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

by Greg Grandin

  So despite the concerns of Brazilian nationalists who thought that the concession granted too much autonomy to Ford, the plantation found itself caught in a relationship with the rest of the Amazon similar to the one Third World countries often have with the First: extreme dependency. Oxholm depended on a detachment of Brazilian soldiers equipped with machine guns and other arms to keep order. Stuck in the middle of a rain forest yet requiring a steady flow of money to pay workers and suppliers, he depended on the Belém-based Bank of London and South America for twice-monthly cash shipments. Nowhere near close to the standard of self-sufficiency Ford set for his village industries back in the United States, Oxholm depended on Indians who lived along the Tapajós to supply the camp with fish and produce and on local merchants for cattle and other food. Though he had access to a few boats, including a speedy Chris-Craft, to go back and forth to Santarém (and Urucurituba), Oxholm depended on local ancient wood-burning steamers to bring goods and people to the plantation. “The words slow, inadequate, aggravating, etc. hardly express what could be said regarding this matter,” was one Dearborn official’s description of his trip up the Amazon.15

  Over and over, Fordlandia’s managers found themselves reliant on outside support, unable to replicate either the extreme independence pioneered by Ford and Sorensen at the Rouge or the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance embodied in Ford’s community factories and mills.

  THE DAY BEFORE he left the estate, Cowling summoned its staff and “lectured them severely for their lack of organization and efficiency.” He was harsh on Oxholm, whom he found overbearing and arrogant and unwilling to offer direction to his managers and foremen. Cowling condemned the lack of organization that had produced “waste of various kinds which is appalling.” With no leadership or plan for moving forward, the plantation’s foremen, he said, were turning in circles. On numerous occasions during his short stay, Cowling had seen four or five members of the staff deep in conversation for extended periods of time over matters of relatively little importance, and even then they often didn’t come to a decision about what to do next.

  “Many things,” Cowling scolded Oxholm, “are begun and then not followed up and to say that your entire operation is costing at least fifty percent more than it should is putting it mildly.”16

  Cowling urged the Norwegian captain to act in a way that would repair the “moral reputation of the Ford Motor Company” and to live up to a “higher sense of duty to the Company as well as a keener idea of personal responsibility in your work.” “You are a long ways from your old home, but you must carry on just as if the eyes of the home office were upon you.”

  The home office, in fact, never took its eyes off Oxholm, and Sorensen followed up Cowling’s visit by firing off cable after cable demanding an accounting.

  “Do you yourself use intoxicating liquors of any kind?” Sorensen asked Oxholm. “Have you any intoxicating liquors in your possession, either in your home or elsewhere on our property? What was the trouble on this liquor question? What about conduct of other officials of the company with reference to this same question that I applied to you? Do any of them use intoxicating liquor? What is the reason for this long delay in answering letters?” Sorensen ended this barrage demanding immediate answers “without any evasion.”17

  Oxholm had had enough. His sister Eleanor and wife, Cecile Hilda, had joined him toward the end of 1928, along with his son Einar and three daughters, Mary, Marcelle, and Eleanor. By the end of 1929, three of his children—Einar, Mary, and Eleanor—had died in an epidemic of an unnamed fever. In early 1930, a second son, also named Einar, died at birth. Sorensen’s cables grew increasingly shrill, but by then Oxholm had stopped replying to them. In May he either quit or was fired—company records are silent on the matter—boarding the Ormoc, along with his brokenhearted wife and their surviving daughter, Marcelle, to sail back to the United States. Upon arriving in New Orleans, he continued on to Dearborn, where he met with Henry Ford, debriefing him on the rubber plantation and asking if there was another ship he could captain. Ford said no, and Oxholm returned to New Orleans to once again work with the United Fruit Company.

