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

by Greg Grandin

  With no help from Washington forthcoming, Ford appointed William Cowling as his personal representative and dispatched him to Brazil to make things right. A loyal “Fordling”—as midlevel executives without official title were known—Cowling was but the first of many such fixers Dearborn would send to Brazil over the next couple of years.3

  Cowling arrived in Rio on August 8, 1929, and spent the next nine days meeting with government officials and other “people of importance.” He wasn’t looking for a quick settlement. He sensed that the game would not be won by legal or moral righteousness. Although Sorensen and other company officials saw Ford’s problems in Brazil as all connected, Cowling knew they sprang from different sources, especially from confused lines of authority separating state and federal jurisdiction. It was the national government that imposed import duties and embargoed building material sent from Dearborn, while the state governments applied export taxes. Who had the power to impede interstate commerce and seize Ford’s seeds was anybody’s guess, and Cowling left that issue to be decided by Brazil’s Supreme Court.

  Cowling, who both in allegiance and in manner was decidedly not a Harry Bennett man, quickly understood that the issues at play were not necessarily captured in the reports and newspaper clippings sent to Dearborn. He moved carefully and in his meetings with officials didn’t push for an immediate answer on specific matters like the import duty dispute, preferring to let the lawyers who worked for the Ford dealership in Rio resolve the matter. The larger problem, he guessed, was that Ford agents, particularly those in Belém associated with the plantation, mostly kept to themselves, doing little to establish friendships with Brazilian politicians and businessmen. He decided to focus on making contacts, building goodwill, and so laying a “thorough foundation for future action.” Cowling hoped to “educate Brazil to the Ford way of thinking,” not arrogantly, as that phrase suggests, but rather by convincing local opinion makers of the sincerity of Ford’s motives.4

  AS HE LEFT Rio, sailing north on a slow boat around Brazil’s eastern bulge, past the city of Recife to Belém, Cowling had time to reflect on what he believed was the root of the company’s problem. He put down his ideas in two lengthy letters to Henry Ford and other top-level company officials.5

  First off, Cowling wrote, Fordlandia was located far from Rio de Janeiro, the center of “Brazilian thought,” and what people there “know about it, or think they know, comes to them in an underground way, full of scandal of all sorts, detailing the worst improprieties on the part of plant managers and other Americans.” Outrage over the revelations of kickbacks and bribes was not really the issue; the “fact that we paid for certain worthless concessions” was appreciated as “good business ability on the part of those who sold to us.” “Official Brazil” was not so much indignant over the corruption as disappointed in Ford’s business skill. And that Ford subsequently made a big deal of “absolute honesty” in all transactions, of refusing to indulge in “petty graft,” only added to the disenchantment. It seemed the carmaker had followed up credulity with naïveté.

  This, Cowling believed, led to a second, more serious perception problem. Many “higher-up Brazilians,” having read Ford’s books and interviews, couldn’t reconcile what he said with the stories they heard from Fordlandia, tales of lost opportunities, mismanagement, wild parties, and “drunken revelry, not by natives but by our own men.” Such gossip wouldn’t matter for any other company. But Ford’s self-promoted reputation for rectitude and efficiency set a high bar.

  When Cowling assured Brazil’s minister of agriculture, who hailed from Pará and was an ally of Governor Valle, that Henry Ford was “taking a personal interest” in Fordlandia, the minister said that he was glad to hear it for he “feared up to this time that he was not.” Cowling asked him to explain, and the minister replied because he had “read Mr. Ford’s books very carefully” and therefore had the idea that Ford’s “success was due chiefly to the fact that nothing was allowed to be wasted.” And yet there were reports of the squandering of resources in the Amazon, including “thousands of dollars worth of wonderful trees which had been burned in clearing the land.” If the United States didn’t need the lumber, the minister said, surely Brazil could use it.

  Cowling warned Ford not to underestimate the political intelligence of Brazilian officials. “We must never get the idea that those in power in Brazil are not shrewd,” he said. They “match up very well with those we meet in Washington.” But neither should Ford equate this cunning with mere venality. Whatever problems the company had in Brazil, they had little to do with corruption. “They never forget Brazil,” he said of the country’s leaders, revealing an ability to appreciate the complex issues facing local politicians usually beyond the reach of most Ford men. If “they are corrupt, it is not in such a small way as in interfering with us. There are always bigger things than playing with one industry.”

  The problem was rather the company’s actions, which had nurtured a bemused detachment among Brazil’s political class. Every politician Cowling met with seemed to be reading from the same script. They first expressed great admiration for Henry and Edsel and graciously accepted the gift of signed photographs of the two Fords that Cowling presented on Henry’s behalf. Then they apologized for not being able to help since the concession didn’t fall under federal jurisdiction. Next they claimed that they hadn’t really been following events along the Tapajós. Then they offered telling criticisms and recommendations. “They know more about our progress,” wrote Cowling, “than some of us do, but they never admit it, for to do so would be to place themselves in the position of having to express an opinion”—and so far the bungling of the Ford Motor Company didn’t deserve such a commitment.

