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

by Greg Grandin

  The main struts of Henry Ford’s philosophy all had antecedents in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American political and literary concepts: that mechanization marked not the conquest but the realization of nature’s secrets and thus the attainment of the pastoral ideal; that history is best understood as the progress of this realization, of the gradual liberation of humans from soul-crushing toil; and that America has a providential role to play in world history in achieving this liberation. It was from such wellsprings of technological optimism that Ford was drawing when he predicted that his Muscle Shoals project would “make a new Eden of our Mississippi Valley, turning it into the great garden and powerhouse of the country.” Against Marxists who warned that an impending “crisis of overproduction” would bring down capitalism, Ford countered by predicting that “the day of actual overproduction is the day of emancipation from enslaving materialistic anxiety.” To those who thought industrialization deadened mind and spirit, Ford responded by saying that want was the true cause of alienation. “The unfortunate man whose mind is continually bent to the problem of his next meal or the next night’s shelter is a materialist perforce,” he said. “Now, emancipate this man by economic security and the appurtenances of social decency and comfort, and instead of making him more of a materialist you liberate him.”21

  These and similar pronouncements were not merely self-aggrandizing conceits on Ford’s part. Many saw the cheap, durable car he made available to the multitudes as the “spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree,” to quote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s description of the quickness with which man embraced the automobile. What else could explain the effortlessness with which the Model T, after its demise, could be transformed into an object of pastoral nostalgia, as ornery as the animal it replaced? “If the emergency brake hadn’t been pulled all the way back,” E. B. White wrote in a 1936 New Yorker essay titled “Farewell, My Lovely,” “the car advanced on you the instant the first explosion occurred and you would hold it back by leaning your weight against it. I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket.”22

  As a response to the Great Depression, Ford’s drive for balance and holistic self-sufficiency manifested itself in a number of ways: he increased his commitment to village industries and hydroelectricity; he said small household gardens would do more to offset poverty than government relief and urged his River Rouge workers to grow their own food; and he promoted his “Industrialized American Barn” at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair as a solution to the farm crisis. Ford also stepped up his funding of “chemurgical” (a neologism coined in 1934, combining the Greek words chemi, or the art of material transformation, and ergon, work) experiments, many of which took place in Greenfield Village’s laboratory, to find new industrial uses for agricultural products. Many of his ideas were harebrained, an industrial version of medieval alchemy. Ford once had a truckload of carrots dumped in front of Greenfield Village’s lab and told its chemists to find useful properties from their pulp. But he did have some significant successes. Iron Mountain chemists figured out how to use wood chips to make artificial leather, while the lab at Greenfield Village developed many new uses for soy meal and soy oil.

  There is symmetry at work in what Ford thought he was doing at Dearborn and what he hoped to accomplish on the Tapajós, and the progress of both Greenfield Village and Fordlandia proceeded on remarkably parallel tracks, functioning almost as counterweights to each other in a pendulum clock, counting out the last long stretch of Henry Ford’s long life. Ford’s experience with model towns and village industries in the Upper Peninsula and lower Michigan set the stage for his frustrated Muscle Shoals proposal and then for both Greenfield Village and Fordlandia.

  This evolution of thought partly explains why Ford never bothered to seek the guidance of other corporations such as Hershey or the United Fruit Company, even though they had long experience building and running company towns in Cuba, Central America, and elsewhere. Fordlandia was to benefit from the combined knowledge of Ford’s many village projects in the United States. In the Amazon, Ford fully expected that chemists would turn the minerals, oils, and plants found on his estate into lubricating grease, fuels, paints, soaps, rope, fertilizers, and insecticides. Fordlandia’s managers sent hundreds of samples back to Dearborn, as well as to Chicago’s Field Museum, and today one can find dusty boxes in the Ford Archives filled with seeds, barks, and leaves of a variety of tropical flora, accompanied by notes indicating their acidity and nitrogen levels, as well as their ash, sodium, and lime content. Just as Ford hoped his village industries would achieve self-sufficiency through hydroelectricity, he thought that the Tapajós would provide enough power to limit the use of purchased gasoline; that the sawmill would cut hardwood not just for local use but for sale to support the plantation; that not just proper hygiene and decent health care but flower gardens and square dancing—which Ford would promote in Fordlandia as a response to the December 1930 riot—would cultivate virtuous workers; and that all of this applied craftwork, supplemented by Ford-founded and -funded schools, would produce a new generation of skilled workers. This is why so many of the men—Rogge, Mulrooney, Weeks, Perini, and others—along with their wives and children, who went down to start and run Fordlandia were from the Upper Peninsula, where the Ford Motor Company had first tried to combine the rational and efficient harnessing of nature with the orderly and aesthetic organization of humans.

  OVER THE COURSE of the 1930s, Ford’s vision began to turn in on itself. Before the Great Depression, the Ford Motor Company could seriously have claimed to have solved many of the most pressing problems that arose from the Industrial Revolution. It proved that capitalism could benefit not just the banker or the monopolist but the masses. And it showed how mechanization could not just drive down labor costs but increase buying power and free individuals from menial labor, allowing them more time for personal enjoyment and satisfaction outside the factory gates. But modern consumer capitalism created a whole new set of problems, aggravated by a depression seemingly without end.

