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

by Greg Grandin

  NEWS THAT FORD had completed the deal prompted wild speculation as to his ability to revive the Amazon’s economy. Modernizers, both those from São Paulo like Consul de Lima but also many from the Amazon, hoped that Ford’s plan for capital-intensive, high-wage industrial development would overcome the jungle’s poverty and backwardness, which many understood to be rooted in its extractive debt economy. National and local newspapers reported that Ford would build a railroad linking the interior to the Atlantic, roads that would flank the jungle’s many rivers, and electric trolley lines running up and down both banks of the Tapajós, all allowing easy access to the Atlantic market for the state’s agricultural products.* Rumors circulated in the press about how big Ford’s city would be (the biggest in the Amazon, most agreed), the amount of money he intended to spend ($40 million, reported one paper), and how many workers he would hire (at least fifty thousand, wrote another). The Amazon would finally become, as Humboldt predicted, the “world’s granary.” On news of Ford’s imminent arrival, Belém’s municipal government paved roads, filled potholes, and laid new sidewalks; the city began to rouse itself, “just like an old broken-down fire horse when he sniffs smoke. The moment somebody says ‘rubber’ out loud there is a sudden stir in all the old river towns.”12

  In the press frenzy surrounding the concession, Ford was a symbol of hope but also a flashpoint of conflict, as many began to question his motives. Members of Brazil’s intellectual and political class were often strongly nationalistic. They admired US industry and needed US capital, but they distrusted Washington’s intentions. Not an unreasonable fear, considering that even as Ford was organizing his rubber project, US marines were occupying Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. And the death of Henry Wickham—now generally known around Belém as “Henry the First”—in September 1928, widely reported in the Brazilian press just as Ford’s men were getting under way, reminded many of an earlier treachery.13

  The tension between the promise of development and the fear of loss of sovereignty was especially acute in the Amazon, over which Rio had but a precarious hold—as witnessed by the prolonged Cabanagem Revolt. The vast rain forest seemed to attract international intrigue, both rumored and real. In 1850, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the head of the US Naval Observatory, floated perhaps the first of what would be a long history of schemes to transfer the Amazon to some jurisdiction other than Brazil’s.* In the hope that the United States could both avoid a civil war and keep its expanding cotton industry, Maury proposed that Washington transfer the entire southern plantation economy—slaves, slavers, and livestock—to the lower Amazon valley. The question Maury asked was whether the Amazon would “be peopled with an imbecile and an indolent people or by a go ahead race that has the energy and enterprise equal to subdue the forest and to develop and bring forth the vast resources that lie hidden there.”† “How men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazon,” waxed another American observer in 1910.14

  And so after an initial flush of enthusiasm the press in Rio and Pará criticized the concession’s vagueness and undue generosity. It was a “monstrous contract,” wrote the initially sympathetic Folha do Norte, a “most shameful document.”15 That Ford was required to plant rubber on only one thousand of the two and a half million acres granted led some to suggest that what the “multimillionaire Yankee” was really interested in was not latex but oil, gold, and political leverage. Much of this early criticism was really an attack on the man who originally brokered the concession, Governor Dionysio Bentes, a powerful local party boss with many friends, quite a few enemies, and higher political aspirations. Critics blasted the secrecy in which the concession had been negotiated and its lavish tax and tariff exemptions. They noted that the estate’s autonomous bank, schools, and police force violated Brazil’s sovereignty. It was, they pointed out, as if Ford had the right to run Fordlandia as a separate state.16

  In provincial Santarém, newspapers reported on the debates with wry detachment that seemed to have eluded their more earnest counterparts in Belém or Rio. “When Ford Comes” is the “catchphrase of the day,” one wrote of the excitement that was building over the arrival of the carmaker, with everybody dreaming of the money to be made and the marriages to be had. The same kind of Christ-like hope placed by rural people in the coming of a redeemer that so troubled Senator Norris in Tennessee was not lost on the Santarém press, which occasionally referred to the savior as São Ford—Saint Ford. “We use the word Ford,” wrote one columnist, “as if it were an amulet, a protective talisman, if not to get rich than at least to get out of the tight situation we find ourselves in.” He went on to suggest that perhaps sausages and toilet paper should bear the name of Ford, as well as a new cocktail, made up of açaí—a local berry believed to be an aphrodisiac—and American “uísque,” that is, “whiskey.”

