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

by Greg Grandin

  The founding of Fordlandia was driven by a similar restlessness, a chafing sense that “something had gone wrong” in America. Other company towns, despite their much publicized altruism, lived and died by the economic logic that led to their establishment. Hershey, Cuba, supplied sugar to Hershey, Pennsylvania’s chocolate factories for decades, until 1945, when it made more sense to purchase the crop from independent mills. Fordlandia, however, moved to rhythms set not by supply and demand but rather by the ups and downs of American life, which Henry Ford pledged to reform. Ford’s frustrations with domestic politics and culture were legion: war, unions, Wall Street, energy monopolies, Jews, modern dance, cow’s milk, the Roosevelts, cigarettes, alcohol, and creeping government intervention. Yet churning beneath all these annoyances was the fact that the force of industrial capitalism he helped unleash was undermining the world he hoped to restore.

  FORDLANDIA’S LESSON WOULD seem to be particularly resonant today. With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seems all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination. “What the people of the interior of Brazil need,” he declared at the outset of the project, “is to have their economic life stabilized by fair returns for their labor paid in cash and their mode of living brought up to modern standards in sanitation and in prevention and cure of disease.” This formula worked in Michigan and Ford saw no reason it couldn’t be exported to Brazil. “There will not be,” Ford said, “any great difficulty in accomplishing these things.” Fordism was a term that would go on to have many meanings, but its first usage captured the essence of cocksureness, defined by the Washington Post as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations.”21

  If anything, failure only made Ford and his emissaries more certain. The more Ford’s errand to grow rubber, as originally stated, proved impossible to fulfill, the more he and his company revised their warrant, justifying their Brazilian mission in ever more idealistic terms, especially after the onset of the Great Depression, when the settlement was held up as a Ford-built solution for surviving hard times.

  Two years into the construction of Fordlandia, after visiting the plantation site and witnessing firsthand the chaos that reigned there, one US diplomat stationed in Brazil wrote his superiors in the State Department to try to explain Ford’s ongoing commitment to a “venture which apparently will never be commercially profitable”:

  In the last few months, the writer has arrived at an opinion, based on a number of different facts, which seems to be the only theory which will fit all of these facts. This belief is that Mr. Ford considers the project as a “work of civilization.” This very phrase has been used in correspondence of one of the higher officials of the Detroit office. Nothing else will explain the lavish expenditure of money, at least three million dollars in the last sixteen months, in laying the foundation of what is evidently planned to become a city of two or three hundred thousand inhabitants.

  On the basis of this theory, discarding any interpretation ascribing to the work the character of a purely commercial venture, it is possible to understand many things which are otherwise inexplicable.22

  The journalist Walter Lippmann identified in Henry Ford, for all his peculiarity, a common strain of “primitive Americanism.” The industrialist’s conviction that he could make the world conform to his will was founded on a faith that success in economic matters should, by extension, allow capitalists to try their hands “with equal success” at “every other occupation.” “Mr. Ford is neither a crank nor a freak,” Lippmann insisted, but “merely the logical exponent of American prejudices about wealth and success.”23

  For Lippmann, Ford represented the essence of Americanism not just because he embodied a confidence born of money but also because he reflected “our touching belief that the world is like ourselves.” “Why shouldn’t success in Detroit,” Lippmann asked, “assure success in front of Baghdad?”

  And if Baghdad, then certainly Brazil.

  PART I

  MANY THINGS OTHERWISE INEXPLICABLE

  CHAPTER 1

  UNDER AN AMERICAN FLAG

  OVER A LONG LUNCH AT HENRY FORD’S DEARBORN HOME, FORD listened to Harvey Firestone complain about the British.

  It was July 1925, and Firestone had thrown himself into a campaign to thwart Winston Churchill’s proposed British rubber cartel. For decades, US industry had imported rubber from European, predominately British, colonies in Southeast Asia with little problem. But when prices started to tumble in 1919, Churchill, the British secretary of state for the colonies, endorsed a plan to regulate the production of crude rubber to ensure supply didn’t outstrip demand. The future Tory prime minister would go on to gain a reputation as a steadfast friend of America. But at the time, politicians and industrialists denounced him as an archimperialist and protectionist. Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth called Churchill’s plan an “international swindle.” Tennessee’s Representative Cordell Hull, who would later serve as FDR’s secretary of state, likened the proposed cartel to a “hold-up.”1

  Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover stoked the anger. The man who would soon be president believed America’s rubber supply to be industry’s choke point, more critical in many ways than oil. Petroleum was found in domestic fields in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and California, as well as in neighboring Mexico and Venezuela, within easy reach of US gunboats. But rubber came from a world away, from British, Dutch, and French plantations in Southeast Asia. Just as an increase in the demand for cotton in the nineteenth century reinvigorated America’s slave plantation system, the growing US auto industry’s thirst for rubber breathed new life into European colonialism, which had been weakened by World War I. Revenue from rubber—tapped and processed by cheap coolie labor—helped Amsterdam, London, and Paris bind their colonies in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indochina tighter into their imperial system, with the profits from the sale of latex helping England and France pay off their war debt. Hoover warned American manufacturers—not just of cars but of any machine that used latex—that their supply of rubber was too dependent on old, imperialist Europe and that they could be subject to a “supercharge” of more than a half billion dollars if Holland and France were to join the proposed British cartel. He pointed out that if the United States adopted the same production restrictions and price controls that London was imposing on its rubber, the price of wheat would go from $1.50 to $8.00 a bushel in foreign markets. The secretary of commerce urged US manufacturers to invest in rubber cultivation in Latin America and funded scientific expeditions into the Amazon to offset their research costs. Business leaders, though, largely responded with indifference to Hoover’s alarm. Except for Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford.2

  “I am going to fight this law with all the strength and vigor that is in me,” Firestone pledged, and he asked Ford to join with him in organizing a rubber association. He had tried this before. In February 1923, he convened a “national conference of rubber, automotive, and accessory manufacturers.” Over two hundred industrialists, including Ford, gathered in Washington at the Willard Hotel to hear Firestone make his declaration of “economic independence” from London. “Rubber under an American flag,” he proclaimed, as his audience listened politely to a plan to create an American Cooperative Association. Capitalized at $50 million, the cooperative would establish plantations in Latin America and the Philippines to bust the “small coterie of British shareholders in plantation interests.” “We must,” Firestone urged his fellow industrialists, “act immediately.”3

  But they didn’t. Neither Hoover nor Firestone could raise much worry among America’s corporate leaders. Firestone’s colleagues at B. F. Goodrich, Goodyear, and U.S. Rubber worked closely with the British and didn’t want to contribute to American Anglophobia, which seemed to be fueling much of the rubber feud. Besides, despite all their talk in support of free enterprise and open markets, they w
ere generally in favor of the right to monopoly. Stuart Hotchkiss, president of U.S. Rubber, actually admitted to favoring Churchill’s cartel. He thought it represented a mature rejection of a juvenile faith in the laws of free supply and demand and laughed at Firestone’s warnings of war with Great Britain. It was so “unthinkable that if it should occur, there would not be much use in anything.”4

  Henry Ford, dependent as he was on rubber, shared Firestone’s concern. The auto industry relied as much on vulcanized rubber as on oil, using processed latex not just for tires but for the hoses, valves, gaskets, and electrical wires needed to run the increasingly complex internal combustion engines, steering assemblages, and shock absorption systems, as well as for the machines that made the cars. The mileage of paved roads in the United States increased rapidly after World War I, reducing tire wear and tear. And during the first two decades of the twentieth century, design improvements extended the average life of a tire more than sixfold. Yet by 1925, the total number of tires sold in the United States hit an all-time high, and by the end of the decade the value of all rubber sold in the country surpassed a billion dollars, with more than 70 percent of it used to manufacture tires, about fifty million of them a year.5

  Already by 1924, Ford had considered growing his own rubber in the “muck lands” of the Florida Everglades. Rumors of his interest in Florida prompted Detroit speculators to organize the Florida and Cape Cod Realty Company to scoop up and subdivide large tracts of land in the town of Labelle, offering lots for sale at seventy-five dollars a piece. “No doubt,” wrote an investigator from the Michigan Securities Commission, “a good many Ford employees will be buncoed, as they will undoubtedly buy lots on the strength of Mr. Ford’s supposed rubber experiment.” But the project didn’t advance much beyond a few plantings of rubber figs and rubber vines to see if industrial amounts of sap could be tapped from their trunks.6

  Rubber-trust busters: Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone.

  So through the course of lunch Ford listened to Firestone’s harangue. He had heard it before, including Firestone’s prophecy that the British would increase the price of rubber to an astonishing $1.20 a pound, even though at that moment it had floated down to about twenty cents. “Well, you know what to do about that,” he finally shouted. “Grow your own rubber!”7

  Ford liked Firestone and considered him not just an industry colleague but a friend. They had met in Detroit in 1895, when Ford walked into the Columbus Buggy Works, where Firestone worked as a sales agent, and ordered a set of sturdy carriage tires that wouldn’t burst under his just built 500-pound gas-propelled automobile. Five years later, Harvey founded the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, and over the next two decades he worked in close partnership with Ford to develop tire technology—a detachable rim, diagonal nonskid thread patterns that allowed increased speeds, and a low-pressure balloon tire that dramatically increased mileage per gallon, thus lowering the cost of owning a car—that complemented Ford’s goal of delivering a cheap, well-built car to the masses.8

