by Greg Grandin
Many on staff thought the team had come to shutter the plantation. In the United States, Ford was spending much of his company’s savings on keeping his American business running and one newspaper after another announced that he was planning to abandon his Brazilian operations. “Report Ford Ending Para Rubber Work,” ran a February 1931 headline in the New York Times. “Americans Assert Tropical Laborers Cannot Be Made to Punch a Time Clock as in North.” Yet the Dearborn representatives did not announce, as many thought they would, the end of Fordlandia. They instead reaffirmed the company’s commitment to build a “model city” in the jungle, one complete with restaurants, shops, churches, schools, decent, well-maintained houses, and “places of amusement.” Once the town was established, Carnegie told a reporter from the Times, it would “elect its own Mayor, maintain its own fire department and police force and levy and collect its own taxes. In other words, it will manage its own affairs as a strictly independent community.”1
“The plan is one of expansion,” Carnegie continued, “by which the Brazilian people and the company will be brought together in a closer union of interests.”
FOLLOWING A COSTLY riot, in the midst of a worldwide economic contraction seemingly without end, with his company for the first time ever running a deficit, even as rubber prices were tumbling, Ford decided to allot even more resources to his Brazilian venture. He did quietly send out feelers to see if any Brazilian interests would purchase the concession but was told that no one “would put money into the Rubber Company where there was no prospect of obtaining a profit for many years to come.” And he continued to fund the efforts of the now eighty-four-year-old Thomas Edison, right up to Edison’s death in 1931, to extract industrial-quality latex from goldenrod and other plants. Yet while Edison announced to the press that he was drinking an all-milk diet so that he would live long enough to find an alternative to tropical rubber, he told Ford that the production of synthetic latex was not feasible. When Soviet scientists issued a report around this time claiming that they had synthesized industrial-quality rubber from petroleum, the inventor, insisting that oil could not be turned into latex, denounced it as a fake. “It just can’t be done,” he said. Edison’s opinion might have influenced the carmaker’s decision to keep Fordlandia going.2
In truth, Ford couldn’t just abandon a project literally linked to his name, one so grandiloquently proclaimed to the world. And here the Depression actually reinforced the decision to stay in the Amazon. Back home Ford was spending even more money on his village industry projects, which by this point had evolved from a remedy for the dislocations of the twenties to a strategy for surviving the 1930s. “There may be no immediate business reason for decentralization,” admitted a Ford spokesman in 1935, “but there may be a human reason . . . and it would seem that our life is such that what is humanly desirable and morally right presently justifies itself as being economically practical.” And though shop-floor reality was quite different—with stalled assembly lines and drastically reduced hours for workers—Henry and Edsel, through 1930 and 1931, repeatedly told the press that not only would they not cut wages, they would invest even more money in the River Rouge. The same boosterism took place in the Amazon.3
A miracle was needed in those bleak first years of the Depression. And Ford was only too happy to supply one. His company reversed its previous tight-lipped policy regarding Fordlandia, which it had adopted in the wake of the concession scandal, and began issuing press releases and supplying facts and statistics to any reporter interested in Ford’s operations on the Tapajós. And sure enough, there began to appear after the riot a series of articles in US and Brazilian papers reprising the fanfare that had announced the original settlement a few years earlier.4
“No Business Depression Here,” ran a headline in the New York Times two days after Christmas 1931, over a photograph of Ford’s Tapajós town. “This is Fordlandia,” the caption said, “where the automobile manufacturer is spending millions of dollars on the scientific growing of rubber. The settlement, once a waste, has been converted into a model city where high wages prevail.” Around the same time, the Washington Post wrote that “electricity and running water in native homes were miracles undreamed before Henry Ford went to the tropics to develop his own sources of rubber supply.” The Chicago Tribune likewise reported on the “modern city” rising in the jungle, one that would soon boast hundreds of “Swiss cottage type” homes, along with shops, parks, a church, a bank, a movie theater, and bus service: “Fordlandia, an up-to-date town with all modern comforts, has been created in a wilderness that never had seen anything more pretentious than a thatched hut. Water is supplied under pressure after it has been thoroughly filtered to remove dangers of fever infection, and electric light illuminated bungalows in a region where such inventions are proof of the white man’s magic.” And in the Upper Peninsula, the Iron Mountain Daily News told its readers, many of them Ford employees, that “Henry Ford has transplanted a large slice of twentieth century civilization” to the Amazon.5
This was increasingly the justification for Fordlandia, broadcast in the material supplied to the press as well as in international company correspondence. The longer it took the plantation to achieve its original purpose and produce latex, the more it was defended as a missionary project, a model for what Ford, and by extension America, could accomplish in the world. “Mr. Ford,” said the Washington Post in 1932, “not only intends to cultivate rubber but the rubber gatherers as well.” “A civilizing mission,” agreed Major Lester Baker in a note published in the Times, a “dream.”6
For Gerald Drew, who replaced John Minter as the American consul in Belém, Ford’s utopianism was the “only theory” that could explain what he saw unfolding on the Tapajós. “Mr. Ford considers the project as a ‘work of civilization,’ ” he told his superiors in Washington, including the secretary of state. Nothing else, he said, could explain the extravagant sums of money the company was spending on Fordlandia.7