  “And so,” Cowling concluded, “out of all this chaotic talk has come a sort of indifference on the part of political influences, a decided suspicion on the part of newspapermen that we were not all we claimed to be, and back of it all the idea that in the end we would do what every one else has done before us, exploit the country to the fullest extent.”

  UPON ARRIVING IN Belém, Cowling shifted tactics. In Rio, Brazil’s political and cultural capital, not wanting to seem imperious, he wisely decided not to push the issue of import duties, preferring to let the matter wind its way through the courts. But in the provinces, Cowling’s solicitousness gave way to a hard line. He met with Valle, letting him know in clear terms that Ford would pull out of the Amazon if the governor’s harassment continued. Valle blinked, and on the key issue of export taxes the two men reached a compromise: the plantation would hold off from exporting anything for two years, after which it would be exempt from duties, as per the terms of the original concession. Following this settlement, a month later, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the release of Ford’s seeds—though this was a symbolic victory, since most of the gathered seeds had germinated.6

  Much encouraged, Cowling next traveled to Fordlandia to see for himself if what Brazilian officials had told him was true, if the plantation was really in as bad shape as they said it was. And sure enough, what he found after a long and listless trip up the Amazon, first to Santarém on a steamer, and then to the estate on a company launch, made a mockery of everything the Ford Motor Company and its state-of-the-art River Rouge plant stood for: efficiency, synchronization, orderliness, smart use of resources, discipline, and independence.

  Within a few weeks of Cowling’s September 1929 visit to Fordlandia, Henry Ford would preside over Light’s Golden Jubilee, a celebration to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent lamp. Five hundred invitees attended the commemoration, including John D. Rockefeller, Marie Curie, Orville Wright, Will Rogers, Gerard Swope, the president of General Electric, Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears, Roebuck (who years earlier had been singled out in the Dearborn Independent’s anti-Semitic campaign), J. P. Morgan (whom Ford had attacked as a warmonger), President Herbert Hoover, and, of course, the eighty-two-year-old Thomas Edison,
who had taken a break from work at his Fort Myers, Florida, laboratory, where he was still trying to find substitutes for tropical rubber. The event nominally took place at Ford’s recently constructed Greenfield Village, the model town near the Rouge composed of historical homes and buildings imported from other locations. But the celebration really took place all over America and beyond. Albert Einstein addressed the crowd by radio from Germany. In a live coast-to-coast broadcast, an NBC announcer dramatized the moment that Edison lit the first electric bulb in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. Across the country, Americans were urged to participate by shutting off their lights, gathering around their radios in the dark, and then switching them on when they heard the cue: “Mr. Edison has two wires in his hand; now he is reaching up to the old lamp; now he is making the connection. . . . It lights! Light’s Golden Jubilee has come to a triumphant climax.” The extravaganza, which was held on October 21, a week before the stock market crash, was to mark not just the invention of electric light in 1879 but the half century of dizzying technological innovation that had followed, including the telephone, motion pictures, the internal combustion engine, the transistor, and the automobile.7

  Back on the Tapajós, Oxholm was having trouble keeping lit the string of bulbs that hung over the few bedraggled streets he had carved out of the jungle. Equipment and tools unloaded from the Ormoc and Farge lay scattered around the grounds, and there had been no attempt to do an inventory or set up a checkout system. Theft was rampant. Oxholm had still not constructed a permanent dock or central receiving building, so additional material shipped from Belém or Dearborn piled up on the riverbank, likewise unsupervised. Bags of concrete sat on the banks, “hard as a rock.”8

  Trees had been cut back from the riverside, but the underbrush remained untouched. In the thousand acres cleaned and burned for planting, charred, black stumps, which Oxholm didn’t bother to pull up, mingled like darkened tombstones among the emerging seedlings, making the plantation look like an untended graveyard. The captain had built some houses, but not nearly enough to meet the needs either of workers or of managers and their families. The hospital building had “sunk on its foundations and leaked terribly.” The soggy office doubled as a residence for its staff, with luggage stored on the porch for lack of closet space. There was no place for visiting Brazilian officials to sleep, so they strung their hammocks where they could. One married American couple slept in an “old seed shed.” Another threatened to leave if the company didn’t provide them with a decent house. As Oxholm had yet to assemble the refrigeration plant, keeping food fresh for a labor force now well over a thousand remained a problem.9

  Throughout May, June, and July, Oxholm had rushed to meet the concession’s July 1929 deadline for planting a thousand acres with rubber. But Manaus’s seizure of Ford’s seeds forced him to use local seeds of dubious quality, and he did so at the beginning of the dry season, the worst time to plant rubber. In his haste to meet the terms of the contract, Oxholm sent gangs of workers to spread out across the cleared jungle armed with sticks, one end whittled to a point, which they jabbed into the ground to make planting holes. A second team followed behind, dropping either hastily gathered seeds or seedlings from a makeshift nursery that one British observer said were “ruthlessly torn out of the ground” and then left under the “hot sun” for “two, three, and even four days.” In agreeing to a July deadline, Ide and Blakeley had no idea, and if Villares had he didn’t let on, that the clearing of tropical jungle best takes place in the dry season and the planting of rubber in the wet. Having started work on Fordlandia in early 1928, the Ford men had only one dry season (June to December 1928) to prepare a thousand acres for planting during the subsequent rainy months, which in effected shortened the July deadline to April or May. That Oxholm was planting at the beginning of the dry season was of course not his fault, considering the mess Blakeley left him, the difficulty of securing a stable labor force, and Manaus’s seed embargo. Nor could he have known that Blakeley’s abundant use of gasoline to fire the felled jungle had scorched the soil of the first lot cleared, adversely affecting its ability to nurture healthy rubber. It didn’t help that a few months earlier Oxholm had driven Raimundo Monteiro da Costa, one of the few people with rubber experience in Ford’s employ, off the estate after an argument over planting techniques. By the end of 1929, it was clear that, while having met the concession’s requirements, Fordlandia’s first planting would have to be plowed under and “planted with better seeds at the right time.”10

