent visit.
Here is the spinning wheel donated by Mahatma Gandhi to Henry Ford, along with a hand-written note. Gandhi and Ford were admirers of each other. The Indian admired Ford’s simplicity and spirit of enterprise and the American admired Gandhi for symbolizing India’s economic independence and reliance on the national industry. Ford, who described Gandhi as a “sensible man,” received the spinning wheel with a handwritten note from Gandhi himself: “So, this goes from one sensible man to another.”
At the Henry Ford Academy located on the museum’s premises, we saw a school set up in 1932 which provides free schooling from kindergarten to 12th grade for 400 students chosen by lot. Here their hands-on experience at the museum is further reinforced by a daily house-building assignment that requires them to take apart and reassemble a wooden house. This daily routine is meant to teach students the dignity of labor and physical discipline.
Next, there are various inventions of Thomas Alva Edison plus the house where Noah Webster compiled his first American Dictionary of the English Language. An interesting exhibit at the museum is the chair on which Abraham Lincoln was sitting at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865 when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth as he watched a play.
The trip to the museum was part of a media trip for a group of journalists from the Gulf, India and western Europe jointly sponsored by KLM and Northwest Airlines. Our mission was to report on their new $1.2 billion terminal at Detroit Airport. To understand and absorb the rich cultural tapestry of Detroit, a look at its history would be in order.
Successively flying the flags of three nations — France which founded it in 1701, then Britain and finally the United States — Detroit reflects these diverse strands and others. In the 1940s it attracted many black Americans and today, three out of four Detroiters claim African-American ancestry, making it the largest black-majority city in the country. The latest wave of immigrants was Arabs, notably Yemenis, Iraqis and Lebanese who have gradually replaced Italian and Polish families in much the same way that they replaced the Germans who settled in Detroit in the 19th century.
Now a new museum is in the offing. The Anthropology Museum of Detroit has decided to set up an Arab-American Institute of Fine Arts. Ordinarily, it might have passed off as a routine event were it not for the events of Sept. 11 and the anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. William Peck, curator of the new museum told Arab News, “It will be a collection of Arab-American art. We will also encourage Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab states to sponsor exhibitions in the museum which promote cultural understanding between our countries.” One of the highlights of the museum is an Islamic gallery containing Islamic manuscripts. “Here is a 15th century Qur’an printed on multicolored Chinese paper. We got it from Iran,” Peck pointed out. The collection of Islamic paintings and other objects are very relevant in Detroit which has 200,000 Arabs in a population of about a million.
No visit to Detroit would be complete without visiting the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Located in Dearborn, it celebrates the spirit of innovation and resourcefulness in America. With holdings of more than one million objects and 26 million documents, prints and photographs, it is the largest indoor/outdoor historical complex in the United States. Additionally, the complex features the ultimate film experience — an Imax theater capable of showing both 2D and 3D films. The Benson Ford Research Center boasts holdings of Henry Ford Museum’s most environmentally sensitive and precious collections — including 10,000 clothing items, 4,000 textiles and rugs, and 8,300 toys and other childhood artifacts, etc. The objective behind these huge collections is unique. Through them, Henry Ford was seeking to celebrate America’s spirit of inventiveness as seen in the collection of automobiles, home appliances, factory machinery, glassware, pewter and dishes. According to an authority, 80 percent of the one million artifacts in the museum were collected by Henry Ford himself. The running theme behind the collection is the evolution of the United States from a simple agrarian economy to the world of electronics and cyberspace. Other memorabilia include the bullet-proof 1972 Lincoln Continental used by former President Ronald Reagan. “All future presidential cars will be destroyed as part of secret service safety experiments,” our museum guide explained.
Greenfield Village, adjacent to the museum, is a class of its own. In 1922, Ford walked into his drafting office and asked for a man capable of handling a job “a little out of the ordinary.” The supervisor singled out a former artist and glass cutter, Edward J. Cutler. Cutler soon found himself working on a variety of things — including repairing threshing machines, restoring historic building and even drawing up plans for a “historic village.” Greenfield Village sets out to capture an important aspect of America and its history — of the people who contributed to it, underscored its cultural values and brought about its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. In a nutshell, it illustrates the force of America’s innovative spirit and resourcefulness.
Other fascinating acquisitions included Edison’s “invention factory.” From 1876 to 1886, Edison obtained more than 400 of his 1,093 patents. Fishing trips, midnight suppers, card playing, smoking, reading and sleeping punctuated the 80-hour weekly work schedule of Edison and his associates. Hundreds of artifacts, including his inventions, testify to his genius. The laboratory was installed in the village premises in 1928.
Another exhibit is the George Washington Carver Memorial. It is in the form of a log cabin, built as a tribute to George Washington Carver, an African-American agricultural scientist. His botanical and agricultural accomplishments included more than 200 practical uses of the peanut — discoveries that transformed farming in the South. Interestingly, Noah Webster compiled the first American Dictionary of the English language within the walls of a 1823 federal and empire-style house located in the village. Webster’s favorite spot to work was at a desk in the center of his study with a circle of reference books around him.
What drew my attention at the Motown Museum of Detroit was the historical perspective provided on the music industry in the US from the 1960s. Jane Poppins, the museum guide told us, “The recording techniques developed by Motown in the mid-1960s were part of the formula for the company’s success. Even today, many of the recording techniques used have their roots in Motown sound of the 1960s.” Poppins, a black American in her 20s, impressed me with her knowledge about American music. “Do you have a doctorate in music?” I asked her. “No,” she smiled. “I am only an undergrad, freelancing here as a guide.”
Since the Kingdom has plans to promote cultural tourism by setting up museums in different regions, why shouldn’t Saudis be trained as museum guides? This would open up new avenues for the Saudization of manpower. There is also scope for a special museum tracing the socio-economic growth of the Kingdom from the time of King Abdul Aziz to the present. It could be a time capsule charting the evolution of Saudi Arabia from a simple economy through the dawn of industrialization to the era of information technology. Opportunities abound. How to make use of them is the $64,000 question.