Over the next decade, the company downplayed the need for rubber as providing Fordlandia’s rationale and instead emphasized its civilizing mission. On Ford’s Sunday Evening Hour, broadcast nationally, Linton Wells, the baritone-voiced foreign war correspondent, told listeners how the “skill and wits” of the Ford Motor Company had triumphed over the “tricky” and “perverse” Amazon jungle. Wells, who during World War II would be tapped by FDR to find a possible homeland in Africa for European Jews (he recommended Angola), described the creation of the town “on the edge of nowhere” almost “like magic” and praised it for containing all the “traditional essentials for health, happiness, and well-being.” There were “churches, schools, and a splendid hospital, with a medical staff from Detroit’s famed Henry Ford Hospital. Shops, movies, restaurants, and comfortable homes lined palm-fringed streets. There were electricity, telephone and sanitary services and an 18-hole golf course.”8
Such cheerleading was not just for public consumption. Dearborn officials were telling one another the same things throughout the 1930s. After visiting the estate, Charles Sorensen wrote to Henry Ford that he should be proud of Fordlandia, for it was indeed a “school of civic education.”9
“I think you would be well advised,” wrote one Dearborn manager responding to an economics professor who asked for information on Fordlandia to include in a lecture, “to point out to your listeners that Mr. Ford’s whole project is still in an experimental stage—that his experiment is as much sociological as industrial. Indeed, it is in the sociological field that he has thus far registered his finest achievements in Brazil.”10
PERINI AND CARNEGIE, in consultation with Rogge, laid out an ambitious plan to have the reality catch up to the promise. The first thing they had to do was rebuild the workforce, which had shrunk to a few hundred workers. The plantation began to hire again, topping off at about fifteen hundred workers and their families—bringing Fordlandia’s population up to around five thousand—within half a year. This time, though, the employment
office took pains to vet applicants more systematically than in the past, when managers were only too eager to receive boatloads of job seekers, hiring anyone who was close to healthy, to offset the high turnover rate. Perini and Carnegie came to believe that during Fordlandia’s first year or so, Einar Oxholm had unknowingly employed labor radicals, along with a “large number of criminals.” The plantation therefore began to work more closely with the new Vargas government, itself involved in an attempt to consolidate its authority. Back in the States, the Ford Motor Company, which distrusted the government when it came to policy or regulation, had no problem with law enforcement. During the first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1921, it had regularly opened its files, including all the information on the personal lives of workers gathered in the wake of the Five Dollar Day announcement, to local police and the FBI, as a way of rooting out potential subversives. At Fordlandia, Perini and Carnegie put a similar system of vigilance into place, with a file opened on every job applicant, to be shared as needed with the police and military. Each worker was henceforth required to carry a “small book similar to a passport,” which would include a photograph, fingerprint, signature, and previous police records.11
The next step was to complete as quickly as possible the “irradiating center of civilization,” as Edsel described Fordlandia, long promised by Henry Ford himself. On the eve of the riot, beyond the American compound and the handful of well-built bungalows the skilled workers occupied, Fordlandia as a town existed only on the Dearborn blueprints rolled out for reporters two years earlier. The bawdy shantytowns on the edge of the plantation had been reduced to ashes and quicklime right after the December riot, though the bunkhouses and ramshackle village where married workers had lived still stood. As Fordlandia began to hire again, single workers and families moved back in. But Perini and Carnegie decided that this village was unacceptable, that a proper town needed to be raised, with a “civic center” complete with stores, movie theaters, and “all other utilities usually found in a city.” They also recommended a significant expansion of Fordlandia’s school system so that it could enroll all the children of the plantation’s large labor force. And since it was no longer practical for the Ford Motor Company, dependent as it was on riverboat operators, local purveyors, and foreign banks, to be, as it had been to that point, the sole source of daily necessities, from shoes and clothing to coffee and food, Perini and Carnegie recommended that the plantation contract out to local “concessionaries” the right to establish businesses in the new town, with the company remaining responsible for health inspections and keeping prices fair and low. In keeping with their vision of small-town America, they recommended a series of small Main Street shops, each one specializing in providing a specific item or service, such as shoes and haircuts.12
But before they had a chance to put much of their plan into effect, Victor Perini was struck sick again. He tried but just couldn’t take the wet Amazon heat. As occurred during his first visit, his legs and face swelled up, his eyelids grew puffy, and his skin broke out in a rash that refused to be soothed by lotions or steroids. He returned to Michigan, again just after a few months on the Tapajós, and soon after retired from the company, settling with Constance in Detroit. Carnegie also had to get back to his accounting responsibilities. And Rogge, while considered by Dearborn to be trustworthy and efficient, was thought an ineffective supervisor of men, a fact underscored by the events of December. He stayed on as an assistant manager, but Archibald Johnston was put in charge of rebuilding Fordlandia.
Archibald Johnston.
