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

by Greg Grandin

  Ford pioneers on their way to the Amazon but dressed for Michigan winter.

  As to the adults, Curtis Pringle, a lean ex-sheriff from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who sported a thin Clark Gable mustache and was described by a colleague as “absolutely fearless in the jungle,” stayed for over a decade, earning a reputation as a practical-minded foreman. Dr. Beaton, thirty-one and single, also enjoyed the assignment, sweetened as it was by having his pay tripled from what he earned in Detroit. When his first tour was up, he signed on for another two-year turn. He put himself to learning Portuguese and soon spoke the language more fluently than any other Michigan transplant. “Extremely well liked,” his personnel file said; Beaton “fit his job like an old shoe.” And, importantly considering the high attrition rate of Americans due to jungle illnesses (he replaced Fordlandia’s first doctor, who couldn’t stand the heat), he enjoyed good health.18

  The sawyer Matt Mulrooney was also never sick, not even for a day during his year in Fordlandia. His immediate supervisor thought he had a “chip on his shoulder,” but what was interpreted as disaffection was in fact a wry Irish sense of the absurd. Mulrooney thought it was funny that he could turn on his radio and listen to American music patched in from the United States via relays in Managua, Nicaragua, and Santa Marta, Colombia. One night, he and his wife danced to a Rudy Vallee concert broadcast live from Green Bay, Wisconsin. America’s original pop idol, Vallee was the first singer to master the intimate, disembodied tone of new radio technology. At the time of his Green Bay concert, he was riding high on a parade of movie musicals and hit songs, including “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover” and “Deep Night,” the lyrics of which wafted through Fordlandia’s American village, as Mulrooney held his wife close:

  Deep night, stars in the sky above

  Moonlight, lighting our place of love

  Night winds seem to have gone to rest

  Two eyes, brightly with love are gleaming.

  . . . . . . . . .

  Deep night, whispering trees above

  Kind night, bringing you nearer and nearer and dearer

  Deep night, deep in the arms of love.

  “Where others have played to thousands,” ran the ad for one of the singer’s movies, “Vallee sings nightly to millions,” including those who found themselves deep in the Tapajós valley, his voice competing with the nighttime sounds of howler monkeys, frogs, and a cacophony of crickets.19

  The Mulrooneys.

  MANY OF THE Americans, though, did not welcome their posting to the Amazon. The jungle pressed heavy on them, with its incessant rains that gave way to baking sun. “It was like living in a steam bath!” thought Constance Perini. There were flying bugs with “claws just like lobsters,” heat rashes and sunburns, insect bites, ticks, skin funguses, and dysentery. The Ford staff was introduced to an array of minor pests bearing strange names, such as piums, small biting black flies, as well as minuscule fleas that dug under fingernails, leaving their eggs to fester and infect the skin. At night, vampire bats often worked their way past window screens to feed, and since their razor-sharp incisors could painlessly pierce flesh, the Americans would sleep through an attack, waking up to find their toes and ankles bloodied. And if malaria didn’t get you, the nightmares brought on by the daily quinine pills would. “Dope every day,” was how Mulrooney remembered the prophylactic.

  Illness, often the kind of undiagnosed fevers that took the lives of Oxholm’s children, became a chronic condition. William Cowling was just one of the company officials who returned to Dearborn gaunt after some time in the Amazon. Malaria became as common as a Detroit cold, and many of the men and women spent their days recovering from an attack or expecting a new one. “Some had malaria two or three times,” recalled one worker. “Rogge had it three times. Bricker had it I don’t know how many times. Casson had it. They all had it.”

  Dr. Beaton sent a steady flow of telegrams to Dr. Roy McClure, his Dearborn superior and head of surgery at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital:

  Mrs. Oxholm has had recurring attacks apparently cholelthiasis (gallstones) probably also functional nervous disturbance. One aggravates other. Needs also considerable dental work her daughter needs tonsils extracted. Recommend both go Ford hospital soon.

  Mr. Carr’s son had a recurrent attack of acute rheumatic fever with cardiac decompensation during the voyage up the Amazon River.

  Advisable to return Mr. Babcock by first available boat he continues to lose weight.

