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

by Greg Grandin

  Johnston believed that if proper drying and storage facilities were built there were enough viable trees on the plantation to export three million board feet of milled, kilned hardwood a year. “We think the United States will be a splendid market,” he said. “We have lumber that will delight the eye of the American architects.” And to demonstrate, Johnston sent Ford and Sorensen that carved “little nigger boy” made out of Tapajós trees.

  Johnston proposed a program of rapid expansion: he planned to run logging roads through 200,000 acres of the Ford concession, felling as many trees as the mill could cut and the market would bear. As the jungle gave way to machetes, broad axes, and cross saws, his men would burn the underbrush and prepare the ground to plant rubber. It would be only a few years, Johnston thought, before he had 100,000 acres planted with over 10,000,000 trees, producing 54,000 tons of rubber a year. That is, he hedged, “if all the trees were 100%.”

  Sorensen responded quickly to Johnston’s letter, impressed with its determination and clarity. As to his planned “clearing of large areas and burning of same,” the head of the Rouge wrote, “you have outlined this in a manner that we all understand, and everybody here is in accord with your program.”4

  Success seemed in reach. After the initial troubles adapting Michigan sawing techniques to Amazonian wood, Mulrooney, Rogge, and Fordlandia’s other Upper Peninsula lumbermen had finally managed to get the sawmill and kiln to produce enough timber for the plantation’s basic needs. And though the mill would have to be refitted to produce lumber for export, Johnston was confident that all obstacles could be surmounted. “The lumber is there,” he told Sorensen, and “we know that the Ford organization can order any equipment and do anything within the power of man.” Though he did concede that “only God can grow a tree.”5

  But it was the Great Depression, and Dearborn was having trouble selling cars, much less exotic veneers. The company tried to find mills and furniture manufacturers in Michigan, North Carolina, and New England interested in Amazonian hardwood. Ford put out a glossy brochure highlighting the wide variety of wood and veneer available from Fordlandia’s mill. Sucupira, with its “unusual blend of colors,” resembled fumed oak. Massaranduba was an unusually strong wood, good for structural work on docks, railroads, and dance floors. Pau d’arco was attractively dark, while andiroba, a mahogany, would be perfect for radio cabinets and caskets. Spanish cedar lent itself to hand carving, as well as to cabinetry, and the mottled and striped muiracoatiara would nicely accent wall paneling where variation in color was desired.6

  Fordlandia’s sawmill, with lumber stacked and waiting to be shipped.

  There were few takers, however. “The banking system is still very much of a muddled state” and the Rouge was running at reduced capacity, wrote the head of the Purchasing Department to explain why he hadn’t been fully devoted to finding a market for his wood. By 1933, Dearborn worked the numbers and concluded that, assuming it found a market and assuming that the mill could produce four million board feet of lumber a year, it would still lose $12,000 a month.7

  RUBBER WAS AN even bigger problem. From Fordlandia’s inception, it was assumed that the company that had perfected mass industrial production would grow plantation rubber. Observers of Ford noticed that he treated machines as “living things,” so in the Amazon it was to be expected that his men would treat living things—rubber trees—as machines. The model naturally was a Ford factory, either Highland Park or the Rouge, with its close-cropped rows of machinery, which cut down wasted movement, and its enormous windows and glass skylights, through which sun poured in, saving electricity by bathing the factory floor in cathedral-like radiance.

  “You know,” Ford once said, “when you have lots of light, you can put the machines closer together.”8

  Johnston strove to apply the same kind of regimentation to the plantation that Ford did to the factory, spacing the trees close together and insisting that with the right discipline two men could plant between 160 and 200 trees in eight hours, at 2½ to 3 minutes per stump. But he soon admitted that he had trouble making the math work, as the pace of planting rubber was subject to more uncontrollable conditions—bad weather in particular—than was the tempo of an assembly line.9

