by Bryson, Bill
Roughly four-fifths of all that rubber was consumed in the United States, mostly by the automobile industry. (Tires on early cars needed replacing every two or three thousand miles on average, so demand was constant and high.) In the early 1920s, when reports circulated that Britain intended to introduce a hefty rubber levy as a way of paying off its war debts, America’s Commerce Department under the tireless watch of Herbert Hoover responded with a crash program to see if there was not some way America could escape its foreign dependence, either by producing its own rubber or inventing a synthetic substitute. Nothing, however, worked. Rubber trees didn’t do well anywhere in America, and not even Thomas Edison could come up with an artificial version that would work half as well.
Henry Ford took this as a personal challenge. He hated in any case being dependent on suppliers who might raise prices or otherwise take advantage of him, so he always did all in his power to control all the elements of his supply chains. To that end, he owned iron ore and coal mines, forests and lumber mills, the Detroit, Toledo & Irontown Railroad, and a fleet of ships. When he decided to make his own windshields he became at a stroke the second-largest manufacturer of glass in the world. Ford owned four hundred thousand acres of forests in upper Michigan. The Ford lumber mills proudly boasted that they used every bit of the tree but the shade. Bark, sawdust, sap—all were put to commercial use. (One Ford product still with us from this process is the Kingsford charcoal briquette.) Ford could not bear the thought of having to stop production because some foreign despot or business cabal was denying him access to some needed product—and by the 1920s he was the single biggest user of rubber on earth. Thus it was in the summer of 1927 that Henry Ford embarked on the most ambitious, and ultimately most foolish, venture of his long life: Fordlandia.
His plan was to build a model American community in the jungles of Brazil and from it run the greatest rubber-producing estate in the world. The Brazilians were so desperate to rejuvenate their moribund rubber industry that they were happy to give Ford almost anything he asked. They sold him two and a half million acres of Amazonian rain forest—an area approximately the size of Connecticut—for the knockdown price of $125,000, and excused him for fifty years from paying import duties on materials brought in or export duties on latex sold abroad. He was given permission to build his own airports, schools, banks, hospitals, and railroads. Essentially Ford was allowed to set up an autonomous state within Brazil. The company was even given permission to dam the Rio Tapajós if that would make the land more comfortable and productive.
To supervise and execute this immense project, Ford dispatched a thirty-seven-year-old junior manager named Willis Blakeley. Blakeley’s instructions were precise and vastly beyond his capabilities. He was to build a complete town with a central square, business district, hospital, movie theater, ballroom, golf course, and other useful and fulfilling municipal enterprises. Surrounding this were to be residential neighborhoods of white shingled cottages, each with a neat lawn, flower bed, and vegetable garden. Artists’ illustrations, which the Ford company helpfully provided, showed a tranquil and idyllic community complete with paved streets and Ford cars, in defiance of the obvious fact that there would be nowhere beyond the very modest confines of the town for them to go. Henry Ford considered almost every detail of the undertaking. The clocks would be set to Michigan time, and Prohibition would be observed, even though it was not the law of Brazil. Whatever the cost, Fordlandia would be dedicated to American laws, culture, and values—an outpost of Protestant ideals in the middle of a hot, godless jungle.
Beyond and around the town would lie the greatest agricultural operation on the planet. Blakeley was not just to plant and nurture forests of towering rubber trees but also to find industrial uses for all the other fruits of the jungle. Fordlandia would produce paints, fertilizers, medicines, and other useful compounds from the leaves and bark and gummy resins of its dense and productive plant life.
Blakeley had no skills or experience that would allow him to achieve any of this. He was little more than an uneducated thug. Long before he got his first sight of the land he was to manage, he was already proving himself an embarrassment to civilized values. Settling temporarily in the port city of Belém, six days downriver from the site of Fordlandia, he took a suite overlooking the main plaza in the Hotel Grande. There he horrified the locals by walking around naked and making love to his wife with the shutters open in full view of citizens out for their evening constitutionals. He was frequently drunk, generally boastful, and always obnoxious. He alienated most of the officials who could help him as well as the businesspeople on whom he would be dependent for supplies.
Using American and Brazilian overseers, Blakeley hired three thousand laborers to clear the jungle and build the camp, but little went well once work began. Clearing the jungle was a nightmare. Saw blades designed for the softwood forests of Michigan spun uselessly against iron-hard Brazilian trees. In the dry season the water level in the Tapajós could fall by as much as forty feet, and for much of the year it was too shallow for boatloads of equipment to reach the plantation. Such equipment as did arrive frequently proved to be useless or at least premature. One crate sent from Detroit contained ice-making machines. Another consignment included a narrow-gauge steam locomotive and several hundred feet of track. Blakeley failed to build adequate storehouses, so supplies spoiled on the riverbanks. Bags of cement absorbed moisture from the air and became hard as rock. Machines and tools rusted and grew unusable. Anything that was remotely portable was pilfered.