  But the scorn and sarcasm were largely lost on the many who continued to believe that Ford’s arrival meant the salvation of the Amazon.17 A Ford car was a cultural symbol the world over, weighted with meaning and familiar to even those who existed on the margins of survival, even if they lived in a place empty of roads, dirt or otherwise, like the Tapajós River valley. “Now I am finally going to learn how to drive,” was one tapper’s response to the news that Ford was starting a rubber plantation there. And throughout the lower Amazon, those looking for work simply said they were on their way to “Ford”—or, rather, “For,” as it was pronounced in the regional Portuguese. They might use the masculine “o For,” to refer to the man, or the feminine “a For,” to indicate the company or plantation, but either way the meaning was clear: “Eu vou prá For”—“I’m going to Ford.”18

  And they hoped Ford would come to them as well, to see Brazil and the wondrous Amazon firsthand. Consul de Lima kept promising he would deliver Ford. He said the carmaker was to have visited as early as 1922 but a failed military uprising interrupted his trip. “With the approach of the winter,” de Lima wrote Dearborn in November 1925, “I wonder if you could inform me at about what time you would be ready to leave for Brazil?” Ernest Liebold’s response was not encouraging: “I could not say definitely at this time whether Mr. Ford will be able to undertake this trip to Brazil.” Another secretary followed up yet another inquiry: “Mr. Ford has not yet made any definite plans concerning the trip you mention, consequently we are unable to give you the desired information.” Not to worry, the consul assured his fellow countrymen in late 1927, for now that the negotiations surrounding the rubber concession had been concluded to everyone’s satisfaction, “it is in the cards that very soon we may have a visit from Mr. Ford,” most likely in his “famous yacht that goes 20 knots an hour.” “Perhaps,” de Lima hoped, “he will come with his old friend Mr. Edison.”19

  Ford said he would come. “I certainly intend to visit,” he promised in 1928, “though I cannot now say how soon.”

  ____________

  *Brazilians were not the only ones to see opportunity in Ford’s project. Dearborn received letters from around the world offering to sell Ford cheap land or share visionary ideas. Leslie Evans, of Battle Creek, Michigan, for example, wrote to the carmaker of his plan to create a system of rail and river transportation throughout Brazil completely powered by biofuel made from the babassu palm nut, which “grows abundantly in a wild state” in the Amazon. The idea was “worth millions,” according to Evans, who said that he himself would build the babassu-powered trains and ships and all Ford would have to do to earn a part of the proceeds was to put him in touch with the proper Brazilian officials and guarantee that the lines would not operate at a loss (BFRC, accession 74, box 13, “General Correspondence”).

  *Brazilians understandably chafed when Al Gore recently said that “contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us.” During World War II, Nelson Rockefeller recommended building a series of large canals connecting Venezuela’s Orinoco delta to the Amazon and beyond to Argentina’s Rio de La Plata,
as a way of making sure that Latin American raw materials could get to US factories directly, without having to travel the German submarine–infested Atlantic. And in 1965, the futurist Herbert Kahn, founder of the conservative Hudson Institute think tank, recommended that the United States, as part of its anticommunist economic modernization policy for Latin America, dam the Amazon to create five “Great Lakes,” to spur industrial development and generate electricity, not just for Brazil but for all of South America (Herman Kahn, “New Focus on the Amazon,” New York: Hudson Institute, 1965; Michael Goulding, Nigel J. H. Smith, and Dennis J. Mahar, Floods of Fortune: Ecology and Economy along the Amazon, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 47; Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon; Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

  †Maury’s proposal reflected the US South’s hope that expansion into the Caribbean or Latin America, by seizing Cuba or parts of Central America, could save slavery. Its politicians and merchants pushed Brazil to allow for free navigation up the Amazon, arguing that the South American river was really an extension of the Mississippi. In 1849, the Richmond, Virginia–based Southern Literary Messenger wrote that since Atlantic currents sweep its waters north into the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon “may very properly be regarded as one of the tributaries” to “this our noble sea,” the Caribbean. Just as the Mississippi Valley worked as the “escape valve” for slavers migrating from abolitionist states, believed the Virginian Maury, “so will the Amazon Valley be that to the Miss.”