  Fordlandia, Oxholm would later say, was “the hardest proposition I have ever tackled in my life.”18

  WILLIAM COWLING LEFT Fordlandia in late September for Rio and sailed for Dearborn on October 2. A request from a New York Times reporter for an interview before he left was met with refusal, which the paper “interpreted as indicating he found conditions discouraging.” Though he had managed to establish some goodwill in Rio, negotiate a compromise on the issue of export taxes, and identify what the problems were in Fordlandia, other troubles persisted. Governor Valle continued to refuse to read the concession as giving Ford the right to expropriate the property of settlers who wouldn’t sell. Nor would he force Francisco Franco, the merchant patriarch of the island of Urucurituba, across the river from Fordlandia, to part with Pau d’Agua, the small village that the Ford Motor Company felt had become the source of much of the plantation’s vice. And while the import duty issue was supposedly settled through the intervention of Ford’s Rio representative, customs inspectors at Belém were still holding up material that they deemed unrelated to the “refining of crude rubber or the manufacture of rubber products.”19

  Then the company’s fortunes received an unexpected boost. In October 1930, a revolution brought Getúlio Vargas to power. Vargas, a reformer who would dominate Brazilian politics for the next two decades, creating the modern Brazilian welfare state, is often compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Vargas government passed labor legislation, regulated the financial sector and other areas of the economy, and generally presided over the strengthening of the central government. In the United States, Ford would come to detest FDR and his New Deal for implementing many of the same policies. Yet in Brazil, Vargas’s ascension meant mostly good news for Ford, as it signaled the end of the excessive federalism that had the Ford men tied in knots trying to address problems in Belém, Manaus, and Rio.

  The ripples of the revolution were immediately felt in the state of Pará. Though the revolutionaries were nationalists and therefore suspicious of foreign capital, they were also modernizers, hostile to the regional oligarchs who ruled each state as if it were their own personal fiefdom. Ford posed a particular conundrum. He was both a modernizer, promising to bring capital-intensive development to the backwater Amazon, and a man who wanted to run his namesake property with sovereign autonomy, like the rubber lords who didn’t like Rio meddling in their affairs. Vargas cut through this dilemma. Soon after coming to power, he replaced Valle with someone sympathetic to Ford. He also confirmed Ford’s land concession, a good sign considering that he canceled all foreign contracts in Pará except for Ford’s and one other. It took somewhat longer to resolve the sundry tax issues, as Ford lawyers continued to debate with officials how to interpret the minutiae of Brazil’s custom tax law. Eventually, in a series of decrees in 1932 and 1933, Vargas granted Fordlandia its long-sought import and export duty exemptions—retroactively, which was key since by the time of Vargas’s dispensation the company, according to Cowling, had a “couple of million dollars charged” against it.20 For the foreseeable future, Ford could count on a relatively supportive government and a predictable tax structure.21

  CHAPTER 13

  WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE

  FOR A GOOD JOB?

  HENRY FORD, EVER READY TO CHALLENGE COMPANIONS TO A foot race or a fence-jumping contest, represented, as both icon and huckster, the freedom of movement that distinguished American industrial capitalism from its European equivalent. “All that is solid melts into air,” Karl Marx wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century to describe the revolutionary potential of capitalism to break down feudal hierarchies and the superstitions that justified them. But Europe took a considerably longer time to thaw than the United States: in no other country had national identity become so closely associated with movement—whether horizontal, that is, the march wes
t and then overseas, or vertical, the idea that those born to the lowest ranks could climb power’s peaks.

  There would be inventors of faster machines than his motor car. Yet nobody could claim to have transformed, at least in such a noticeable way, nearly every realm of daily life, from the factory and field to the family. And for capitalism’s sake he did so in the nick of time. Just as industrial amalgamators like John D. Rockefeller were declaring that “the age of individualism is gone, never to return,” Ford came along to put the car—a supreme symbol of individualism—in reach of millions. “Happiness is on the road,” Ford said. “I am on the road, and I am happy.”