  But Ford was not an association man. Unlike northeastern corporate elites on the model of Hotchkiss, Ford, who grew up on a Dearborn farm, disliked collective action. In June 1926, despite a personal plea from General Motors’ chairman, John Raskob, he refused to attend a meeting of Detroit’s major car company executives called to figure out how to bypass antitrust legislation prohibiting the auto industry from importing rubber collectively. Raskob was an ally of Pierre du Pont, another GM director, and Ford had long felt persecuted by the patrician du Ponts. He did show up at Firestone’s Washington conclave and funded a few joint projects with the tire maker to explore the possibility of growing rubber in Nicaragua. And the two men underwrote Thomas Edison’s slow-going efforts to develop what Edison had taken to calling “war rubber”—that is, synthetic or organic alternatives to rubber, made from milkweed maybe or goldenrod. But he did nothing to help his friend realize his rubber association. “Mr. Ford,” remarked his longtime personal secretary, Ernest Liebold, “wouldn’t consider a thing like joining an organization of rubber producers. . . . He never wanted to ally himself with anybody else in connection with any specific activities.”9

  When the lunch was over, Ford held Liebold back out of earshot. “Find out,” he whispered to his bespectacled aide, “where is the best place to grow rubber.”10

  Liebold threw himself into the task. He read everything he could on rubber, including reports supplied by the Department of Agriculture and Hoover’s commercial attachés stationed in Brazil. He also took a crash course in African history and fairly quickly concluded that Liberia, where Firestone, unable to rouse interest in his rubber collective, would soon establish a plantation, was too unstable to suit Ford’s interest. Latex, thought Liebold, the American-born son of German Lutheran parents, should be cultivated “where the people themselves have reached a higher state of civilization.” Ford’s secretary decided that this ruled out Liberia, a country “composed entirely of Negroes whose mentality and intellectual possibilities are quite low.”

  “Rubber should be grown where it originated,” Liebold concluded. And that meant the Amazon.

  THE SOUTHERN HALF of the Amazon basin, running from the Atlantic mouth of the river through Brazil and into Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, is home to Hevea brasiliensis, the species of rubber tree that provides the most elastic and purest latex. From the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, the Brazilian Amazon supplied nearly all of the world’s rubber, demand for which steadily increased as the Industrial Revolution in the United States and Europe took off. At the height of the rubber boom, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Amazonian latex made up 40 percent of Brazil’s total exports and supplied most of the rubber used for gaskets, valves, belts, wire insulation, carriage, bicycle, and automobile tires, boots, shoes, raincoats, condoms, and elastic garters. Latex lords grew magnificently wealthy, building opulent palatial homes and gilded jungle cities. With their Beaux Arts palaces, neoclassical municipal buildings, electric trams, wide Parisian boulevards, and French restaurants, the cities of Manaus, located about nine hundred miles up the Amazon River, and Belém, the region’s principal Atlantic port, competed for the title of “tropical Paris.”11

  Manaus is famous for its hulking Amazonas Theater, an opera house built of Italian marble and surrounded by roads made of rubber so the carriage clatter of late arrivals wouldn’t interrupt the voices of Europe’s best tenors and sopranos. Finished in 1896, it reportedly cost more than two million dollars to construct. Money flowed freely during the boom, and Manaus’s better classes imported whatever they could at whatever price. American explorers found that they could sell their used khakis for five times what they paid for them at home, once they grew tired of parading around the city in their jungle gear.* With more movie theaters than Rio and more playhouses than Lisbon, Manaus was the second city in all of Brazil to be lighted by electricity, and visitors who came upon it from the river at night during the last years of the nineteenth century marveled at its brilliance in the midst of darkness, “pulsating with the feverish throb of the world.” But not just light made Manaus and Belém, also electrified early, modern. Their many dark spaces provided venues for quintessentially urban pleasures. Roger Casement, Britain’s consul in Rio, who later would become famous for his anti-imperialist and antislavery activities, wrote in his diary in 1911 about cruising Manaus’s docks, picking up young men for anonymous sex. Belém, for its part, wrote a Los Angeles Times correspondent in 1899, had an “amount of vice” that would shock the “reformers of New York,” most of which could be found in its many cafes and cabarets, as well as its best brothel, the High Life Hotel, which is “devoted to the life of the lowest order” and which Brazilians pronounced, according to the journalist, as “Higgy Liffey.”12

  A contemporary view of the opera house in Manaus, the tropical Paris.

  From start to finish, the production of rubber that made such
affluence possible represented an extreme contrast to the industrial method pioneered by Henry Ford in Michigan. Hevea brasiliensis can grow as high as a hundred feet, standing straight with an average girth, at breast height, of about one meter in diameter. It’s an old species, and during its millennia-long history there likewise evolved an army of insects and fungi that feed off its leaves, as well as mammals that eat its seeds. In its native habitats of Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, it best grows wild, just a few trees per acre, far enough apart to keep bugs and blight at bay; would-be planters soon learned that the cultivation of large numbers of rubber trees in close proximity greatly increased the population of rubber’s predators. The extraction and processing of latex, therefore, was based not on developing large plantations or investing in infrastructure but rather on a cumbersome and often violent system of peonage, in which tappers were compelled to spread out through the jungle and collect sap.