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

by Greg Grandin

  “At least,” Weir said with just a hint of hesitation, “as far as this work of planting can be uniform.”1

  PRIOR TO WEIR’S arrival, the Ford Motor Company, which in Michigan prided itself on state-of-the-art everything, was using planting techniques, as one employee put, “as antiquated as the Model T.”2

  After Rogge’s return from his upriver pursuit, Fordlandia managers used the seeds gathered by the Mundurucú in the second planting as well as to cultivate a “mother seed bed.” Hevea was planted in a circumscribed area and the seeds thrown off from these “mother trees” were transferred to the plantation proper. This was a cumbersome, unpredictable system. The bed was nearly ninety miles away, isolated from the main plantation and accessible only by boat up the Cupary River and then by mule. The company had to maintain a camp of men at the site, both to keep the undergrowth of the trees clear and to hunt the wild boars and other jungle animals that fed on the seeds. More critically, Johnston and his men could not know if the seeds used to plant the mother bed would, in fact, produce trees that would yield high volumes of latex or would resist blight—the two characteristics that would make or break Fordlandia—until they matured considerably. There were too many variables at play: plantation workers believed that the seeds gathered by the Mundurucú at the headwaters of the Tapajós were generally better than those around Fordlandia. But the quality of any given seed was unknown. And even if a “mother tree” could be identified as a potential high yielder of latex or a strong resister of blight, that didn’t mean that the seeds it threw off—products of pollination and thus composed of the genetic material of two trees—would likewise be so. Many trees grown from seeds gathered from Ford’s mother bed, as Weir warned in his report, might prove to be “duds.”

  The alternative was asexual reproduction. As Johnston assured Dearborn, one could simply stick a rubber branch in the ground and it would “take root almost without fail.”3 That was one way of doing it. But Dutch botanists more than a decade earlier had pioneered the technique of bud grafting, which by the early 1930s had become the exclusive method in use on Southeast Asian rubber plantations. Bud grafting entailed taking a hearty rubber rootstock and grafting onto it a bud from a selected tree, or scion, with the desired properties—in this case high yield and strong resistance. The result is an amalgam, or clone, comprising two distinct genetic systems: sturdy roots and a resistant, high-yielding trunk. After the tissues of the two systems grafted and the bud produced a new shoot, the clone could be uprooted and planted as a whole tree or the grafted bud could be lopped off and the stump rooted. It was an efficient method of producing plantation stock because most rubber trees had a serviceable root system, and once a valued scion (high yielder, strong resister) was identified, it could provide multiple buds ready to be grafted.

  This kind of genetic work was but a step removed from Fordism’s mapping of the social genome, the manipulation of individual movement into precise motions to achieve maximum productivity. And Dearborn would eventually embrace bud grafting with enthusiasm. Yet a few years prior to Johnston’s and Weir’s coming, when a company official wrote to Fordlandia to ask if anyone there had ever heard of the technique, Rogge, the lumberjack from Upper Michigan then in charge of the estate, wrote back saying that, while he knew of the method, he didn’t “consider bud-grafting necessary.”4

  In fact, Fordlandia’s managers knew embarrassingly little about pollination, much less about asexual reproduction and bud grafting. In October 1932, the humorist Will Rogers, on a tour of Brazil and hearing that things were not going well for his friend Henry Ford, gave him a good-natured ribbing in the form of a letter to the New York Times:

  To the Editor:

  Pará, Brazil, October 24, 1932. Brazil ought to belong to the United States. We like to brag about everything big. We been flying up its coast line for five solid days and still got another day.

  If any of you see the Rockefellers, kiss ’em for me. There is not a mosquito up this coast.* If they can just hear of one trying to get a start down here there is ten Rockefeller Foundation men got him singing the blues before sundown. No sir, you got to wait till you get to “God’s country” to get eat up by insects.

  Rio Janeiro is the prettiest city in the world from the air. We are just circling Para where we land for the night. It’s right at the mouth of the great Amazon River.

