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

by Greg Grandin

  They never really figured out who their workers were, either. In addition to inappropriate housing, Ford managers laid on a program of civic education and wholesome recreation that had little to do with the Amazon—and everything to do with America, or at least Henry Ford’s understanding of America.

  ____________

  *Urban poverty in America is often presented as a result of industrial decline. Yet historian Thomas Sugrue, in his The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), argues that the roots of poverty and housing discrimination are inextricably linked to the consolidation—not the decline—of American industrial capitalism, not only to the refusal of corporate leaders like Ford to take responsibility for providing adequate housing for a growing urban working class but to specific choices made by companies to relocate in suburbs and other hard-to-unionize rural areas. Meanwhile, in Dearborn, Ford’s River Rouge African American workers, 12 percent of his total workforce, were isolated in poor surrounding townships like Inkster, living in pitiful bungalows, with little access to basic services like decent schools for their children. The Great Depression finally forced Ford to spend tens of thousands of dollars to rehabilitate Inkster. But it was too little, too late and served only to reinforce segregation in Dearborn, which the Ford Motor Company never contested and which lasted well into the 1970s. Detroit continued its slide into urban poverty as Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler moved more and more of their work out of the city.

  CHAPTER 18

  MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON

  THE FIRST TIME CONSTANCE PERINI MET HENRY FORD WAS IN 1926 as she was lying in bed in his namesake Detroit hospital, recovering from a long illness. “Stay right there,” he said to family members who made to leave when he came in. “I’m not going to hurt anybody.”

  “Are you comfortable here?” Ford asked Mrs. Perini.

  “Very much.”

  “How do you like Iron Mountain?” he inquired.

  It was winter when the Perinis arrived in the Upper Pensinsula, having come from Manchester, England, where Victor worked in the Ford plant, and the Michigan town was covered in twelve feet of snow.

  “I don’t know what Iron Mountain looks like. All I’ve seen is roofs and snow. They don’t even have sidewalks.”

  “Oh yes, they have sidewalks up there. You’ll see them when the snow goes away.”

  “I don’t know . . . we’ll see when the snow goes away.”

  “You’ll see,” Ford replied, “there are plenty of sidewalks there and dandelions. You will be able to put flowers in and show them how to do it.”

  On his way out, she heard Ford tell her husband, “I knew she would come out all right. You can be proud. You’ve got a good wife. She is a good housekeeper and a good mother. Take care of her.”

  Constance recovered her health and returned to Iron Mountain, where she took Ford’s advice. She planted flowers that spring, and sure enough, she said, “the idea must have taken hold on the rest of the town because the next year everyone got to work planting flowers and bushes. You would be surprised at what a difference it made.” Ford, when he visited, “was quite pleased with the looks of the places on this visit,” said Mrs. Perini. “He said so to several people.”1

  Here then, summed up, is Ford’s civilizing injunction, issued in his home state years before he made his move into the Amazon: Go forth and plant flowers.

  FOR HENRY FORD, gardening captured his vision of holistic Emersonian self-sufficiency, in which aesthetics and economics, nature and mechanics worked as one. At his Fair Lane estate in Dearborn, his wife, Clara, presided over twenty gardeners, three greenhouses, a sprawling general garden, a ten-thousand-plant rose garden, and the restoration, under the guidance of the naturalist John Burroughs, of a great portion of their land to its forested state. Ford also promoted gardening as an integral part of the curriculum of the many schools he supported in the United States, including those in Greenfield Village and his village industries. He gave his Upper Peninsula lumberjacks, jobbers, sawyers, and other mill workers plots of land to grow vegetables for their own use. In Dearborn, starting in 1918, the company began to make 35-by-60-foot plots available to employees on Ford property and encouraged homeowning workers to keep flower and vegetable gardens in their yards. Colored posters appeared around the Highland Park and Rouge plants letting workers know about Ford’s Garden Education Service. A “company-gardener” was “on hand during all daylight hours to answer all questions” on how best to lay out plots, when to plant, and how to prepare and fertilize the soil. Workers paid a dollar for these services, which included the provision of seeds. The fee was “totally inadequate to cover the cost,” noted an internal memo, but “sufficient to give each participant a ‘stake’ in the project.” Through the Great Depression of the 1930s, Ford pushed gardening as an alternative to government relief. And by the end of the decade, some fifty-five thousand of his employees kept home gardens and another three thousand workers maintained garden plots on Ford-allotted land.2

