The Lost Tycoon and the Losers : Iacocca’s ‘American Way’ Is Miles From Urban Realities

“That’s the American way. If little kids don’t aspire to make money like I did, what the hell good is this country?” Lee Iacocca’s characteristically brash remark on receiving $20 million in salary, bonuses and stock options for 1986 rings a little differently on the mean streets of Detroit than in Chrysler’s corporate headquarters in suburban Highland Park.

In his career and in the artful shape of his best-selling autobiography, Iacocca has embodied the American way with a vengeance. A poor immigrant’s son, he rose by “hard work and big dreams,” and by creating popular cars like the Mustang and the Mark III, to the presidency of Ford Motor Co. There, as he tells it, “the despot whose name was on the building,” “King Henry” himself, struck down this peasant pretender to the throne. Humiliated and angry, Iacocca guided a no less wounded Chrysler Corp. back into the black. Now Chrysler has bought Lamborghini and American Motors, and Iacocca’s story has not ended yet.

Iacocca draws an uplifting moral from his experience: “There are times when things seem so bad that you’ve got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it . . . . If you keep your nose to the grindstone and work at it, it’s amazing how in a free society you can become as great as you want to be.” This is the exhilarating gospel of American success, and Iacocca has certainly earned the right to preach it.

Success has two faces, however, and one is failure. Success is the bitch goddess, as William James called it, not only because it betrays those who have won its favors but because it also torments those who cannot do so.

The fact remains that a multitude of people inhabit Detroit (and every other big city) who will never be “great,” or even middling, and for whom the rhetoric of success is nothing more than a taunting reproach for their insecure spells on the line and on the dole.

For this underclass (as it is now called), Detroit is not a city of proud towers like the Renaissance Center erected by Henry Ford II, but what Joyce Carol Oates in her novel “them” calls “a nightmare of a city . . . a kind of stretched-out hole, a hole with a horizon.”

The lower class and lower-case “them” of her story are the city’s dispossessed, always craving a standard of living beyond their reach and indulging in violent satisfactions (the novel ends with scenes of the 1967 riot). “All of Detroit is melodrama, and most lives in Detroit fated to be melodramatic,” writes Oates.

Iacocca is an exception to this rule. Despite his attempt to portray himself as just another victim canned by the boss, nobody would ever mistake this Promethean entrepreneur for one of “them.” He has performed wonders, and now, like any culture hero, he bears the responsibility of leading his city--and perhaps his country--into a golden age of prosperity.

In fact, these are not the worst of times for Detroit. A high-tech “second industrial revolution” promises to restore some of the city’s status and image. White-collar opportunities are expanding, and a riverfront complex increasingly attracts convention, tourist and suburban dollars. But nobody can overlook the fact that the Detroit area will lose half a million automotive jobs in the 1980s, and that since 1970 people have been leaving the city at an average rate of 30,000 a year.

“The Reckoning,” as David Halberstam calls it in his recent book on the Japanese challenge, must be paid disproportionately by the blue-collar unemployed and the (mostly black) unemployable. For Iacocca and the new royalty of Detroit, incredible bonuses. For the masses, more reminders of the good life that they must covet from afar.

For some of the poor, crime is a way of grabbing their fate by the shoulders. Without suggesting a glib cause-and-effect relation, it’s impossible not to make some connection between Motor City and Murder City as manifestations of the bitch goddess. The automobile has always been an American symbol of success, and the mystique of Detroit in the national imagination derives from its association with a product of such immense power and beauty.

In Detroit, hefty car sales are proof that the big chief belongs in the driver’s seat. “When money talks, ideology walks,” Iacocca writes. Money is ideology, the effective definition of who you are and what you’re worth. Throwing your weight around, scoring on the competition, getting even with the system that humiliated you (as Iacocca did with Ford)--this is the law of the land.

And as one descends the economic scale, the law becomes brute force, the land a jungle.

There is a statue in front of the City-County Building called “The Spirit of Detroit.” It depicts a titanic figure with a family in one hand and the sun in the other. Iacocca has tried to make himself into The Spirit of Detroit, a hopeful symbol of how muscular leadership can bring astonishing cash rewards in a capitalistic society. He deserves our gratitude for his achievements. But he needs to be aware that children reared on envy and greed can grow up to be desperate and dangerous citizens.