Fordlandia: The rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city

Gregg Grandin

“Mr Ford shoots about 1,500 cars out the back door of his factory every day just to get rid of them. They are the byproducts of his real business, which is the making of men.”

Ford hated cows, believing what they produced wasn’t worth the effort; he wore clothes made from soy fibre and, while suspected of being illiterate, managed to change the face of the modern world through his production of vehicles for the mass market.

Henry Ford was a visionary and villain in almost equal measure and Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, tells this Fordian epic in a lucid and objective manner which at no time elevates the carmaker to some firmament dotted with the supernovae of commercial enterprise.

If anything, Grandin makes a point of setting the record very straight. Ford’s use of violent strongarm tactics on the shop floor; his abhorrence of trades unionism and Jews; his political naivete and his contradictory actions – like being actively pacifist while converting his factories for the war effort – are all features of this story which, while not essential to the central theme, embellish rather than detract from the work.

The savagery of the tropical jungle; man’s hopelessness against the insurmountable forces of nature at its wildest and the deterioration of the human condition when salvation is beyond reach are themes which can be found in myriad books.

Obvious examples of this genre are Exploration Fawcett, Mosquito Coast and Heart of Darkness, three books which come to mind at various junctures in the telling of what was one of the most extraordinary and tragic commercial adventures of the 20th century.

Conrad’s work is referred to by the author while the others – one work of fact, one of fiction – are equally similar to the extraordinary story which unfolded when the all-American car maker decided to set up shop on the banks of an Amazon tributary. In 1927, Henry Ford was determined to deflate the European monopoly on rubber. You could have had a Ford car in any colour, as long as it was black, but one without rubber tyres was worse than useless, no matter what the colour.

Ford was then the world’s richest man, but European traders had a stranglehold on rubber production through their Asian colonies and while cash was obviously not a problem for him, a ready supply of rubber was. He had no fondness for middlemen at any level and if they could be avoided or overpowered he would take steps to do so. The European rubber brokers, and especially the British, had been causing concern among American industrialists other than Ford. Over dinner in 1925 at his Dearborn home, Ford was told by Harvey Firestone, founder of the tyre manufacturing empire which bore his family name, of the threat posed by Winston Churchill’s proposed rubber cartel. Soon-to-be 31st president Herbert Hoover believed America’s rubber supply to be as important, if not more so, than oil.

Ford had all the motivation he needed and, like some Marvel Comic book hero, he donned his soy suit to take on the threat to his beloved America or, put another way, those who would put the brakes on his even greater motor mass production plans which he egotistically believed to be one and the same.

“The economics of Ford-style mass production were demonstrably simple. In 1911-’12, it took just under 7,000 Ford workers to make 78,440 Model Ts. The following year, both production and the workforce more than doubled. Then in 1913-’14, with the introduction of the assembly line and other innovations, the number of cars the factory produced doubled yet again, while the labour force decreased from 14,336 to 12,880 men. At the same time, the cost of manufacturing a Model T continued to decline, which allowed for a reduction in price, which increased demand, which generated more profit, which could be poured back into the factory to synchronise and mechanise production even further, to start the whole process over again,” Grandin writes.

That same socially questionable model (of production, not car) was integral to the plan Ford hatched for his rubber empire, but the Amazon and Brazil would not be as accommodating as hometown America had been.

On paper, the transplantation of a midwest-type town into the heart of the Amazon with houses, schools, hospitals, shops and the all important rubber plant looked like an achievable dream.

In reality, it became a nightmare, mostly for the Michigan-based Ford personnel who were given the task of making the car manufacturer’s vision a reality.

Ford bought 2.5 million acres on the banks of the Tapajós River.

Heat, humidity, pests and disease were just some of the many obstacles which Ford’s planters had to overcome.

Language was another – most of the Fordlandians never mastered Portuguese. A joke among Brazilians at the time went that after the first year the Americans knew enough of the language to ask for one beer and after two years they could ask for two beers.

Not all who were influenced by Ford’s promise of a better life in his promised land survived. In 1929, on average, one man a day died in the course of planting rubber trees and associated Fordlandia works like clearing jungle, draining lands, building roads and processing timber.

The carmaker, who never once visited his Brazilian rubber venture, insisted on prohibition and no smoking and general clean living among his employees. This too failed and drinking, vice and associated social spin-offs were as much a feature of Fordlandia’s immediate hinterland as the mosquito infested wetlands.

For a brief moment Fordlandia looked like it might realise its objective but, it proved be more effort than it was worth and jungle ways, both imported and indigenous, would eventually defeat the efforts of those inspired by Ford’s puritanical, arrogant capitalism.

His motor company invested $20 million in Fordlandia. In 1945 it was sold back to the Brazilian government for $244,200. When the Americans abandoned the area in ’45, their fellow South American workers knew nothing of this retreat until the Yanks were on the boats sailing down the Tapajós.