  And so in Fordlandia, as part of the post-riot rebuilding program, both Henry and Clara Ford became personally involved in promoting gardening, saying that it was their “expressed wish that the planting of flowers and vegetables be incorporated into the estate’s school curriculum and encouraged among its workers.” Roy McClure, chief of surgery at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, wrote to Archie Johnston that “Mr. Ford expressed considerable interest in the schools and in the hope that the medical program and perhaps gardening projects might be started as they have been at Dearborn, Georgia, Northern Michigan, as well as Wayside Inn.”3

  As with housing, Archie Johnston did what he could to comply. But here, too, he found the gap wide between Dearborn principles and Tapajós practice. “We are aware that Mr. Ford wants every home to have a small plot of ground in connection with same,” Johnston wrote Carnegie in Dearborn, “but we wonder if the picture of Boa Vista has been properly presented to him.” He pointed out that because the Brazilian settlement was nestled tight between the river and a hill, to give each house the 12,000 square feet of land Ford suggested would stretch out the population center. “One might say, what does that matter, but let us consider the costs, this means miles and miles of water mains, electric poles, wire, sewers, time lost in maintenance.”

  Johnston fudged when it came to spacing the houses. He bunched them up closer than Ford demanded. As to gardening, he told Dearborn that “we will do the best we can.” But it was the dry season and there was much work to be done and ground to be cleared. Workers had made considerable headway during the 1930 rainy season, with the seed supply secured by Rogge on his trip up the Tapajós. And a good deal of forest had been cleared in the dry months leading to the December riot, with much of it planted by the skeleton crew kept on after the clash. Yet Johnston felt that too much time had been wasted in the months after the uprising, and he wanted to focus his energies on what he felt he had been put in charge to do, grow rubber. He was learning quickly that he had to spend a lot of resources dealing with the insects that attacked the maturing rubber trees, and he didn’t want to expend any more of them trying to fend off the creatures that fed on fruit and vegetables. “Bugs,” Johnston wrote, “both crawling and flying, are a great handicap.” In addition, it wasn’t easy to acquire the seeds for the kind of horticulture Henry and Clara suggested.4

  He did try. Every new house was given a quarter acre of land to plant, and households were provided seeds and seedlings. Many of Fordlandia’s workers had experience in maintaining roças, small jungle clearings where they grew vegetables, tubers, beans, fruits, and herbs. Others had farmed on the seasonally enriched floodplains.5 And well before Ford started promoting gardening in the Amazon, many of Fordlandia’s workers who lived in Pau d’Agua and other villages had raised pigs and chickens and kept vegetable and manioc plots. This ended up being a problem for the plantation, since too much access to land made Ford employees less dependent
on Fordlandia’s wages, restaurants, and commissaries. It also contributed to a high turnover rate among workers, as many would just quit and go back to their home communities to plant or to fish.6 As in Michigan, Ford preached decentralization, and he hoped his garden program in Fordlandia would encourage a “sense of propriety and personal pride”—yet not so much pride that his workers would be able to forsake a cash salary altogether. So even as Johnston was encouraging residents to plant flowers and vegetables he was ordering families to dismantle their corrals—as his counterparts in the Upper Peninsula had done a decade earlier in Pequaming—thus prohibiting them from keeping livestock in their yards. Gardening, he said, should be geared to the “improvement of the street in general instead of small individual squares.”7

  Eventually, the plantation established a garden club and posted notices around town, translated into Portuguese:

  Many persons here have expressed their wish that there be a concerted effort to beautify our streets and houses. It seems that this wish is shared, more or less, by every family and every person on the plantation, but up until now this wish has not been publicly shown and therefore has not been generally recognized. The cultivation of gardens contributes greatly to the general well-being of any community and is a source of pleasure to the owner as well as an improvement to the neighborhood. . . . With these thoughts in mind there has been inaugurated a Garden Club to which any family and any individual may join.

