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

by Greg Grandin

  By this point in his life, Ford had become an ardent antiques collector, another one of his eccentricities that the press enjoyed reporting on. The Detroit News ran a steady stream of stories detailing his purchases of old furnaces, musical instruments (particularly violins), clocks, books, tools, kitchen utensils, London churches—anything that could be shipped back to an overflowing warehouse in Ford’s tractor factory. Just that year, Ford had Thomas Edison’s Fort Myers, Florida, workshop—a house built by the inventor’s father in 1884—disassembled and rebuilt in Greenfield Village, a model town Ford had started building in Dearborn composed of important landmarks in American history.

  Now, in his flight from the heat, Ford first headed to a train depot in Fraser, Michigan, where he hoped to acquire the key on which a young Edison had learned how to transmit telegraph messages.

  “What do you want for it?” he asked the stationmaster.

  “Well, I’d like to get delivery on my new Ford. It was ordered a long time ago.”

  “We can fix that up.”

  Ford got his “relic” and the next day the stationmaster received his newly painted Model A. Ford then continued on to New Jersey to celebrate his birthday with the aging Edison in person.9

  Returning to Dearborn a few days later, Ford held a press conference where he told reporters that he himself had driven a good part of the seven-hundred-mile trip in the new Model A. Ford’s birthday corresponded to the silver anniversary of his company, which now employed well over 200,000 men in operations on six continents. It had gone from producing less than two thousand cars a year in its old Mack Avenue workshop to over nine thousand in a single day. “The company’s 25th birthday,” wrote the Wall Street Journal, “finds Henry Ford in the midst of the most intensive period of activity since he first began to dream of horseless carriages.” “Isn’t there an age limit somewhere?” he was asked by a reporter on his return from New Jersey, about not just his endurance behind the wheel but his steerage of his company. “I haven’t found it yet,” Ford answered. He said he expected to “do more in the next five years than I have in the last 20.” “You have got to keep going and doing,” Ford wrote in his notebook.10

  THE ORMOC CUT across Lake Erie to the Welland Canal and Lake Ontario, then out the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic, docking at Kearny, New Jersey, in New York Harbor. There it joined the slower moving Lake Farge, which had left Dearborn two weeks earlier pulled by the tug Bellcamp. The ships picked up additional supplies, along with fourteen passengers—the plantation’s staff and their wives—who had arrived from Detroit by train: a doctor from the Henry Ford Hospital, an electrical engineer, a chemist, an accountant, and “several competent managers.” The Ormoc had plenty of science, brains, and money on board. What it didn’t have was a horticulturalist, agronomist, botanist, microbiologist, entomologist, or any other person who might know something about jungle rubber and its enemies.11

  The ships averaged about a hundred miles a day, stopping in Belém for a few days and then arriving in Santarém in mid-September, in time for a jungle heat wave that for the next three months raised temperatures ten degrees higher than normal. It was an exceptionally dry season, and the Tapajós’s banks were drawn low, exposing a two-meter strip of sand, rock, and cracked clay. As predicted, it would be at least two months, probably longer, before the ships would be able to make the final hundred miles to Boa Vista.12

  Ford executives on the deck of the Lake Ormoc. Left to right: William Cowling; Edsel Ford; Einar Oxholm; Henry Ford; Pete Martin, in charge of production at Highland Park; Charles Sorensen; and Albert Wibel, head of company purchasing.

  For months local newspapers had talked about what would happen “when Ford comes.” Now, a year after the concession’s ratification, the moment had finally arrived. Santarém was founded as a fort in the early seventeenth century, when Portuguese slavers pushed up the Amazon River, obliterating the peaceful Tapajó Indians. Home to a few thousand people in the late 1920s, the city is located where the impressive Tapajós River comes to an end, giving way to the even more imposing Amazon. The juncture of the two rivers sits where the rocky bluffs of Brazil’s southern alluvial shield butt up against the lower and flatter alluvial plain, creating a sheer drop just off Santarém’s shore that allows large vessels like the Ormoc and Farge to pull up close. But despite a natural advantage that made the inland town a deepwater port, residents were used to big ships ignoring them, stopping only for a moment, or not at all, on their way to Manaus or Iquitos. Decades later, Elizabeth Bishop, poet laureate of the United States, visited Santarém and wrote an eponymously titled poem that captured the town’s languid, time-stopping qualities:

  That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;

  more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile

  in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,

  grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.

