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

by Greg Grandin

  DESPITE PERINI’S INITIAL impression, and despite first Blakeley’s and then Oxholm’s clumsy administration, Cowling’s lecture had had a galvanizing effect on Fordlandia’s managers and the project of transforming the jungle into a settlement and plantation had advanced considerably. The labor situation had stabilized somewhat, and by the end of 1930 Fordlandia employed nearly four thousand people, most of them migrants from the poverty- and drought-stricken northeast states of Maranhão and Ceará. Before he departed, Cowling delegated more authority to the engineer Archilaus Weeks, who had arrived in Fordlandia in 1929 from Ford’s L’Anse lumber mill, located on Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to take charge of construction.8

  Under Weeks’s direction, a recognizable town had begun to take shape along the Tapajós to replace Blakeley’s work camp. Having pulled up the stumps and burned the undergrowth along the river frontage, Weeks organized a more efficient system to receive material and process potential employees. Workers had begun to lay pipes and wires for water, sewage, and electric systems. The sawmill and powerhouse had been completed, and the water tower was rising. About thirty miles of roads crisscrossed the property, pushing into the jungle. Work was under way on a 3,200-square-foot dining hall to replace the shambles of a mess hall left by Blakeley. The old lopsided hospital was torn down, and in its place was built a sleek new clinic designed by Albert Kahn. And soon after his arrival, Perini took charge of supervising the construction of what would be a three-mile-long railroad, cutting through the estate’s many hills and linking the sawmill to the farthermost field camps, which were charged with clearing more land for rubber planting.9

  Dearborn had also finally sent a topographer down to do a proper survey and identify the best location for a “city of at least 10,000 people to cover about three square miles.” Though Fordlandia was going on its third year, the construction of permanent houses for its Brazilian workers had not yet begun. Single laborers lived in bunkhouses or in holdout towns like Pau d’Agua along the plantation’s periphery. A few took up residence across the river, on Urucurituba island, and paddled to work every morning. Married workers mostly lived in the ever metastasizing “native village” stretching along the river. The largest, rambling part of this settlement was made up of the families of the plantation’s common laborers. They slept and cooked in one-room thatch houses, some of them reinforced with planks pried off discarded packing crates. Children, mothers, fathers, and other relatives hung their hammocks like radiating spokes from a central pole; the cooking fire’s smoke damaged their lungs but protected them from mosquitoes. Better-paid workers—hospital orderlies, coffee roasters, cooks and their helpers, waiters, log loaders, swampers, deckmen, firemen, gardeners, painters, oilers, janitors, sweepers, clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, teachers for the Brazilian children’s school, draftsmen, boat pilots, meatcutters, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths—lived in slightly nicer houses, often made of milled wood, but also with thatched roofs and dirt floors. As the workforce increased, the town grew haphazardly, with packing crate planks recycled as boardwalks, laid over a midway that turned to mud in the rain and baked into ruts in the sun.

  Top: An “ambulance” arrives at Fordlandia’s hospital, designed by Albert Kahn. Below: The scene in the hospital ward.

  By 1930, the plantation’s lines of administration had evolved into a more or less settled routine. Oxholm, who either decided or was told to leave the plantation two months after Perini’s arrival, was still the nominal manager, yet work was organized through a number of departments: “plantation,” “gardens,” “construction,” “sawmill,” “transportation,” “general stores,” “kitchens,” “clerical,” and “medical.” Americans, Europeans, and skilled Brazilians presided as managers and assistant foremen over work gangs of Brazilian laborers, who mostly remained nameless as far as company records were concerned so long as they didn’t try to organize a union, steal, or cause some other kind of trouble. Archie Weeks oversaw the largest part of the labor force, the men who did the hardest, most exhausting, and often deadliest work, beating back the jungle, quarrying stone, cutting underbrush, sawing trees, burning the wood waste, tilling the ash and soil, and planting new blocks of rubber. Weeks developed a “rare knack of training the natives to do his work,” according to his personnel file. He was a “driver,” but in a way that “made his men like it,” which may very well have been the case since most credited him with whatever progress Perini saw upon his arrival.