  Ford lived long enough to see himself and his system of production implicated in many of the vices he preached against. He also witnessed the ascendancy of Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin as head of a political coalition—the New Deal—that was setting America’s reform agenda. Ford’s opposition to FDR and his program of government regulation flowed from the same kind of pastoralism that powered his technological optimism: a view of industry and nature as existing in fundamental harmony by extension tends to take even the mildest form of government interference as perverse.* Of course, his exhortations to self-reliance and patronage of village industries had as little chance of solving the problems revealed by the Great Depression as Fordlandia managers had of taming the Amazon. Yet Ford never relented in his condemnation of the New Deal’s solution to the crisis: the promotion of unionism, government regulation of industry, and establishment of federal relief.

  Specifically, Ford refused to warm to Roosevelt and his New Dealers. “People like that,” he told Charles Lindbergh, “always get what’s coming to them.” But Ford not only saw the country elect FDR four times but witnessed the federal government complete its Tennessee Valley Authority project, in effect carrying out the Muscle Shoals proposal Ford made a decade earlier.† It would be Roosevelt and not Henry Ford who would bring cheap electric power to the farmers of the lower Appalachian Valley.23

  In the last years of his life, Ford responded to these setbacks by losing himself in the past, in the details of Greenfield Village. Even as the Chrysler Corporation was pushing ahead despite the financial crash with its namesake modernist masterpiece in the busy heart of New York City, Ford was fussing over spinning wheels and rag dolls. And as GM and other businesses were rationalizing the modern corporate management structure, Ford’s once revolutionary company was turning gothic, presided over by a gangster who ran the labor force as if he were a medieval lord.24


  Ford fell into a depression when his longtime friend Thomas Edison died in late 1931. The carmaker would preside over one more breakthrough engineering triumph: the V8 engine, introduced in 1932, would serve as the industry standard for decades to come. But Ford’s body and mind began to yield. He continued to dress with precision, his back revealing only the slightest of stoops. And in interviews, he could still rouse himself to gracious animation of the kind he displayed to the Brazilian consul José Custódio Alves de Lima years earlier. He was charming when hosting Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, for dinner during their stay in Detroit, even after Kahlo asked him if he was Jewish. Yet those close to him noted that he was losing his sense of humor, and the malevolent side of his personality was becoming more manifest. Ford had renounced his public anti-Semitism, but in his private conversations with his old Independent staff, as well as with friends like Charles Lindbergh, the main point of conversations remained “the Jews.” They, along with the Communists, GM, the Du Ponts, and FDR, Ford was sure, were trying to take over his factory. And though, as some have noted, his anti-Semitism remained detached from the close relations he had with many Jews, the nastiness he began to show his close associates, including the sadism with which he treated his son, Edsel, was visceral. As was his stoking of Harry Bennett’s brutality. “Harry, let’s you and him have a fight,” Ford would gleefully whisper to his enforcer, siccing him on a troublesome worker.25

  The balance Ford tried to achieve between industry and agriculture, society and community, gave way to a full-on retreat into antiquarianism. Between the River Rouge and Greenfield Village, Ford increasingly preferred the latter. Nearly every morning found him at its Martha-Mary Chapel, where the village schoolchildren started their days singing hymns. “He spent so much time around the village,” remembered Edward Cutler, the architect who had planned Greenfield. “It was a relief for him to get down there.” Ford would walk the village streets, sit under a tree and play his mouth harp, or warm himself by a fireside hearth. He refused, at least during the village’s early years, to have a telephone installed. “He didn’t want any way for them to get a hold of him,” remembered Cutler.26

  Frank Lloyd Wright, who earlier had praised Ford’s vision for Muscle Shoals, was less understanding than Rivera of what he condemned as Ford’s unrestrained traditionalism. Speaking of a trip he made to the River Rouge early in the Depression, Wright praised a building designed by Albert Kahn as a perfect synthesis of form and function. “It was really a fine thing,” he said, “eight hundred feet long, beautifully lighted. The sun was shining in it, and over about half of the shining surface of maple flooring was planted with wonderful machinery, with men working at the machines.” But Ford—“the captain” as Wright called him—was nowhere to be found. He was “out playing” in his museum with his “old things, . . . reprehensible enough in themselves, and now worthless.” Such antique “slumming,” Wright thought, was part of a general escape from the innovative modernism of the 1920s into a sham traditionalism (an escape likewise represented by the wanderlust ballads that so entranced John Rogge on the Tapajós). Besides, Ford’s “old cast-off things” weren’t even American. Real Americanism was vital and organic, like Kahn’s River Rouge. What Ford was collecting was “Georgian” carried over “to this new freedom by the Colonials because they had none other or better to bring.”

  Wright couldn’t explain Ford’s turn. “This is a man,” he said, “from whom the future had a right to expect something more than sentimentality.”27

  In the Amazon, too, Ford’s vision began to split apart. He took a personal hand in many of the decisions involved in rebuilding Fordlandia after the 1930 riot, particularly as they related to education and recreation. Yet as the attainment of the original motive for the project—to grow rubber—became increasingly elusive, Fordlandia became more and more a museum piece, Ford’s vision of Americanism frozen in amber.

