Success Quote by Jennifer M. Granholm

Michigan isn’t being remembered here; it’s being recruited. Granholm frames the 20th century as a home-field era when the state didn’t merely benefit from American prosperity but authored its blueprint. The word choice is doing quiet political work: “defined it” turns regional pride into a claim of authority, a way of saying Michigan has standing to lecture the country on how growth should look.

The sentence is built like a coalition in miniature. “Innovators and entrepreneurs” nod to business mythology, the familiar motor-city saga of risk, scale, and industrial genius. Then comes the pivot: “our unions made sure.” That “made sure” is a moral and causal assertion, not a footnote. Productivity didn’t naturally trickle into the middle class; it was bargained, enforced, and institutionalized. Granholm is restoring labor to the story as an active agent, not a cost center, and she’s doing it without sounding anti-business. The message: the golden age wasn’t just factories and patents; it was power on both sides of the negotiating table.

Context matters: this is a post-deindustrialization pitch, aimed at an audience living with the aftershocks of offshoring, automation, and union decline. Nostalgia is the bait, but the intent is policy-forward: if Michigan once fused innovation with broad prosperity, it can do it again. The subtext is an argument against the contemporary habit of celebrating “productivity” while treating wage growth as optional.