Blakeley found, moreover, that local growers, fearful of his competition, would not sell him seedlings, so his stock had to be imported from the Far East. Although the seeds he brought in were native to the region—Henry Wickham, as it happened, had collected just across the river from the Ford estate—they struggled to thrive when planted on newly cleared land. Blakeley failed to appreciate that Hevea brasiliensis was a jungle tree and needed protection from the scorching sun. It had evolved to grow in isolation and so lacked the resistance needed in crowded conditions. When planted together, the trees became magnets for insects that overwhelmed the trees with devastating effect.
The clearing of great swaths of landscape also exposed to direct sunlight streams that had formerly been heavily shaded. Now algae bloomed as never before, causing snail populations to explode. The snails hosted tiny parasitic worms that harbored schistosomiasis, a horrible disease that leaves its victims chronically prostrate with abdominal pain, high fever, fatigue, and diarrhea. Schistosomiasis had been unknown in the region before Ford came along; after Fordlandia, it was endemic. Malaria, yellow fever, elephantiasis, and hookworm were rife as well.
Agonizing discomfort could come from almost anywhere. The river teemed with a little fish, the candiru, or toothpick fish, which would swim into any available human orifice (most notoriously the penis), then extend prickly, backward-facing spines, making it impossible to dislodge. On land, maggots from the botfly Dermatobia hominis burrowed into the skin and hatched eggs; victims knew of an infestation when they could see wriggling just under their skin or when sores erupted and newborn maggots spilled out.
Beyond the camp boundaries, vipers and jaguars lurked in the undergrowth. The natives were universally hostile. By coincidence, this was the area where the British explorer Percy Fawcett had famously vanished two years earlier with his son and another young Englishman while searching for the mythical lost city of Z. Fawcett had developed a theory—more a fixation really—that a great civilization of pale-skinned people had once existed deep in the rain forests and had left behind a magnificent city that awaited rediscovery. He called the city Z for no reason that he ever explained. He had no evidence for its existence; he was driven purely by intuition. Fawcett may have been slightly mad, but he was an experienced explorer. He had been making expeditions through Amazonia since 1906, so he knew his way around. That he and his two companions vanished without trace was something of a testament to how tough condi
tions were in this part of the world.
One theory was that Fawcett and his companions had been confused with the members of another party of adventurers led by the American Alexander Hamilton Rice, who had been exploring the same area at about the same time (to Fawcett’s extreme irritation). Rice was fabulously rich thanks to marriage to a wealthy widow, Eleanor Widener (who endowed the Widener Library at Harvard). His wife’s money allowed Rice to fund enormous expeditions with all the latest gadgetry. The expedition of 1925 even included an airplane—one of the first archaeological expeditions to do so. Rice used the plane for aerial surveying but also stocked it with bombs to drop on any jungle natives he found difficult or obstreperous. This naturally left the natives disinclined to look favorably on any white people who stumbled into their midst, which may explain poor Fawcett’s unfortunate end.
Considering that Willis Blakeley had three thousand workers at his disposal, his achievements were slight. A small section of road was graded and paved. A clinic and dining hall were built. Accommodation was provided, though it was mostly rough and substandard. Superior houses for American managers were sent in kit form from America, but these had been designed by architects in Michigan and showed a complete lack of understanding of jungle conditions. All were provided with heat-retaining metal roofs instead of the traditional thatch, which made them like ovens. No one at Fordlandia was ever comfortable.
Blakely, having proved largely incompetent, was replaced by Einar Oxholm, a Norwegian sea captain who was described by one impartial observer as a big man with a small mind. Like Blakeley, Oxholm knew nothing about botany, agronomy, the tropics, rubber, or anything else that would help him run a large agricultural operation in the jungle. He was a better human being than Blakeley, but not a more competent one, and merely extended the run of ineffectual management.
During Oxholm’s unhappy time there, four of his own children died from fevers. Oxholm’s maid went bathing in the river one evening and emerged in wide-eyed shock with an arm missing. A caiman had bitten it off. The unfortunate woman bled to death.
Morale, never good, plunged further under Oxholm. Workers were deeply disenchanted over pay and conditions, and mystified by the American foods like oatmeal and Jell-O that they were served in the dining hall (though mercifully Ford did not insist on his workers following his soybean diet). Wages were a particular sore point. Most estate employees had assumed that they would be paid $5 a day, as Ford workers in America were. Instead, they found, their pay was 35 cents a day, and from those meager wages money was deducted for food whether it was eaten or not. The limitations placed on personal freedom—in particular, strictures against drinking—were also much resented, especially when the plantation managers could be seen enjoying cocktails on their verandas of an evening. The upshot was that the employees one night cracked and rioted, running through the camp with machetes, belaying pins, and other dangerous implements. Many of the managers had to escape by boat or flee into the jungle until things calmed down.