  Up from here is where Mr. Ford’s rubber plantation is but somebody sold him all male trees and they are having a little trouble getting ’em to bear. I bet they couldn’t fool him on carburetors but he didn’t know sex life in the forest.

  Yours,

  Will Rogers

  It was a joke: rubber trees did not reproduce by gender. The humor, though, was lost on Rogge, who sent a letter to the US Department of Agriculture asking if it was true that rubber trees were divided along male and female lines. “Rubber does not have male and female trees,” someone from the department wrote back, before giving the lumberjack a fast lesson in insect cross-pollination.5

  So Johnston decided that with Weir’s impending arrival he better study up. In Fordlandia’s office he came across a report on Southeast Asian rubber production detailing the technique of bud grafting (Dearborn had commissioned the study in 1928, though it seems that no one on the estate had bothered to consult it). As Johnston was reading, Curtis Pringle came into the office and mentioned that he knew how to do the procedure. Johnston was surprised to hear that an ex-sheriff from Kalamazoo had ever bud grafted, so he asked for a demonstration. Pringle proceeded to do exactly what the report “said must be avoided.” Whittling the rootstock where the bud was to be attached, Pringle cut clear through the cambium, the thin layer of generative tissue found between the bark and the wood, responsible for the production of secondary shoots. Johnston told Dearborn that this might just have been carelessness on Pringle’s part but he was convinced more than ever that he needed an “expert’s opinion and advice, on all our rubber operations and this as early as possible.”6

  “It might be in order,” he said, “to have Mr. James Weir give our people a course of instruction.”7

  WEIR DID TEACH the staff how to bud graft properly. But the real problem, the pathologist said, was that Fordlandia had no sure scions from which to graft. So Edsel Ford agreed to Weir’s request to travel to Southeast Asia, to Sumatra and Malaysia, to find trusted stock. Weir set out in June 1933 and quickly obtained 2,046 budded stumps grafted from an assured selection of high-yielding trees. Packed in sterilized sawdust, the cache left Singapore at the end of December, sailing across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal in early 1934, then out into the Mediterranean, over the Atlantic, and up the Amazon.8

  These stumps were, as all Southeast Asian rubber was, the direct descendants of the seeds spirited out of the Amazon more than fifty years earlier by Harry Wickham. Indeed, Weir, who didn’t suffer from an excess of modesty, saw his mission as a bid to reverse history’s course and restore Brazil to its former rubber glory.

  In his letters back to Fordlandia and Dearborn, posted from different ports of call, Weir made much of his adventure. He told of the “breakbone fever” he contracted in Kuala Lumpur and of smuggling some seeds out of Malaysia with false customs certificates. He reported on the increasing restrictions placed by the Dutch and British on rubber production, which he predicted would lead to a market shortage that could be filled by “tropical America,” with its constant, steady supply of latex. He repeatedly forecast success not just for Fordlandia but for all of Brazil. “The chances,” Weir wrote, “of making Brazil a very large factor in the rubber world are good.” Within a year, he told Johnston, the bud grafting of just eighteen of his more than two thousand stumps would produce thousands of seedlings. A second round of bud grafting could, conservatively calculated, “breed up to 120,000 trees” more, which in a decade would yield 3,600,000 pounds of latex.9

  Johnston was encouraged not just by the information Weir sent him but because the pathologist, who see
med aloof at first, appeared to be loosening up a bit. From his Singapore hotel Weir wrote Johnston a letter teasing him about his Scottish brogue and reporting that his “blood brothers” from the “Land of the Mountains and the Flood” were kicking up a racket on the floor below. “The clans,” he wrote, his own blood up from the success of his mission, “are marching under the banners of their chiefs, the pipes are sounding their wild and thrilling music, the old war cries make the hotel tremble and their tartan in fancy is still steeped in the blood of the brave. Vive le Scott!”

