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

by Greg Grandin

  The medical staff, too, learned to accommodate. After first trying to enforce a ban against midwifery, the hospital relented and allowed for home births. “There was so much resistance that half the people didn’t obey it,” recalled Emerick Szilagyi, a surgeon from Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital who did a tour of duty on the new plantation, “so I lifted the rule and made it voluntary.”8

  As a result of this newfound willingness to adapt rather than impose, labor problems were much less acute at Belterra than at Fordlandia. There were no more kitchen riots and nighttime evacuations of the Americans, no more urgent telegrams to Juan Trippe asking for Pan Am hydroplanes to shuttle in detachments of soldiers and disperse armed crowds by flying in low over their heads.

  Nature, though, refused to be subdued.

  IN LATE 1936, Belterra’s plantation seemed to be in relatively fine shape. Pringle had cultivated a nursery with over 5,000,000 seedlings to serve as rootstock, cleared and blocked out a good part of the estate, and planted 700,000 trees. These trees came from a mix of the surviving Southeast Asian stock, clones from Fordlandia trees that had weathered the epidemic relatively unscathed (thus indicating that they had some immunity to blight), stumps obtained in Panama, and seeds gathered from trees around the mouth of the Amazon, mostly from Marajó Island, that showed strong resistance. Blight began to make an appearance on the leaves of Belterra’s young trees, yet it seemed like workers would have a better chance at controlling it than they did on Ford’s first plantation. The new estate had good soil and was much flatter than Fordlandia’s rolling hills, which made it easier to fumigate and prune. Set back from the river, it experienced less morning fog than Fordlandia, and the winds were drier, which also slowed the growth of fungi.

  The main threat to Belterra’s rubber, at least at first, was not blight but bugs. The company had great success in eradicating mosquitoes and flies by draining and oiling wet areas where they could breed and maintaining a rapid-response team of swatters. But as with blight, the concentration of Hevea accelerated the reproduction of insects that fed off rubber, leading to wave after wave of infestations. “The bugs have never been seen before in such quantities,” wrote Johnston of an early mite epidemic, “the reason being there has never been a Rubber Estate before with such large nurseries.”9

  The lace bug was rubber’s worst predator. In normal jungle conditions, the natural food chain kept the population low and the threat contained. But as the entomologist Charles Townsend, brought in on more than one occasion to respond to an outbreak, observed, the “extensive planting of rubber . . . has created a greatly increased food supply and the bugs took advantage of it to multiply in proportion.”

  Dusting nursery at Belterra against leaf fungi and insects.

  Dearborn officials received a crash course in tropical entomology, having asked Townsend to compile an “insect census” for Fordlandia. Townsend started with lace bugs, noting that they deposited their “eggs on the underside of the rubber trees and these hatch into small spiny larvae, which pierce the leaf epidermis with a sharp proboscis and suck the juices of the leaves, thus greatly weakening the seedlings.”10

  He went on to register scores of other problem pests. Red mites sucked the sap from leaves, as did the white flies, which fed on a variety of plants but preferred rubber. They “fly freely” about, Townsend observed, and “it is only a matter of time” before they “extend over the whole plantation.” The flies were “attended” to by “small black ants,” which likewise drained sap from the rubber leaf. Then there were the white weevils, ten millimeters long with light blue legs, bluish to pinkish leafhoppers, treehoppers with broad bodies and two short, sharp horns, spanworms, mandarova moths, green roaches and green grasshoppers, large locusts, and generic broad and flat “plant bugs.” A similar multicolor palette of scale insects—green, white, and black—attached their long stylets to leaves, draining them of their vigor and leaving a brown or black crust when they were done.

  Caterpillars are especially harmful to rubber, and they thrived on Ford’s estates. There were pale caterpillars and small yellowish to greenish caterpillars with erect pointed dorsal tubercles sporting stinging hairs. And there were plenty of tussock caterpillars, slug caterpillars, sphinx caterpillars, and hairy caterpillars with “slender tufts of black hair near the head.” For a brief period, fire and suava ants, which swarm from September to November, ate caterpillars, but like the white flies they came to prefer rubber. This cavalcade of insects attacked not just rubber but machinery as well. “Nocturnal spiders,” for instance, would “spin webs from wire to ground during wet weather,” causing the telegraph equipment to short-circuit.11

  The protocol to fight such an array of threats was exhaustive and included placing a standing bounty on the “head” of a “mole-type animal that eats stumps.” Reports back to Dearborn extensively detailed the activity of “ant men making their regular rounds,” teams of women who pulled weeds and picked insects, new experimental techniques to deal with lace bugs, and weekly inspections of trees for Fomes lignosus, a root fungus, and Diplodia dieback, another fungus distinct from leaf blight.