  There is a reason rubber in the Amazon isn’t planted close together but rather grows wild, scattered among other trees. Hevea is native to the Americas, which means that its natural predators, including its most deadly foe, South American leaf blight, are also native to the region. Thus rubber trees in the Amazon grow best when they are relatively far removed from each other, about two or three to the acre, slowing the propagation and spread of fungi and bugs that feed off their leaves. In contrast, in Southeast Asia, free from the presence of native predators, they can be planted in tight, well-ordered rows, hundreds to the acre. In his drive to plant as much acreage as possible to meet the terms of the contract, Captain Oxholm did space out the trees of Fordlandia’s first planting somewhat farther than was the custom in Southeast Asian plantations. But those trees came up sickly as a result of Blakeley’s scorched soil and Oxholm’s reliance on hastily gathered seeds and seedlings of unproven quality, planted at the worst possible moment, when the air was dry and the heat high. “Stuck in the ground anyhow,” most of Oxholm’s frail, sun-baked plantings had to be plowed under.10

  This meant that when Johnston took over management of the estate, most of its trees were young, a little over a year old, having been planted in early 1930, in the months after Rogge returned from up the Tapajós. Some of the trees in this second planting showed signs of blight. As their crowns had yet to form a canopy, though, there was still space enough separating each tree to slow the spread of the contagion. But there were already other concerns.

  Despite the Amazon’s relatively consistent dry and wet seasons, the specific ratio between sun and rain can change significantly from one region to the next. Fordlandia’s average rainfall, about eighty-seven inches per year, was well within rubber’s tolerance. Yet within this average, there is considerable variation. In 1929, 102.5 inches of rain fell in Fordlandia. The next year saw only 70 inches. Such fluctuation is another reason in Brazil Hevea thrives in the wild but suffers in plantations: the dense, diverse root systems of jungle foliage guard against erosion during particularly wet seasons and regulate the distribution of water during dry ones. Fordlandia’s hilly terrain was made up of flat-topped plateaus surrounded by steep declines leading to deep undulating hollows and ravines. It was fine for jungle rubber when it stood alongside other trees buffered in a dense forest. But stripped bare, it magnified the power of the rain and sun. Hilltop seedlings proved vulnerable to the strong Tapajós wind, and the sun beat down on the fields like rays through the glass planes of Ford’s factories, scorching exposed leaves and desiccating the plateaus (1930 was an exceptionally dry year). Clear-cut and free of roots, the inclines, with slopes thirty degrees or more, lost their topsoil to the eroding rains, exposing stony sterile soil, while the ravines flooded from poor drainage.11

  Johnston tried to compensate by terracing the slopes and planting cover crops, mostly calopogonium, both to hold the topsoil and add nutrients. But this was costly and ultimately wasted labor. Terracing added nearly an extra twenty-five dollars of expense per acre, and ground cover often dried out from too much sun and risked catching fire.

  In Fordlandia, then, managers were obsessed with the vagaries of Amazon weather, to a much greater degree than were the traders and merchants who profited from wild rubber, tucked away as it was under jungle cover. During his near decade tenure, Johnston would issue a steady stream of weather reports to Dearborn:

  “The unusual dry weather continues . . .”

  “The unusual drought continues . . .”

  “Crop is very dry and dangerous from a fire point . . .”

  “The plantation is exceedingly dry, cover crop in many places burned brown . . .”

  “We have not had a drop of rain in 42 days . . .”

 
“During this period we have had an unusual amount of rain . . .”

  “Everything is bone dry, there has been no rain for approximately 120 days . . .”

  “We had three small fires . . . but managed to get them out . . .”

  “The river draws rain clouds from the plantation . . .”

  “Due to more rain than usual for this season of the year, we have not made as good progress as we would have liked . . .”12

  IN EARLY 1932, after less than a year at Fordlandia, Johnston reassessed his options. His building program was progressing reasonably well. Yet the difficulties involved in both rubber growing and managing labor relations led him to revise his original proposal to Sorensen.