  Mrs. Johnston keeps losing weight, she was 127, and is now 106. I have tried to persuade her to go home, but she is not keen about that, however.

  Mr. and Mrs. Runge are leaving for Miami. Mr. Runge did not get along too well in this country but that may be the fault of the country.

  Mrs. Bradshaw has suffered during the month from gastric hyperacidity with attacks of dull hunger like pain accentuated if anything by meals and relieved temporarily by alkalis. At times the highly acid stomach contents are vomited with relief. . . . [Her illness is] provoked by the nervous strain inherent with life here. She is very soon returning to the States. . . . The unrelieved stretch of two years work under tension in a tropical climate is too long and its effects continue to manifest themselves. The cities of Belém and Manaus are no health resorts but visits to them or . . . quiet rests on ranches, hunting trips, etc. . . . would steady nerves, calm ruffled tempers, distract attention from petty exasperations and infuse one with new and more worthwhile interests.

  For some, the isolation of the plantation increased fears born of loneliness, making some feel as if they were “prisoners.” Moody and unable to concentrate, Mr. Groth, a chemist doing lab work on parasitical infections for the plantation, kept asking to be allowed to return to the United States. His supervisor dismissed his complaints as “imaginary ills” stemming from a fear of catching some of the diseases he was studying. “Take hold of yourself,” he scolded Groth, telling him that “as a man thinks so he is.” This may not have soothed the chemist’s nerves, but it did keep him quiet for a while. But when he again demanded to be allowed to leave, management relented. “We are not trying to persuade him any more. We believe he is lonesome and has had some trouble with his sweetheart and he feels that he can’t carry on.”20

  The most striking defection was Victor Perini’s. Henry Ford had hoped Perini would turn things around, but Perini couldn’t take the Amazon heat. He hated the jungle and from his first day in Belém began to suffer from “edema of legs and puffiness of face.”

  “Awaiting instructions,” a distressed Dr. Beaton wired Dearborn, “on what to do with Victor Perini.” Diagnosed with chronic exhaustion, Victor eventually took his family and sailed back to Dearborn in May 1930 on the Ormoc, only two months after his arrival.

  MOST OF THE rubber Oxholm had planted in the middle of 1929, during the dry season, under the hot sun in burnt ground, with seeds and seedlings of doubtful quality, had come up weak. And in April, before he left the plantation, Perini had decided to plow the field over and start again. Which meant that it would be at least another five years before Fordlandia would produce latex. The lumber mill, too, was a mess, its blades and saws ill suited for the very hard or very soft jungle wood. Hired to be a sawyer, Matt Mulrooney felt more like an undertaker: “They averaged about a man a day dying. I used to get orders every so often to cut this lumber for coffins. There was a certain thickness and a certain width they used to make the coffins out of. They’d bring an order up every so often and give it to me. I’d say, ‘What, some more of them gone?’ ‘Yep, better fix up for about ten, Matt.’ ”

  Fordlandia cemetery.

  Like many of the other men Ford sent to Brazil, Mulrooney belonged to the generation of skilled carpenters, miners, and lumberjacks that had presided over the transformation of Michigan’s natural resources into wealth; they had seen the conversion of the state’s forests, minerals, and waterways into the energy and capital that fed the great industrial factories and cities of the Midwest. Sawyers like M
ulrooney had witnessed in their lifetimes the seemingly inexhaustible white pine forests of upper Michigan thin out, leaving first inferior stocks of yellow pine, birch, and deciduous aspen and then wastelands of cutovers, trunks, shrubs, and branches of no economic value. Yet they also saw the rise of cities that spoke of prosperity enjoyed not just by the lords and barons in the manor houses of Chicago and Detroit but by increasingly affluent working- and middle-class communities that spread out from these cities.21

  So Mulrooney could take pride as the gnarl of the Amazon gave way, slowly, to the order of the plantation. “You know, an old sawyer likes the looks of a sawed log,” he said. “There was some nice-looking logs there, some nice-looking timber, awful nice-looking. To go out and look at a bunch of that timber cut up in the woods, it was really a picture to look at, straight and not a limb or a knot in it.”

