A Note on Dearborn: From Vietnam to Gaza
By Joe Allen
Since Dearborn, Michigan emerged as one of the most notable cities opposed to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, it reminded me that this wasn’t the first time that Dearborn drew attention to itself over a contentious foreign policy issue. In 1966, as the war in Vietnam escalated under President Lyndon Johnson, Dearborn, known primarily as the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, held a referendum on the Vietnam War. A large minority of the residents voted for the U.S. withdrawal from the war, which shocked many in the political establishment, and foreshadowed doom for Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. It also challenged many of the sensibilities of the media of the time that has hardened into a myth of working class support for the Vietnam War.
Here’s an excerpt from my book, Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost:
“There were few opportunities for the public to vote for clear antiwar candidates or express clear antiwar positions. In the few campaigns there were, it was obvious that antiwar protests had created sizable opposition to the war. In California, two editors and the publisher of the left-liberal magazine Ramparts ran as antiwar candidates in three separate Democratic congressional primaries. All three received more than 40 percent of the vote in their races while facing the wrath of the Democratic establishment.
The best known of these was Robert Scheer, the foreign affairs editor of the magazine and author of the popular pamphlet How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam, who ran against Johnson supporter and incumbent congressman Jeffrey Cohelan in the Democratic primary for California’s Seventh Congressional District. Cohelan was a former Teamsters union official in the Bay Area and received a 95 percent approval rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Scheer got 45 percent of the vote despite the campaigning of Vietnam War “critics” like Fulbright and Bobby Kennedy for Cohelan.
The most telling expression of antiwar sentiment took place in Dearborn, Michigan, where the residents in the then predominately mixed-income, white suburb of Detroit, participated in a referendum on the war initiated by former autoworker and long-time revolutionary socialist and UAW trade unionist John Anderson.
The referendum read: ‘Are you in favor of an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of United States troops from Vietnam so that the Vietnamese people can settle their own problems?’ Forty-one percent voted yes and a future study revealed that the vote correlated inversely to peoples’ class position, with blue-collar workers voting against the war in much larger proportions than managers or professionals. It was an example of how mass antiwar sentiment was spreading on the ground regardless of the maneuverings of the major parties.”
The Dictator and the Revolutionary
The size of the opposition to Johnson’s war policies in Dearborn was in many ways counterintuitive to the politics of the Detroit suburb. The city was ruled by its Mayor Orville L. Hubbard, an ex-Marine and Republican, who was first elected in 1941 and ruled the city with an iron fist and a tough political machine until 1978. Dubbed the “Dictator of Dearborn,” he was a vile racist and once boasted in an interview, “I’m against anything that’s unpopular with the public. I favor segregation.” Few African-Americans dared to move into Dearborn even though one-third of the 36,000 workers at Ford’s gigantic River Rouge Plant were Black.
But, Hubbard was also a wily politician who used the lucrative taxes from Ford’s operation to fund a mini-welfare state for its white residents, including buying a resort in Clearwater, Florida for Dearborn’s senior citizens, and, apparently, free daycare. Hubbard also built a camp for Dearborn’s residents, but he also hated Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society liberalism of his administration, and looked for an opportunity to embarrass the president. The opportunity came when he sensed correctly that the war was unpopular.
“Congress has failed to exercise its duties — that is to declare war. I don’t believe they [Congress] has any idea how they [the People] feel,” Hubbard declared. The Militant newspaper, the voice of the Socialist Workers party (SWP) U.S. reported:
“The referendum was placed on the ballot by the city council. Orville L. Hubbard, a racist politician who has been mayor of Dearborn for two decades, has been making statements opposed to the war during the past year. Not too long before the November elections, an announcement appeared in the press that the city council was meeting to consider putting such a referendum on the ballot. John Anderson went to the meeting to speak in favor of the referendum.”
John Anderson, according to a profile on the Reuther Library website, “was born in Wisconsin in 1906 and majored in economics at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1931. He was hired at Briggs Manufacturing in 1933 as a metal finisher. Later that year he joined the IWW and began organizing the auto plants. In 1936 he went to work at Fleetwood Fisher Body, quit the IWW and promptly joined the UAW, becoming chairman of Local 15’s organizing and strike committees. He held several positions in the local, including the presidency from 1947 to 1949.” During most of this period John Anderson was a member of the SWP and in the 1950s, he was a member of the American Socialist Union.
Hubbard appointed Anderson and three other Dearborn residents to draft the referendum and present it to the city council, where it passed seven to five and was placed on the ballot. Anderson became the co-chair of the Dearborn Vietnam Referendum Committee. The Democratic Party establishment made a legal effort to remove the referendum from the ballot. Rep. Charles Dingell (D. MI) attacked Hubbard’s resolution saying the referendum doesn’t give voters a “fair choice.” Former Democratic Congressman Harold M. Ryan brought a suit to the federal courts to remove the referendum from the ballot. He charged that it “seriously harms and endangers the national security.” The suit was dismissed. Hubbard called Ryan’s charges “a lot of hokum.”
Despite these efforts, Dearborn voters went to the polls and delivered a 41% yes vote for U.S. withdrawal. When discussing the outcome of the referendum outcome later, John Anderson told a Detroit audience:
“The majority of the residents [of Dearborn], though are not workers but are professionals and middle class sections of the American population. That is why the referendum has particular significance. I am sure in larger cities with a large working class composition there would be a larger vote in support of a referendum of this type.”
Two years later, Hubbard put a similar referendum on the ballot and it passed overwhelmingly.
The Dearborn Historical Museum reported, that Dearborn “lost 61 (including 47 men killed directly as a result of warfare and another 14 men lost indirectly as a result of the conflict).”
John Anderson continued to be an active revolutionary socialist for the rest of his life, including being a regular monthly columnist for Socialist Worker (U.S.), the newspaper of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Orville Hubbard was Mayor of Dearborn until 1978 and died in 1982. A statue of him was removed from the city of Dearborn in 2020 as a result of the national uprising against racism following George Floyd’s murder. Meanwhile, Dearborn became one of the largest Muslim and Arab communities in the United States.