  He now suggested that, in place of rapid expansion at Fordlandia, all major planting operations be moved about fifty miles upriver, to a flatter location that he, John Rogge, and Curtis Pringle had scouted out. Johnston recommended planting only on level land that didn’t need terracing and leaving the hills, streams, and ravines wild to absorb the rainfall. The location Johnston and his men surveyed offered longer stretches of unbroken plateau than did Fordlandia, with its “terrible contours” that made the grading and paving of roads costly and prohibited the extension of the railroad, which had stalled at a few miles. It would be easy, said Johnston, to build bridges over the igarapés, or streams, the valleys of which would be left wooded as sources of firewood.13

  Johnston was searching not only for flatter land but for a way to lessen the social burden on the company. Since the proposed site was close to an already established town, Itaituba, all the company had to do was build a small clinic, warehouse, office, and radio station. His idea was to outsource the clearing of the jungle to a local contractor, with Ford’s medical department supervising the housing and sanitary conditions at the work site. Johnston could arrange for a “first class hardware store” from Belém to provide cutlasses, axes, saws, files, and grinding stones, so that Ford would not have to supply the “wants of any contractor.”

  “This means,” Johnston said, that the company would be relieved of the responsibility of caring for its workers, for once the land was cleared the “contractor would burn down his palm huts, fill in the toilets, and leave us a cleared area.” All that would be needed was a few hundred hired men to maintain the plantation, who while at work would be “subject to our policy in every way.” Yet they would reside in Itaituba and “be allowed to live in the Brazilian style while not at work.” Johnston concluded his case to Sorensen by saying that his job would be to “look after the health of our men, see that we get eight hours work each day and let someone else look after their minor needs.”

  Sorensen, perhaps after consulting with one of the Fords, would have none of it. He curtly dismissed Johnston’s proposal, writing in its margin: “I don’t want to see this done.”14

  Johnston had no choice but to try to make Fordlandia work. But he did finally ask for help. For nearly five years—from early 1928 through 1932—despite the occasional employ of Tapajós rubber men, Fordlandia had proceeded without expert counsel. Evidence suggests that its managers spurned the use of mateiros—native naturalists who possessed invaluable knowledge about the jungle.* Johnston himself was a structural engineer and knew nothing of the land. But as a Ford man, he represented a company that prided itself on having revolutionized industrial production through hands-on experience. He was a quick study, fast accumulating a store of rubber knowledge. And he was practical, constantly trying to deflate Henry Ford’s “utopian ideas” by reminding him of the reality on the ground. Yet he also suffered from the occupational hazard common to Ford men, a kind of crackpot realism where decisions supposedly justified by observation were really shaped by a sense of infallibility born of success, a belief that the company could, as Johnston put it, “do anything within the power of man.”

  Charles Lindbergh, Ford’s friend, described his experience working for the Ford Motor Company’s aviation division thus: “Once they get an idea, they want to start in right now and get action tomorrow, if not today. Their policy is to act first and plan afterward, usually overlooking completely essential details. Result: a tremendous increase of cost and effort unnecessarily.” And indeed Sorensen once told Lindbergh, “Don’t forget, when you want to do something, the most important thing is to get it started.” Don’t let the experts, the head of production at the Rouge advised, “keep it on the drafting board; they’ll keep on drawing lines as long as you’ll let ’em.”15

  It was this “edict engineering,” as one frustrated manager described Ford’s development policy at the Rouge, that explains why it took four years for someone in Dearborn to raise a question that should have been asked in 1928. Was it “fair to assume,” Ford’s accountant W. E. Carnegie asked Archie Johnston in 1932, “that seeds which grew up in a forest will do as well when planted in a totally denuded area under a hot tropical sun?”16

  It also explains Johnston’s answer. Starting with “yes” and then working backward from there, here’s how Sorensen’s protégé justified his reasoning:

  1) When the seeds of the rubber trees that now exist in the jungle were washed down in the flood era, there was probably no jungle and the rubber plants were probably subject to the same exposure as all other trees.

  2) Rubber trees never spring up in the jungle from seeds dropping from the rubber trees, as it is too shaded.

