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  3. David Maraniss choked up when he saw the two-minute Chrysler advertisement during the Super Bowl, the annual football extravagan

David Maraniss choked up when he saw the two-minute Chrysler advertisement during the Super Bowl, the annual football extravagan

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问题     David Maraniss choked up when he saw the two-minute Chrysler advertisement during the Super Bowl, the annual football extravaganza, with its images of smokestacks, ice skaters and Diego Rivera’s "Detroit Industry" murals. Suddenly he realized how much he still cared for his birthplace, where he spent the first six and a half years of his life. So much so that he decided to write his 12th book about the city, when it was at the peak of its economic, political and cultural power. He picked the early 1960s, from the autumn of 1962 to the spring of 1964.
    At the time Detroit was the economic engine of America. In January 1963 Life magazine published a story under the headline "Glow from Detroit Spreads Everywhere". The factories of Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and American Motors were firing on all cylinders. The increase in women drivers, the trend towards two-car families, the rising income of the post-war baby boomers and the promise of foreign markets inspired tremendous optimism for the industry’s growth. The annual motor show was the biggest and most important event of its kind, the Academy Awards on wheels; on occasion even the vice-president came.
    Detroit was also a center of progressive politics and the civil-rights movement. Mr Maraniss devotes an entire chapter to Walter Reuther, the memorable boss of the most powerful union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). His parents, German immigrants, raised him with visions of social justice and workers’ rights. Reuther was an idealist but also a pragmatist, which made him enemies on the left as well as the right. George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, called him "the most dangerous man in Detroit" because of his ability to bring about "the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing norms of society".
    Reuther was concerned with civil rights almost as much as with workers’ rights. He invited Martin Luther King to the UAW’s 25th-anniversary dinner and afterwards distributed copies of King’s speech to the rank-and-file. When hundreds of protesters were jailed after King’s Birmingham campaign of civil disobedience, Reuther dispatched two UAW staffers with $ 160, 000 in money belts to bail them out of jail. "It could be said that to a significant degree Detroit and its autoworkers were the civil rights movement’s bank," Mr Maraniss writes. In Detroit in June 1963 King led the "Walk to Freedom", then the largest civil-rights march, and delivered a version of his "I Have a Dream" speech which he would give nine weeks later at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
    For all Detroit’s glow, the storm clouds were already gathering in the early 1960s. Mr Maraniss cites a study by Wayne State University in 1963 that predicted the population of Detroit would drop from nearly 1.7 m to 1.2m between 1960 and 1970 and continue to dwindle. "Productive persons who pay taxes are moving out of the city, leaving behind the non-productive," the report noted. It also mentioned that in 1960 Detroit’s population was 28. 9% black and forecast that by 1970 the city would be 44. 3% black, pointing out that blacks who had the resources moved to the suburbs "with the same urgency as whites".
    The report turned out to be unusually prescient. In spite of the efforts of Reuther, Cavanagh, King and others, Detroit was rocked by one of the worst race riots in history in 1967. From then on the pace of the city’s decline quickened. By the time Mr Maraniss was writing his meticulously researched book, which at times provides almost too much detail for the uninitiated, Detroit had declared bankruptcy. Its population was 83% black, its workers were largely unskilled and the city’s headcount had shrunk to 688, 000. The city that had given America so much was in desperate need of help.
How significant was Detroit economically and politically in the early 1960s?
选项
答案It was the economic engine of America and a center of progressive politics and the civil-rights movement．
解析 事实细节题。第一段最后一句指出，大卫．玛兰妮斯选择描写20世纪60年代早期的底特律。第二段第一句指出，这时的底特律是美国的经济引擎。第三段第一句则指出，这时的底特律是进步政治和民权运动的中心。
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