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

by Greg Grandin

  In his encomium to Ford’s music patronage, Lovett linked specific dances to “the racial characteristics of the people who dance them.” Modern American dancing, with its flappers moving to the fox-trot, shimmy, rag, Charleston, and black bottom, not to mention the obscenely sensuous tango, had been sullied by influences “that originated in the African Congo, dances from the gypsies of the South American pampas, and dances from the hot-blooded races of Southern Europe.” But Ford was rescuing a truer tradition of dance that “best fits with the American temperament, . . . a revival of the type of dancing which has survived longer among the Northern peoples.” Ford himself traced the rot not to Africa, Argentina, or Italy but to Jews. The Independent, during its run of anti-Semitic articles, complained that the “mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes are of Jewish origins.”17

  Ford’s dance revival clearly reflected his conservative turn. As the historian Steven Watts writes, the industrialist “deployed swirling, waltzing couples and stamping square dancers as skirmish lines in a larger cultural campaign to reclaim and defend American values and practices from an earlier day.” Fordlandia allowed Ford to go on the offensive, to advance his campaign into the Amazon and reclaim its inhabitants, some of them already under the sway of dances like the Charleston, for a more virtuous sociability. In the rain forest, Ford made his counterthrust against Jazz Age culture not only with dance but also with verse. The man many the world over blamed for “trampling down individuality, beauty, and serenity, and erecting machine altars to Mammon and Moloch” sponsored in Fordlandia readings in Portuguese translation of Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and, ironically, William Wordsworth, the poet who declaimed against the mechanical “fever of the world” leading a “rash assault” on English greenery.18

  IN ADDITION TO buying soccer balls to keep workers busy, Captain Oxholm also asked Charles Sorensen to send him a “moving picture outfit.” Sorensen did, and Fordlandia began to screen films. But the projector the Rouge sent down was outdated and the movies available from Belém’s distributor were old, “terribly scratched, warped and dried out.” And workers complained of boredom if the same picture was screened too many times. When Johnston took over management, he secured a better sound projector, which allowed him to feature more up-to-date films. He found a Fox agent in Recife who could supply the plantation with B action pictures, the “type that is best liked down there,” said Johnston. Rio’s movie industry was just getting started in the 1930s, and Johnston tried to show Brazilian films whenever he could, especially the popular chanchadas, slapstick musicals, including a few starring a young Carmen Miranda. “We intend putting on a good show for our workers,” Johnston said. It’s unknown if he ever had the opportunity to screen Law of the Tropics, a Warner Bros. picture partly based on a 1936 Collier’s Weekly article on Fordlandia. The film, released in 1941, was a bust in the United States, panned by the New York Times for unrealistically depicting a “verdant” jungle where “mosquitoes never bother any one.”19

  Fordlandia dance hall, with movie screen on back wall.

  “We intend putting on a good show”: John Rogge, second from left, Curtis Pringle in the middle, and James Kennedy with camera, filming scenes of family life.

  Fordlandia also put on a good show for Dearborn. By the 1930s, Henry Ford had embraced celluloid as a way to link together his far-flung empire. Film crews would document his camping trips with Thomas Edison, Herbert Hoover, and John Burroughs; aerial shots of Mexico; scenes of street life in Bridgetown, Barbados; Diego Rivera painting the Detroit Institute of Arts; surgeries in the Henry Ford Hospital; Ford mines, mills, and dams; and each and every subassembly process that went into making a Ford car. Fordlandia, too, was filmed, as a decision was made early to “build up a complete history of our development in detail,” for “a ready reference to any given operation.” Henry Ford specifically asked to see “action, pictures, etc. etc.” of Fordlandia’s garden program.20

