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Jerome Patrick Cavanagh (June 16, 1928 – November 27, 1979) was an American politician who served as the mayor of Detroit from 1962 to 1970. Initially a popular figure, his reputation was seriously damaged by the city's 1967 riots, the most destructive of any U.S. city that decade. He was the first mayor to reside at the Manoogian Mansion, donated to the city by the industrial baron Alex Manoogian.
Cavanagh was successful in receiving money from the U.S. federal government through the Model Cities Program. New skyscrapers were built downtown. The Model Cities Program was a key component of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty. Begun in 1966, it operated five-year-long experiments in 150 cities to develop new antipoverty programs and alternative forms of municipal government. The ambitious federal urban aid program succeeded in fostering a new generation of mostly black urban leaders. Detroit was one of the largest Model Cities projects. Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson's task force. Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which used $490 million to try to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a model city. The city's political and business elite, and city planners, along with the black middle class, wanted federal funding to assist the economic growth of the entire city. They sought to protect the central business district property values from nearby slums and to construct new revenue-generating structures. However local community organizers and civil rights activists rallied poor residents in opposition to these plans. They said federal renewal funding should be used to replace deteriorating housing stock, whether with new public housing or low-cost housing built by private developers. The Model City program was terminated in Detroit and nationwide in 1974 after major race riots in most of its target cities.Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (1989)
Observers believed that Detroit had extinguished the embers of resentment left over from the 1943 Detroit Race Riot.
For example, Fortune magazine commented:
The economy of the city also seemed in generally good health. The National Observer commented:
Buoyed by this optimism, Cavanagh was reelected overwhelmingly in 1965. In 1966, Cavanagh was elected president of both the United States Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities, the only mayor to hold both posts at the same time. He served as president of the United States Conference of Mayors until the following year.
Detroit faced serious financial trouble. Cavanagh had inherited a $28 million budget gap in 1962. To close the gap, and to pay for the new programs he wanted to implement, Cavanagh had pushed through the legislature income tax and for Detroit, but these proved unpopular with residents and businesses.
On July 23, 1967, a police attempt to break up an illegal party escalated into what would be known as the 12th Street Riot. Feeling a large police presence would make things worse, Cavanagh acted slowly to stop the riots. Late Sunday afternoon, Cavanaugh and city officials met at the 10th precinct with black community leaders and neighborhood activists. When asked why it took so long to call in the guard, Cavanaugh replied "because they're all white. Were leery about that." Rioting lasted for five days, killed 43 people, left over 5,000 people homeless, and required two divisions of federal paratroopers to be put down; these would be the most destructive of the approximately 400 riots that American cities experienced in the 1960s. Cavanagh himself had to admit in July 1967, "Today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough."
The view that Detroit was a “Model City" led to the belief that it might not suffer the same race-related troubles of many other cities. The riots came as a complete shock to Cavanagh. He was, moreover, procedurally limited in his ability to control the riots as it was the role of Governor George Romney to ask for federal assistance once it appeared local resources might not be sufficient. By the time the National Guard had been called in, riots had already reached a massive scale. Cavanagh believed that a prompt federal response may very well have greatly reduced the severity of the riots. Cavanagh chose not to run for reelection in 1969.
After Cavanagh left office, he returned to his private law practice in Detroit and was also one of the first adjunct professors at the newly created Public Policy Department (later renamed The Gerald Ford Public Policy Institute) at the University of Michigan. In 1974, Cavanagh again ran for office, this time for Governor, but lost in the primary election to Democrat Sander Levin, who later lost in the general election to Republican William Milliken. It was Cavanagh's last attempt at political office.
Cavanagh died of a heart attack on November 27, 1979, at St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, while visiting a client in that city. He was 51 years old. He is buried in Mt. Elliott Cemetery in Detroit.
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