Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City Read online

  ALSO BY GREG GRANDIN

  Empire’s Workshop:

  Latin America, the United States,

  and the Rise of the New Imperialism

  The Last Colonial Massacre:

  Latin America in the Cold War

  The Blood of Guatemala:

  A History of Race and Nation

  FORDLANDIA

  FORDLANDIA

  The Rise and fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

  Greg Grandin

  Metropolitan Books

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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  Copyright © 2009 Greg Grandin

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  “DEEP NIGHT”

  RUDY VALLEE, CHARLIE HENDERSON

  © 1929 WARNER BROS. INC. (Renewed)

  Rights for the Extended Renewal Term in the United States controlled by WB MUSIC CORP. and WARNER BROS. INC.

  This arrangement © WB MUSIC CORP. and WARNER BROS. INC.

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  Used by permission from ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC.

  “RAMONA”

  Music by MABEL WAYNE Words by L. Wolfe Gilbert

  © 1927 (Renewed 1955) EMI FEIST CATALOG INC.

  All Rights Controlled by EMI FEIST CATALOG INC. (Publishing) and ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC.

  All Rights Reserved

  Used by permission from ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC.

  “Santarém” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983

  by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Grandin, Greg, 1962–

  Fordlandia : the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city / Greg Grandin.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8236-4

  ISBN-10: 0-8050-8236-0

  1. Fordlândia (Brazil)—History. 2. Planned communities—Brazil—History—20th century. 3. Rubber plantations—Brazil—Fordlándia—History—20th century. 4. Ford Motor Company—Influence—History—20th century. 5. Ford, Henry, 1863–1947—Political and social views. 6. Brazil—Civilization—American influences—History—20th century. I. Title.

  F2651.F55G72 2009

  307.76'8098115—dc22

  200804964

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First Edition 2009

  Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

  Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  To Emilia Viotti da Costa

  Why, though, did we need a Mahagonny?

  Because this world is a foul one.

  —BERTOLT BRECHT

  The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Nothing Is Wrong with Anything

  PART I: MANY THINGS OTHERWISE INEXPLICABLE

  1: Under an American Flag

  2: The Cow Must Go

  3: Absolute Americanisms

  4: That’s Where We Sure Can Get Gold

  5: Fordville

  6: They Will All Die

  7: Everything Jake

  8: When Ford Comes

  PART II: LORD FORD

  9: Two Rivers

  10: Smoke and Ash

  11: Prophesied Subjection

  12: The Ford Way of Thinking

  13: What Would You Give for a Good Job?

  14: Let’s Wander Out Yonder

  15: Kill All the Americans

  PART III: RUBBER ROUGE

  16: American Pastoral

  17: Good Lines, Straight and True

  18: Mountains of the Moon

  19: Only God Can Grow a Tree

  20: Standard Practices

  21: Bonfire of the Caterpillars

  22: Fallen Empire of Rubber

  23: Tomorrow Land

  EPILOGUE: Still Waiting for Henry Ford

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Acknowledgments

  FORDLANDIA

  INTRODUCTION

  NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ANYTHING

  JANUARY 9, 1928: HENRY FORD WAS IN A SPIRITED MOOD AS HE toured the Ford Industrial Exhibit with his son, Edsel, and his aging friend Thomas Edison, feigning fright at the flash of news cameras as a circle of police officers held back admirers and reporters. The event was held in New York, to showcase the new Model A. Until recently, nearly half of all the cars produced in the world were Model Ts, which Ford had been building since 1908. But by 1927 the T’s market share had dropped considerably. A half decade of prosperity and cheap credit had increased demand for stylized, more luxurious cars. General Motors gave customers dozens of lacquer colors and a range of upholstery options to choose from while the Ford car came in green, red, blue, and black—which at least was more variety than a few years earlier when Ford reportedly told his customers they could have their car in any color they wanted, “so long as it’s black.”1

  From May 1927, when the Ford Motor Company stopped production on the T, to October, when the first Model A was assembled, many doubted that Ford could pull off the changeover. It was costing a fortune, estimated by one historian at $250 million, because the internal workings of the just-opened River Rouge factory, which had been designed to roll out Ts into the indefinite future, had to be refitted to make the A. Yet on the first two days of its debut, over ten million Americans visited their local Ford dealers to inspect the new car, available in a range of body types and colors including Arabian Sand, Rose Beige, and Andalusite Blue. Within a few months, the company had received over 700,000 orders for the A, and even Ford’s detractors had to admit that he had staged a remarkable comeback.2

  The New York exhibit was held in the old Fiftieth Street Madison Square Garden, drawing over a million people and eclipsing the nearby National Car Show. All the many styles of the new model were on display at the Garden, as was the Lincoln Touring Car, since Ford had bought Lincoln Motors six years earlier, giving him a foot in the luxury car market without having to reconfigure his own factories. But the Ford exhibit wasn’t really an automobile show. It was rather “built around this one idea,” said Edsel: “a visual demonstration of the operation of the Ford industries, from the raw materials to the finished product.” Visitors passed by displays of the manically synchronized work stations that Ford was famous for, demonstrations of how glass, upholstery, and leather trimmings were made, and dioramas of Ford’s iron and coal mines, his blast furnaces, gas plants, northern Michigan timberlands, and fleets of planes and ships. A few even got to see Henry himself direct operations. “Speed that machine up a bit,” he said as he passed a “mobile model of two men leisurely sawing a tree, against a background of dense forest growth.”3