Eventually, Ford appointed a Scottish-born manager named Archibald Johnston, who was intelligent and able and made many belated improvements. Shops and a school, better housing, and a clean water supply were all provided. He and his estate managers even managed to get seven hundred thousand rubber trees growing, but only at the cost of keeping them constantly fumigated against insects and diseases. Even so, workers had to be sent out to pick caterpillars off the trees by hand. The costs were out of all proportion to any possible profits. At the same time, the onset of the Great Depression meant that demand and prices both slumped; then, during the Second World War, artificial rubber was developed. In 1945, after nearly twenty years of failed efforts, Ford gave up on its Amazonian dream and essentially gave back its jungle estates to the Brazilian government. Many estate employees didn’t know the Americans were pulling out until the day they departed. In an ultimate irony, the land was eventually taken over by the American company Cargill and today produces great quantities of soybeans, the agricultural product that Henry Ford esteemed above all others.
If things were going badly for Ford in Amazonia, in Detroit they were going even worse. For years, Ford’s son and heir, Edsel, had argued that the Model T should be retired and replaced with something more stylish, but his father more or less reflexively dismissed almost everything Edsel ever said. Indeed, Henry devoted much of his life to humiliating his son. Although he had appointed Edsel president of the company in 1919, when Edsel was just twenty-five years old, Henry routinely belittled Edsel in front of others or countermanded his orders. Once when Edsel had a new set of coke ovens built at the River Rouge factory, Henry waited until the work was finished and then ordered them taken down.
But now with sales plummeting Henry had to acknowledge, if not exactly admit, that the Model T had had its day. On May 26, while the world was in the grip of Lindbergh mania, the Ford Motor Company produced what it claimed was its 15 millionth Model T (in fact, it was at least number 15,348,781, if not more—no one really knew), and immediately stopped production in order to build an entirely new car. For an indefinite period, the world’s largest car manufacturer would have no new products to sell. Sixty thousand Ford employees in Detroit were immediately thrown out of work. Tens of thousands more at assembly plants across America and throughout the world were similarly idled. Most would be out of work for at least six months, many considerably longer. The shutdown was hard on Ford’s long-suffering dealers as well, particularly those with city showrooms with high rents. Many never fully recovered.
Work on the new car was done in the utmost secrecy. Not even the name was revealed. Many guessed that it would be called the Edison after Henry Ford’s close friend and hero the inventor Thomas Edison. Only a few within the company knew that it was to be called the Model A. Rumors abounded as to what was going on within the plant. Henry Ford was said to be living in the factory, sleeping on a camp bed in his office or in one of the workshops. (He wasn’t.) The amount of work involved in producing a new car from scratch was daunting, to say the least. It was almost certainly the biggest industrial retooling ever undertaken anywhere, before or since. The new car would contain 5,580 separate components, nearly all of them brand-new, so all had to be designed afresh—and not just the parts themselves but also several thousand new machines to make the parts. Some of these were enormous. Two power presses stood almost three stories high and weighed 240 tons each.
Remarkably, the company did almost all of the design and retooling without expert guidance, for Henry Ford hated experts and refused to employ them. As he put it in his 1924 book, My Life and Work: “I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts.” Later he added: “We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert—because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job.”
In consequence, Ford had no one on the payroll with advanced engineering or design engineering skills. The company didn’t even have a proving ground—it tested its cars on public highways, to the dismay of the police. Ford’s chief tester, Ray Dahlinger, was a man of very few words. He offered only two terse verdicts on any car: it was either “damn good” or “no damn good.” “You could never get any details from him as to what was wrong or what needed improvement,” sighed one engineer. The company did have a stylish research lab, designed by Albert Kahn, but Henry Ford refused to invest in precision instruments or other useful tools. Much of the space was given over to his experiments with soybeans and other foods.
Ford’s refusal to employ experts was what had doomed Fordlandia and now threatened to doom the Model A. For years, the Model T had been criticized for having unreliable brakes. Many states were beginning to require annual safety inspections, and there were fears within Ford that Model T’s wouldn’t pass the examinations. Germany was reportedly considering banning the Model T outright because of concerns over the brakes’ safety.
For that reason, Lawrence Sheldrick, Ford’s top engineer, made sure new, safer brakes were designed for the new Model A. Henry Ford bitterly resented the idea of outsiders telling him how to make his products, and for some time through the summer refused on principle to let the safer brakes be incorporated into the new car, slowing progress further.
As Charles E. Sorensen, a long-suffering Ford executive, later noted, no rational businessperson would have stopped production of the Model T without having a replacement model designed and ready to go into production. Putting the new car together on the fly, Sorensen calculated, added between $100 million and $200 million to the cost of the changeover. The additional costs of Henry Ford’s intransigence were beyond computation.
On July 26, four days before Henry Ford’s sixty-fourth birthday, General Motors declared first-half earnings of $129 million. No manufacturer had ever made that much money in six months—and that was on sales made before the Ford shutdown. Now with Ford making no cars at all, his competitors had the marketplace all to themselves. How well, or even whether, Ford could recover from such an extended shutdown was a question many within the industry were beginning to ask.
The rest of the world was beside itself with curiosity to know what Henry Ford would come up with as a replacement for the Model T. What the world didn’t know was that many within Ford were just as curious to have that question answered themselves.
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* Wickham returned to England around 1910 to find himself a national hero. He was given a life annuity by the British Rubber Growers’ Association and knighted by the king.