Johnston was forty-seven years old when he took over in the middle of 1931. Born in Scotland, he had a thick brogue, intelligent eyes, and brushed-back tawny hair and was dubbed the “White Tiger” by the Brazilian press, as much for his swift adaptation to jungle living as for his poise in navigating through Belém’s political scene. Not only did he rebuild the labor force and reestablish Ford’s authority (with the help of the Brazilian police and military) but it was he who finally secured the company’s long sought-after tax and tariff exemptions.13
With Rogge and Curtis Pringle as his assistants, Johnston also made some progress on turning Fordlandia into a real town. At first he had a hard time finding the kind of concessionaires Perini and Carnegie recommended to meet the settlement’s needs. Local merchants were reluctant to specialize in one or two items. Francisco Franco, for instance, across the river, kept a small warehouse stocked with knives, rifles, ammunition, rope, candles, grains, sugar, shoes and sandals, cooking utensils, and perhaps a guitar or two to advance on credit, or to sell outright if cash was on hand, to rubber tappers and other river dwellers. But he was hardly likely to open a butcher shop or a shoe store typical of an American Main Street. As Victor Perini reported to Dearborn just prior to his departure, merchants “all want to conduct a general store” because in “small towns like Santarém it seems to be the custom for a merchant to sell everything that he can stock, including liquors of all kinds. They do not look so favorably upon the idea of one man running a shoe store, another a grocery, and a third man a meat market, as all felt that they should be permitted to sell whatever they can.”14
Johnston eventually did contract with enough concessionaires to open a bakery, barber shop, shoe store, tailor, a store selling “notions and perfumery,” two grocery stores, a vegetable and fish market, and a butcher. He also found someone to take over the repaired dining hall, now divided between the larger “Ford Restaurant” on one side and a slightly more upscale eating place for skilled workers on the other.15
Then he turned to Fordlandia’s housing crisis. The plantation’s original plans from 1928 called for the building of four hundred two-room houses “per Ford Motor Co. drawings,” at a cost of $1,500 each—clearly insufficient for the thousands of workers and their families who had come to the settlement. In truth, this failure to address workers’ housing needs was not that different from what was happening in Michigan. Despite his famed paternalism and acquisition of towns like Pequaming, Ford, except for a small experimental community of 250 homes, largely tried to avoid providing houses for his Dearborn and Detroit workers, believing his high wages would be enough to create prosperous neighborhoods. He steadfastly ignored the city’s mounting housing problems, which had dogged the automobile industry since the beginning of its expansion. Workers lived in overcrowded slums, flophouses, and tenements, most without decent plumbing, electricity, or heat, with African Americans consigned to the worst of the lot.16*
“There was nothing down there to absorb their earnings,” said Ernest Liebold. So Fordlandia opened a series of shops, including a shoe store.
But on the Tapajós, the Ford Motor Company recognized that it couldn’t escape the responsibility for supplying decent living quarters, and Johnston, in the wake of the riot, was determined to get it right. He demolished the “disreputable straw village” where workers with families had crowded, replacing it with over a hundred new palm-roofed adobe houses equipped with water and electricity and laid out in “good lines, straight and true.” He cleaned up the riverfront and graded, paved, and named the streets that ran through what was finally beginning to look like a midwestern town, with sidewalks, streetlamps, and red fire hydrants. Dearborn, though, wasn’t happy with the thatched houses and ordered Johnston to build proper midwestern-style clapboard bungalows. Johnston tried to reason with his superiors, saying that the huts were “no disgrace to the Amazon region.” He explained that “the natives are quite happy and willing to live in them and as long as they are no detriment to the health of Boa Vista, we feel that they should be allowed to use them so why build more wood houses now?”17
A snug bungalow on the Tapajós.
But it was not thatched roofs and mud walls that impressed visiting reporters, who inevitably pointed to Fordlandia’s handful of “Swiss cottage type” homes and “snug bungalows” as exemplars of a “model colonial town.” So Johnston and Rogge got to work, and by the end of 1933 there were over two
hundred “modern houses” for laborers and foremen.
Designed in Michigan, the houses proved to be totally inappropriate for the Amazon climate. Brazilians objected to the window screens that Ford officials insisted be used, believing that they served not to keep bugs out but to trap them in, “much as an old-fashioned fly-trap collects flies.” Amazon dwellers also preferred dirt floors, which were cooler than wood or concrete ones. But Victor Perini, who during his first visit had inspected housing conditions with Dr. Beaton, believed that beriberi was caused by sleeping in low-slung hammocks with one’s back close to the cold clay. So Dearborn ordered that all houses have poured concrete for flooring.18
Straight and true: Fordlandia’s Riverside Avenue, with Tapajós River to the right.
Metal roofs lined with asbestos, chosen by Ford engineers to repel the sun’s rays, in fact kept heat in. The “workers’ houses were hotter than the gates of hell,” recalled a priest who ministered in Fordlandia, “because some faraway engineer decided that a metal roof was better than something more traditional like thatch.” They were “galvanized iron bake ovens,” said Carl LaRue, commenting on Fordlandia’s foibles years later. “It is incredible that anyone should build a house like that in the tropics.” Another visitor described them as “midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares.” They seemed to be “designed by Detroit architects who probably couldn’t envision a land without snow.”19
Ford managers, said the priest, “never really figured out what country they were in.”