  PART II

  LORD FORD

  CHAPTER 9

  TWO RIVERS

  SHORTLY AFTER THE NEW YEAR’S DAY THAT FOLLOWED THE ratification of the land grant, Henry Ford wired Governor Bentes to wish him well for 1928 and to thank him for the “fine assistance” he had extended to Ide and Blakeley. “We are at present working out plans,” he wrote, “and are fitting up a ship of our own for the voyage” to the plantation to “inaugurate the nucleus of a project which we trust will contribute to the prosperity of North Brazil.”1

  The ship in question was the Lake Ormoc, one of 199 decommissioned merchant marine vessels purchased in 1925. Throughout the 1920s, River Rouge managers pioneered techniques of industrial recycling, scouring through the detritus of government and commerce for reusable resources. Ford was obsessed with finding as many ways as possible to use nature’s bounty. Just a few months after wiring Bentes, for instance, Ford was in England to promote his new Model A. Told that a garbage dump in Dagenham, Essex, had been burning for over a thousand years, he proposed building a powerhouse on the site to transform its heat into steam to run his nearby factory. “This dump goes back to prehistoric times,” he said. “Those fires have been burning away, wasted absolutely, all these centuries. I would like to see them working for man.”2

  In the case of the Ormoc, the ship was part of a fleet of “lakers” decommissioned by Washington after World War I and sitting rusting for years in seaports along the East Coast, until Ford acquired them at a cut rate. Under the direction of Charles Sorensen, Ford’s legendary engineer who ran production at the Rouge, the ships were towed to Dearborn, stripped of brass, copper, piping, wires, and wood, then sent through a massive half-mile-long aquatic disassembly line. The line was composed of ten positions fitted with wrecking cranes, industrial torches, and giant shears, each charged with shredding a different ship section: masts, deck cabins, boilers, engines, hulls, and keels. Boilers and engines were refurbished and used elsewhere, and cabins became tool sheds and stockrooms. Railcars rolled the sheared steel to the Rouge’s pig-cast building, where it was melted in enormous blast furnaces and shipped to the foundry. It took less than a week to render what it took months to build, leaving only a shadow of “oil and rust on the water.” “What we call waste is only surplus,” Ford once remarked, “and surplus is only the starting point of new uses.”3

  Two ships were spared. Rouge workers gave the Lake Ormoc a new diesel motor, a machine shop, and water distillation plant, both for drinking and boiler use. They refitted the ship’s mechanics, reducing the number of men needed to sail it from twenty-four to six. The captain’s desk and dining table, his shower, and bedsprings for the crew’s mattresses were all made of material recycled from other salvaged ships. As the proposed “base ship” until Fordlandia was up and running, the Ormoc was equipped with a hospital and an operating room, chemistry lab, refrigerators, laundry, a “well stocked library,” lounge, and screened, relatively spacious cabins. The Lake Farge was converted into a tow barge, to be used to haul most of the makings of Fordlandia to the Tapajós.4

  In early July, boxcars began to pull alongside the Rouge’s slip and cranes and winches started to fill the holds of the Ormoc and Farge with the machinery and material needed to start and maintain the plantation: a steam shovel, electric generators, road-building machinery, tractors (some with threaded wheels), picks, shovels, a stone crusher, a huge ice-making machine, hospital equipment, concrete mixers, a sawmill, pile drivers and stump pullers, a diesel tug, smaller river launches, prefabricated buildings, an entire disassembled warehouse recycled from Ford’s Highland Park factory, piles of structural steel precut and fitted for the quick construction of buildings, asbestos to be used as a roofing material to deflect the sun’s rays, plumbing fixtures, office supplies, clothes, medicine, and food, including a “huge supply of frozen beef” and vegetables to “obviate any necessity of recourse to native tropical diet.” There was even a railroad—a locomotive, rails, and ties—salvaged from Ford’s Upper Peninsula sawmill operations, which by then used mostly Ford trucks to transport timber. It was a million dollars worth of goods all told.5

  Unfortunately, the Rouge’s synchronized industrial efficiency didn’t always spill over to the company’s administration. No one told Sorensen that an underwater rock ledge cut across the Tapajós fifty miles downriver from where they planned to establish the plantation, making it impossible for ships the size of the Ormoc to reach the site during the dry season, when the water was low.