  This announcement was followed by the “Best Home Garden” contest. The first-place prize would be twenty-five dollars, with the highest score given to the garden that was “attractive as well as practical, that is, it should have a combination of vegetables and flowers.”8

  JOHNSTON DIDN’T REALLY believe gardening would achieve self-sufficiency or even contribute to the moral improvement of character. He did think, though, that it could occupy children and stop them “from being destructive with trees already planted”—after school, they had a habit of trampling through just-planted fields and nurseries, and a gardening club, Johnston hoped, might otherwise absorb their energies through the afternoon.9

  How to keep people busy—Americans so they didn’t feel like “prisoners,” Brazilians so they wouldn’t decamp out of boredom or, worse, revolt—had become a major worry of Fordlandia’s managers. It was a concern before the 1930 uprising. Right after the first food strike in 1928, Oxholm purchased six soccer balls, hoping that the sport would allow his men to blow off steam. And following every subsequent labor conflict, some Ford official would come up with a new remedial amusement. But after the 1930 riot, with the razing of the bordellos, bars, and casinos that had entertained workers during their off-hours, the provision of recreation became a more pressing issue for plantation officials. In their report back to Dearborn, Perini and Carnegie suggested setting up a “soft drinks and ice cream shop” and a “bandstand,” so that the “natives would soon organize a band among themselves.”10

  As to the Americans, the company worried that they “have practically no diversion, and get extremely tired of seeing the same faces at all times and places.” Dearborn urged its plantation staff to take vacations, to visit Belém or Manaus. Roy McClure, head of Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, wrote a note to Edsel suggesting that Fordlandia residents take a railroad trip through the jungle on the near defunct Madeira line “or wherever they wish to go in order to clear their minds of petty grievances which arise in some people who get to feeling they are prisoners.”11 Workers built playgrounds for children and a tennis court for adults, and Carnegie and Perini thought that if enough road was rolled—by 1934 there were close to thirty miles of paved and dirt thoroughfares—then “an automobile trip,” in Ford “station wagons,” of “several miles will also be possible.”12

  New roads to roam: A Lincoln Zephyr stuck in Fordlandia mud.

  Back in the United States, golf had grown in popularity in the years after World War I, and like many other corporate managers Ford Motor Company officials, including Reeves Blakeley, who while in Belém negotiating the terms of the Tapajós concession could often be found shooting holes on a jungle range outside the city limits, had become avid players. And the Dearborn Independent, reflecting Ford’s growing cultural conservatism, particularly his distrust of large, easily manipulated urban crowds, promoted golf as a substitute for baseball. Ford’s paper criticized America’s pastime for concentrating “ten thousand people” in one place while giving them little to do other than to sit in “cramped-up positions watching nine men handling a bat and a ball. . . . A large portion of our so-called sportsmen are mere shouters and noise makers, and have no more claim to be regarded as exponents of any particular game than the Roman mob which attended the gladiatorial contests in the arena.” Golf, in contrast, got “people out of the crowded city to the pure air of the seaside or the country.” It encouraged spectators to become participants themselves, not as part of a “team” but as individuals. The paper urged municipalities throughout the country to build golf courses as a way of promoting civic virtue, since a “community playing golf in its leisure moments should have no time for less edifying pursuits.” Golf develops “foresight and perseverance,” as the “golfer never looks backward; ‘Fore’ is his slogan, and his aim is to drive his ball clear of all traps and pitfalls.” And so Ford workers on the Tapajós moved forward, laying out a nine-hole course adjacent to the American compound and the “nature park.” Archie Weeks’s daughter, Leonor, dubbed the links the “Winding Brook Golf Course,” since it ran along an igarapé, or stream.13

  “The golfer never looks backward”: Fordlandia’s Winding Brook Golf Course.