  Ford peddled change as if he were the head not of a motor company but of the Metaphysical Club. “Life flows,” he remarked in his cowritten autobiography. “We may live at the same number on the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.” The myth, of course, didn’t come close to matching the reality, for what some came to call a “new industrial feudalism” intensified existing prejudices and created new forms of exclusion and control, including those perfected by Ford himself. “The Ford operators may enjoy high pay, but they are not really alive—they are half dead,” mourned the vice president of the Brotherhood of Electrical Engineers in 1922. Ford responded by justifying his antiunionism not in the language of reaction or even primarily in that of efficiency but rather by assigning to it the essence of true “freedom”: “The safety of the people today,” he said, also in 1922, is that they are “unorganized and therefore cannot be trapped.” But if most of his employees had been reduced to cogs in the greater machine called Fordism, for a few mobility was more than a promise.1

  Charles Sorensen—handsome as Adonis, thought a colleague, and “masculine energy incarnate,” wrote a historian—started out working at Ford’s foundry pattern shop in the old Highland Park plant. By the 1920s, his engineering intelligence had combusted with a “burning passion for advancement” to catapult him to the pinnacle of company power. Sorensen jockeyed for position with Ford’s other lieutenants, including Edsel Ford and Harry Bennett, and became the executive force behind Rouge production, as well as assuming a large role in the running of Fordlandia.2

  Others who didn’t make it that high nonetheless had new vistas opened to them. Victor Perini, a twenty-year-old son of Sicilian peasant immigrants, was apprenticing as a toolmaker with the Richardson Scale Company in Passaic, New Jersey, when he heard from a friend that the Ford Motor Company needed workers. So he and his wife, Constance, headed for Detroit. It was 1910, and the company was still operating out of its first plant on Piquette Avenue, then producing a hundred Model Ts a day.

  “Can you use a toolmaker?” Victor yelled through the plant’s gates. “Oh yes, we can use a toolmaker,” came the answer. He was hired at thirty-five cents an hour.3

  As Perini’s engineering know-how matured into a reserved yet meticulously observant managerial style, he was promoted to help run Ford’s copper radiator factory and hydroelectric dam on Green Island, in the Hudson River near Troy, New York, then sent to Manchester, England, where he oversaw the manufacture of the British Model T, and on to Iron Mountain, where he built an airstrip before becoming manager of Ford’s state-of-the-art sawmill.

  “We covered a lot of places during the years that my husband was at Ford’s,” Constance recalled of Victor’s career. “The company was more than generous in arranging accommodations for our comfort and convenience. We always went first class.” She remembered with gratitude that “because of this the entire family has had experiences that are not often duplicated.” But there was one not-so-comfortable place Ford sent them.

  VICTOR FIRST LEARNED about Fordlandia from Henry Ford himself, when his boss visited the Perinis at their home in Iron Mountain in late 1929. “You would think that he owned everything around here,” said Henry to Constance as he surveyed the photographs of Ford factories that hung on their living room wall. Over their kitchen table, Ford, having himself been recently debriefed by Cowling, told Victor about the mess Oxholm had made of things in Brazil and asked him to check on the sea captain and relieve him of his duties if necessary. Perini immediately said yes.

  The first thing Perini did was tap other workers he wanted to bring with him, and he did so with the same kind of informality that got him his first Piquette Avenue job. One morning a few weeks after Ford’s visit to his home, Perini, along with another Iron Mountain manager named Jack Doyle, ran into the tousle-haired second-generation Irish sawyer Matt Mulrooney on his way to work.4

  “What would you give for a good job, Mulrooney?” asked Doyle.

  “A cigar,” Mulrooney responded without missing a beat.

  “Come on and give it to me.”

  “I haven’t got the cigar on me. Mr. Perini, you’ve got some in your pocket. Lend me one.”

  Perini did and Mulrooney handed it to Doyle, who “sprung this proposition” on him “about going to South America.”

  “What do you say?” they asked the sawyer.

  “I haven’t got anything to say. If I’m of more use to the company down there than I am here, I’d be a damn poor stick if I wouldn’t go. They’ve been feeding me here quite a while. It would be a good thing to go down there and eat off them for a while.”

  “Well, that’s pretty good,” said Perini, who later described Mulrooney as a “gentlemanly young man.”

