by Greg Grandin
The migrants were a varied lot, described by one observer as made up of “the hopeless, the lame, the blind, the unemployed and everything else, along with some good men.” Some were hired. But those who weren’t stayed anyway, as did many who were initially employed yet quit soon after; with a 300 percent turnover rate, Fordlandia had to make about six thousand hires to keep a payroll of two thousand. Many of these new arrivals took up residence in the small villages that predated the Ford contract and dotted the periphery of the plantation, such as Pau d’Agua, a settlement of sharecroppers located about a half mile upriver from the cleared riverfront that, like Boa Vista before its sale to the company, was owned by the merchant Franco family. A whole service economy sprang up in these villages, and the plantation became, as one observer sent by Dearborn to see how Ford’s namesake town was progressing put it, a “mecca for all undesirables, even criminals, of the entire Amazon Valley.” These “troublemakers,” the Ford official went on, “endeavored in any way conceivable to make a living off of the men who were working for the company.” The sudden influx of cash gave bloom to “filthy small cafes, restaurants, meat and fruit shops,” gambling houses, and thatched bordellos established by local merchants and staffed mostly with women from Brazil’s poor northeast. Riverboats pulled up to Fordlandia’s makeshift dock daily, and workers “swarmed aboard” to buy beer and cachaça.16
Captain Oxholm and James Kennedy, Ford’s accountant, tried to have these villages destroyed, but they ran into resistance. Though the Francos had been willing to part with Boa Vista, they insisted on holding on to Pau d’Agua, which provided the family a useful monthly revenue in rubber, pigs, hens, ducks, and, increasingly as Ford’s wages began to seep into the local economy, cash. In addition to the Francos, a number of other landowners along the Tapajós and up the Cupary River refused to move or sell, even though property values had increased dramatically. What made this standoff even more intractable was that the Ford Motor Company refused to compensate residents who did not have a clear and legal deed. This meant that those who had occupied their land for decades without titles, a common enough situation in the Amazon, had little incentive to move. Kennedy wrote to Dearborn saying that he had managed to buy out a few families who did have deeds. Yet they refused to leave their homes, and when the accountant tried to have them evicted they complained to the press that Ford had swindled them, buying their land from illiterate family members without their authorization. The Ford Motor Company didn’t always get its way—Ford was, after all, frustrated at Muscle Shoals—yet it often did. In Michigan in 1923, when property owners refused to sell land where Ford wanted to build a hydroelectric dam to power one of his village industries, the company got the state legislature to pass an eminent domain law that allowed it to expropriate the property. But in the Brazilian state of Pará, with Governor Valle’s anti-Ford campaign in full swing, a judge issued an injunction ordering Kennedy to cease his eviction threats.17
PROHIBITION WAS ONE of the Ford principles Oxholm was sworn to uphold. It had been the law of the land in Michigan since 1916 (a law that Ford lobbied for, telling reporters that he would convert Detroit’s breweries to produce alcohol fuel for his cars) and in the United States since 1920. Prohibition of course didn’t stop drinking but rather provided fertile opportunities for the extension of organized crime. Detroit and Dearborn sprawled with bars and speakeasies. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Iron Mountain, where the Ford Motor Company paid high wages to a large workforce, also saw the spread of “unparalleled conditions of vice and prostitution.” Mob gangs with ties to Detroit’s Mafia moved in to set up whiskey “joints,” casinos, brothels, and morphine dens along its midway. “One pretty 18-year-old miss,” reported a local newspaper, “has found that there are shadows as well as bright lights along the primrose path of jazz,” having succumbed to the town’s ample supply of “white powders.”18
But the problems created by the criminalization of alcohol failed to diminish Ford’s sense of virtue. With reports coming in about drunken revelries in the Amazon, he insisted that what was law in America be company policy in Brazil. “Mr. Ford constantly impressed me with the fact that he didn’t want anyone around addicted to liquor,” Ernest Liebold recalled. “We were in prohibition, and he wanted it enforced, as far as our employees were concerned. Even though it was a foreign country, I think it was largely in line with Ford policy to carry it into that country. If we were to permit promiscuous use of liquor on our plantation, why, the employees might on certain occasions get beyond our control.”19
It was Ford’s will, but Sorensen was his enforcer. He fired off one directive after another to Oxholm, demanding strict compliance with Prohibition. “We absolutely will not have it,” meaning alcohol, “on our property. We know from events that have happened during the past year that drinking has taken place.” He insisted on “absolutely no tolerance.”20
In truth, Oxholm was powerless to stop the debauchery. He couldn’t even keep a leper named Castro from camping on the dock to solicit alms. Shooed away, the mendicant simply returned when the captain’s attentions were elsewhere. Similarly, when Oxholm did manage to shut down a few bordellos and bars, the proprietors simply set up shop on an island just off Fordlandia’s banks, building their brothels on stilts because the island was half wetlands and prone to floods. It was ironically dubbed the “Island of Innocence” since, as Eimar Franco put it, “no one on it was innocent.”