  A terraced hillside in Fordlandia planted with rubber.

  The sawmill posed problems for Oxholm as well. Blakeley before him had indeed, as the minister of agriculture complained to Cowling, begun clearing land during the rainy season. The plantation was littered with “huge piles of green wood” that could be neither burned nor cut into lumber because the felled wood was too big, too soft, or too wet. In addition, neither Blakeley nor Oxholm had properly graded the 2½-mile road leading from the plantation clearing to the sawmill. When the rains turned the road into mud, as they did most every day, the plantation’s tractors couldn’t haul the logs to the mill. Even when workers lay cut trees over the worst stretches, creating what lumberjacks call a corduroy road, it was still slow going. And when they did get through, they could transport only about eight to ten logs at a time. With gasoline at forty-eight cents a gallon, the cost of moving wood within the plantation alone was proving to be prohibitive.11

  Like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Tapajós valley is filled with mixed stands of broad-leaved trees about a hundred feet in height, with robust, shade-providing crowns and straight trunks relatively free of branches. Yet unlike in Michigan, where most species were neither too hard nor too soft and fell within a profitable range, much of the wood in the Tapajós was either too pulpy or too dense to be usable. Some of the largest trees, like angelim, were often hollow. And Michigan saw blades, when they didn’t rust from the humidity, were no match for the hardest of Brazilian hardwood. A “round-saw would scream halfway through a giant log and stop dead,” reported a manager, while a “band-saw would melt into smoke.” Being Ford men the managers did what Ford men do when confronted with an obstacle: they ordered a speedup. Running double fast, the “saws shook down their stations and almost wrecked the mill,” blowing out the electric generator and delaying work until Dearborn could send hardened blades.

  Also unlike the Upper Peninsula, which counted on average about six different tree types per acre, the Tapajós contained about a hundred different species within the same space. Sawyers quickly realized that potentially profitable trees were never grouped together but scattered throughout the forest. And the forest was so thick with trees, climbers, and vines that four or five trees would have to be cut and yanked before a clearing could be made for a free fall. “It cost too much,” remembered one lumberjack, “to get in here and there through the timber to get the kind of wood that was any good. You couldn’t walk ten feet into the woods without cutting your way. It is just a mass of jungle and vines.”

  Making a high cut on a big tree.

  So Oxholm began to purchase lumber for his construction needs, which meant that the plantation was not only failing to generate income from timber but actually losing money to purchase it. And since the unsettled customs duty issue made the importation of value-added material expensive, Oxholm had no choice but to buy raw timber in Brazil and mill it at the plantation. He ended up purchasing wood from local indigenous villages. The Ford Motor Company may have been bringing the techniques of centralized and synchronized mass industrial production to the Amazon, but for at least a time it relied on jungle dwellers using little more than crude hand axes to supply its would-be rubber plantation with lumber.12

  At this point, Henry Ford, who had pioneered innovative conservation methods in his timberlands in the Upper Peninsula, intervened directly. He ordered an end to the burning of wood, demanding that logs be milled and stored until “such time as world prices
make it salable at this end, and at a profit.” But Fordlandia’s sawyers had little experience storing hardwood in a humid environment, and the sun-dried lumber quickly rotted and warped. Edsel Ford quietly countermanded his father, allowing for the burning of all wood that was “worm-eaten and rapidly decaying.”13

  And Oxholm had no more luck than did Michigan officials enforcing Ford’s “absolutely no tolerance” liquor policy. He tried to evict the “squatters,” as company officials now called titleholders who wouldn’t sell, and to shut down bars and brothels. But faced with what the New York Times described as “small uprisings” of machete-wielding protesters, he backed down. Efforts to keep workers off liquor boats also resulted in the threat of “armed resistance on several occasions,” according to Oxholm, who turned to Brazilian authorities for help. But all they did was point out that Prohibition was a US, not a Brazilian, law. They also criticized his hypocrisy since, as they pointed out, the Norwegian captain and his foremen were known to like their drink. Balking at the attempt by Fordlandia’s managers to “apply Prohibition to Brazilian workers without accepting it themselves,” a local magistrate ordered Oxholm to let the liquor boats dock alongside Ford’s property. When plantation managers turned to the itinerant Catholic priest to help preach against drinking, he refused. “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “I’m not a Baptist.”14