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

by Greg Grandin

  Slowly, before the second whistle signaled the official start of the day, the morning sounds of the forest would give way to the noise of waking families, women grinding manioc, and the chatter, first subdued and then playful, of assembling men. Most came from the bunkhouses or the plantation settlement. But a contingent commuted from the other side of the river, their canoe paddles splashing the water, oil lamps piercing the thick fog, helping them navigate, as did the occasional soft whistle if one drifted off course. Others walked from Pau d’Agua or one of the other small settlements on the plantation’s edge that had so far withstood the company’s attempts to buy them out or shut them down, continuing to offer a degree of nighttime autonomy to Fordlandia’s workers. Time cards were punched, ignitions turned, instructions given, and the workday commenced.

  By the end of 1930, then, it seemed as if Fordlandia had made it through its rough start and had settled into a workable routine. Most of the physical plant was built, and crews were pushing into the jungle, clearing more land, planting more rubber, and building more roads. John Rogge, named acting manager following his return from the upper Tapajós and Victor Perini’s sudden departure, had arranged for a steady supply of seeds to be sent down from the Mundurucú reservation. Rogge had also sent David Riker earlier in the year to the upper Amazon, to Acre in far western Brazil, to secure more seeds, some of which had arrived and had been planted. Sanitation squads still policed the plantation’s thatched settlement where workers with families lived, inspecting latrines and kitchens and making sure laundry was hung properly, waste was disposed of in a hygienic manner, and corrals were kept dry, well drained, and free of feces. But managers had their hands full getting the plantation and sawmill running, so they had mostly given up insisting that all single employees live on the estate proper, though they did try to force unmarried workers to eat lunch and dinner in the company’s newly built dining hall. Nor did the administration in those early years provide much in the way of entertainment. For most employees, the workday ended at three. Apart from dinner there wasn’t much else for single men to do but to drift to the cafes, bars, and brothels that surrounded the plantation, where they could eat and drink what they wanted and pay for sex if they liked. On Sundays, small-scale traders and merchants from nearby communities arrived on canoes, steamboats, and graceful sailboats, still widely used at the time, setting up a bustling market on the riverbank, selling fruit, vegetables, meat, notions, clothes, and books.

  The strikes, knife fights, and riots that marked Fordlandia’s first two years had subsided, and for all of 1930 there were no major incidents. Rogge decided that the detachment of armed soldiers that had been stationed at the camp since the 1928 riot was no longer needed. Fordlandia’s end-of-the-year report, compiled in early December 1930, praised if not the work ethic then the “docility” of Brazilian workers, who do “not resent being either shown or supervised by men of other nationalities.”

  Still, Rogge kept a tug and a smaller launch at the ready—not at the main dock but up the river, accessible by a path from the American village.

  THE TROUBLE STARTED in the new eating hall, a cavernous concrete warehouselike structure inaugurated just a few weeks earlier. To enforce the regulation that single workers had to take their meals on the plantation—both to discourage the patronage of bars and bordellos and to encourage a healthy diet—Rogge, back from a four-month vacation, decided after consulting with Dearborn that the cost of food would be automatically deducted from bimonthly paychecks.

  The new system went into effect in the middle of December. Common laborers sat at one end of the hall, skilled craftsmen and foremen at the other; both groups were served by waiters. Workers grumbled about being fed a diet set by Henry Ford, consisting of oatmeal and canned peaches imported from Michigan for breakfast and unpolished rice and whole wheat bread for dinner. And they didn’t like the automatic pay deductions, which meant they couldn’t spend their money where they wanted. It also meant they had to form a line outside the dining hall door so that office clerks could take attendance, jotting badge numbers in their roll book. But the arrangement seemed to be working.

  Then on December 20, Chester Coleman arrived in the camp to oversee the kitchens. Before having spent even a day at Fordlandia, he suggested that the plantation do away with waiter service. Fresh from his job as foreman at River Rouge, with its assembly lines and conveyor belts, Coleman proposed having all the men line up for their food “cafeteria-style.” Rogge agreed, and the change went into effect on the twenty-second. Rogge also charged the unpopular Kaj Ostenfeld, who worked in the payroll office, with the job of deducting the cost of meals from workers’ salaries and with making sure that the new plan went smoothly. Dearborn believed Ostenfeld a man of “unquestioned honesty,” though they did think he could use some refinement and suggested that at some point he be brought to Detroit for “further development.” Workers had long been unhappy with his condescending, provocative manner.9

  During the first hour or so, eight hundred men made it in and out without a problem. Ostenfeld, though, heard some of the skilled mechanics and foremen complain. “When they came from work,” he said, they expected to “to sit down at the table and be served by the waiters”—and not be forced to wait on line and eat with the common laborers. As the line began to bunch up, the complaints grew sharper. “We are not dogs,” someone protested, “that are going to be ordered by the company to eat in this way.” The sweltering heat didn’t help matters. The old mess hall had been made of thatch, with half-open walls and a tall, airy A-frame roof that while rustic looking was well ventilated. The new hall was concrete, with a squat roof made of asbestos, tar, and galvanized metal that trapped heat, turning the building into an oven.10

  Cooks had trouble keeping the food coming and the clerks took too much time recording the badge numbers. Outside, workers pushed against the entrance trying to get in. Inside, those waiting for food crowded around the harried servers, who couldn’t ladle the rice and fish onto plates fast enough. It was then that Manuel Caetano de Jesus, a thirty-five-year-old brick mason from the coastal state of Rio Grande do Norte, forced his way into the hall and confronted Ostenfeld. There was already animosity between the two men from past encounters, and as their words grew heated, workers in dirty shirts and ratty straw hats and smelling of a day’s hard work gathered round. Ostenfeld knew some Portuguese from his previous work at Rio’s Ford dealership. But that didn’t mean he fully understood de Jesus, who most likely spoke fast and with a thick working-class north Brazilian accent. Often Ford men had just enough Portuguese to get by, which could be a dangerous thing, creating situations where both parties might easily mistake obtuseness for hostility. In any case, Ostenfeld grasped what it meant when de Jesus took off his badge and handed it to him.

  Ostenfeld laughed. As de Jesus later testified, “it was as if he was making fun,” which “infuriated” those who were standing close by, following the argument. For his part, Ostenfeld claimed that de Jesus turned to the crowd and said: “I have done everything for you, now you can do the rest.”11

  The response was furious, one observer recounted, like “putting a match to gasoline.” The “horrible noise” of the breaking pots, glass, plates, sinks, tables, and chairs served as a clarion, calling more workers to descend on the mess hall armed with knives, rocks, pipes, hammers, machetes, and clubs. Ostenfeld, along with Coleman, who had watched the whole scene unfold not knowing a word of Portuguese, jumped in a truck to escape. As they sped away to tell Rogge what was happening, they heard someone yell: “Let’s break everything, let’s get hold of Ostenfeld.”

  With Ostenfeld in flight, the crowd went on a rampage. Having demolished the dining hall, the rioters destroyed “everything breakable within reach of their course, which took them to the office building, power house, sawmill, garage, radio station, and receiving building.” They cut the lights to the rest of the plantation, smashed windows, dumped a truckload of meat into the river, and broke pressur
e gauges. A group of men tried to pull out the pilings holding up the pier, while others set fire to the machine shop, burned company records, and looted the commissary. The rioters then set their sights on the things most closely associated with Ford, destroying every truck, tractor, and car on the plantation. Windshields and lights were shattered, gas tanks punctured, and tires slashed. A number of trucks were pushed into ditches, and at least one was rolled down the riverbank into the Tapajós. Then they turned to the time clocks, smashing them to bits.

  One group broke away and headed to Pau d’Agua to get liquor, while another ran to rouse other protesters. Unaware of what was going on, Archie Weeks nearly drove a “touring car” straight into a group of men armed with clubs and knives. He spun the steering wheel hard and sped away, but not fast enough to avoid a rain of rocks that shattered his back window. Gaining some distance, Weeks ditched the car and made his way back on foot to where the Americans lived.

  Learning of the uprising, Rogge, who himself was getting ready to eat dinner at his home in the American compound, dispatched a trusted Brazilian to cable Belém for reinforcements before the mob got to the radio. He then ordered Curtis Pringle, who by this point was in charge of Fordlandia’s rubber planting, to evacuate most of the Americans from the estate, especially the women, who were “in a very nervous condition.” Some left on the launch Rogge kept at the ready. Others availed themselves of “all means of transportation such as canoes, motor boats, horse back, etc.”

  Rogge, with his remaining staff, headed out to meet a group of about forty workers who were advancing on the American houses.

  Smashed time clock.

  “What are your grievances?” he asked them.

  “We are mechanics, masons, and carpenters, not table waiters,” they replied.

  Rogge said he was sympathetic and promised to address their concerns, but only if they would go and calm their fellow workers. But the men sent to find liquor had returned, and the riot was “in full swing.” When Rogge heard a group of drunken workers chanting “Brazil for Brazilians. Kill all the Americans,” he decided that it was time to leave. He ordered his men to make for the tugboat, but David Riker, just back from Acre, and Archie Weeks found themselves cut off from the evacuation route. Fleeing into the jungle, they hid out for two days while the riot raged on.12

  Rogge and the rest of his staff made it on the boat safely, passing the night anchored in the middle of the Tapajós. As the river’s waves lapped against the hull, the “tremendous noise” that signaled the destruction of Fordlandia continued into the morning.

  * * *

  FORDLANDIA’S UPRISING WAS an aftershock of the revolution that had rocked Brazil a few months earlier, the one that brought Getúlio Vargas to power. Vargas’s ascension was relatively bloodless, yet the frisson generated by his insurrection created a sense that the old rules no longer held and the old hierarchies no longer had to be respected. In the weeks before the December riot a number of Fordlandia’s staff made mention of the charged atmosphere that enveloped the plantation—which is, perhaps, why Rogge kept a tug waiting. “A few radicals among the skilled workers,” wrote Fordlandia’s Belém agent, James Kennedy, to Dearborn, “misinterpreted the successful revolution all over Brazil which occurred in October and these radicals began agitating against anything pertaining to foreigners.” Workers even hoisted red flags over their bunkhouses, which the Americans decided to let fly. But the ascension of Vargas also undoubtedly saved Fordlandia, for the man he named to replace Pará’s governor, Eurico de Freitas Valle, who had led the campaign to revise Ford’s concession, immediately agreed to provide whatever aid was needed to retake the plantation.

  The riot began on Monday, and that night Kennedy wired Juan Trippe, the legendary founder of Pan American Airways, at his office in New York to tell him that Fordlandia had fallen to “mob rule.” Trippe had recently established a trunk line between Belém and Manaus, with a mail and refueling stop in Santarém, and Kennedy asked if one of his planes could fly him and a few soldiers to the plantation. If they didn’t get there soon, Kennedy warned, the “place will be a total wreck in 24 hours.” Trippe immediately agreed.

  The next morning, Tuesday, having secured a military detachment from the local army base, Kennedy, a Brazilian lieutenant named Ismaelino Castro, and three armed soldiers boarded a Pan Am twin-engine Sikorsky hydroplane, taking off from Belém’s riverfront. It took about seven hours for the plane to reach the area, and when it landed in the early afternoon outside the town of Aveiros, just downriver from Fordlandia, Kennedy and Castro were greeted by Rogge and a few other Americans (the rest of the staff had fled to Santarém). Kennedy and the lieutenant decided to spend the night in Aveiros and travel to Fordlandia the following day. The next morning, they received word that the plantation had awaked quiet. But later that day, “irate” residents of Pau d’Agua and other villages that ringed Fordlandia’s periphery marched on the estate’s office with guns and machetes. Angry at the company’s efforts to evict them, they were perhaps urged on by Francisco Franco, who after Oxholm’s departure had developed an increasingly antagonistic relationship with Fordlandia, aggravated by Kennedy’s heavy-handed efforts to force him to sell his property in Pau d’Agua.

  Kennedy and Castro had the pilot of the Sikorsky swoop down and buzz the protesters, dispersing the threat. The plane then landed in the Tapajós and pulled up along Fordlandia’s dock. Calm seemed to be restored, though Castro and his men went ashore on their own, telling Kennedy to wait behind.13

  A delegation appointed by the workers received the lieutenant with a list of grievances they wanted to be presented to the company. High on the list was the demand that Ostenfeld be fired. The rest of the complaints had to do mostly with the right of free movement. Workers demanded to eat where, and what, they chose. They were tired of being fed whole wheat bread and unpolished rice “for health reasons,” as per Henry Ford’s instructions. They wanted to be able to frequent the cafes and restaurants that had sprung up around the work camp and be allowed to board steamboats, presumably to buy liquor, without first having to obtain permission. Single men complained about being jammed fifty to a bunkhouse.14

  In the weeks after the riot, regional newspapers ran stories featuring other criticisms of the plantation’s management. Manuel Caetano de Jesus, the mason fingered as the riot’s instigator, told the Estado do Pará that the workers hated the time clocks, not just because they were unaccustomed to such regimentation but because the clocks were impractically placed too far from their work stations, making it difficult to punch in as required to do “under penalty of losing wages.” Mario Pinheiro do Nascimento complained not just about being charged for food, which was not part of the deal when he contracted for work, but about the “very poor quality” of the food itself. The kitchen staff, he said, often served “rotten” fish “not fit for a dog kept hungry for three days.”15

  Others groused that come payday, the company, dependent on shipments of cash from Belém, was frequently short. So it handed out “cards” as markers. But if someone tried to leave, the plantation made it difficult to “exchange those cards for money.” The hospital and medical staff had done much to improve the health conditions of the residents in the center of Fordlandia. Yet the death rate remained high from “beri-beri and other unknown fevers” for those who worked on the estate’s outskirts building roads, gathering palm for thatch and timber, or clearing forest to plant more rubber. Pit vipers—large, thick-bodied snakes with a triangle-shaped head and rounded snout—continued to strike at the hands of workers as they chopped at the jungle’s undergrowth.* Others made mention of cramped living conditions, of being made to work in the rain, or of mandatory trips to the hospital without reason or explanation.16

  FORD VISCERALLY OPPOSED the notion of workers representing themselves collectively; he once called unions the “worst thing that ever struck the earth.” And as unions gained in popularity and strength, he seamlessly added labor leaders to his galler
y of enemies. At the time of the 1930 riot, Ford could claim a series of victories against organizing campaigns led by the militant Industrial Workers of the World and the AFL-affiliated Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers Union, and he would settle for nothing less in the Amazon. The men he sent down to Brazil, along with their supervisors back in Dearborn, were well versed in their boss’s thinking when it came to labor unrest, and they took it as an article of faith that, as Sorensen would repeatedly remind Fordlandia’s management, the company would not “let any strikers dictate how our business must be run.”

  So Kennedy told Lieutenant Castro flat out that he would not meet the protesters’ demands “under any circumstances.” Instead, he decided to use the opportunity presented by the riot to, as the sawyer Matt Mulrooney put it, “clean house.” He wired José Antunes, owner of the namesake riverboat Zeantunes—Zé being short for José—who was in Belém waiting to bring a shipment of goods recently arrived from New York, along with two hundred newly contracted employees, to Fordlandia. Kennedy told him to unload the cargo, dismiss the workers, and go to the Bank of London and withdraw an emergency shipment of cash.

  As Kennedy waited for the money, a boat carrying thirty-five soldiers “fully armed and equipped with machine guns” docked at Fordlandia on Christmas Eve. The troops inspected the plantation, confiscating knives, guns, and any other implement that could be used as a weapon. Kennedy then ordered the soldiers to evict the residents of Pau d’Agua and the other shantytowns that surrounded Fordlandia and close down the bars, restaurants, and brothels that had long bedeviled the plantation. “Entirely clean them out,” he told the soldiers. After the families were forced out and their houses torn down, Kennedy sent in the sanitation squad to “clean it up,” to burn the latrines and pour quicklime into the pits. Shortly thereafter, with the backing of Vargas’s government, he finally forced Francisco Franco to sell him the land where Pau d’Agua had stood for, as Eimar Franco puts it, “the price of a banana.”17