The forgotten battle of East Lansing | Hacker News Reader

The forgotten battle of East Lansing

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105 pointsrmason24 comments

Fun to see something about East Lansing here. While I am Dutch, I have been there in the neighborhood (e.g. Lansing itself) on and off for 6 months in total when I had a long distance marriage (we live in the Netherlands nowadays). I’m a fan of Blue Owl coffee there.

REO town was cheap to rent and quite walkable to the city center (or “downtown” as they call it). I liked it more than I thought I would. Many places there aren’t walkable but from REO town to the city center it was possible. One thing I noticed was that walkability wasn’t priced in the rents at all since after a 1 mile walk from the city center, studio apartments were about 800$ (2024) whereas in the city center itself it was more like 1100$ IIRC. In my view going 300$ while just having a 1 mile walk seems like a steal.

MSU is massive nowadays. It’s crazy how big it is. It feels like an actual town. I wonder how big it was then.

As for the article itself. I find it interesting to read how certain groups were just taking action and there was no discernible leadership that could talk to each other. I wonder if this would have happened if that was the case.

The car manufacturing culture in Michigan in general is a low-key tourist worthy thing to check out (e.g. in the Detroit Institute of Art). But I have my father in law for that, haha. Asking Claude what a CNC programmer does because he’s not that great at explaining it to a total noob like me :’) once I understood that he had a macro language inside what he called G-code it was fun to ask what he programmed haha.

g-code brings back a nostalgic pang, that was what we used before STL was common in 3d-printing. It's kind of amazing to read in this story just how tightly knit a community like this can be despite its industrial nature, what are the worthy touring spots that GM security wouldn't take issue with?

Local here. Downtown Lansing, just off Michigan Avenue has the R.E. Olds Transportation museum. My late father was involved with the museum as a volunteer. Lots of rare Oldsmobile's including one of the first cars he produced known as the "curved dash" from 1901. Note Olds invented the modern assembly line, not Henry Ford. Though to be fair Ford and his chief engineer C. Harold Wills perfected the car assembly line we know of today.

https://www.reoldsmuseum.org/

Right next door is the Impression 5 science museum. While it is aimed at children I've always found it fascinating and it is hands on. Unlike most science museums with which I am familiar they keep building new exhibits.

https://impression5.org/home

If you are into history the Michigan History Museum is just South of the Capital. They have an original copy of our state constitution on display. They also got a copy of every computer the state has purchased. Last time I was there they had a room full of old computers. So if you've never seen a Next cube, an Osborne portable, first Compaq portable or an Apple Lisa they are all on display in working order.

https://www.michigan.gov/mhc/museums/mhm

Lastly if you enjoy art visit the Broad Art Museum on the North end of the Michigan State University campus. The building is striking looking and was featured in one of the Batman movies. It is one of the few buildings in America designed by the late Pulitzer prize winning British architect Zaha Hadid.

https://broadmuseum.msu.edu/

Course all that pales to Detroit where you could literally spend ten days if you wanted to visit every museum.

Impression 5 rules! My 4-year old loves it, so we have a membership.

btw, slicers turn the STL into g-code for the printer before you hit print. STL is just easier to work with for the transformations that need to happen within slicer software.

> One thing I noticed was that walkability wasn’t priced in the rents at all since after a 1 mile walk from the city center, studio apartments were about 800$ (2024) whereas in the city center itself it was more like 1100$ IIRC. In my view going 300$ while just having a 1 mile walk seems like a steal.

A surprising number of people in the state would not consider 1 mile 'walkable'. I'm not saying I agree with that, however in general our car culture and the related urban design means it can be a PITA for a lot of people to live their lives without one.

> MSU is massive nowadays. It’s crazy how big it is. It feels like an actual town. I wonder how big it was then.

For whatever it's worth, MSU was still more of an agricultural college than anything back then. Heck, one of my ancestors actually got indoor plumbing installed by the college as part of a study into how it could benefit the life of a farmer.

My father actually went there near the end of that era, I can ask him for some stories this weekend when we do breakfast. Will be 20ish years off but while it was handled by the 'Board of Agriculture'.

> The car manufacturing culture in Michigan in general is a low-key tourist worthy thing to check out (e.g. in the Detroit Institute of Art)

The DIA has Diego Rivera's mural, worth also noting the Detroit Historical Museum has an example of part of an older style body-on-frame line alongside a lot of other interesting automotive history bits. (Also, in general other important sections for parts of our history, The basement even captures the 1800's cobblestone aesthetic.) Both the Motown and Riot exhibits are worth a good visit.

In general the state has one of the most curious meshes of industrial and rural/agricultural history, between the mining towns in the UP, the Logging towns in the norther LP, the farming history in much of the LP, and the 'Arsenal of Democracy' that was Detroit.

> A surprising number of people in the state would not consider 1 mile 'walkable'.

In a surprising number of American cities, 1 mile is not walkable, simply because no one thought to put in a sidewalk or have adequate protection for pedestrians. That goes double for places like Lansing, where the sidewalks that are there are often icy during the winter.

