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Detroit, July 27. — This haggard city is a mirror of a civilization going backward.

Its smoke blood and gunfire are the most tragic testaments to date that urban America cannot even keep up with the accumulating problems of the modern age.

Federal troops on street corners. Tanks firing at night in streets where the lights have been shot out. Wretched, bleeding men in hospital emergency rooms. Jails so teeming with miserable prisoners that is is a questions whether legal processes really mean much. buildings gutted by fire. Weapons everywhere.

Take all these ingredients. Mix them with fear, alarm, bewilderment, hatred, despair and hopelessness. The elixir that results is Detroit. Its chief distinction, of course, is that it comes in a larger bottle. The same elixir from Newark, Watts, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Minneapolis and Cambridge, Md., has come in smaller vials.

Some comforting myths lie dead in the ashes of Detroit. Foremost among them is the myth that when rioting begins the troopers can seal off the ghettos in their misery and allow life in the better sections of town to go on as usual.

In Detroit the whole life of the city, practically its entire commerce, was brought to a standstill, and fear reached far into the loveliest suburbs.

The smell of smoke from an unknown source caused dread. The people went out and made sure their garden hoses were attached, as if these would do any good any against gasoline bombs. Automobiles were driven off the streets and locked in garages. Residents called the police and inquired about rumors of danger approaching in the night.

Some of them turned a lot of lights on in their houses. Others kept the rooms dark. Noises that otherwise would have gone unheeded brought anxious faces peering out of windows.

“No one knows where a moving mob, or a newly-formed one, is going to strike next,” a suburban reporter wrote in the “Detroit News.” “It’s a helpless feeling.”

The feeling of no escape could scarcely have been more aptly dramatized than by a worried act of Gov. George Romney in asking the state police to keep an eye on his suburban home to make sure that Mrs. Romney would be safe. — International Herald Tribune, July 28, 1967 —