  3) We planted several hundred thousand seeds in the shade four years ago and last year when Mr. Rogge went there to collect them he found that they were in most cases a sickly bunch of stumps.

  4) Rubber, we are informed, is planted successfully in the East under the same conditions as ours.

  “All of the above deductions are by questioning people and observations,” wrote Johnston. Therefore, in response to Carnegie’s question, he had “every reason to believe yes.”17

  Reasoning by observation was in fact central to the way the Ford Motor Company, and Henry Ford himself, operated. “Learning by doing” was the core of the pedagogy Ford promoted in the numerous schools he patronized in the United States, and it accounted for the success of the scientific “experts” he trusted and admired, men like Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, and Luther Burbank.

  As his company evolved and grew, however, exhortations to use “common sense” to achieve success became less instructive than inspirational. As Albert Wibel, head of Ford’s purchasing department, told Johnston, “you are going about this new work with a good common sense idea of the difficulties you have to overcome. About the finest asset one can have when in charge of a job such as you have at the rubber plantation is good horse-sense and sound judgment. The ability to be careful and think things over quietly before going off half-cocked, to my mind, is a wonderful characteristic for an executive to have.”18

  Henry Ford himself was often invoked in letters between Dearborn and Fordlandia, his oracular pronouncements used not just for public consumption but to encourage intracompany striving. Concerned about cost overrides and the slow pace of progress, Wibel wrote to Johnston on another occasion to say that he was glad that finally “things seem to be shaping themselves very much for us instead of the other way.” But, the head of purchasing went on, Dearborn was hard-pressed to understand why the “venture is costing us such a tremendous amount of money, with no return whatever for a great number of years.” Still, Wibel assured Johnston, the general consensus was that he was doing very well: “Mr. Ford states that we only need to do what is right, and the rest of the situation will take care of itself.”19

  Or again: “Mr. Ford is optimistic as to the future, and feels that it is only a matter of time until business conditions will be normalized. He tells us that what we are going through is for the good of all parties concerned.”

  Johnston soon came to believe he needed something more than reassurance. This led him to do what Ford men were loath to do: request the help of an expert. “We are entering a gigantic proposition,” he wrote Sorensen, and
“we feel that it would be well to have the opinion of the highest expert on rubber planting.”

  He soon came to rue this moment of weakness.

  ____________

  *Mateiros were often Portuguese-speaking, either married to Indians or raised in native communities; to this day, they serve as guides to outsiders, imparting otherwise inaccessible indigenous knowledge to those hoping to unlock the secrets of the forest either for science or for commerce (Susanna B. Hecht, “Last Unfinished Page of Genesis: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon,” Historical Geography 2:43–69, esp. p. 56; David Campbell, Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p. 109).

  CHAPTER 20

  STANDARD PRACTICES

  THE PLANT PATHOLOGIST JAMES R. WEIR WAS IN SUMATRA DIRECTing research at a Goodyear Tire Company plantation when he was recruited by Edsel Ford. Previously Weir had worked with the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Plant Industry, studying fungi on trees in the western United States, as well as on sugar cane in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Bearded, tall, and, in the opinion of one American diplomat, conceited and cranky, Weir knew the Amazon well, having been part of the same Department of Commerce rubber expedition that included commercial attaché William Schurz and the botanist Carl LaRue. From research he did on that trip, Weir had published a pamphlet that became the authoritative reference on South American leaf blight, known in Brazil as mal-das-folhas and in the technical journals as Dothidella ulei or Microcyclus ulei.

  Weir arrived at Fordlandia in March 1933 and quickly impressed Johnston with what appeared to be a sound assessment of the plantation’s problems and an aggressive proposal for expansion based on the modern techniques used on Southeast Asian plantations. He told Johnston that he had written a manual of standard practices for Goodyear and that one should be prepared for Fordlandia. “As rapidly as possible a series of Standard Practices on planting and general agriculture work is to be drawn up,” Weir wrote in his preliminary report, advising that after they had been approved they should “become law.” He counseled Johnston that “standard practices are as important in planting work as in the factory. They insure uniformity of result.”