  Suddenly there’d been houses, people, and lots of mongrel

  riverboats skittering back and forth

  under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,

  with everything gilded, burnished along one side,

  and everything bright, cheerful, casual—or so it looked.

  I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.

  Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung

  from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four

  and they’d diverged. Here only two

  and coming together. . . .

  A long river beach—which Bishop described in a letter to a friend as made of “deep orange sand”—and wharf served as the heart of the city, whose irregular cobblestoned streets, then lined with a mix of close-cropped blue and red stucco and tile houses and thatched straw huts, rise gently from the beach, like aisles away from a stage in an amphitheater. The town had one car, an old rusted Ford truck, and had recently built a small electric plant, which powered a few straggling streetlamps. Facing the river stood the bleached blue and white Nossa Senhora da Conceição, Our Lady of the Conception, the town’s turreted cathedral built in the eighteenth century.13

  The scene rarely changed. Women beat dirty laundry on the beach rocks. Freighters, steamships, fishing boats, and the occasional timber raft vied for dockside space. Small boats filled with birds, monkeys, fruits, and “turtles of mammoth dimension” paddled to intercept ocean liners heading to Manaus. Dockmen hoisted steers onto cattle boats with a harness and a pulley rope. “Two rivers full of crazy shipping—people / all apparently changing their minds, embarking, / disembarking, rowing clumsy dories,” Bishop’s poem continues. There was also the strange confluence of the blue green water of the Tapajós and the muddy brown of the Amazon, each keeping its own color, flowing like two bands for miles without blending. Occasionally, a boat would discharge a fortune seeker or naturalist: Henry Wickham lived just outside the city before gathering the seeds that would doom the Brazilian rubber trade; Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce made significant contributions to nineteenth-century evolutionary theory by using Santarém as a base of operations to send samples of plants and insects back to London’s Kew Gardens.* And during the high-water season, a parade of up-valley debris, the bloated carcasses of alligators and manatees, fallen trees, and even whole islands made of river grass, bromeliads, vines, moss, and philodendrons, floated past the town as the river made its way to the Atlantic.14

  A faded view of Santarém’s waterfront, 1928.

  But that September there was a new show, as onlookers took in the Ford ships and waited to see what they would do next. The Ormoc and Farge were hearty American vessels, about 250 feet long and nearly 50 across. Well provisioned and newly painted, they spoke for Ford’s seriousness of purpose and proven capability. Yet they seemed rather forlorn as they sat in the Tapajós’s massive “mouth-lake”—twelve miles wide and ninety long—which intersected with the Amazon River to create a body of water one anthropologist compared to an “inland sea or one of the North Americ
an Great Lakes.” One could, observed a Ford employee, “drop Lake Houghton, the largest of Michigan’s inland lakes,” into the Tapajós “and still have miles of margin left over.”15

  CAPTAIN OXHOLM, WHO had taken over command from Prinz upon the ships’ arrival in Brazil, considered his options. He could wait a month or so for the waters to rise, but impatient Dearborn wanted to see progress. That meant he had to transfer most of the cargo to smaller launches and use the Bellcamp to tug them to the plantation site. One local company, affiliated with the British Booth Line, offered to do the job for six dollars a ton. This was perhaps the last time Oxholm would be quoted a fair estimate, for in the months ahead, after Ford made the captain chief manager of the plantation, he developed a reputation as a “soft touch” easily fleeced for goods and services. In this instance, though, he declined a reasonable bid. He opted instead to rent lighters and hire labor directly, which not only wasted much valuable time but cost, according to a subsequent audit, roughly thirty-five dollars a ton. With a capacity of 3,800 tons, Oxholm paid out about $130,000 to unload just the Farge.16

