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

by Greg Grandin

  CHAPTER 11

  PROPHESIED SUBJECTION

  FOLLOWING REEVES BLAKELEY’S DISMISSAL AND THE NOVEMBER riot, Charles Sorensen suggested to Henry Ford that he appoint Captain Einar Oxholm as Fordlandia’s manager. Born in 1892 in Fredrikshald, Norway, near the border with Sweden, Oxholm ran away from home when he was thirteen to join the merchant marine, working his way up from cabin boy to deck hand, then to command of his own ship with the New Orleans–based United Fruit Company. After reading a notice in a local paper in early 1928 that the Ford Motor Company was hiring ship crews, he traveled to Dearborn. Henry Ford gave him a job on the spot and sent him to the Amazon with Blakeley’s advance team. Word had not yet reached Dearborn of Oxholm’s clumsy unloading of the Ormoc and Farge, so the carmaker took Sorensen’s recommendation.

  Oxholm had no experience in tropical botanics or plantation management. But this didn’t trouble Ford, who disdained specialization and expertise. He liked to brag that his company never employed an “expert in full bloom” because they “always know to a dot just why something cannot be done.” “None of our men are ‘experts,’ ” Ford said. “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.”1

  Much of this contempt was pure posture, for Ford in fact hired experts, from lawyers and doctors to sea captains. Yet he did have famed luck entrusting complex missions, even industry-transforming tasks, to people with intuitive engineering intelligence. It was not a trained metallurgist but a former factory sweeper, John Wandersee, who perfected the alloy process for vanadium, the breakthrough lightweight steel compound that made the Model T possible. Ford’s “pioneering spirit,” as Albert Wibel, the company’s purchasing chief, put it, allowed him to take chances on unproven men. “He thought of it in terms of common sense.”2

  For Ford, the Lutheran Oxholm did have one quality that made him perfect for the job: a reputation for absolute honesty. Stories from Brazil of corruption and kickbacks troubled Dearborn officials, as did reports of drinking and prostitution, not just by Brazilians but by Ford men.

  Ford, then, charged Oxholm not just with taking over what Blakeley had started but putting an end to what he had let fester. It was Sorensen, a fellow Scandinavian, who gave Oxholm his brief: “I am of the opinion that the difficulties you are up against will gradually clear up if you confine yourself strictly to the principles of the Ford Motor Company, which are absolutely honest in every direction you are dealing,” he wrote. “It is on this one point that I am depending so much upon yourself, because at home, while we feel your lack of experience in matters of this kind, we are, however, strongly of the opinion that we can depend upon your honesty. The experience that is required will come by keeping this point in mind at all times, and doing the work in accordance with strict Ford principles.”3

  OXHOLM MAY HAVE been honest, but honesty is not a required jungle virtue. Nor would strict Ford principles help him interpret local expectations.

  He refused the reasonable bid by a shipping firm to unload the Ormoc and Farge, instead spending over a hundred thousand dollars to do himself what others would have done for a fraction of the cost, because he didn’t want to seem an easy mark. Worse still, his strict reading of his orders inflamed the import duty issue. Little contretemps that could have been settled with a bit of charm in his hands turned into an exhausting fight that lasted three years. Brazilian law stated that when custom inspectors needed to travel outside their stationed port of entry to examine cargo, the owners of the merchandise were responsible for paying about $2.50 for their room and board. But when Belém’s inspectors, having traveled to Santarém to inventory the holds of the Ormoc and Farge, requested the fee, Oxholm thought he was being tapped for a bribe. He indignantly refused to pay it, leading the port authorities to harden their assessment on future Ford imports.4

  A “big man” with a “weak mind,” as one of his assistants remembered him, Oxholm, having wasted nearly three months unloading the Ormoc and Farge, only continued Blakeley’s “chaos” and “mismanagement” at Fordlandia, according to the US consul in Belém.5 By January, with the Ormoc and Farge finally at the plantation site and order restored after the riot—thanks to a “quantity of arms and munitions, including machine guns,” sent by Brazilian authorities, as one local newspaper reported—Oxholm began to hire more men.6 By the end of 1929, the Brazilian workforce at Fordlandia had grown from a few hundred to over a thousand. Workers poured in from all over the country, and boats arrived every day bringing more. “We are steadily increasing the force,” Oxholm told Dearborn. Yet even as the number of employees continued to climb, progress toward making the plantation an efficient productive unit faltered.

  Oxholm had started construction on an administrative office, a makeshift hospital, and workshops, hoping to establish a temporary settlement until a good patch of jungle could be cleared and enough rubber planted to meet the terms of the contract. Then he would devote himself to surveying a street grid for the town and building “proper houses according to blue prints.” But in the meantime, single workers crammed into hastily built, poorly ventilated bunkhouses, and married families threw up ramshackle houses along the work site’s edge, using discarded planks from packing crates for walls and palm thatch or canvas tarps for roofs. “We are having a hard time,” Oxholm admitted to Dearborn in December 1929, making “this place look as a Ford plant should.”7

  * * *

  THE CAPTAIN’S MAIN problem was labor: getting it, keeping it, and managing it. It would be years before the estate needed rubber tappers, but the company still required as many men as it could hire to clear the jungle. Oxholm had to have at least a thousand acres planted by July 1929, as per the terms of the concession. He also needed men to level roads and the bed for the railway and to build the physical plant and town residences.

  In the first months of his tenure, Oxholm hired thousands of workers. But he had trouble retaining them. During some weeks in 1929, particularly through June, July, and August, the turnover rate equaled that of the Ford Motor Company back in Highland Park in the years prior to the Five Dollar Day. Three times as many workers were quitting as were being hired, which meant that the plantation’s managers and foremen had to spend a good part of their day training new workers to adjust to the regimentation of plantation labor.

  Oxholm couldn’t tell Dearborn why he was having such a hard time building and keeping a steady labor force. “We have lately lost quite a number of men without being able to obtain any special reason,” he wrote to the home office in June. Foremen were powerless to stop workers getting on boats and leaving. Most refused to say why they were quitting, but Oxholm believed they didn’t want to work during the dry season, which was also the insect season, “when the fever is most prevalent.” He tried to make “these people understand that this place is far healthier than the places where many of them live, swampy regions, where nothing is done to subdue the mosquitoes, and where there is no medical attention within reach.” But perhaps having survived, or heard of, the malaria epidemic that crippled the camp the year before—when Blakeley refused to provide the sick with quinine—they didn’t listen.

  Other Americans who spent time on the plantation thought the low retention rate had to do with the fact that living was too easy in the bountiful jungle, or at least they thought it was. A long tradition of Amazon travel writing attributed the region’s supposed lethargy to its fecundity, which, by easily yielding its nutritional riches, was said to encourage idleness. Though the genre would become mostly associated with nineteenth-century Victorian travel and naturalist writers, one of the first Europeans to appreciate the satiating richness of Amazonian life was the man for whom the Americas were named, Amerigo Vespucci, who upon sailing up the Amazon in 1499 said that he “fancied himself to be near the terrestrial paradise.” “One turtle suffices to satisfy the largest family,” wrote Father Cristóbal de Acuña a
century and a half later. “These barbarians never know what hunger is.” If daily life could simply be picked off a tree, there was little incentive to harness the resources of the jungle to set productive forces loose. “When they got a little money they would just take off,” the Michigan wife of one early Fordlandia administrator recalled. Workers would amble into the woods and bring “out avocados which grew wild. Wild bananas are sweet, yellow and are used for desserts. The natives would bring back grapefruits, oranges and papaya and lima beans. . . . Beans grow about ten times the size of their Michigan relatives. The orange was bigger than the grapefruit. . . . Fishing was wonderful. This gives you an idea of how simple it was for the natives to live.” The sawyer Matt Mulrooney thought the natives the “richest people in the world. . . . All they had ever seen was the woods and water. They didn’t know anything about work.” Having come to the United States as a boy with his family from Ireland to escape famine, Mulrooney, but a generation removed from peasant labor himself, appreciated the Amazon’s abundance. “There is pears, oranges and bananas,” he said. “Right in front of the house where I lived, bananas were growing.” People “could go out Sunday and kill monkeys. They had monkey meat there the year around. The woods was full of them. You could go out there with a gun and in twenty minutes have a monkey. They didn’t have guns. They got them with a slingshot.”8

  That Ford paid wages, as opposed to advancing credit, did seem to undercut the plantation’s ability to ensure a stable labor force. Once a worker accumulated enough savings to live on for a few months, there was little incentive to stop him from returning home to his family and tending to his crops. “There was nothing down there to absorb their earnings,” said Ernest Liebold, acknowledging that the Amazon lacked a key ingredient of Fordism: something to buy. David Riker, who for a time served as one of Fordlandia’s labor recruiters, had a similar view. He had difficulty finding workers, since as long as Brazilians could live without wages they resisted the “Ford machine.”9

  Others attributed worker flight to abusive foremen, bad food, and continued poor housing conditions. Years earlier, Ford, during his animated conversation with Brazilian diplomat José Custódio Alves de Lima, said he had every intention of paying his celebrated Five Dollar Day wage, a promise de Lima repeatedly published throughout Brazil to build support for the coming of Ford. But in its many overseas operations, the Ford Motor Company tended to pay a notch above the prevailing wage, which is what it intended to do in the Amazon, notwithstanding Ford’s showboating.

  This, thought the American consul in Belém, was possibly one of the reasons for the high turnover rate, as workers who showed up thinking that they would be getting five dollars a day were disappointed to receive thirty-five cents.10

  LABOR RECRUITERS FANNED out through the region’s maze of rivers, creeks, and lakes but found the going exasperatingly slow. “It is hard to get around as fast as one would like,” said James Murray, a Scottish recruiter who was sailing around the confluence of the Tapajós and the Amazon near Santarém. Traveling through Lago Grande, just up the Amazon from Santarém, Murray’s steamship ran aground for three hours. A “terrific storm” then delayed it another four. He finally arrived in the town of Curuai and rounded up thirty-three recruits. Then at midnight, the boat hit bottom again. By seven in the morning, it was still trying to break free. And while riverboats could be used to travel to the main river towns, many of the settlements dispersed along the banks of lesser rivers, streams, and lakes could be reached only by smaller crafts.11

  Murray tried to send advance word through priests, traders, and steamboat pilots that he would be arriving in a given village on an approximate date so that those who lived inland looking for work could gather in their village plaza. But he found local elites none too cooperative. Many feared that the Ford Motor Company, and the cash it paid, would disrupt the patronage relations that governed life on the river.

  When Murray landed in the town of Monte Alegre, he had hopes that he would be able to find some workers among what appeared to be a largely idle and poor population. But he had a run-in with the mayor, who not only “flatly refused to help in any way” but threatened to charge the company a tax of fifteen dollars for every inhabitant Murray took from his town. An election was coming up, and the politician didn’t want to lose any potential voters. On the town’s outskirts, the recruiter spoke with a number of migrant families who had settled in Pará because of severe drought in their home states of Ceará and Maranhão. They were interested in Fordlandia work. But they were indebted to the state government for the land and tools advanced them and were not permitted to leave, as their labor was contracted to a local cotton plantation owner.

  Then there were the steamboat operators who shuttled recruiters around river towns and carried contracted labor back to Fordlandia. That Ford agents might have to spend days in a forlorn village waiting for a boat to arrive tended to weaken their ability to negotiate reasonable fares. When the Santa Maria finally showed up in Parintins, an island town in the Amazon River, Murray went aboard and asked how much it would cost to take him and the twenty-three men he had signed up back to the plantation. The captain first said he was too busy to take the job. Then, when pressed, he quoted a price of four dollars a head. Murray said he was crazy and walked away. But stuck on an island with few other options, he returned to the dock and pleaded the price down to three dollars. Murray tried to pass this expense on to his recruits, but they balked. Twenty of them changed their minds and decided not to take the job. Two others said they would get to Fordlandia in their own canoe.