  ____________

  *This point was underscored after Ford’s death when the president of Ford Motor Company, Robert McNamara, joined the John F. Kennedy administration as secretary of defense, a position in which he used industrial “systems theory” to rationalize warfare and wage “mechanized, dehumanizing slaughter” from the skies over Vietnam. See Gabriel Kolko, “On the Avoidance of Reality,” Crimes of War, ed. Richard Falk, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Jay Lifton, New York: Vintage, 1971, p. 15.

  *Four years earlier, in his Ministry of Education mural in Mexico City, Rivera painted a ghastly Ford sitting at a banquet table, along with J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, reading a stock market ticker tape.

  *Ford’s patronage of chemurgy, for instance, was an attempt to provide a corporate, private-sector alternative to government remedies for the rural crisis; if the industrial market for crops could be enlarged, there would be no need to regulate agricultural production, as the New Dealers proposed (Howard P. Segal, Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005, p. 34).

  †Roosevelt signed the TVA Act on May 18, 1933, shortly after his inauguration. The legislation was sponsored in Congress by none other than George Norris, the Nebraskan senator who led the campaign that successfully denied Ford Muscle Shoals nine years earlier. The act created the Tennessee Valley Authority, which soon became a working laboratory for many of the New Deal’s rural initiatives and a testing ground for a new aesthetic style that sought to reconcile regionalism with modernism. Spectacularly successful, the TVA brought together hydraulic and electrical engineers, doctors, architects, economists, teachers, artists, and thousands of well-paid, unionized workers to carry out an enormous experiment in social planning. As Arthur Morgan, the engineer in charge of the project, put it, the “Tennessee Valley is the first place in America where we can sit down and design a civilization.” Despite Ford’s antipathy, many New Dealers drew inspiration from the carmaker’s village industries and used the TVA to complete an ambitious agenda that included many of Ford’s favorite ideas: dam building for flood control and hydroelectricity, dredging to improve navigation, reforestation, efforts to stem soil erosion, and prevention of disease, including malaria and hookworm. They even created a model town, Norris, Tennessee, named after Ford’s adversary and described as a “rural-urban community where 1000 to 2000 people can have four-acre family gardens, modern city conveniences of pure water, electricity for cooking and heating, attractive homes, and the added interest of a town forest.” Like Ford, FDR imagined the development of the Tennessee Valley having an exemplary effect on the whole country. He said that Muscle Shoals would become “part of an even greater development that will take in all that magnificent Tennessee River from the mountains of Virginia to the Ohio,” benefiting “generations to come” and “millions yet unborn.” In many of the discussions surrounding the TVA, an implicit analogy was drawn between the raging, uncontrolled, and flood-prone river with an unregulated boom-and-bust economy and the need for government intervention and planning to put both in service to human beings. FDR drew a similar comparison in his 1935 dedication of another large-scale public works project, the Hoover Dam in Nevada: “As an unregulated river, the Colorado added little of value to the region this dam serves. When in flood the river was a threatening torrent. In the dry months of the year it shrank to a trickling stream. For a generation, [residents] had lived in the shadow of disaster from this river which provided their livelihood, and which is the foundation of their hopes for themselves and their children. Every spring they awaited with dread the coming of a flood, and at the end of nearly every summer they feared a shortage of water would destroy their crops.” See William E. Leuchtenburg, “Roosevelt, Norris, and the ‘Seven Little TVAs,’ ” Journal of Politics 14 (1952): 418–41; Arthur Morgan, Log of the TVA, New York: Survey Associates, 1936, p. 19; Tim Culvahouse, ed., The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

  CHAPTER 17

  GOOD LINES, STRAIGHT AND T
RUE

  BACK IN BRAZIL, A “PALL” SETTLED “OVER EVERYTHING” IN FORDlandia once the immediate threat of the December 1930 riot passed, a report back to Dearborn said. The Americans returned to their homes, but in the months after the clash they felt “intimidated” and “not sure that they cared to remain” on the plantation. They seemed paralyzed, “waiting for something to happen.” The women were nervous, the men on edge. The skeleton crew of workers retained by James Kennedy had begun rebuilding the plantation’s physical plant. Electricians got the generator working again, and laborers installed windows, hung doors, and fished trucks out of the Tapajós. Yet a sense of distress, of impending trouble, remained. It was as if the shock of the Great Depression, held at bay through 1930 by the magic of Ford wealth, had finally arrived on the Tapajós.

  Even before the uprising, Ford had feared that his namesake plantation was spinning out of control into a cesspool of waste, vice, and ridicule. For a brief period after the departure of Oxholm, under first Victor Perini’s and then John Rogge’s supervision, the situation seemed to be improving. But the riot created a new sense of concern and urgency. So in February 1931, he once again sent Victor Perini, who a year earlier was forced to leave the plantation due to chronic edema, to make things right. This time Perini was accompanied by W. E. Carnegie, Ford’s head accountant, and Archibald Johnston, a Sorensen man from the River Rouge.