Those men didn't create the mess they inherited, but as Draughn said: "It's hard to believe much of any of it is going to get fixed."

When Ford offered the $5-a-day job in 1914, a worker could buy a car with four months' pay. Today, it would take a new autoworker earning $14 dollars an hour more than six months to buy Ford's cheapest car.

"My father put in 40 years with DeSoto and Ford and he never missed a day's work to my knowledge," Draughn said.

Ford did not believe in debt and so did not extend credit to car buyers until General Motors began allowing customers in 1919 to purchase cars on installment payments. The mass marketing of "buy now pay later" is another invention straight out of Detroit.

The Detroit Public Schools have been taken over by Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager. But Bobb ended up delivering a $100 million deficit his first year -- no better than his predecessors when averaged over the previous two years. Bobb was specifically hired by Gov. Jennifer Granholm to balance the books. Nevertheless, Bobb got a raise, earns more than Obama and is tied up in court over academics and school closings.

Nearby stood two 21st century men who are employed to watch over those unpaid car loans: Terry Madden, a ruddy 50-year-old, and Eric Draughn, a square-jawed 39-year-old. The fathers of both men came to Detroit from the South and made middle-class lives in the factories.

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"Here at his Highland Park plant, Henry Ford in 1913 began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915, Ford built a million Model T's. In 1925, over 9,000 were assembled in a single day. Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th Century living."

If Ford today walked across the rubble of his office and looked out the window facing Woodward Avenue, he would see a green historical marker that reads:

"It just don't add up," Bynum said.

To which he replied: "As long as you have each other and you have faith, then there's hope. I guess."

A third man came shambling by, an unemployed passer-by and something of a savant of automotive history. Harrison Bynum, too, is the son of a Southern man who made his way to Detroit in 1948 and got a job with Chrysler and like his father, Bynum, 57, spent some of his youth on the line.

Goldman Sachs, the mega-bank, is being sued by the federal government for selling mortgage bonds as good investments and then turning around and betting they'll fail. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama, despite his "fat-cat bankers" rhetoric, is surrounded by former Wall Street men and took $15 million himself in the last campaign, a record.

To which Madden replied: "Not as long as we have politicians."

A lot of it doesn't add up.

And there's the rub, the discontent, the root feeling among the little man that he's just not being told the whole truth by his leaders, that he gets lip service while the country crumbles around him.

Detroit City Hall is talking tough on its finances. But Mayor Dave Bing unveiled a budget last week that has the city plugging its deficit with $250 million in bonds that still leave the city $85 million in the red. Bing, who was elected largely on his business acumen, refuses to discuss the details on the collapse and sale of his metal fabricating company.

Where's the hope, I asked him? Most Americans are asking that question.

"Hard to believe it all come to this," he said. "Ford, Durant, Sloan, Joy, Reuther, Dodge, Chevrolet, Kahn," he said of the industrial giants of generations ago. Detroit used to make heroes out of nobodies. Who replaces them? Despite the balmy afternoon, Bynum wore a knit cap. What happened to dreamers like that? "All of 'em. Now we got nobodies pretending to be heroes."

Then there is General Motors announcing with much fanfare that it has paid back its $4.7 billion loan to Uncle Sam in full. But the federal government still holds a majority stake in GM, GMAC and 10 percent of Chrysler. In the end, the federal government expects to lose a minimum of $30 billion of the $85 billion in bailout money it extended to those failing companies.