Well, it wasn’t where I was as I walked my miles daily. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to Haslett. Haslett reminded me that the walkability of REO town to the Michigan State Capitol seems more like a coincidence than intentional urban planning. Because Haslett often lacked any sidewalks.

I remember one time walking to the Lidl for a 6 mile roundtrip. I think it was the first time when I realized why Americans don’t walk. That walk was one bad experience while nothing bad was happening. For contrast: I live near Amsterdam my whole life.

I live about 90 minutes north of Lansing in a town at about the same latitude as Toronto. Weather-wise, the problem isn't the ice. It's the snow accumulation, the cold. For about 3 months out of the year, you're lucky if it's at -7 C or higher.

It's also just that nothing is structured for it. Homes are built relatively far away from businesses and shops due to zoning, and stroads are the common way to get between the two. And where the stroads end, rural roads begin. It's structured not to be walkable not just at the large city level, but at the small city and town level, too. Our infrastructure is dictated by what the people in the 1940s thought, and they were extremely wrong about a great many things.

> “But many Michigan State College students, overhearing the arguments between the unionists and the businessmen, quickly perceived the situation as a challenge to their sovereignty and to their eating places,” they wrote.

I'm skeptical of the idea that this was all the result of a big misunderstanding. Students were often recruited to act as strikebreakers in the early 20th century.

There's a book that deals with this subject, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Football players were especially valued.

Pretty telling that it kicked off with the ROTC unit after their commander dismissed them from class.

It's not just that; unions were quickly becoming broadly unpopular, especially among those outside of the union. It hurt job prospects and slowed hiring, usually ending in the company leaving or shrinking. Saying young people opposed the union only because they were afraid their favorite burger join would shut down for a few days is revisionist history to say the least.

It's interesting to read this about the attitude of unions and students in that time. I agree with the other comment that the rotc teacher likely sent his students over to stop the strike. But this was 1937, the depression was still affecting lots of people, so I'd have expected more students to be sensitive to the workers. Were the students influenced by the rotc teacher, were they "the more wealthy kind of people" who could afford to go to college then?

I'd have expected the students to be split at least, with more supporters for the union than not. I had several family members who managed to graduate from college in the 30s, and it was a grind, with time off for working, more than 4 years, scraping by with hardly any money. I wonder if they saw unions as evil or good or what (can't ask them this question now).

Were those problems actually the cause of unions though? The entire time period was a downturn and unions seem to be used as the scapegoat for any and every economic ill.

I think you're mischaracterizing the article though. It doesn't claim it was all a big misunderstanding. It says the students didn't like the disruption to local businesses , simply because it was disruptive. It was viewed as a bunch of outsiders coming in and controlling their city.

Isn't that just the obvious explanation anyways? That a group of people come into your city and shut down your businesses is going to piss people off? Of course people are going to oppose outsiders shutting down people's livelihood.

You can tell it is written for local people. I find it quite jarring when I have to stop reading to find out what ROTC or MSC are supposed to mean.

I’m not sure that’s true, I was able to infer from context what MSC stands for and if you’ve had exposure to American culture then ROTC is quite common.

I live 3000 miles from east Lansing.

It's a local newspaper. It's not in English because it's seeking an international audience.

But, MSC is easy enough to determine from context, and ROTC would be a familiar abbreviation for any American.

Good reminder that all government is based on force, threat of violence and coercion. Authority comes from the fist, the gun, the daring act. We only paper over it enough to make ourselves feel better.

Nice reminder that higher education wasn't always a bastion of the radical left-wing. But wait!

'“It is indeed refreshing to know,” wrote one lawmaker, “that we have at least one instance of higher learning that is not shot through with communism.”'

Ah. Perhaps this answer's the article's question of why no-one commemorated it with a folk song in the 60s.

Curious because when I read this piece, I have the feeling that the student actions are typical left-wing movement things.

Like workers doing the hard work and fighting for their rights to not be exploited. Not to be put in jail for asking better life conditions.

Students on the other side that are lazy brats that fight the workers instead of the system for unclear philosophical "moral" goals...

I fail to see how they're lazy, sounds like they were quite the opposite. And really, the students explained the crux of the matter quite well. You can request solidarity, but you cannot force it by thuggery. You might bring out some brats and end up in the still-chilly water of the local river.

The point is that the students are not workers themselves. It is not them that could be "forced" to be on strike. So their reason is because they don't accept that "others" might be forced to be on strike...

> At 2 a.m. Monday, June 7, 1937, Lansing police pounded on the Washburns’ door to arrest him and his wife, Nevah, but the union leader was on a train back from Detroit. His wife was home with their three young children, all under 10. Nevah was arrested and left her children with a neighbor. Several labor union leaders and their wives were rounded up that night by the Lansing Police Department.When Washburn returned to Lansing about an hour later and found out his wife was in jail, he hurried to a pay phone — he said police had cut the telephone wire outside their home before serving the warrant for their arrest — and started waking people up. He gathered with other leaders who had escaped arrest and, within the next few hours, the UAW had declared a Lansing Labor Holiday. Approximately 15,000 union members would not report to work that day to protest the arrests. The union members and their supporters took to the streets in a parade led by a gravel truck, Washburn recalled in the 1986 interview.

sigh

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