Besides, Oxholm himself developed a fondness for cachaça com limão. Many afternoons, even before the workday had come to a close, he’d take a fast launch over to the island of Urucurituba to visit his friend Francisco Franco, who after his nephew Luiz used the money from the sale of Boa Vista to move to Belém, had taken over the main hacienda. Swaying on a hammock on Franco’s veranda, right in front of the chapel to Saint Peter, Oxholm sipped rum and watched Fordlandia’s bustle.21
BACK ON HIS side of the Tapajós, Oxholm found himself governing a community of ailing migrants. By late 1929, the workforce had grown considerably, yet on any given day about a hundred would be in the hospital sick. The “amount of medical attention for the approximately 1300 men on the payroll,” he wrote Dearborn, “is way out of proportion to what one would expect.” During the rainy season, the numbers of sick increased, taxing the hospital “to the limit.” Its beds filled with workers with suppurating sores on their feet and legs. The medical staff was charged not just with treating the sick but with screening recruits. Potential employees stripped naked in front of a Ford doctor, who examined their eyes and ears, recorded their weight and height, and took their urine.22 The company rejected 5 to 10 percent of all applicants. Some were turned away for illnesses ranging from cirrhosis and bronchitis to paralysis, hernias, and leprosy. One was blind in the right eye. Another in the left. And at least one job-seeker was too short.23
That didn’t mean everyone who got a job was healthy. More than 85 percent of job seekers had in the past suffered from at least one disease: syphilis, malaria, beriberi, dysentery, parasites, typhoid, ringworm, filariasis—caused by a mosquito-borne thread worm that infects the lymphatic system and leads to a thickening of the skin—or yaws, skin ulcers caused by bacteria. But Oxholm couldn’t afford to turn anybody with such “garden variety” illnesses away since “nearly everyone has them.” By December, a third of the hired workforce had to pass some time in the hospital before even getting started.24
He also had to deal with the employees who had contracted venereal diseases, running at a rate of about nine a month, in the camp’s bordellos. When a Ford doctor visited one of the brothels, he found that seven of its nine prostitutes had an active gynecological infection. Oxholm ordered the following sign posted around the work sites and villages:
It is a serious matter to contract venereal disease during the period of employment in this Company and the Company wishes to discourage it. Any employee having contracted venereal disease must immediately report the fact to the Medical Department. In c
ase it is decided to hospitalize him the Company reserves the right to charge a reasonable amount to cover this service. At intervals there may be a Medical Inspection of employees to ascertain if there are any unreported cases. The disposition of these cases will be at the discretion of the Company.
As to the women, Oxholm would not treat them: “We do not want to have anything to do with them, and have absolutely refused treatment in any way, shape, or form. We hope that by doing so they will be forced to leave.”
The families of migrant workers put yet another strain on Fordlandia’s already overwhelmed health services. Plantation administrators factored into the cost of transport one wife and three children per worker. But they soon realized that workers from northeast Brazil, where many migrants to the Amazon originated, were, as one labor recruiter put it, “very prolific and 5 children should be reckoned.” The medical staff was completely unprepared to deal with the influx of these children, many of whom were malnourished and suffered from hookworm, intestinal illnesses, and jungle fevers. “While we make it a practice to examine men who enter our employ,” the captain reported to Dearborn, “we have not been examining the women and children who live in the native camp, and every river boat which reaches our property is bringing more of them. The boats are also bringing in friends and relatives of employees.” Oxholm had to relent, allowing the hospital to set up a children’s ward, which was never without a severe case of malnutrition.
To offset all these expenses, Oxholm suggested that the company abandon its promise of free medical care. He set up a payment scale that would cover job applicants who needed hospital treatment before they started working, family members who required care, and those employees who contracted venereal disease despite the posted warnings. He wanted to deduct fees from salaries, yet there was no bookkeeping system in place that could manage such accounts. It took some time to locate the office supplies that were packed in the Farge, and once they were found, typewriter carriages had rusted and paper had grown moldy from the humidity. The roof of the accounting office poured in water so that every time it rained “all records have to be gathered up and put away and the office force has to evacuate the building until the rain has ceased.” In any case, when Oxholm told Dearborn officials of his plan, they overruled him, insisting that medical care should remain free.
IN HIS SEARCH for labor, Oxholm also looked to the British Caribbean, which had a long history of supplying workers to large-scale construction projects throughout Latin America, such as the Panama Canal. In the first couple of months he managed to attract a number of West Indians from the upper Amazon who had survived the construction of the 228-mile Madeira-to-Mamoré train line, one of the most brutal and ill-conceived industrial projects ever executed. The line was started in the 1870s at the height of the rubber boom with the idea of bypassing a series of formidable rapids that hindered the use of the upper Madeira River, which ran roughly parallel to the Tapajós, farther west. An engineer for the first company to undertake this task called the Amazon a “charnel house,” with workers “dying like flies” as they tried to build a rail line that “ran through an inhospitable wilderness of swamp and porphyry ridges.” Even with the “command of all the capital in the world and half its population, it would be impossible to build the road.” A series of other companies were engaged to finish the job until one finally did, in 1912, just as the boom collapsed. All told, it cost $30 million and took ten thousand lives—one, it is said, for every tie that was laid.25
When the line was completed, workers, including a number of West Indians, were left abandoned in the railroad work camp of Porto Velho, which had grown into a small, destitute city. At the news that Ford was hiring, many headed down the Amazon and then up the Tapajós to the plantation. Added to these stranded West Indians rail workers were migrants who came directly from Jamaica, Barbados, and Saint Lucia.
They arrived at a camp where many of the same conditions that sparked the riot in late 1928 continued—poor housing and working conditions, particularly for those hired to clear the jungle, confusing pay schedules, and bad food—aggravated by strident attempts to regulate hygiene and enforce Prohibition. In June 1929, a knife fight broke out between a Brazilian worker and Joseph Hippolyte, a migrant from Santa Lucia, as the two men waited on line to receive their wages. Hippolyte stabbed the Brazilian, whose friends retaliated by nearly beating the Santa Lucian to death.
In his report to Sorensen, the increasingly beleaguered Oxholm seized the moment to showcase his decisiveness. He blamed the brawl on Brazilian racism, saying that it was impossible to make native workers toil alongside “foreign Negroes.” As Villares did the previous year, Oxholm claimed that his quick actions had headed off a riot, telling Sorensen that he gave all of Fordlandia’s West Indians some travel money, loaded them on a lighter, and sent them downriver.
“We think you will agree with us,” he wrote, hedging behind the plural, “that on such occasions as these a quick and decisive policy is better than dilly-dallying and waiting for events which may prove to be disastrous.”