  The transfer was slowed because the “special cranes” needed to remove the heavy equipment were packed first, “below all other freight on the ships.” In future shipments, managers urged Rouge workers to “endeavor to use good judgment” in filling the Ormoc so that “articles of general use or which might have several uses can be easily found.” Another reason for delay was that it took at least two days for the Bellcamp to make it up to the construction site and back, teaching the Ford staff an early lesson in the slow rhythms of Amazon life. And even if the tug could go faster, the makeshift dock the advance team had constructed was too small to handle such a massive shipment of material and too wobbly for much of the heavy equipment. Nor was enough of the riverbank cleared to receive the cargo, which led to more bottlenecks. Then there was the confusion of Portuguese-ignorant foremen supervising local laborers, making for what one eyewitness described as good “material for a super Charlie Chaplin film.” Modern Times meets Fitzcarraldo.

  On October 4, the plantation’s representative in Belém cabled Charles Sorensen in Dearborn good news: “Lake Ormoc left Santarém last night bound for plantation.” But later that day he sent a correction: “Report Ormoc leaving Santarém for plantation in error due to misunderstanding. Ormoc still at Santarém.” Then a third: “Water going down instead of rising.”17

  At the end of November, there were still over a thousand tons of equipment on the Farge, and the general chaos of the work got on the crew’s nerves, yielding to “nasty accidents” and scuffles. On the last day of the cargo transfer, “Sailor Stadish” was on the deck of the Ormoc operating a steam winch and teasing “Fireman Patrick,” who was in the hold supervising local workers in a final cleanup. Stadish said something he shouldn’t have, or at least not to someone in the hold of a ship on a day when the thermometer had well passed ninety degrees. He looked up and saw Patrick coming after him with an iron bar. Taking a step back, Stadish fell into an open hatch twenty-five feet, fracturing his skull and breaking a few ribs.18

  It was not an auspicious beginning for a company that hoped to, as Edsel Ford put it, bring “redemption” to the Amazon. It took nearly until the end of January to finally get the ships up to Boa Vista and fully unloaded. And then the trouble really began.

  ____________

  *Though an improbable amount, both the Times and the Los Angeles Times reported this six billion figure, most likely provided by a company press release.

  *It was Spruce who identified and delivered to London a potent variety of cinchona, used to begin cultivation in India to make quinine—described by one official with the East India Company in 1852 as the most valuable medicinal drug in the world, “with probably the single exception of opium.” At Santarém, where Spruce lived for over a year, he documented the local use of guarana—a caffeinelike stimulant prescribed for nervous disorders and thought to be a prophylactic for a variety of diseases—believing it could be introduced into European pharmacies, perhaps as a supplement to tea or coffee (Mark Honigsbaum, The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria, London: Macmillan, 2003, p. 5; Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon & Andes: Being Records of Travel on the Amazon and Its Tributaries, London: Macmillan, 1908, p. 452).

  CHAPTER 10

  SMOKE AND ASH

  AS THEY WAITED FOR THE ORMOC AND THE FARGE TO REACH THEM, Blakeley and Villares set about establishing a work camp just outside the hamlet of Boa Vista and started to clear the jungle. True to the kind of optimism typical of the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s, reinforced by Villares’s constant assurances that he had plantation experience, Blakeley was convinced that the rain forest and its people would soon yield to a “great industrial city” housing twenty-five thousand workers and a hundred thousand residents. The proposed location for this metropolis, on a rise sloping gently to the river, “lends itself well to an economical development of sewage.” Though Blakeley was no more an engineer than his immediate boss, Harry Bennett, he thought building a city would be “a more or less simple matter.” His plan was to allow arriving workers to live in temporary quarters set apart from the main settlement, until pronounced fit by Ford doctors to move into Fordlandia proper. Under company supervision, Brazilians, Blakeley proposed, should be allowed to build their own homes according to local traditions, though he would insist on the construction of proper and sanitary outhouses, which would be an important step in bringing “forth a new race.” He told the American consul in Belém that Ford had given him “carte blanche” to spend up to twelve million dollars, not just to “show some profit for the company” but to “do good” for the Amazon.1

  In a preliminary report to Dearborn, he suggested paying workers between twenty-five and fifty cents a day and teaching them how to grow vegetable and fruit gardens to diversify their diet. Schools and churches would be built later, as the tappers were long used to living and working in isolation, free from religious and educational institutions. Unlike at the Rouge, he did not foresee a discipline problem; Brazilian workers are “most docile,” he wrote. Among his crew, he hadn’t heard the “slightest murmur of Bolshevism.” Not even the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti—which took place just as he and Ide were negotiating the concession with Bentes—aroused their sympathy, Blakeley said.2

  Yet also true to the Ford tradition, Blakeley quickly developed a reputation as an autocrat. During his short reign at Fordlandia “his word was law.” He had set himself up in an old Boa Vista fazenda—Portuguese for hacienda—that was decrepit but well ventilated while the laborers slept outdoors in hammocks or in palm lean-tos and his foremen crammed into a quickly erected, sweltering, malaria-ridden bunkhouse, each given “one room with one door and no window and no bath.” Dearborn first got an inkling that something was wrong when Blakeley tried to take control of the subsidiary corporation Ide had set up as the legal owner of the plantation. “You have not explained why,” company officials wrote him pointedly, “it was necessary to elect yourself managing director.”3

  But where autocracy in other realms of the Ford empire tended to produce some concordance between vision and execution, in the jungle it led to disaster.

  THE FORD MOTOR Company enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for industrial immaculateness. Hundreds of workers painted the Detroit plants on a regular basis. Cleaners scrubbed them as if they were operating rooms, making sure even the most remote corners were well lit, to prevent spitting. “One cannot have morale,” Ford said, “without cleanliness.”4

  Imagine, then, Dearborn’s reception of this very first notice on Fordlandia’s progress: “No sanitation, no garbage cans, flies by the million, all filth, banana peels, orange rinds and dishwater thrown right out on the ground. . . . About 30 men sick out of 104, no deaths but plenty of malaria. . . . Flies abounded in kitchen in all food and on tables and dishes until you could hardly see the food and tables. No screens for men to sleep under, no nets.” The report
was filed by São Paulo’s Ford dealer, Kristian Orberg, after a visit to the camp. Orberg told Dearborn that two creeks bordering the main work site had been converted to a dump, breeding flies and mosquitoes that led to a severe outbreak of malaria. As a result, work came to a standstill for nearly the whole month of August. Food rotted. “They need ICE worst of all,” he said.

  The impending arrival of the Ormoc and Farge promised tractors and other heavy equipment that would ease the work involved in land clearing. But in the meantime Blakeley and Villares tried to make do. In Belém, Blakeley had purchased a few power saws and a small tractor, which he had delivered to the work site. Yet he quickly ran out of gas, so the machines sat idle. After months of labor, with workers cutting and dragging logs by hand, only a few hundred acres of trees had been felled.

  To add to the difficulties, the two men had picked the wrong time of the year to begin work. Ideally, the clearing of jungle for planting or pasture should be done during the dry season, between June and October, when the downed trees can be left to dry for a few months before being burned. But Blakeley and Villares had started felling trees during the wet season. When they tried to torch the waste wood, daily rains would extinguish the fire, leaving soaked piles of charred scrub. So they had to use copious amounts of kerosene to start a second burn, bigger than any yet seen on the Tapajós—or in most other parts of the Amazon, for that matter. The jungle was turned inside out, as flames rose over a hundred feet, forcing tapirs, boars, cougars, boas, pit vipers, and other animals into the open, “crying, screaming, or bellowing with terror.” Toucans, macaws, and parrots took flight, some of them falling back into the flames.5