  “Where are you going to send this boat?” Ernest Liebold asked Sorensen, who had called Ford’s secretary over to the Rouge to have him take a look at the newly equipped Ormoc.

  “Down to the plantation,” Sorensen replied.

  “You can’t get up there.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve got a rock ledge that goes across there, and you’ve only got nine feet for navigation.”

  “How did you find that?”

  “Well, that information was available. If you had told me you were going to send the Ormoc down there, I might have told you.”6

  Sorensen didn’t believe Liebold, so he asked Einar Oxholm, a Norwegian sea captain sent by Ford to do advance work to check it out. Oxholm reported back that there was indeed a “shoal in the river” that made it “impossible for anything over nine feet in draft to move up at low water period.”

  ANYWHERE BETWEEN SIXTY and a hundred inches of water fall in the Amazon every year, mostly during the high-water season, which runs from December to June but often lingers on through July and August. To keep with the standard most often used by the Ford men, that’s four times more precipitation than what the US Midwest gets in any year. Rain combines with melting Andean snow to swell the Amazon and its tributaries during these months, and rivers rise as much as thirty-six feet, overflowing into the jungle’s floodplains, or várzea, leaving behind a coating of rich mountain soil that during the subsequent low-water season will nourish cultivated manioc, corn, beans, and other jungle crops. During the flood months, the jungle takes on a netherworld, shape-shifting quality, as plateaus and hills become islands and trees seem to float erect, each an ecosystem to itself, alive with lichens, moss, algae, insects, snakes, bats, and mammals. From December to June, much of the Amazon basin forms a vast but seasonal freshwater lake, what the Portuguese called a sea river, that constantly reworks the contour of the land. During the
se months, the Ormoc and Farge could easily make it up the Tapajós to the plantation site.

  But the ships were ready to go at the end of June, and back in Brazil Blakeley and Villares’s advance team had already started to clear the plantation site and they needed the heavy equipment. So Ford decided to dispatch the Ormoc and Farge despite Oxholm’s advice to wait until the rainy season. They would at least make it as far as Santarém, about a hundred miles downriver from Boa Vista, the sleepy river village of a few dozen families picked to be the “capital of Fordlandia.” In these early days, “Fordlandia” referred not to the plantation settlement but rather to the entirety of Ford’s 2.5 million acres.7

  With Captain K. E. Prinz at the helm, the Lake Ormoc left the Rouge dock on July 26, three days before Ford’s sixty-fifth birthday. Its departure was an event momentous enough to earn front-page applause in most every major US daily. All of Brazil, announced the Detroit News, was eagerly awaiting the two ships loaded with “science, brains, and money.” “Brazilian Area Bigger Than New Jersey Expected to Yield Gum to Make Tires for 2,000,000 Cars Yearly,” ran the Washington Post’s headline. The Christian Science Monitor said that Ford planned to plant five million acres with rubber, while the New York Times predicted that the estate would eventually produce “five times the total world production estimated by experts for this year,” or “6,000,000,000 pounds of rubber a year, enough to make nearly 1,000,000,000 Ford tires.”8*

  Despite this fanfare, Ford, usually loath to miss a publicity opportunity, skipped the send-off. A week earlier, he and Edsel had taken the Ormoc out on a trial run down the Rouge River into Lake Erie. But now, a heat wave had settled over lower Michigan, killing scores of people. Defying the Amazon’s dry season from a world away was one thing. Suffering Detroit’s humidity in the flesh was another, so Ford escaped the city by taking off on one of his road trips.