  But the sawyer also knew that a “very, very big percentage” of the cut wood was “no good.” Watching the absurdity of it all—Oxholm’s bungling, the silliness of trying to impose Henry Ford’s ideas concerning diet and morality, the enormous expense and waste of resources, the impossibility of making the mill work right—Mulrooney had a distinct sense of futility. At the end of the workday, he and his pal Earl Casson, also from Iron Mountain, would “grin and wonder how we’d ever wound up in a madhouse, or if we’d ever win. We tagged it as a game.”

  ____________

  *More than a half century earlier, Henry Wickham wrote about the sensation of sitting in the forest and gazing up at the “leafy arches above” and becoming “lost in the wonderful beauty of that upper system—a world of life complete within itself.” The British explorer Charles Luxmoore, traveling up the Tapajós in 1928 trying to locate Percy Fawcett, complained incessantly in his journal about everything he encountered—people, food, insects, heat, and the landscape. Yet upon taking a hike in the forest, “lit up by the sun,” he pronounced it “very beautiful.” “I would not have missed this part of the journey for anything,” Luxmoore conceded. (Joc Jackson, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, New York: Viking, 2008; 99; Devon Record Office, Exeter, UK, Charles Luxmoore, Journal 2, 1928, 521 M–1/SS/9.)

  CHAPTER 14

  LET’S WANDER OUT YONDER

  IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL THE STORY OF FORDLANDIA WITHout invoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that great, indelible allegory of European colonialism in general and Belgian brutality in particular. Here, the Rouge River stands in for the Thames, the starting point of Conrad’s tale, and the Ormoc for the Nellie, which carries Marlow to his rendezvous with tropical madness. Any number of Ford agents—Blakeley, for instance, or Oxholm—could double for Kurtz, defying the “whited sepulchre” of Dearborn puritanism and giving in to their lusts.

  Yet there’s something more Mark Twain than Joseph Conrad, more Huckleberry than homicidal, about the stories of Ford men lost in the wilderness. Consider Mr. Johansen, a Scot, and Mr. Tolksdorf, a German, dispatched to gather rubber seeds in September 1929 by Ford’s envoy William Cowling. Their mission was urgent. After the disaster of Captain Oxholm’s first planting, the two men were charged with locating groves of high-yielding rubber trees, gathering their seeds, and returning in time to plant them by the coming May, before the rains ended. Traveling with a Brazilian assistant named Victor Gil and a “Negro cook” named Francisco, the two Europeans cut loose their Brazilian underlings a month into the trip. Gil they abandoned in a two-hut village, and Francisco they put ashore on an uninhabited island.1

  Johansen and Tolksdorf headed to Barra, a small rubber town at the headwaters of the Tapajós. With the idea that it would be “nice to have a highball or two” on the coming New Year’s Eve, they ordered wine, whiskey, and beer and paid for it with company funds. They proceeded to get “intoxicated and remained that way most of the time throwing money away and making fools of themselves in general.” One night, Johansen stumbled into a trading post, where he purchased several bottles of perfume. He then headed back out to the town’s one street, swerving back and forth as he chased down cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Baptizing the livestock with the perfume, he repeated the benediction “Mr. Ford has lots of money; you might as well smell good too.”

  After about a week, the two renegades contracted a launch, loaded it with Ford-bought whiskey and a prostitute they hired as a cook, and set off on what sounded more like a “vagabond picnic than a rubber seed gathering expedition.” They continued their riverine ribaldry from village to village, one smaller than the next, until they landed in a government area set aside for the Mundurucú Indians, centered on a Catholic Franciscan mission. There Johansen established himself as the “rubber seed king of the upper rivers,” using a crew of about forty Indians to clear underbrush and gather seeds.