  Johnston sent roll after roll of raw 16 mm footage to Dearborn, to be screened for officials, including Henry and Edsel, so they might get a sense of the plantation’s progress and everyday life. These reels were largely made up of random, uncaptioned images: men sawing trees and clearing jungle, Americans shooting caimans and gutting manatees, chunks of meat dangled in the river to provoke a piranha frenzy, lingering head shots of workers, who seemed to have been chosen to illustrate the region’s racial diversity, schoolchildren listening courteously to their teacher, and workers lining up to receive their paychecks, undergoing a medical examination, or playing soccer as women and children looked on. Many of these images were folded into in-house documentaries detailing different facets of Ford’s vast holdings or into films focused on latex, such as Redeeming a Rubber Empire. In exchange, Dearborn sent news and documentary shorts down to Fordlandia, familiarizing Brazilian workers with other branches of the Ford family. New Roads to Roam and Streamlines Make Headlines introduced them to the Lincoln Zephyr, a luxury car made by a company Ford purchased in 1922, and let them know they were living in a new, aerodynamic age. Making Wooden Wheels for Autos gave the estate’s residents a picture of the Rouge’s state-of-the-art machinery that made the spokes and rims that would soon be framing tires made from Fordlandia latex.

  Dearborn also provided films capturing the age of discovery, which was largely made possible by the rapid advances in transportation technology. Fordlandia workers and managers watched Bottom of the World, about Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s expedition to Antarctica, a “rare, unbelievable record of the strangest and queerest things on earth” in which “not a scene” was staged (Byrd, partly funded by Edsel, named a mountain range after his patron). Some Wild Appetites let them enjoy “monkeys, alligators, tortoises, otters, opossums disporting themselves at feeding time.” And Hell Below Zero took them to central Africa on an expedition commissioned by the Milwaukee Museum in search of the legendary Mountains of the Moon, a snow-capped 16,000-foot-high range separating what is today Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Deep in the sweaty sea-level Amazon, clackity film projectors beamed onto an outdoor screen the “fantastic sight of natives shivering before a campfire on the mythical line of the Equator.”21

  A whole set of films featured the heroism not of explorers but of Ford’s cars, which could put the most remote places within the imaginative reach of the common man. Increasingly after World War I, newspapers reported on global expeditions that tested the endurance of the Model T. How far into the Amazon could it penetrate, how far up Machu Picchu could it climb? Ford News, an in-house paper for company employees, regularly ran stories about the adventures of the T along the Inca Highway or into the Mayan jungle. If Ford’s car could make it, then anyone could, and so the age of exploration gave way to the age of tourism. In Fordlandia, in addition to documentaries about expeditions to the South Pole or up the Mountains of the Moon, the estate screened Ford-produced films such as Yellowstone National Park and Glacier International Park, promoting automobile leisure travel and introducing plantation workers to America’s natural wonders, accessible as never before thanks to Ford.

  Most of the company’s historic film stock is stored in the United States National Archives in Washington, D.C., and judging from the sharp juxtapositions of otherwise unrelated shots—footage detailing, say, the synchronous industrial choreography of the Rouge followed by a bucolic panorama of farm life, or scenes illustrating the glacial pace of rubber tapping preceding images of dizzying assembly lines and conveyor belts—Ford officials and managers seemed to revel in contrasting the primitive with the modern, which highlighted their role in speeding up the world. In early 1928, for example, the Ford News ran a story reporting on a momentous event: the world’s first in-flight movie. Outfitted with a projector and screen, a Ford TriMotor, the first mass-produced metal-clad airplane, took off from a Los Angeles airfield with curtains drawn as eight “theatrical people” settled into comfortable wicker chairs. The movie selected f
or the occasion, Harold Lloyd’s Speedy, was a sly choice. Unlike Charlie Chaplin’s later Modern Times, which offered a dark critique of Depression-era industrial speedup, Lloyd’s movie is a Jazz Age celebration of the velocity of modern life. The plot of the film involves Lloyd’s fighting not to save Manhattan’s last horse-pulled tram but to make sure its owner gets a good price for selling his route to a motorized trolley monopoly. As the Ford TriMotor circled over Los Angeles, its passengers probably laughed at the opening scene of a tourist guide pointing out a “vehicle that has defied the rush of civilizashun—the last horse car in New York.”22