  Then Weir did an inexplicable about-face. Prior to departing for Singapore, he had praised Johnston’s management. “It is very gratifying to an agriculturalist,” he said, “to see the amount of good work that has been done at Boa Vista.” In time, he said, the plantation would no doubt be “a very great success,” bringing “prestige for American business and for the name of the organization behind the project.” He dismissed concerns that Fordlandia was too hilly, pointing out that numerous Southeast Asian plantations were just as rolling.10

  But suddenly, upon his return toward the middle of 1934, he urged Edsel to “abandon” Fordlandia, insisting that it would never be profitable. He suggested that the company move operations seventy miles downriver, to Belterra, a flat 150-foot-high plateau slightly drier than Boa Vista but with richer soil and better drainage.

  Weir’s proposal caught Johnston off guard. Just two years earlier he himself had suggested moving operations upriver, yet by this point he had become invested in Fordlandia. His overhaul of the plantation was largely finished, and there now existed the orderly town that had long been imagined. He bristled at Weir’s cavalier use of the word abandon to discuss Fordlandia’s fate. “We do not think,” Johnston wrote Dearborn, “that word should have been used and if you could see Fordlandia today you would see new shoots showing everywhere.”

  But Weir insisted to Dearborn that he could make a go of things only at a new site, especially with the clones he obtained in Sumatra. Having spent six years and $7 million on an enterprise that no one would take off their hands, the Fords now decided to heed the advice of an expert, even if it meant starting anew. In May 1934, their agents in Belém traded a little over 500,000 acres of Fordlandia—from a section that had yet to be fully explored—for an equal amount in Belterra. The rubber groves at Fordlandia were to be maintained as they were, with no further expansion, and the estate was to be used primarily as Weir’s research station and “to produce budwood” for the new plantation, which the Fords apparently resisted calling Edselville, or Edselândia, as Jorge Villares had originally proposed when he met with the two Fords in Dearborn. The new settlement kept its original Brazilian name, Belterra, which means beautiful land.11

  Johnston never forgave Weir his treachery, and for the remainder of Weir’s four years with the Ford Motor Company, he issued a steady stream of criticism about him to Sorensen and to any other company official who would listen.

  Weir refused to admit his mistakes, even when they led to serious setbacks. When “mites and other bugs had almost taken control” of Fordlandia’s budwood nursery in 1935, Weir recommended that they be repelled with “sulphur, tobacco smoke, and finally soap.” But because the pathologist had misidentified the pests this treatment didn’t work and that year’s cultivation of “clones and budwood was shot.”12

  Weir was expensive. “To date, with salary and expenses, trips, etc,” Johnston wrote Dearborn, “we have paid out to Mr. Weir $70,000 and for this amount he has never assumed, or had to assume, any responsibility.” Weir came and went as he pleased, accountable to no one, Johnston reported. That was why the plantation had had such poor luck with the Southeast Asian clones, half of which had died. “Mr. Weir was here when they arrived, and although planting is the most important function in plantation work, Mr. Weir did not actually see or take part in the planting of one stump.” Johnston and a helper did the planting. “We did our best,” he said, but admitted that “it might not have been good enough.”

  Weir was haughty, and he couldn’t get along with the rest of the staff. He clashed constantly with Johnston, but there was “one employee in particular” he really didn’t like. That was Sheriff Curtis Pringle. Johnston had put Pringle in charge of the new plantation—the clearing of forest and construction of buildings having gotten under way in early 1935—where he and Weir wrangled over every aspect of its development, from the location and size of the nursery to how much pruning should be done of existing wild rubber trees, from what kind of ground cover to use to whether it was better to transplant budded stumps from the nursery to the field (Weir’s position) or to graft desired buds directly to rootstocks already in the field (Pringle’s).