  Hunting was another sport that the Michigonians brought with them to the Amazon. In the forest they shot jaguars, panthers, and large snakes. The staff was allowed the “occasional use without charge of company boats,” and men went out on the river on shooting expeditions. Opening fire into large congregations of caimans provided a way more to vent frustration than to test hunting prowess, though it took more skill to kill manatees and botos, the river dolphins that Brazilians affectionately and mischievously blamed for otherwise unexplainable pregnancies. The Americans were also encouraged to go on boating trips, yet the Tapajós was treacherous. Violent storms could be conjured out of a blue day, with afternoon wind heading up the valley crossing with the downstream current to create more than a meter-high chop. Santarém’s Catholic cathedral is adorned with a gilded life-size iron Christ on a cross made of local itauba wood, a gift from the Bavarian naturalist Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius for his having narrowly survived a fierce storm just off the shores of the town in 1819. The inscription thanks “divine pity” for saving him from the “fury of the Amazonian waves.” Floating islands, as big as twenty acres wide and ten feet deep, posed another threat, able to encircle a craft and paralyze its propeller with their underwater vines. Swimming in the river was likewise dangerous, filled as it was with “alligators, piranhas, electric eels, sting rays, and large water snakes, sometimes as long as 30 feet.” So once the houses Johnston had built, complete with indoor bathrooms and showers, were ready for occupancy, and two swimming pools, one for common laborers, the other for skilled workers and staff, were excavated, the company discouraged river bathing.14

  Ford workers and administrators, including, in the center, James Kennedy, John Rogge, and Dr. and Mrs. Smith, view a “sea cow,” or manatee. A note on the back of the photograph says it weighed 600 pounds.

  Ford tugboat trapped in a river-grass island.

  There was radio reception, of the kind that brought Rudy Vallee to the Mulrooneys. The company made sure that the Ford Sunday Evening Hour, which broadcast wholesome American music as well as safely exotic fare, such as the Ford Hawaiians, reached the plantation. But reception was often ruined by static. And with “victorola records and books” slow to arrive, managers continued to sponsor community-wide public activities, mostly on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons but also occasionally during the week.
Brazilian workers participated in competitive sporting events, such as soccer, boxing, and foot races, which helped not only to keep them occupied but to entertain the Americans, particularly bored women. But all enjoyed the vaudeville show staged by the managers. One extravaganza was such a “big success,” wrote Archie Johnston to Dearborn, that “everyone says it is the best ever here.”15

  At the end of 1931, Johnston built an open-air dance hall where the plantation held, at Henry Ford’s urging, traditional American dances. Back in Michigan around this time, Ford, as part of his broader antiquarianism, began to sponsor fiddling contests and sent agents to scour the nation to record the steps of traditional dances before they disappeared or were corrupted by the “sex dancing” that was sweeping America. He also established his own private record label, Early American Dances, and hosted balls in Dearborn and in his growing collection of inns, farmhouses, and village industries throughout the country. Employees understood invitations as “thinly disguised commands” to attend, and they did their best to maneuver through waltzes, polkas, minuets, square dances, as well as the quadrille and the ripple. All guests—even Harry Bennett, who liked to wear bow ties so that in a fistfight his opponent couldn’t get a hold on him—were expected to follow proper decorum: men, not women, were to initiate the dance and there was to be no cutting in and no crossing the middle of the dance floor. Benjamin Lovett, the instructor Ford contracted to organize these balls, wrote in his Good Morning: After a Sleep of Twenty-Five Years, Old-Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford, published in 1926, that protocol dictated that the man was to guide the woman without embracing. There would be no bodily contact except for the thumb and forefinger, which were to touch the woman’s waist as if “holding a pencil.” Boxes of the book were shipped up to Ford’s towns in the Upper Peninsula, to Alberta, Pequaming, and other villages, where for a time the local schoolchildren took daily dance classes.16