  * * *

  ON THE TAPAJÓS, Johnston had finally succeeded in replicating a shiny American town, with neat houses, clean streets, shops, and a town square. It was, one traveler said, a “miniature but improved Dearborn Michigan in the tropical wilderness.” He even managed to re-create some of the social conventions of Main Street America, at least as Ford imagined them, with weekly dances, movies, and other forms of recreation, including golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools, and gardening clubs. Fordlandia paid good wages, provided decent benefits, including health care, and tried to cultivate virtuous workers. Yet Johnston was still finding it hard to usher in Ford’s vision of modern times. In Dearborn, Ford’s famed paternalism was diluted by the diverse resources available to workers in an urban, industrializing society. But in the Amazon, running a remote plantation with impoverished labor in a hostile environment, Fordlandia’s managers found themselves presiding over an extreme version of cradle-to-grave capitalism—literally.23

  Hundreds of babies were born each year in Fordlandia, creating a whole new set of problems for its managers. Amazon residents were used to giving birth at home under the care of a midwife. Ford doctors frowned on the practice, yet did not want to tie up hospital beds for obstetrics. So they didn’t push the issue until a woman died in childbirth in late 1931. From then on, medical and sanitation squads added a new responsibility to their ever growing list, as they checked women for pregnancy and made sure no illicit midwifery was taking place.

  Once born, children needed care. Dr. McClure had hopes that Dearborn chemists would soon find a “satisfactory substitute for cow’s milk with soy bean milk” that could be used to feed infants and toddlers. But until then, Fordlandia’s hospital distributed Borden’s Klim, a powdered whole milk, to new mothers. The staff quickly learned that utensils had to be provided as well, since most workers didn’t own dishes, or “even a spoon,” to prepare the powdered milk, using instead their fingers to mix the powder in empty cans. Before long the plantation, on instructions from Edsel, had established a day-care center, named after Darcy Vargas, President Vargas’s wife. Working mothers could leave their children in the care of company nurses, under the supervision of doctors who made daily visits. Johnston complained that the center “cost considerable money to operate.” Children also needed to be educated, and before long the company was running seven schools in the Amazon, named after Ford’s son and grandchildren, teaching home economics for girls and vocational training for boys, and gardening and ballroom dancing for all. “Shades of Tarzan!” ran the caption under a photograph of children in a company brochure celebrating the plantation. “You’d never guess these bright, happy healthy school children live in a jungle city that didn’t even exist a few years ago!”24

  Despite such cheery publicity, children on the Tapajós, including many who lived in Fordlandia, continued to suffer. Malnutrition remained one of the plantation’s most obdurate problems. “The cemetery,” McClure reported to Edsel, “contains children’s graves far in excess of adults.”

  After the December riot, Dearborn attempted to hire more married than single men, with the idea that men with families would be less transient and more dutiful. But married men often trailed behind them not just a wife and a few children but an extended network of relatives, ever in danger of becoming wards of Ford’s largesse. “These caboclos,” wrote Johnston, “all seem to have a lot of hangers on.” To discourage them from coming to Fordlandia, he suggested that they be provided with nothing “other than food.”

  Johnston was finding it difficult to abide by his own judgment. He tried to cut off commissary credit to the wife of an injured worker laid up in the hospital, since she was using the food she purchased on the credit to feed her extended family of three cousins and three nieces and to prepare meals for sale to unmarried workers. But when Johnston went to speak with her, she pleaded hardship. “God only knows my worries,” she told the engineer. The “poor woman is probably correct,” Johnston admitted, fearing that if he cut her off her immediate family would go hungry. He relented. “It is hard to know where to stop,” he said. “We take care of all cases which actually need help.”

  Workers were still dying, leaving widows behind. “Widow Francisca Miranda” was an “old timer” who has “caused plenty of trouble” for the staff, insisting that she had the right to tap Fordlandia’s wild rubber trees. Johnston concluded it was probably “easier” just to give her some money. And there remained the issue of burials, which the company still paid for, though it did try to pass off responsibility for the cemetery to Santarém’s Catholic bishop. But the bishop’s priests were stretched thin throughout the Tapajós valley, and he was already annoyed that Fordlandia refused to place its schools under his authority or pay for the construction of a proper church. So he demurred, consenting only to have his clerics occasionally pass through the plantation to say mass and minister the sacraments. Without a resident priest, Fordlandia would have to continue to bury its own dead.25

  All these social problems, though, would pale beside the one looming just ahead with nature.