  Pringle, “like the rest of us, is by no means perfect,” Johnston wrote to Dearborn, but if he “never took a cooperative attitude with Mr. Weir” it was because the pathologist “never took this attitude with Mr. Pringle; one cannot assume that all superior air and command either attention or respect.” Johnson tried talking to Weir several times, telling him that his attitude was antagonizing the rest of the staff. But Weir shrugged it off. “At present,” Johnston told Dearborn, Weir “can neither work in harmony with Pringle nor the writer.”13

  Weir was a prima donna. Though he presumed to tell Pringle how to build Belterra, he refused to spend a night there because the site was still under construction and there was no “privacy” and “no good bathroom.” Johnston tried to order Weir to move to the new plantation. But Weir said he wouldn’t until a proper house was built for him. Until then, he insisted on staying at Fordlandia, where Johnston ordered him to bunk with other single men and work in the “engineering office.” Weir balked, adamant on remaining in one of the well-equipped houses built for married American managers. Johnston unsuccessfully tried to get Dearborn to back him up, writing that if Weir was allowed to work from home there would be no way to make sure he wasn’t slacking. “We cannot control a man if he is at home,” he said, since “he might be in bed.”

  Weir took credit for the accomplishments of others. “There is little or nothing in what he writes, nothing we do not already know, nothing we are not doing or intend on doing in the proper season,” Johnston complained. “Everything he writes is meant to convey the idea to Dearborn that no one here knows anything about rubber. This condition does not exist, we know what we are doing.” Weir even claimed to be the first to extract the poison rotenone, found in the roots of the timbo plant and used locally to kill piranhas, as an insecticide. “The timbo business is our idea,” said Johnston, who claimed to have developed the pesticide himself.14

  But Weir’s worst vice, in Johnston’s eyes, was that he valued theory over practice. Weir never stayed at Fordlandia for long periods of time, the manager said, always finding one reason or another to travel to Belém or Rio, or even back to the States. Therefore he hadn’t actually observed the complete Tapajós annual planting cycle. That didn’t stop him, Johnston said, from making sweeping generalizations about Fordlandia’s planting methods. Weir, he told Dearborn, “is not acquainted with the conditions here through an entire season,” making him “scarcely qualified to talk on certain subjects.” Johnston heaped particular scorn on Weir’s planting instructions, which the company had adopted as “law” shortly after Edsel had hired him. “He continually refers to his General Letters, and Standard Procedures, etc.,” Johnston groused, accusing Weir of having imposed practices common on Southeast Asian plantations “before he had an opportunity to qualify as an expert about what should be Standard Practices in Brazil.”

  To support his cause, Johnston enlisted the services of another expert, Walter Bangham. A former colleague of Weir’s who worked for Goodyear in Central America, Bangham supported Johnston’s contention that they could make a go of rubber at Fordlandia. Johnston asked Bangham if Weir had indeed written Goodyear’s “Standard Practices,” as he claimed he had. “No, not one,” replied Bangham. Johnston’s new ally reported that Weir, having taken th
e Ford job, wrote him several times asking to be sent copies of Goodyear’s plantation handbook, which he then passed off to Dearborn as his own work. Bangham also confirmed Johnston’s suspicion that Weir was treating the whole operation more as an opportunity to conduct experiments than as a practical business venture. Weir’s “Standard Practices as written are not standard practices, but experimental practices,” Bangham said, “and the way you have done things here is more practical than what is written.”15

  “So it makes you wonder,” complained Johnston to his Michigan superiors, “if Mr. Weir is sincere, does he know what he is talking about?”16

  WEIR, FOR HIS part, sent Dearborn a series of progressively gloomier reports, blaming the plantation’s lack of success on a combination of pestilence and incompetence. In early 1936, he “threw quite a bomb,” in his words, at Dearborn officials, recommending that Fordlandia be scaled back dramatically and that planting in Belterra be extended only gradually. Contradicting his own initial enthusiasm, Weir declared that “no rubber man would have gone to Brazil in the first place to build estates.” Having already convinced the company to move the whole operation downriver to Belterra—at this point still under construction—the pathologist now recommended to Dearborn that it start over in Central America.17

  There may be some truth to Johnston’s claim that Weir was taking advantage of his employment with Ford to test pet theories. Not only had the pathologist managed to convince Dearborn to turn Fordlandia into his own personal research laboratory, Weir himself admitted in his original survey that Ford’s operations presented a wonderful opportunity to research a question that had long preoccupied rubber specialists: Did the seeds gathered by Henry Wickham represent Amazon’s best Hevea, or could a sturdier and more profitable variety be identified? He wrote: