Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
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Bungalows with modern plumbing and screened windows; hospitals, schools, sidewalks, recreation halls, tennis courts, swimming pools, even a golf course: On the face of it, Henry Ford’s vast 1930s rubber plantation deep in the Amazon jungle – called Fordlandia – provided all the modern amenities for both its American managers and its Brazilian laborers. What it couldn’t provide was rubber.
Greg Grandin’s riveting account of this “forgotten jungle city” demonstrates that in business, as well as in affairs of state, the means may be abundant but the ends still unachievable. Even as the prospect of profits from Fordlandia receded further and further into the future, the settlement was hailed as a victory of technology and organizational skill, showing South Americans what could be done by their neighbors to the north. But that claim wasn’t quite true either: Fordlandia was convulsed by more than one violent riot. What is more, the work force had a high turnover rate – and little wonder.
Lying along the banks of the Tapajós River, a tributary entering the Amazon 500 miles from the Atlantic, Fordlandia spread itself across 2.5 million acres – almost the size of Connecticut. There the resemblance to the Nutmeg State ends, however: Man-eating caimans and piranhas don’t bother fishermen in Connecticut’s Housatonic River, and Jaguars don’t sneak into New London homes to steal babies. Fordlandia, sweltering amid such dangers, was also home to a host of tropical – diseases and the – insects that carry them.
Some Americans lasted less than a month before heading home, while others stayed for years, burying their children in the company cemetery or just plain going mad. Ford spent $125,000 to buy the land, but he might have had it free, so eager was Brazil to get the great Henry Ford to revive its rubber production. Instead, as Mr. Grandin tells us, a wily group of Brazilian businessmen and bureaucrats, in cahoots with Americans in the U.S. consular service, acquired an option on the Tapajós spread and then convinced Ford that it was the best land for his – purpose. They also suggested that the local laborers were in need of his benevolent paternalism. So Ford plunged ahead, optimistically if – unwisely.
Ford’s odd, magnificent and maddening personality always threatens to overwhelm Mr. Grandin’s account of the Amazonian plantation – which Ford, incidentally, never saw himself, though he kept promising a visit. Ford liked soybeans and American antiques; he hated unions, Wall Street and sitting down. And though he came to idolize the small-town America his cars were helping to change forever, he was not a believer in nationalism. “A businessman knows no country,” he told the Brazilian consul visiting his plant in Dearborn, Mich. Hence Ford was happy to make money in the American Midwest or, if it came to that, in the Amazon.
In the 1920s, Ford became fed up with hearing Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and tire mogul Harvey Firestone express their fears of a British, French and Dutch monopoly on latex, a crucial by-product of rubber that was used in industrial manufacture. At one event, Ford bellowed at Firestone: “Well, you know what to do about that? Grow your own rubber!” Fordlandia was the result of Ford taking his own advice.
June 10, 2009
Copyright © 2009 Wall Street Journal