  CHAPTER 19

  ONLY GOD CAN GROW A TREE

  HENRY FORD ONCE CALCULATED, AS PART OF HIS QUEST TO REDUCE the complexities of the production process to their simplest components, that it took 7,882 distinct tasks to make a Ford car, and he divided the number by the physical and mental capabilities of his workforce. “Strong, able-bodied and practically physically perfect men” were required for 949 jobs; 670 could be done by “legless men,” 2,637 by “one-legged men,” 2 by “armless men,” 715 by “one-armed men,” and 10 by “blind men.” The remainder required able-bodied workers, but of “ordinary physical and mental development.”1

  Yet the Amazon was a place where 7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles, the most diverse ecological system on the planet, one that did not move toward simplicity but stood at the height of complexity. One tree alone could serve as home to a dazzling variety of insects, along with an array of animals, orchids, epiphytes, and bromeliads. About 10 percent of the world’s five to ten million species are found in the Amazon, and there are, as one observer puts it, more “species of lichens, liverworts, mosses, and algae growing on the upper surface of a single leaf of an Amazonian palm than there are on the entire continent of Antarctica.” The region is home to 2,500 kinds of fish, about an equal number of birds, 50,000 plants, and an incalculable number of invertebrates. In 1913, it took one year to reduce the time needed to make a Model T from twelve hours and eight minutes to one hour and thirty-three minutes. Yet it is estimated that half of all the Amazon’s species remain undiscovered, and after centuries of observation scientists are still not exactly sure why the Amazon—unlike other forests, where leaves turn brown during the dry season—grows green and lush when the rain stops or how this reversed pattern of photosynthesis contributes to the broader seasonal distribution of water throughout the region. The slightest intervention could produce changes beyond the ability of Ford’s engineers to foresee, much less control: clearing the forest for rubber removed the leaf cover that sheltered the small creeks running to the river, with the added sunlight enriching the algae, which in turn increased the snail population. The snails were the vector for the small parasitic worm that causes schistosomiasis, a disease that affects human bladders and colons and didn’t exist anywhere in the Brazilian Amazon until
it appeared in Fordlandia.2

  The clash between Ford’s industrial system and the Amazon’s ecological one, Chaplinesque in its absurdity when it took place over logistics, labor, and politics, grew even sharper when it came to the nominal reason for Fordlandia’s founding: to grow rubber.

  EVEN AS ARCHIE Johnston struggled through 1931 and 1932 to comply with Dearborn’s social planning directives, he never lost sight of why he was sent to the Amazon, and at the end of his first year at Fordlandia he wrote to Charles Sorensen about how to move forward. “Everyone agrees that a great amount of work has been done at Boa Vista, and a great deal of money has been spent,” Johnston said, yet “very little has been done along the lines of what we came here to do, namely plant rubber.” He lamented that, having planted 3,251 acres after nearly four years of work, “we have merely scratched the surface. We have provided comforts for the sick, the staff, and the caboclo, but have done very little towards creating an early income for the Companhia Ford.”3

  Johnston shared the belief of his predecessors—Blakeley, Oxholm, Perini, and Rogge—that the sale of milled wood could potentially cover the plantation’s expenses until rubber was ready to be tapped. Not all of the trees logged could be used or sold. “We are aware that Mr. Ford dislikes very much to burn down timber,” he told Sorensen, “but it has to be done.” Felled trees either too soft or too hard piled up, “rotting in the skid-way.” Milled wood, unable to be shipped until the rainy season swelled the Tapajós enough to allow an oceangoing cargo ship to get to the plantation, warped in the humid climate, infested with termites. Once again caught between the ideals of Ford and the reality of the Amazon, Johnston pleaded for practicality: “We do not consider it wrong to burn this timber, simply because we cannot saw it. When we consider the whole question logically and seriously, it is just a question of whether we burn good American dollars (gasoline to get the timber) or burn the lumber.”