  Though he was known to have opinions on many matters, as Henry Ford made his way through the convention hall reporters asked him mostly about his cars and his money. “How much are you worth?” one shouted out. “I don’t know and I don’t give a damn,” Ford answered. Stopping to give an impromptu press conference in front of an old lathe he had used to make hi
s first car, Ford said he was optimistic about the coming year, sure that his new River Rouge plant—located in Ford’s hometown of Dearborn, just outside of Detroit—would be able to meet demand. No one raised his recent humiliating repudiation of anti-Semitism, though while in New York Ford met with members of the American Jewish Committee to stage the “final scene in the reconciliation between Henry Ford and American Jewry,” as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described the conference. Most reporters tossed feel-good questions. One wanted to know about his key to success. “Concentration on details,” Ford said. “When I worked at that lathe in 1894”—the carmaker nodded to the machine behind him—“I never thought about anything else.” A journalist did ask him about reports of a price war and whether it would force him to lower his asking price for the A.

  “I know nothing about it,” replied Ford, who for decades had set his own prices and wages free of serious competition. “Nothing is wrong with anything,” he said, “and I don’t see any reason to believe that the present prosperity will not continue.”4

  FORD WANTED TO talk about something other than automobiles. The previous August he had taken his first airplane ride, a ten-minute circle over Detroit in his friend Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, just a few months after Lindbergh had made his historic nonstop transatlantic trip. Ford bragged that he “handled the stick” for a little while. He was “strong for air travel,” he said, and was working on a lightweight diesel airplane engine. Ford then announced that he would soon fly to the Amazon to inspect his new rubber plantation. “If I go to Brazil,” he said, “it will be by airplane. I would never spend 20 days making the trip by boat.”5

  Ford didn’t elaborate, and reporters seemed a bit puzzled. So Edsel stepped forward to explain. The plantation was on the Tapajós River, a branch of the Amazon, he said.

  Amid all the excitement over the Model A, most barely noted that the Ford Motor Company had recently acquired an enormous land concession in the Amazon. Inevitably compared in size to a midranged US state, usually Connecticut but sometimes Tennessee, the property was to be used to grow rubber. Despite Thomas Edison’s best efforts to produce domestic or synthetic rubber, latex was the one important natural resource that Ford didn’t control, even though his New York exhibit included a model of a rubber plantation. “The details have been closed,” Edsel had announced in the official press release about the acquisition, “and the work will begin at once.” It would include building a town and launching a “widespread sanitary campaign against the dangers of the jungle,” he said. “Boats of the Ford fleet will be in communication with the property and it is possible that airplane communication may also be attempted.”6

  In the months that followed, as the excitement of the Model A died down, journalists and opinion makers began to pay attention to Fordlandia, as Ford’s Brazilian project soon came to be called. And they reported the enterprise as a contest between two irrepressible forces. On one side stood the industrialist who had perfected the assembly line and broken down the manufacturing process into ever simpler components geared toward making one single infinitely reproducible product, the first indistinguishable from the millionth. “My effort is in the direction of simplicity,” Ford once said. On the other was the storied Amazon basin, spilling over into nine countries and comprising a full third of South America, a place so wild and diverse that the waters just around where Ford planned to establish his plantation contained more species of fish than all the rivers of Europe combined.7

  It was billed as a proxy fight: Ford represented vigor, dynamism, and the rushing energy that defined American capitalism in the early twentieth century; the Amazon embodied primal stillness, an ancient world that had so far proved unconquerable. “If the machine, the tractor, can open a breach in the great green wall of the Amazon jungle, if Ford plants millions of rubber trees where there used to be nothing but jungle solitude,” wrote a German daily, “then the romantic history of rubber will have a new chapter. A new and titanic fight between nature and modern man is beginning.” One Brazilian writer predicted that Ford would finally fulfill the prophecy of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist who over a century earlier said that the Amazon was destined to become the “world’s granary.” And as if to underscore the danger of the challenge, just at the moment Ford was deciding to get into the rubber business, the public’s attention was captivated by reports of the disappearance of the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett. Having convinced himself, based on a combination of archival research, deduction, and clairvoyance, of the existence of a lost city (which he decided to name “Z”) just south of where Ford would establish his plantation, Fawcett entered the jungle to find it. He was never heard from again.8