  FORD MANAGERS, LIKE European colonialists in Asia and Africa, were fixated on race. Ernest Liebold, after all, advised Ford to plant rubber in Brazil and not in Liberia largely because of his low opinion of Africans. “She has just a touch of the ‘tar-brush,’ ” wrote O. Z. Ide in his diary after meeting the Brazilian wife of a Belém-based British exporter. Others who followed Ide used the words nigger and negroes freely and, according to historian Elizabeth Esch, plotted workers by skin color on a spectrum that ranged from “tameness” to “savagery.” When Archibald Johnston, who would shortly become Fordlandia’s manager, wanted to send Henry Ford and other company executives some samples of rain forest wood, he had a “little wooden nigger boy” made from different specimens of trees found on the estate. Johnston said in a note accompanying the gift that its color was “all natural.” Its cap, coat, teeth, and collar were made of pau marfim, a dense, cream-colored wood. Its head was carved from pau santo, a kind of tonewood. And the buttons were pau amarelo, or yellowheart. Ford’s secretary thanked Johnston for the “nigger boy,” saying that his boss was “very pleased” with the gift. “It is indeed a fine piece of work,” Sorensen replied directly.2

  Yet instead of unleashing the kind of mortal racism that gripped Kurtz, the jungle seemed to catalyze in Ford men another trait endemic to Americans: a blithe insistence that all the world is more or less like us, or at least an imagined version of “us.” Here is the sawyer Matt Mulrooney commenting on workers, many of whom in the United States he would have undoubtedly considered black:

  Most of the people are white people. They are as white as we are. They are not colored up. Once in while you would run across a fellow and you could see he was smeared up with some other nationality. I wouldn’t say it was Irish, or English, or Scotch or Dutch. I don’t know what it was, but he’d have a different color on him. You couldn’t tell. There was a color there. He wasn’t a smokey or a white face. Them are the best workers. The rest of the 3,300 people were all the same, all white generally, they are all white, sunburned or tanned.

  Nor were the Ford men seduced into thinking about the natural wonders of the Amazon in existential terms as markers of evil or human progress—as were so many travel writers. For Theodore Roosevelt, who valued the rough frontier or jungle life as character building, the Brazilian rain forest was simultaneously empty of the moral meaning created by civilization’s advance and a cure for its corruption. But the men Ford sent down to build Fordlandia, and the women who went with them, largely avoided such musings. They did occasionally make mention of the tropical flora and fauna, yet often in the most prosaic way, commenting on the size of the bugs or the relentlessness of the heat and rain, and usually in mundane comparison with what they knew back in the States. Two decades after Constance Perini returned home, what still impressed her the most were the “black ants with claws just like lobsters” and the “largest flying cockroaches I’ve ever seen”—or, she said, “at least they looked like cockroaches.”3

  Charged with transforming the jungle into a plantation, company managers were of course concerned with the Amazon’s natural dimensions. They had to consider many variables—quality of the soil and level of the lan
d, irrigation, potential for hydropower, density of mosquitoes—when choosing where to plant rubber, where to build the workers’ settlement and town center, and where to place the factory and dock. Dearborn sent a steady stream of questions to determine what equipment to ship: “What is the general tenacity of attachment of vines to trees and can they be readily pulled away from trees with heavy tractors or with a Fordson tractor?” “Is nature of soil such that trees will cling tightly to soil and carry a large portion of soil with roots if pulled up with tractors, or is soil loose and free enough to allow trees to be pulled out without leaving large holes which will require backfilling?” “What percentage of trees will be suitable for logging?” “What would be the cost of logging over 1000 board feet using native hand labor without machinery?” “Ascertain sources, quality and quantity of stone, gravel and sand for concrete. Crushing strength and chemical composition of clean sharp sand, gravel, and limestone should be determined.” But the managers answered these questions with an unimpressed prose, unlike the kind of florid verse that the Amazon usually provoked.4

  The jungle tended to produce not apocalyptic reflections on man’s place in the universe but rather a wistful homesickness, a constant comparison of the Amazon with Michigan. Mulrooney got a “big kick” when, upon his return to Michigan, his friends would say to him, “Oh, gee, Mulrooney, it must have been a wonderful place to fish and hunt, all woods.” “Yep, fine place,” he told them, “you couldn’t get out in the woods to hunt. If you caught a fish, it wasn’t any good. They were just a bunch of grease. Give me the fish in Michigan!” Whether Ford managers, engineers, and sawyers may have thought the jungle a gothic hell or a window on to the consuming indifference of the primeval world to the hurriedness of man, they mostly kept it to themselves. When they looked up and saw vultures, as O. Z. Ide did upon arriving in Belém for the first time, they thought of Detroit pigeons.