  In other areas of plantation life, however, efforts to accustom a fast-growing labor force to Ford-style regimentation, discipline, and hygiene generated tensions, often aggravated by brusque and antagonizing managers. Oxholm, for instance, had organized a ten-man “service department” to enforce Prohibition, dispatching his agents to do spot searches of the bunkhouses and bungalows and to confiscate any stashed liquor. Kaj Ostenfeld, who was from Denmark but had worked for five years as a cashier in a Rio Ford dealership, was put in charge of the camp’s payroll. His rude impatience in explaining certain deductions from biweekly wages, including for food service, compounded the resentment single men already felt about having to eat in a crowded mess hall (married employees who lived in the plantation’s riverside village were allowed to eat at home). And though Dr. Colin Beaton was respectful in his dealings with his patients, his efforts to make the plantation village conform to certain hygienic standards were felt to be radically intrusive. Before coming to Fordlandia, most of the workers had been destitute but at least had the freedom of living as they saw fit.10

  At Fordlandia they found themselves subject to the dictates of “sanitation squads” and “medical teams” that roamed the camp, draining and oiling potential mosquito breeding sites, killing stray dogs, checking for gonorrhea, and swatting flies. Inspectors swept into homes to make sure that food was correctly stored, that latrines were kept clean, and that all knew how to use, and properly dispose of, company-provided toilet paper. Their efforts to prevent families from sleeping in the same room where the cooking fire was kept not only were impractical, since the company had not built multiroom houses, but ignored the local practice of using the smoke to protect from insects. Inspectors fined families that didn’t keep the small, crude pig and chicken corrals in front or on the sides of their houses clean and insisted that women hang wet laundry on clotheslines. Dr. Smith, a pathologist Dearborn sent down to assist Dr. Beaton, believed that the common practice of laying items flat on the ground to dry helped transmit hookworm and other soil parasites.

  * * *

  Dr. and Mrs. Smith show off a collection of butterflies, tarantulas, and other jungle fauna.

  BEHIND THE NATIVE village, to the left if one’s back was to the river, stood a dozen or so clapboard bungalows where European, American, and Brazilian engineers, foremen, and sawmill workers lived. Among them, working in the plant and seed division, was David Serique, the son of Julio Serique, a Tangiers-born Jewish émigré who helped Harry Wickham gather the Tapajós seeds that ended Brazil’s dominance of the world’s rubber supply. Also at the estate were a few of Santarém’s Southern Baptist Confederates, who in an odd historical turn first encountered northern industrial regimentation in the Amazon. During the plantation’s first bungling years, members of this community provided indispensable support, provisioning it with goods and interpreting local language and culture for its managers. David Riker acted as a translator and also ran the plantation’s cattle yard and stockyard. Pushing seventy, he is described in his personnel file as an “older man than the Company would usually employ to put in charge of so large a work.” Yet his intimate knowledge of the Tapajós, along with the fact that since his father had established a small rubber farm on the outskirts of Santarém he was one of the only people around with experience in cultivating Hevea, compensated for his age. “Healthy and active,” with “several good years ahead,” Riker, aside from his service as labor recruiter and interpreter, presided over the “cleanest native camp on our premise.” Thre
e of his sons moved to Dearborn, where they took jobs at the River Rouge. As the oldest man in the camp, Riker had the honor in early 1928 of planting Fordlandia’s symbolic first seedling in a patch of cleared forest. A dozen or so workers stood in a circle as the old man pushed his spade into the soil with his foot, turned it, set the seedling in the hole, and patted the soil back in. He then said a few quiet words asking that the Lord bless the tree and make prosperity, for the plantation and the valley, flow from its bark.11