  In the case of Ford, who had all the resources of the industrial world at his disposal, journalists had no doubt about the outcome, and they reported on his civilizing mission in expectant prose. Time reported that Ford intended to increase its rubber planting every year “until the whole jungle is industrialized,” cheered on by the forest’s inhabitants: “soon boa constrictors will slip down into the jungle centers; monkeys will set up a great chattering. Black Indians armed with heavy blades will slash down their one-time haunts to make way for future windshield wipers, floor mats, balloon tires.” Ford was bringing “white man’s magic” to the wilderness, the Washington Post wrote, intending to cultivate not only “rubber but the rubber gatherers as well.”9

  Since the sixteenth century, stories of El Dorado, an Indian king so rich that he powdered himself with gold, lured countless fortune hunters on futile quests. The word quixotic has its origins in a story set on the Spanish plains, in the same century when Europeans were first entering the Amazon. It’s often applied to those entranced by the promise of jungle riches, as certain of the existence of the object of their pursuit as the Man from La Mancha was that the windmills he tilted at were giants. “I call it Z,” said Colonel Fawcett of his fabled city, “for the sake of convenience.”10

  Ford, though, turned the El Dorado myth inside out. The richest man in the world, he was the gilded one—the “Jesus Christ of industry,” one Brazilian writer called him, while another called him a New World “Moses”—and salvation of Brazil’s long-moribund rubber industry and the Amazon itself was to come from his touch. The “Kingdom of Fordlandia,” however, was decidedly secular, and its magic technological. Ford’s move into northern Brazil took place on the cusp of two eras, as the age of adventure gave way to the age of commerce.11

  Their time passing, explorers acted as Ford’s John the Baptists, walking through a fallen land and heralding its deliverance even as they faded from the scene. Theodore Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness—an account of the former president’s last jungle expedition, taken in 1914, just a few years before his death, to survey a heretofore uncharted Amazon river—predicted that the treacherous rapids that nearly cost him his life would eventually provide enough hydropower to support a “number of big manufacturing communities, knit by railroads to one another.” Francis Gow Smith, a member of New York’s Explorers Club, was in Brazil searching for Colonel Fawcett when news got out that Ford had secured his Brazilian concession. In a lengthy dispatch from the field, Smith described his near lethal encounter with the “King of the Xingu”—a rich and ruthless rubber baron on the Xingu River who “typifies the feudal tyranny of plantation methods in Brazil just as his new competitor” Henry Ford “typifies North America’s industrial enterprise.” The “jungle millionaire” terrorized his “peons,” keeping them in a state of perpetual debt, locking those who dared to challenge his authority in stockades, beating them unmercifully, and leaving them to lie for hours on the ground as vampire bats “feast upon their blood and hordes of ants gnaw at their bare skins.” Henry Ford “has never met his jungle rival,” Smith wrote, but his “Brazilian project will be the wiping out of the King of Xingu’s rubber monopoly, the liberation of his peons and the dawn of a new day for Brazilian prosperity.”12

&
nbsp; THE AMAZON IS a temptress: its chroniclers can’t seem to resist invoking the jungle not as an ecological system but as a metaphysical testing ground, a place that seduces man to impose his will only to expose that will as impotent. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century explorers and missionaries often portrayed the jungle either as evil inherent or as revealing the evil men carry inside. Traveling through the region in 1930, the Anglican lay leader Kenneth Grubb wrote that the forest brings out the “worst instincts of man, brutalizes the affections, hardens the emotions, and draws out with malign and terrible intention every evil and sordid lust.” Theodore Roosevelt’s account of his expedition, which first ran as a serial in Scribner’s, likewise painted the Amazon as a malevolent place, where things “sinister and evil” lurked in the “dark stillness” of its groves. Ancient trees didn’t just fall and decompose but were “murdered,” garroted by the ever tighter twists of vines. Roosevelt described the jungle as being largely “uninhabited by human beings,” portraying its challenges as nearly wholly natural, even preternatural, captured in gothic depictions of “blood-crazy” fish and “bloodsucking” vampire bats. The jungle was “entirely indifferent to good or evil,” he wrote, working “out her ends or no ends with utter disregard of pain and woe.” For those readers not familiar with the theology that hell is the absence of God, the Rough Rider left little doubt as to the analogy he was implicitly drawing: he began his tale with a detailed seventeen-page description of treacherous serpents.13

  Even more recently, those who survive encounters with the jungle primeval are often compelled to search for some larger meaning in its severity, holding it up as a touchstone to expose the charade of human progress. “We are challenging nature itself and it hits back, it just hits back, that’s all,” said the German film director Werner Herzog of the hardships he encountered in making his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. Herzog’s notorious attempt to replicate the compulsion of his title character, played by Klaus Kinski, and pull a 340-ton steamship over an Amazon mountain (the movie is based on the life of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald López, who had the good sense to dismantle the boat before proceeding) leads him to ponder the ethical vacuity of the natural world: “Kinski always says [nature] is full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic. I see it more as full of obscenity. . . . Nature here is violent, base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication, and asphyxiation, and choking, and fighting for survival, . . . just rotting away. Of course there is lots of misery but it is to say misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, the birds here are in misery. They don’t sing, they just screech in pain.”14