  “Don’t say anything about it now for a while,” Perini told his recruit, “later on, we’ll see.”

  Mulrooney proved more obliging than did Perini’s wife. Constance was tired of packing up house as they moved from one post to another and wanted to “live at the same number on the street” for just a bit longer. “You go by yourself this time,” she told her husband.

  “Okay, you can stay here,” Victor said. But Ford overruled him. Dearborn had by then received word that the drinking and gambling of Fordlandia managers was mitigated somewhat by the “presence of American women.” Wives were having a “beneficial effect on the general appearance of all the men here,” a Fordlandia manager wrote. Even the “whiskermania” that had gripped Americans cut free from Michigan’s clean-shaven decorum waned in their presence. Ford’s men and machines would civilize the Amazon, but Ford’s women were needed to civilize his men.5

  “Where you go,” Ford told Perini when the two men met later in Dearborn to discuss specifics, “your family goes with you.” Victor nodded and phoned Constance back in Iron Mountain. “I guess you better get ready.”

  THE PERINIS’ TRIP, in early March, was nothing like Ide and Blakeley’s gentle roll to Belém two years earlier. Off the coast of Florida, the Ormoc ran into a hurricane. Lashing rain drenched the ship, whose motors were no match for the whitecaps washing over its deck. Unable to make steerageway, the boat drifted hundreds of miles into the Atlantic. Pitching and rolling “all day and night,” the Ormoc tossed cargo into the sea as the passengers huddled in their cabins.

  The Perini family.

  It took two days for the ship to right its course, and another two weeks to arrive in Belém. The Perinis and their three children stayed at the Grande Hotel, which was the best in the city yet still a place where spiders could be found in the bedclothes. Belém’s Ford agent, James Kennedy, told Constance to get used to it. In the Amazon, he said, “the cockroaches follow the ants, and the mice follow the cockroaches. Everything takes care of itself, don’t worry about it.”

  After a rough night in a soft bed, which gave out under Victor’s weight, the Perinis were “glad to get back on the Ormoc because it was nice and clean there, even though traveling was rough.” Both the Amazon and the Tapajós are broad rivers, in places vastly so. In a work published just that year, the Brazilian writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro noted that the Amazon makes perspective impossible. Instead of appreciating its vast panorama, first-time observers “recoil sharply under the overpowering sensation of the absolute which seems to have presided over the formation of that world.” And as the Perinis made th
eir way up to the plantation, the wide sky combined with long stretches of dense forest to weigh on Victor’s mind. He complained of the tedium as they passed endless low banks with “no hills of any kind and nothing but trees and vines visible.” The view was interrupted only by occasional villages, most derelict and some deserted. The family was traveling during the rainy season, when the Amazon just below Santarém is at its widest and the constant green of the shore at its most distant. During these months, the floodplain spills over into the forest, creating half-submerged islands and a “vast flow of muddy water,” as the writer Roy Nash, who made the trip just a few years before, described his impression. Sailing as close up the middle of the waterway as possible, voyagers on oceangoing ships often miss the sublime, radiant sensation many experience under the rain forest canopy; traveling on a crowded boat, wrote Nash, one is even cheated of the “poignancy of solitude.”* After leaving Santarém, the Ormoc’s captain, unfamiliar with the Tapajós’s shifting channels that make it difficult to travel even when the water is high, ran the ship aground and was pulled free by a tug only after “considerable effort.”6

  Victor was even less taken with Fordlandia, and whatever recoil he might have felt on his voyage from the human emptiness of the jungle was intensified when he confronted the amount of work the place needed. His first impression upon leaving the dock was of tractors and trucks “wailing in mud,” slipping and sliding on roads that weren’t graded, drained, or surfaced properly. The rain was constant, and the wet heat, without the relief of a river breeze, overpowering. “There is so much to be done that it looks hard to decide where to start. . . . It will be necessary,” he thought, “to start a railroad line at once,” along with houses, schools, and a receiving building.7