  Murray also saw many men who seemed to be unoccupied in the town of Alenquer, across the river from Santarém, so many that he wrote the plantation to say that he had “a feeling of confidence that labour is available.” But he was quickly disappointed. “There are many men around, but when you talk to them and suggest working a hoe they tell you flatly that this type of work does not interest them.” Instead of the constant work Fordlandia was offering, Murray reported that local residents preferred seasonal labor, tapping rubber or gathering nuts on expeditions financed by local merchants. Most showed “little interest in Fordlandia. Claim passage rates too high, too far from home, and high cost of living.” Likewise in Santarém, another Ford man complained that while there were “hundreds (maybe 2000) idle men” who didn’t “have one thin dime,” they didn’t “want to work.”12

  Steamboat on the Tapajós.

  Henry Ford sent instructions that Fordlandia was to pay at least 25 to 35 percent more than the local wage. But it was impossible for Fordlandia’s staff to translate that differential into cash, since so much of the river economy was calculated in kind and credit. “No fixed scale of wages exist,” Murray wrote. “What the caboclo earns is secondary to him.” How much, he asked, was to be added to a Ford wage that would compensate a worker for the ability to throw a line into the river and fish for that night’s dinner, even as he sat on a dock and sorted brazil nuts for some merchant who hired him for the day?13

  If Ford paid too little, he wouldn’t attract enough workers to begin with. If he paid too much, there was nothing to stop those who did come from melting back into the jungle once they earned enough to live for a few months without work. Labor in exchange for goods advanced on credit created a familiar set of expectations, against which pure cash wages and a fixed schedule often couldn’t compete. Murray wrote that what tappers “like is to be free and go and come when they think fit.” It’s a sentiment confirmed more recently by anthropologist Edviges Marta Ioris. In the course of fieldwork in rural communities in the Tapajós National Forest, which today overlaps with what was Fordlandia, she met a few surviving Ford workers who told her that they would stay on the plantation for a time but leave when they needed to “plant the field crops, go fishing.”14

  Murray and other recruiters mostly scouted among the river caboclo communities, made up of descendants of migrants from Brazil’s northeastern departments who had come to the r
egion during the rubber boom. These communities, whose economy rested solely on rubber tapping, were hard-hit when the latex economy crashed. Ford, however, was arriving nearly two decades after the bust, when some of them had managed to revive and diversify their survival strategies, planting crops, keeping animals, and fishing to provide a basic level of subsistence, taking jobs with local patrons as needed.

  But there were also settlements of desperately poor, hungry indigenous peoples around the Tapajós who had managed to survive, just barely, rubber’s heyday. Whether or not Fordlandia would have been able to draw a significant amount of labor from these communities is debatable, as a combination of racism and ignorance precluded anyone’s even trying. At one point, a labor recruiter indicated that there was a group of “2000 starving Indians” recently settled by the government on the banks of the Xingu, a river running roughly parallel to the Tapajós, to the east, and that they would probably welcome working at Fordlandia, which would provide them with “free housing, free medical attention, free hospital, good water, free school, and a steady job for steady men.” Yet before an agent could be dispatched to the Xingu, Edmar Jovita, an Oxford-educated Brazilian who worked for the company but was then traveling, sent a telegram urging the plantation to “have nothing to do with these Indians as they are not tamed.” Fordlandia wired back asking if Jovita thought that just a hundred men could be hired, with the “distinct understanding that they are subject to discipline.” But the Brazilian responded forcefully: “Today more than ever have the opinion that we should not have any [Indians] in the plantation either these or others. . . . You would have trouble ahead. Even if they were tame they are lazy and undisciplined. Besides all other defects they are treacherous, even the tamest.” Fordlandia relented. “Okay on Indians. We repeat we don’t want them. Glad you got right information.”15

  FROM BEYOND THE Amazon, where wage labor was more institutionalized, many impoverished Brazilians did travel to Fordlandia at their own expense, too many for Oxholm to handle, either as plantation manager or town administrator. Soon more than five thousand people lived in and around the plantation, about double Santarém’s population. There existed little infrastructure to support such a fast-growing community. Through 1929 and into 1930, there was no permanent dock or reception hall for Fordlandia’s new arrivals. So when job seekers got off the steamboats, they spread out along the riverfront, setting up family camps, building cooking fires, and hanging their hammocks. A jungle shantytown quickly took shape. “Sometimes it is several days before they present themselves at the employment office,” complained one foreman.