  Many of Fordlandia’s skilled workers were “prosperity boomers,” who, having arrived in Latin America to help dig the Panama Canal twenty years earlier, passed from one job to another. They traipsed through the jungle and desert frontiers, finding easy work in the US-owned mines, railroads, oil fields, and plantations that were spreading out across the continent. At each new job, they waxed about the glories of the last, and at the end of the day, over beer and whiskey, they “persisted in digging the Canal again” in tales that grew taller with every retelling. Others first came to the Amazon to work on the Madeira–Mamoré railroad and then stayed on. Texas cowboy Jimmy James, for example, had been living in Belém when he befriended Reeves Blakeley and signed on to his work crew. Fordlandia also attracted a number of “American and European renegades” fleeing their pasts. The Frenchmen Yves Efira, who did Fordlandia’s clerical work and was considered a “splendid linguist,” was rumored to be an escapee from Devil’s Island, the prison island located just off French Guiana. Additionally, the plantation hired a number of veterans who for one reason or another had landed in Brazil after the war. One of them, a machinist named Sullivan, “never missed an opportunity” to talk about “Paris and the wonderful French girls.” But he didn’t get along with Mueller, an Austrian draftsman. Tensions between the two men boiled over, and after one fight the machinist took the Austrian’s clothes and suitcases from the bunkhouse and threw them “outside in the mud from the torrential rain.” Mueller quit the plantation soon after.12

  Most of these migrants were engineers and mechanics, bringing years of experience working in the jungle to the plantation. But it was hard to check credentials on the Tapajós, so a few professed to have talents that they didn’t. A Dane named Simonsen claimed to be a rubber expert and said that the best way to protect seedlings from insects was by rubbing Vaseline on their trunks. “He succeeded in getting rid of the insects, but the trees died too, so he was given a pink slip,” according to one personal account.13

  By the time Fordlandia got fully under way, life for quite a few “tropical tramps” had turned desperate. In the 1910s and 1920s, they had “boomed from job to job,” ever ready to quit one because they knew they could always “find work at the end of the trail.” But after 1929, Europeans and Americans were likely to arrive at the mines, plantations, and railroads less boisterous and more hungry, searching not for adventure but for steady work no longer available in their home countries. Increasingly during the Great Depression, they found work sites to be unaccepting of the indulgences and pleasures associated with the drifting life of skilled itinerants. Mining and plantation companies had learned the importance of hiring married men, beholden to women and children, as a way to maintain a stable and responsible labor force. Corporate-run company towns grew “more and more respectable, more and more conscious of the ugliness of sin,” as a travel writer who passed through the region put it.

  Fordlandia’s puritanism was especially hard on Jack Diamond. Like Jimmy James, Diamond first arrived in Brazil to build the Madeira–Mamoré railroad, before moving on to other large infrastructure projects, eventually drifting over the Andes to take a job in Chile’s copper mines. With the onset of the Depression, though, Diamond found himself out of work and stranded. Bumming his way back to the Amazon, he hoped to get work again on the Madeira–Mamoré line, only to find it “virtually dead,” practically killed, first by the collapse of rubber prices and then by the global recession. After all the human lives wasted to build it, it was by 1930 running only one train each way every two weeks. He traveled down the Madeira River to Manaus. There, a group of expatriates raised a collection to stake him a ticket to Fordlandia, since “Henry Ford had a reputation of never refusing work to any man who came to his rubber plantation in search of it.” But Diamond couldn’t reconcile himself to Ford’s “new morality,” including his attempt to ban drinking and smoking. The shock was not of physical withdrawal: everybody from the head manager to common laborers got around Ford’s prohibition, and Diamond could always find a drink on what the skilled workers called rum row—the boats, barges, and canoes that served as floating bars and gambling houses bobbing just off the plantation’s shore—or on the Island of Innocents. It was rather, as one of his contemporaries put it, that Fordlandia’s strictures forced on him the realization that he had “outlived his day,” that “time had passed him by and that there was no longer a place for him in this world.”14

  So he quit the plantation and boarded a cattle steamer back to Manaus. As the ship slowed to approach the city’s dock, Diamond looked down from its upper deck into its brown waters and saw his way out. He climbed over the railing and leaped into a congregation of crocodiles.

