♪♪ -America's Great Lakes, with an abundance of coal, iron ore, and lots of water fueled an unparalleled industrial revolution.

It forged some of the world's most innovative industries.

The region grew the greatest labor force of the Western world to run its factories and made the fortunes of a mighty few who took astonishing risks and created America's first corporations.

-They're innovative, so they begin to change the way that business is done and business practices take place.

Sometimes for the better.

Sometimes for the worse.

Some of the regulations on business come because of the things that they do.

They're entrepreneurial in both good and bad ways.

They try new things.

They take risks.

They're interconnected.

So you'll often find that many of these titans -- They know each other.

They're friends.

They're rivals.

Sometimes they're enemies.

But they're all pushing each other to do different things.

And you can't get the development, the Industrial Revolution in the United States that comes from the late 19th century onwards, without these companies, because they're covering everything.

You know, they are the pioneers in their industries, both for good and bad.

-The Rust Belt is concentrated in the formerly dominant industrial states surrounding the country's Great Lakes.

They feed the states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, and Minnesota.

Without them, there would have been no Industrial Revolution here.

In 1865, a brutal Civil War had divided America.

It was a nation torn by economic differences between North and South by the question of slavery and ways of government.

America had not yet become a United States.

Then an Industrial Revolution connected east to west, north to south, first by water and then by railroad.

Suddenly, like a phoenix rising from the flames, America becomes a United States.

-There is this very dramatic rise-and-fall story which mimics, in a lot of ways, a rise-and-fall story that we could tell about many other other things, formal empires.

But there is something of an of an informal empire dynamic about the industrial United States and the ways that it operates in through the late 19th and early 20th century.

♪♪ -Previously, we explored the grain elevators of Buffalo and the blast furnaces of a once fiery Pittsburgh, the working backbone of America's pioneering industries, and marveled at the feats of engineering, some of which were laid in tracks.

♪♪ The Model T Ford motor car, that most auspicious of creations, laid the foundations.

The home of Henry Ford and his everyman's horseless carriage is in the state of Michigan.

♪♪ Detroit was occupied by French fur trappers at the turn of the 18th century, but it gradually evolved into a metropolis.

It was rebuilt after a fire back in 1805, in glass and steel instead of stone, with Industrial Revolution technology.

As a result, many classic 20th-century American buildings were spawned here in Neoclassical and Gothic towers of undiminished beauty.

But Detroit is best known as the cradle of America's automobile industry, home to the Big Three -- Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford, whose Model T sparked a worldwide revolution in transportation.

♪♪ It's difficult to imagine it now on this undistinguished avenue of motor companies where Ford and Packard once ruled the world... and right across the street from each other.

Then, in the heat of foreign competition, high wages, and outdated manufacturing techniques, these car giants fell from their lofty perch.

Ford survived, but Packard crumbled.

By 1960, Packard was no more.

It became a gutted shell of a building bearing no name.

Here, the spirit of Henry Ford lives on, however.

This is where the motorman made his Model T and founded his production assembly line.

Automation changed the face of industrial manufacturing forever.

♪♪ -The assembly line and mass production isn't new to the Industrial age and this period.

We can see the intensification of this within this Midwest region.

We can see the logics of this taken to a new level, the logics of thinking about and computing cost of production, for example, something that Andrew Carnegie is fiercely, fiercely obsessed with tracking the costs of production.

We could talk, too, about the simplification and the rationalization of tasks on the assembly line, the motorization of the assembly line in the early 20th century.

The River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, which is finished in 1927, becomes this sort of industrial mecca for this very reason.

People from across Europe that are trying to industrialize and mimic these mass-production methods, whether it's people from the Soviet Union, whether it's people from Italy, whether it's people from Germany, are flocking to the River Rouge plant to look at the mass-production techniques that are being, as I've said, taken to a new level at this point in time and really taken to lengths that would have been unimaginable to people even 30 or 40 years ago.

And that's, I think, one of the interesting things about this story, is the sheer pace of technological change that we're talking about and thinking about from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

We could talk about the speed at which products are being made, the speed at which commodities are being broken down or processed into other things.

-The Model T was more than a motor car.

It was a symbol of an industrial revolution.

Mass production also created thousands of new skills, new jobs at higher wages.

And under this powerful stimulus, the nation's economy expanded enormously.

This is Henry Ford's house.

It's called Fair Lane.

And he lived here with his wife, Clara, and his only son, Edsel.

The historic preservationist here is Annie Rubel.

-He was a man of contradictions, so it's hard to know exactly who he was all the time because he was a man who was crafting his own image as he was living.

And so he was careful about how the world saw him.

It's hard to know what he was like when, you know, he took off his tie.

And so we talk about him as a husband, as a father, as a bird watcher.

You know, he was interested in watch repair.

He was interested in furniture restoration.

So many things that made him more than just the car guy.

Henry and Clara weren't as interested in socializing like Edsel, their son, and Eleanor, his wife.

They were much more interested in innovation and ideas, so they hosted some of the most incredible minds at the time.

This is everyone from Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, the naturalist, Harvey Firestone.

You would have also had George Washington Carver and Woodrow Wilson.

So it really ran the gamut of people who were innovators of the time.

And Henry and Clara would have loved to host them here at this very table.

One of those relationships that's the most important here is with Thomas Edison, though.

You know, he started as Henry's mentor, and then he became really good friends with Henry, and so together they collaborated on lots of different projects.

And the most interesting project, the most relevant to this house, is the powerhouse that Thomas Edison helped him build.

He laid the cornerstone in 1914.

And, so, that powered the entire estate.

They had a telephone system.

They had full electricity.

They had treated water.

They had a central vacuum.

And so all of that would have run to the powerhouse through a 300-foot tunnel.

-Underneath this thoroughly classical house, you find secret corridors and rooms that conjure up the imaginings of some mad scientist.

Welcome to the curious world of Henry Ford.

-So, this is Henry Ford's generator room in his powerhouse.

It's quite impressive.

He and Edison designed it together, so it's direct current.

Edison was a major proponent of direct current.

And it's powered by hydroelectric.

So, there's a dam outside, and the water comes through to underneath us where the turbines are.

And those turbines power the generators.

Welcome to Henry Ford's garage.

This is where he kept all of his cars for the 30 years that he lived at Fair Lane.

This is the 1934 Brewster Town Car.

Brewster made the body, and then Ford made the chassis and the engine.

And it was actually Edsel's.

That was Henry and Clara's only son.

And so you'll see a lot of Edsel, the refinement and grace that he brought to the vehicle, whereas Henry Ford was more utilitarian.

This is the 1930 Model A LeBaron dual-cowl sport Phaeton.

This was another one of Edsel's custom designs, and that's something that Edsel really brought to the company, was that sense of design and refinement.

And this is actually what I consider to be one of Henry Ford's greatest contributions to America.

This is the Fordson Model F tractor.

He created a rapid industrialization, and one of those things was to create a mechanized agricultural piece of machinery.

And he did this mainly to be able to help resolve the issue of a food-supply shortage that was the result of World War I. Most of the men an horses were fighting, and so they had no one to farm, and that's why the Model T of the soil was able to help with that problem, because it really didn't require as much labor.

It was a much more efficient way to farm.

So, Henry Ford did not invent the tractor.

He didn't invent the automobile either.

But what he was able to do was he was able to perfect the assembly line and vertical integration.

And that's how he was able to create vehicles that were affordable to the masses.

-In its heyday, Henry Ford's perfection of the production assembly line made Detroit a magnet for the unskilled and underrepresented in America.

It attracted immigrants as well as a significant population of African-Americans from the South.

♪♪ Those new horseless carriages needed wheels, and it was the small city of Akron in Ohio which would become the rubber capital of the world.

Here, as everywhere in America, the new four-wheels were the thrill of the century, and everyone wanted to be a racer.

They built their own motorless gravity-powered cars out of soapbox crates and rollerblade wheels and raced downhill all across the country.

♪♪ True to its wheeled history, Akron has been staging the All-American Soap Box Derby every August since 1935.

♪♪ The races take place on a specially designed racetrack called Derby Downs and attracts kids of all shapes and sizes drawn to the excitement of the automobile.

These iron horses can travel up to 45 miles per hour.

♪♪ The Derby grew out of America's Great Depression, when the automobile industry was having a tough time selling its cars.

In Akron, the automobile industry made the town's fortunes... but also sank it.

Akron, like other destinations, grew with the building of the canals.

Then the discovery of clay led to the building of sewerage-pipe factories.

Suddenly, Akron started manufacturing, and before long, the city was alive with industry.

♪♪ Akron became the perfect location for the exploitation of the latest scientific and industrial inventions.

It did this when vulcanized rubber became mass produced in order to make bicycle tires and, of course, the automobile.

By the start of the 20th century, Akron was the rubber capital of the world, and Goodyear was one of the four giant rubber companies that served America, the others being BFGoodrich and Firestone.

They all had one man to thank -- vulcanized-rubber inventor Charles Goodyear.

-Charles Goodyear was a fledgling businessman, was an innovative person, tried lots of things, became fascinated with rubber in the 1830s, when it was a new, popular product, and decided he could find a solution to the problem that rubber presented in that it was a gooey mess when it got warm in the summertime and brittle and frozen in the wintertime.

And when he finally solved the problem, he had mixed sulfur with the rubber and went to a shop to show it to some of his contemporaries, and they were not impressed.

So in disgust, he tossed it, and it happened to land on a stove and had inadvertently discovered vulcanization.

And that was the eureka moment for him, where he saw he could do things with it and actually come up with a product that he could sell.

-In vulcanization, Goodyear had stumbled upon an elastic but tensile material that had a multitude of uses... like tires.

Charles Goodyear's rubber only came to Akron because civic leaders had a history of knowing a good business idea when they saw one.

♪♪ Rubber tires was the industry waiting just around the street corner with the coming of the motorcar.

Akron soon produced the business magnates who turned it into the rubber capital of the planet.

Author Steve Love is an expert on Akron's tire timeline.

-Between 1910 and 1920, Akron became the fastest-growing city in America.

There was so little housing that people were sleeping in shifts.

So, Frank Seiberling recognized they weren't going to stay, so he decided that he would create Goodyear Heights because people need to have housing.

Four years later, in 1916, Harvey Firestone saw the need to follow that example.

And all around us here is Firestone Park.

They -- Actually they were kit homes.

The Sears and Roebuck Company built these homes, transported them here, and they put them together.

But they tried to make sure that they did all sorts of different designs so it wasn't just, you know, row houses that all looked exactly alike.

Harvey Firestone said, "I want people to have a decent place to live.

They have to have something that they can be proud of."

And it's still an attractive community.

When times got tough financially, they wouldn't milk the employee.

They would lower the mortgage payment.

Because they didn't want them to lose their home, because if they lost their home, they would lose their worker.

And their worker, they had all this time and effort invested in, and they were valuable to them.

And all the workers obviously were valuable to the city because they paid taxes.

-You can find a tire shop in every American town, but Akron ones have some history.

-It had a smell.

Burning rubber permeates everything.

Sometimes when the smog layer came in, we had our own rubber storms.

It was -- And that's just the way it was.

And the factories got older.

Technology advanced, you know.

And it just -- So I would say, what, in the mid-'70s, Akron shriveled.

After the Second World War, I believe, there was a quarter -- about 250,000 people here.

And I would say it dropped down to probably 150,000.

You know, so we lost, what, 40% of the population in this city.

And then, from the rubber factories, of course, you had all the other businesses, the associated businesses.

Just like down a little farther north to Cleveland, it was a steel town -- the steel mill in Youngstown.

Steel mills.

They all closed, too.

So this is -- They don't call this the Rust Belt for nothing.

You know, it's been in an economic downturn for the last, what, 30 years?

-Innovation being a byword for the region, it's no surprise that Akron's tire men took the use of rubber to dazzling new heights.

The Wingfoot Lake Hangar is where the Goodyear Rubber and Tire Company first made, and still make, America's dirigibles.

♪♪ This is the first Goodyear dirigible envelope from 1911.

Goodyear man Keith Price sheds light on the subject.

♪♪ -It actually began as a another use for the rubber the company was making and developed into a view that airships would become similar to ocean liners as a mode of transportation.

It didn't take off quite the way they thought, and they ended up producing blimps for the Navy.

The military had asked for companies who would be able to build a blimp to fly along with ships.

And Goodyear was the only company that was able to produce what they needed in the time frame it was needed.

After a few years of producing blimps for the Navy, the company started using them as advertising ships.

We put our name on the side, and they flew around the country promoting the company's products.

Today, we've moved into a whole new version of innovative airship that is very modern, controlled much like an airplane, and is actually a semi-dirigible, kind of harkening back to some of our olden days of building the giant dirigibles.

-The Goodyear Blimp would become an iconic image of growing up in the United States.

At sporting events, crowds saw the Goodyear blimp fly over and would go wild at the sight of this fantastic, magical flying machine.

♪♪ The Rust Belt would soon be producing lots of other new products, as well, everything from cast-iron stoves to nylon, Teflon, and aluminum.

♪♪ -For example, typewriters.

Lots of arms manufacturers were involved in the mass production of typewriters in the New York, Connecticut area.

Remington, the arms manufacturer.

But so, too, Corona typewriters.

These are mass-production, mass-use consumer and industrial goods, used, of course, in the offices of industrial factories and everything else.

-It was this man, King Camp Gillette, who was the inventor and entrepreneur behind another Rust Belt innovation.

-They see a need for disposable safety razors, both in terms of the safety element, so people aren't just using a straight razor, but also the possibility of a disposable and the way to make that work.

So, talking about innovation in technology, it may not be the obvious thing that we think about, but safety razors become important.

They really take off.

They're being reasonably successful.

They have to work out how to be able to make blades from sheet steel, which hadn't been done before, so there's your technical innovation again to make that.

But they really take off with World War I because they developed these sort of travel shaving kits for soldiers who are being sent to fight, and things begin to catch on.

So Gillette comes out of this period, as well.

♪♪ -From Motor City to Motor Bike City.

Milwaukee, the birthplace of the quintessential American motorcycle.

It's a 280-mile journey through two states, involving a drive and ferry ride across Lake Michigan into the state of Wisconsin.

By the start of the 20th century, Milwaukee had achieved a level of industrialization that gave opportunities to many forward-thinking engineers.

Two of them developed a mode of transport that was more affordable than Henry Ford's Model T. It was the mechanical horse.

At the start of the 20th century, Friends William Harley and Arthur Davidson, in a shed very much like this one in the Davidsons' family backyard, decided to rebuild their bicycles.

They created a loop frame, cradled an engine inside, and with that, an American classic was born.

-They started with a bicycle frame and kind of wedged their own smaller engine into that triangle of the diamond frame of the bicycle, and then they graduated to the bikes that you see here.

We call these loop-frame motorcycles because you notice the frame is designed to go around the engine.

They upsized the engine.

It allowed for more power.

All four founders came out of industry.

Three of them had worked for railroads and things like drafting and machining.

Among other things, William Harley had experience from his teenage years as a bicycle repairman.

If you look at these early motorcycles, they had bicycle seats.

I always like to point out no rear suspension.

And you think about what some of the roads were probably like in 1908, 1909.

And you've got those springs in the seat.

That's about the most you're getting for comfort.

The supplier to Harley-Davidson for tires was Firestone.

We often hit people on the tours about, "Why are the tires white?"

And we usually get one history buff that gets that.

That's the natural color of gum rubber.

And it's not until the 1910's that you see carbon added to tires to make them more durable.

-Harley's story is a little bit different.

He had a unique way of getting their product out into the world.

-Well, we come to find out from Arthur Davidson's son, who visited us shortly before he passed away in 2009, that his father loved to travel, and he would recruit one more dealer every chance he got, so you could find Harley dealers in Japan by 1912.

In Africa, before 1920, you could actually get a Harley.

So it's pretty incredible.

So, by 1920, Harley-Davidson had a dealer footprint worldwide that dwarfed all competitors by a long shot.

And it's one of the reasons we're still here.

-By championing custom-built designs, the Harley became the motorcycle of the individual, hence it crossed the class divide.

Stockbrokers, carpenters, librarians, airline pilots, even Hollywood stars.

They all boasted a Harley-Davidson.

[ Engine revs ] ♪♪ ♪♪ About 150 miles east in neighboring Ohio is Toledo, with demands of a World War almost half a century later, saw automobile innovation as a route to victory.

♪♪ The canal boat brought industry to Toledo, but it was the wholesale of America's great automobile export, the Jeep, in World War II, which made the city and its manufacturer, the Willys-Overland Company, its name.

♪♪ A festival held in the city center celebrates Jeep history.

Much loved for its versatility, the Jeep was once described as faithful as a dog, strong as a mule, and agile as a goat.

It may just be man's best mechanical friend.

Brandt Rosenbusch is a Jeep buff.