The British consul in Belém disagreed. He wrote to Henry Ford saying that Oxholm’s emphasis on Brazilian prejudice diverted attention from his already well-known incompetence. The diplomat pointed out that for decades West Indians had worked on large-scale railway and public works projects throughout the Amazon valley “on friendly terms alongside their Brazilian fellows.” He also contested Oxholm’s claim that the plantation had covered the travel costs of the exiled workers to “wherever they wanted to go.” At least half paid their own fare to Belém, where they found themselves “strangers in a land of which they did not speak the language.” Many were stranded at the mouth of the Amazon in a “more or less destitute condition.” As a result of Oxholm’s actions, he said, Ford could no longer count on Her Majesty’s assistance in securing Caribbean workers.
“I invite the company,” the consul concluded, “to consider whether, in the circumstances described, in preference to sacrificing justice to expediency, they do not feel themselves bound, at least morally and equitably, if not legally, to assume some responsibility for the loss [to the West Indian workers] their action has involved.”26
Oxholm, though, had more pressing matters to worry about. Rubber planter, construction manager, town planner, health care provider, Prohibitionist, the sea captain had yet another responsibility to discharge: undertaker.
By the end of 1929, ninety people had been buried in the company cemetery, sixty-two of them workers and the rest “outsiders who had died on the property.” Most of the deaths were from malnutrition and common disease. But lethal snakebites, from vipers especially, infections from ant, hornet, or vampire bat bites, and, before proper shelters were built, jaguars, which occasionally snatched babies right from their hammocks, all made the plantation especially dangerous during those early years. Oxholm’s maid had her arm bitten off by a caiman and bled to death while bathing in the Tapajós. And the company was responsible for interring all who died on the plantation, not just workers. As Oxholm explained to Dearborn, Brazil’s civil code required that “if strangers come to our property and we render them aid we are responsible for their burial in the event of death”—a law that invoked a bond between death, community, and soil reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s observation, made in a novel about the foundation of another doomed town, that “a person doesn’t belong to a place until there is someone dead underground.” A year later, there were three times as many graves—including four that contained Oxholm’s own children.
BY THE END of 1928, it seems that Ford—who once claimed to have invented the modern world and all that went with it—found himself in much the same position as did Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores centuries earlier: presiding over an enormous land grant populated by quite a number of dependents. Friend Ford had become Lord Ford.
CHAPTER 12
THE FORD WAY OF THINKING
TO FORD’S PEOPLE BACK IN DEARBORN, THE CONFLUENC
E OF EVENTS in Brazil hampering the development of the plantation—threats to revoke export tax exemptions, seizure of seeds, levies of import duties, rebellious workers, and relentless bad press—seemed like a conspiracy, a confirmation of preexisting prejudices many of them had about doing business in Latin America. What to do? The decision to invest in rubber cultivation had been based on the assumption that Ford’s Amazon operation would pay for itself, not with latex at first but with the sale of lumber or minerals. But mounting costs and floundering construction proved such a forecast wildly optimistic. Already by the beginning of 1929, Ford had spent over a million and a half dollars with little to show for it. An even greater concern than the money was Ford’s reputation, for newspapers and newsreels had already announced the imminent rescue of the Amazon from the “scrap heap of civilization.” So with Henry Ford “exercised” about import duties, and Charles Sorensen “annoyed” by Oxholm’s inability to resolve matters, the company did something Ford had always been loath to do: it turned to Washington for help.1
The Ford Motor Company had extensive overseas business interests. Yet remarkably it had no contacts, either formal or personal, with anyone in the State Department. Edsel had to go to Herbert Hoover, now president, while the company’s chief lawyer, Clifford Longley, approached Attorney General William Mitchell, asking to be put in touch with the right people. Out of these inquiries, Sorensen obtained a meeting with Dana Munro, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America. But when he traveled to Washington to ask for help in putting pressure on Rio, Munro treated Sorensen coolly. This was perhaps to be expected considering the company’s long history of cold-shouldering US diplomats. Whatever the reason, the assistant secretary considered Ford’s Brazilian tax problem routine and simply sent off a perfunctory directive to the embassy in Brazil to render whatever assistance possible. To little effect. The American ambassador, about to sail to Europe on his summer vacation, had left his considerably less influential deputy to handle the matter.2