  SET EVEN FARTHER back from the river were the “modern wooden houses” that Oxholm had built for the American staff, with porches and sloping front yards, on a wide street lined with mango trees, sidewalks, and streetlamps. These residences sat on a high spot on a bend in the river about a mile and a half from the dock and had stunning views in two directions of the Tapajós. Within a few years, this neighborhood would have a clubhouse where the men played cards and pool, a hotel for visiting guests, a tennis court and swimming pool, a movie theater, and a golf course. Compared with the “veritable Babel” of the skilled workers’ international camp, as Eimar Franco described it, this compound, aside from the occasional European like Oxholm, tended to be insular and homogeneous. The Texan Jimmy James married Oxholm’s sister and Kaj Ostenfeld wedded his Brazilian secretary, yet those who came directly from Ford’s Michigan operations tended to keep to themselves. Having visited the town with his father, Eimar Franco remembers walking in and thinking the Americans to be a race apart. “They were very white, blond with blue eyes, and spoke a different language,” he recalls. “It was as if the earth had been invaded by beings from another planet.” One traveler through the area at the time compared them unfavorably to the Confederates, who though they built their own Baptist churches lived huddled together in a group and maintained their southern drawl and faded gentry manners, married Brazilians, and produced new generations of “American faces and gray eyes chattering Portuguese on Santarém’s streets.” In contrast, the midwesterners at Fordlandia had erected a “wall of provincialism” around themselves.15

  Most never really mastered Portuguese, beyond learning how to conjugate the imperative form of a small number of verbs. A joke among Brazilians who lived on the plantations went: “What do the Americans learn how to say after their first year in the Amazon?” “Uma cerveja.” A beer. “And after two years?” “Duas cervejas.”16

  In the United States, the men and women Ford sent to the Amazon were decidedly working- or lower-middle class, accustomed more to showing deference than to receiving it. Even those who had a certain amount of status back home, like Dr. Beaton, who before being transferred to Brazil worked in Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, were not used to sitting at the absolute top of the social ladder as they did in Fordlandia. For men like Perini and Weeks, charged with building a plantation and company town, the change in class position probably elevated their sense of self-worth. For the women, however, the shift was disconcerting. Suddenly finding themselves serviced by a complete domestic staff, including cook, washerwoman, housecleaner, nanny, and “choreboy,” they quickly succumbed to boredom. Illiterate in Portuguese, the wives couldn’t even enjoy the pleasure of speaking the language of command to their servants, who competently went about their jobs with little direction. “Frankly, I believe that one
of the troubles with the ladies,” wrote one staff member back to Dearborn, is that “for them it is a listless, useless life, nothing to do, and they have not the energy to do anything, due to the climate, which is undoubtedly of an insidious nature.”

  Some Americans, in particular children, took happily to the adventure the Amazon offered. Leonor Weeks, Archie Weeks’s daughter, was eight when she arrived at the plantation. She loved her time at Fordlandia and today considers it the most interesting part of her long life. She remembers swimming in the American pool, which was right by her house, and playing golf with her father. She suffered from one bout of malaria but didn’t think it much worse than the flu. She did hate the “horrible hairy spiders” that often got in her house. If she ever came across a snake, she just did what her father taught her and let it pass. Unlike their parents, American boys and girls socialized with Brazilians, attending the plantation’s schools along with the children of Brazilian workers, and some, like Charles Townsend, who was born in Fordlandia in 1938, grew up speaking Portuguese as their first language. (When Townsend returned a few years ago to visit the house he lived in, now home to hundreds of bats, he couldn’t believe that he had survived such humidity.) The younger Leonor was tutored at home, but she too learned Portuguese and rode bikes with the children of her servants. Her fondest memory of the time at Fordlandia is of Chico, her pet monkey, which she describes as different from most, with “long black hair and bangs.” Leonor took Chico with her when she returned to the United States, much to the delight of her Michigan schoolmates.17