♪♪ -There was really nothing that existed at that time that filled this niche.

The Army was still using mules to carry packages.

They were still using motorcycles for reconnaissance vehicles.

What they were looking to do is put together a light vehicle that fit all those needs -- reconnaissance, carrying things, pulling trailers.

So they developed the specifications, and engineers put it together.

This is a hooded light.

That way, the enemy couldn't see if they were an aircraft, looking down on the vehicle.

So that would keep the light low.

Another feature on the lighting system is this, where you could flip the light back, and, that way, it would light up the whole engine.

Then, of course, the windshield would fold down.

This was so it could be crated and packaged and shipped around the world.

There are grab handles all the way around the vehicle.

This is so if a Jeep was stuck in the mud, they could come up and pick it up and pull it out.

Of course, the spare tire.

Every vehicle needs a spare tire.

A five-gallon jerry can.

This would carry your gas.

So there you go.

That's the complete package.

This is the vehicle that was built here in Toledo, Ohio, by Willys-Overland and shipped to the U.S.

Army and was really the face of the United States Army during World War II.

-The Jeep was conceived to compete on the field of battle against the Nazis; fast and light all-terrain "bucket wagon."

It came into production just one month before the USA entered the war in December 1941.

It's an amazing example of "seat of your pants" American innovation... when you consider that this vehicle was put together in only 49 days.

♪♪ -The U.S., of course, sees no fighting on its shores, so its industrial capacity is only strengthened through World War II, whereas its previous rivals, its previous competitors, are in smoldering ruins in 1945.

Germany.

Japan.

All of these countries have lost huge amounts of their steel-producing capacity, lost their factory capacity, more generally.

So in 1945 right, really, through until the second half of the 1950s, the United States is in a position of effortless industrial supremacy.

The United States comes out of World War II in a position that is unparalleled across the world, from dominating the industrial landscape for the next, really, 15 or 20 years.

And that helps supercharge the situation that has already been in place for the last half-century.

♪♪ These are the largest companies in the United States by employee numbers, by profits.

The Fortune 100 index until, really, the 1970s is dominated by industrial corporations, by manufacturers.

But there's also another element, I think, of this for prestige, which is the pioneering of these technologies, which are intensified, developed, pioneered by these large American -- and that's very important -- large American corporations, that it is U.S.

Steel that is building or helping to build the planes of the Second World War, the armaments of the Second World War, but also that it's Ford Motor Company that is building the mass-production car that is rolling out in the millions.

In short, it's the engineering prowess and the inventiveness and the entrepreneurship of American business leaders, but also workers themselves, that are helping lead the world in developing new products, developing new modes of manufacture that are the envy or talked about across the world.

♪♪ -In this golden age of the auto industry, soon, workers of the Rust Belt were among the best paid in the United States, enjoying the best working conditions and subsequently the best lifestyle.

-Companies themselves do not want any kind of a work stoppage to be put in place because a work stoppage is billions of dollars of lost sales, billions of dollars of lost revenue.

So during this moment in time, the wages and benefits that are earned by blue-collar workers within manufacturing industries really sore to... levels that are unprecedented within a previous moment in time.

And what this means is that these industrial workers, particularly within the automobile and the steel industry, industries that are employing hundreds of thousands of Americans, are providing individual workers with a wage and benefits that are the envy of other working-class workers within the United States.

A steel worker and an automobile worker are able to support, really, because of this a lifestyle for them and their families.

And we should remember that most industrial workers that we're talking about in this period are men.

But they're able to support for them and their families a standard of living that is certainly the envy of any industrial worker in Europe, but it's also the envy of working-class Americans within other industries.

So you get this privileged class of worker, and this has huge ramifications for industrial communities.

Places like the U.S.

's second major steel town, Youngstown, is one of the richest, by per capita, cities in the United States in this 1950s moment in which the industrial economy of the U.S.

is at its most unchallenged, highest position.

♪♪ -Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Afro-American migrants were flocking into the city from far and wide.

They came from places like Atlanta, Kentucky, and Louisiana, and they brought with them an enormous talent for making music.

In 1959, a Detroit automobile worker called Berry Gordy mined the best of this talent and used Henry Ford's assembly-line methods to create the legendary Motown record label.

It glimmered like a jewel of early Black capitalism in a land that had thus far given so little to its African-American people.

Gordy's great-niece is still here today.

-This is it.

So this is Studio A. This is why people come from all over the world to Motown Museum, to stand in this room.

We always say, "If these walls could talk."

So many greats who have not just passed through this space, but created in this space.

♪♪ He was a young songwriter who was working on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company.

To him, as a creative, that was a really mundane job.

So in order to entertain himself, he would write songs to the rhythm of that assembly line.

And eventually he wrote a song for a man named Jackie Wilson, "Reet Petite," and that song was a hit.

And once that song was a hit, he knew he could be a successful songwriter.

As he transitioned into his own songwriting business, he reflected on that assembly line at Ford Motor Company and said, "I want to model my business in that way."

They took raw material, put it through a process, came out with a shiny new car.

"I want to take raw talent, put it through a process, come out with a superstar."

And that's what he did.

When you think about the stable of talent that came from Motown, that came from this little house, Hitsville U.S.A.

in Detroit, everybody from your Marvin Gayes and Stevie Wonder, the Velvelettes, The Marvelettes, Four Tops, Temptations.

Those acts all came from within a five-mile radius.

So you say, what was going on in Detroit?

There was music in the churches.

There was music in the high schools.

You had doo-woppers on street corners.

And then in addition to that, you had the whole Civil Rights Movement.

You know, we're talking about the '60s, and there was a lot to write about.

There was a lot to sing about.

And it just took the genius of this little young songwriter, Berry Gordy, to say, "Hey, I want to create a special place where folks can come and we make great music."

♪♪ -The collapse of the car industry in the 1970s and 1980s hit Detroit hard.

The city filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and a lack of employment opportunities led to a mass exodus.

-The industrial companies within the United States are focused on meeting demand at the quickest way possible, not necessarily at the most cost-effective way possible or in the most technologically innovative way possible.

So you have the expansion of steel factories, for example, in particular, using old -- by that stage, really outdated technology.

By contrast, the countries that are rebuilding their industrial capacity, really, from scratch, like Japan, are building steel mills with the newest forms of technology, which by the time that they come online, by the 1950s and 1960s, means that it is cheaper to produce steel and fewer, as we would call it, man-hours are involved in producing a ton of steel in these newer, more innovative factories.

So it's a story not so much of complacency, I think, in that sense, as thinking about the short-term and not thinking about the long-term consequences of trying to meet the short-term demand.

This really accelerates starting in the 1970s, the end of the post-World War II economic boom, an economic boom that affects the whole world in many respects, but particularly Europe and North America, so too Japan.

But in the early 1970s, there are a series of economic slowdowns.

1973 to 1975, there is a major global economic recession, which really impacts the growing economies of Europe and North America.

Japan becomes a major producer of steel, a major competitor with the United States from the 1960s onwards, but it really bursts very quickly into public view in the 1970s in this moment of global slowdown.

West Germany, too, is emerging as a powerhouse of production and industrial competition.

-Steel, the must-have product that helped build the Rust Belt, was soon being produced cheaper elsewhere in the world.

-Steel is seen as a product that doesn't involve the engineering prowess or the development because there's an idea of steel as -- the technical term would be a fungible product, a product that is the same whoever makes it.

In recognition of this, U.S.

Steel renames itself USX in the 1980s in part as a recognition that steel is no longer purely the core of what it's doing.

We can say that, between 1979 and 1982, something like 40% of America's steel workers are laid off.

We can pinpoint days in time in which 10,000 workers lost their jobs with a factory.

We can talk about the fact that those factories have never been replaced.

♪♪ -There are approximately 76,000 abandoned buildings in and around Detroit.

The question of the moment -- how to rebuild.

Vacant homes populate rundown neighborhoods, all pleading for a new lease of life.

But not everyone left, and many of those who stayed here are rebuilding their city, sometimes literally from pieces of scrap.

Rebel Nell runs a women's self-empowerment operation as they hunt down graffiti that has fallen off the city's walls.

These women collect graffiti and turn it into shiny pieces of jewelry.

♪♪ Another group is run by Faith Fowler and her team.

They recycle the Motor City's well-worn tires, turning them into something altogether different.

-We pick up illegally dumped tires here in the city and then convert them into both mud mats and Detroit treads.

And, obviously, every pair is different because the treads are different from the tires, how they're worn, and what sort of pattern they have on them.

With the Detroit "D."

So the tagline is "Leave your mark."

So if you're on a beach or soft soil, you're going to leave the "D" wherever you go.

So we use the money to employ formerly homeless men and women to make them, so it really is more than just a product.

It's an employment program here in Detroit.

♪♪ -The music of rock icon Bruce Springsteen, who hailed from the Rust Belt, tells an emotional story of what happened here.

-Bruce Springsteen, really, in many ways becomes the totemic cultural figure of the changing or shifting of this economy.

Some of his most famous songs and most famous albums are really grappling with the fact that the promise that people like him believed... and the life that people like him, born in an industrial town but not able to play music and not able to become a music superstar, that the life had been sort of taken away from them, that this world was changing.

And you can see it in some of his famous songs.

"Foreman says, 'These jobs are gone and they ain't coming back'" is a lyric from one famous song.

He references in other of his famous anthems -- and they are really anthems, but anthems written and being sung in real time just as this moment is occurring.

He references specific car-plant closures.

So he's really broadcasting this.

Other artists, too, are engaged and thinking about this.

If you were to look at someone like Billy Joel.

Billy Joel in 1982 has an album called "Nylon Curtain."

There's a song, "Allentown," about the steel town of Pennsylvania Allentown within that.

-In recent years, there have been active efforts to revitalize Detroit and preserve its industrial heritage.

-There's a silver lining, really, to people ignoring Detroit for so long, was that we didn't hurry up and tear down our beautiful old buildings.

And now that we have an opportunity to revitalize them, we have these amazing, restored beauties like the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel.

It's designed by Louis Kamper in 1924, and Louis Kamper is one of Detroit's most famous architects.

And he really liked his ornamentation, as you can see on the building.

And then $200 million was spent to renovate it.

♪♪ So this is Campus Martius Park, which is this amazing public space that has free concerts all the time all throughout the year.

But even more amazing than that is that it didn't even exist 12 years ago.

This was an ugly intersection with five streets trying to come together, and they were all rerouted to put in this amazing public space that has really transformed this part of downtown.

Dan Gilbert is a local billionaire who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, Quicken Loans, and a hundred other companies, but who has also invested $2 billion in Detroit, including buying almost over 100 buildings and moving 15,000 employees and creating jobs in downtown.

It's kind of a theme, I guess, because certainly Detroit has been around, and even in its lowest point, it didn't disappear, but it didn't have the TLC that it needed.

And now we're just, like, cleaning it up a little bit, right?

And people are waking up and realizing that, you know, strip malls and Walmart, you know, isn't the most fun and exciting thing and that historic buildings and amazing public spaces and getting out and talking with your neighbors is what they want.

And that's what Detroit has.

♪♪ -Within the the formerly industrial regions of the United States, there is acute poverty.

There is plummeting house values.

And there is, too, a very strong memory of place, a very strong memory of the communities that once existed, a very strong "rooted in time" memory, an idea of what came before.

The industrial monuments, in many ways, to this era -- many of them still stand.

Many smokestacks are now incorporated into shopping -- the entrance to shopping malls in Bethlehem, or they're incorporated into casinos, et cetera.

So a strong regional and a community identity certainly exists in cities, towns of the Midwest and Northeast that formerly were dominated by industries that no longer have a strong presence within them.

And that does fuel a sense of loss.

And it has in many ways unmoored, politically, these regions.

One thing that we can see after the 1970s is that those blue-collar, white industrial workers are no longer solidly voting for the Democratic Party because they no longer credit the Democratic Party officials at a national level, but also at a local and regional level, for delivering the prosperity.

[ Dog barks ] -In recent decades, difficult political decisions regarding the future of the Rust Belt cities have been avoided.

-And that the answer is not to try and rebuild cities as they were, but to adapt and evolve cities.

And this often gets talked about and labeled with the label "planned shrinkage."

Because what people, these economists and urban planners, often say is, well, a fundamental problem with a city like Detroit, for example, a city that at its peak had nearly around a million and a half residents, now has something in the region of 700,000 residences.

If we were to start designing this city again, it wouldn't look like it does now because this is a city that now holds half the people that it was in many ways planned for and built for.

So people who are talking about and proposing planned shrinkage are trying to evolve or redesign, re-engineer a city or a community in light of what exists now, rather than changing it.

Now, of course, one of the problems with this idea of planned shrinkage is it often involves narratives.

And you can see this as people are talking about how to respond and react to deindustrialization, a narrative of, well, people who live within these communities should just leave because jobs aren't coming back.

The life doesn't exist anymore.

Leaving is often very difficult.

House prices have collapsed.

If you can sell your house, means that you're not able to afford a house anywhere else that you might move to.

Finding jobs require skills that you might not have.

So planned shrinkage is this narrative of coping or evolving and changing the city.

It's talked about a lot amongst urban planners and economists.

It's far less popular for reasons that should, I think, be obvious as to why very few politicians embrace the idea of trying to go and make a speech to say, "What we need to do to save this city is to shrink it."

It is one that's politically very brave, let's say.

-Soon, the mighty companies of the post-war period were moving out of the Rust Belt, a trend that has continued.

-So they move into the South, where there are very limited histories of unionization, where they can capitalize on racial tensions, they can capitalize on the limited economic alternatives to people there because of it being agricultural.

And then we see unions responding gradually in those areas, and then they go further south.

And the studies have been done by historians about companies that literally move from the north gradually into the southern bits of the United States and then over the borders.

And, you know, there's huge areas of that northern part of Mexico that are manufacturing goods that, you know, a few generations before would have been manufactured on the other side of the border.

We will see the movement of jobs, the movement of production processes to where it's cheapest.

The American companies are folding because they are being overtaken and replaced by competitors in other places.

The nature of union contracts or the nature -- the packages -- the standards of work were not any more sustainable to be competitive.

-But the stigma of the words "Rust Belt" distracts from appreciating one of the most historically profound regions of the United States.

You can't help but marvel at the feats of innovation that happened here and how they changed the world.

-U.S.

Steel, for example, which comes out of a merger of Andrew Carnegie's company with a couple of others, the finance worked by J.P.

Morgan to make that happen.

That still exists.

It's not as big or as powerful as it used to be, but it's still there.

And they have -- Their steel can be found in everything from skyscrapers across the United States to things like the Golden Gate Bridge.

So you're seeing it, even if you're not necessarily familiar with the company itself.

-And Rockefeller's giant broken-up conglomerate, Standard Oil, has survived in many parts.

-It's broken up into something like 37 different companies as a result of this, many of which are still around.

Biggest one is probably ExxonMobil.

One is Chevron.

And the third of the big ones that still exists is -- It became part of what is now BP.

And for people who have never heard of Standard Oil, if you've ever seen Esso at the petrol station, Esso is "S.O."

-- Standard Oil.

♪♪ -At the center of the Rust Belt story, we can construct a rise-and-a-fall arc.

It's a story that explodes rapidly, whether it's the rapid growth of a place like Chicago growing from a backwater in the mid-19th century to a million-resident city by the early 20th century, peaking at 3 million.

You had tens of thousands of automobiles in the United States in the 1910's.

By the end of the 1920's, it's in the multiple million.

So there's a dramatic rise story.

And then, later, we can tell something of a dramatic fall story.

♪♪ There are comparisons that we could make to the 21st century in the story of the Rust Belt.

In the 21st century, there is a story that we could tell of the continuation of a lot of processes that begin or intensify in the late 20th century.

We might think about the area around San Francisco that often gets called Silicon Valley.

Specializes in computing, an industry which is quite broad.

So, too, is steelmaking.

But Silicon Valley doesn't employ the same type of workers.

It employs educated, degree-holding workers.

If there is a story of technological change and human displacement that is going to occur in the 21st century, I don't think it will be as clustered.

Yes, technological change remakes or changes industries dramatically.

And that has consequences for workers.

The greening of China, for example, the embrace of the Chinese state of green energies, is clearly going to have consequences in a few decades hence for the coal power plants that were built in the late 20th century.

So, in a 21st-century context, it seems very difficult to imagine the United States being in that place of an unchallenged economic superpower.

China, it would seem, is going to be a competitor... and a competitor, it should be said, that is fueling the United States and United States actors to think in new ways about manufacturing and industry.

When we look back on -- I suspect when we look back in 50 years on the 2020's and think about the way that manufacturing is geographically placed across the world, we will have to think about the impact of the economic rivalry between U.S.

actors and Chinese actors and the ways that that has shaped the world of the future and the world that we live in.

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