  The company mobilized Belterra’s whole population to respond to outbreaks. During one early caterpillar assault on a block of the first trees to be planted on the estate, “every available person, man and women, was lined up to do an effective handpicking.” In five hours, they collected an estimated 250,000 caterpillars, filling fifty one-gallon containers. When no more caterpillars could be found, they emptied the containers into a pile, threw gasoline on it, and torched the pyre.

  Beyond bounty hunting and bonfires, Belterra chemists did come up with innovative insecticides. They extracted poison from timbo and cassava, concocted a fish oil wash laced with kerosene, mixed a compound of nicotine sulfate and arsenate, and boiled a “poisoned syrup” that was effective against fire ants, “designed to kill the whole nest including the queen.” The fight against insects added even more expense to what it would cost the company to produce a pound of latex.

  Effects of South American leaf blight on rubber tree.

  BUT WORKERS WERE holding the insects at bay, and Belterra was progressing. The key to success, as always, was to find stock that both yielded profitable amounts of latex and had strong immunity to fungi and pests. Pringle and others involved in planting the new estate had identified high yielders (mostly from strains found at the headwaters of the Tapajós, as well as on the upper Amazon River, around Acre) and strong resisters (many from Marajó Island, at the mouth of the Amazon). But the staff soon came to realize that these two traits tended to be mutually exclusive in wild Hevea: high yielders had low immunity, while strong resisters produced too little latex.

  It was ostensibly to search for an ever elusive strain of high-yielding and hardy Hevea that James Weir, in late 1937, organized yet another seed-gathering expedition to the state of Acre. But the pathologist had no intention of returning. “This is my last day on the Tapajós,” he wrote a confidant. “I did not tell anyone at Fordlandia that I did not plan to return after I finish with the Upper Amazon. I will drop you a line from God knows where.” Perhaps Weir had decided to quit the plantation because the appearance of blight had convinced him of the futility of trying to grow estate rubber in the Amazon. Or maybe he left because he was peeved that Dearborn denied him permission to make a second trip to Southeast Asia. Whatever the case, in keeping with his aversion to teamwork, he said not a word to anyone at Fordlandia or Belterra.12

  Johnston was glad to be rid of him. Once it was clear that Weir was not returning to Fordlandia, Johnston told Dearborn he would welcome a replacement, so long as he didn’t have previous experience in Asia and thus wasn’t steeped in assumptions that “might not apply” in Brazil. “Some young Harvard graduate in Botany and Genetics, one that came from the West with a farm background,” was his idea of a suitable candidate. “Bring him here,” he said, and “let him learn plantation practices, and through time he will develop into the ma
n you want.” Actually, Johnston didn’t have to look far, for two individuals with the qualities he described, short of a Harvard pedigree, were already on the plantation.

  Edward and Charles Townsend—sons of the entomologist—had been Weir’s assistants, and now they took over research. They focused on selection and controlled cross-fertilization to try to produce hybrids that had both desirable traits. They made some progress, particularly using bees as pollinators. Yet they had trouble finding just the right combination. One hybrid proved resistant to blight and a high yielder, but its leaves were thin and unusually vulnerable to lace bug. Another, with thicker leaves, ran unimpressive amounts of sap.13

  Even as they worked to cultivate hybrids, the Townsend brothers began experimenting with crown, or top, grafting, a technique that had been developed in Southeast Asia to control leaf mildew but never put to large-scale commercial use. Once a tree created by grafting a high-yielding strain of Hevea to a healthy rootstock attained a height of seven feet, planters would perform a second graft higher on the trunk, this one from Hevea that had demonstrated strong resistance. After this splice took, the old crown would be lopped off and the result would be a tree formed of three distinct genetic compositions: durable roots, a high-yield trunk, and a full, verdant crown of blight-and bug-resistant leaves.14

  To Johnston’s delight, the experiment was working. The grafts were holding, even against the Tapajós’s strong winds, and the circumference of twice-grafted trees grew at the same rate as did an unspliced tree’s. The procedure was time-consuming and costly and entailed building bulky scaffolding in the field to perform the operation and to support the graft until the tissue fused. And since only about every other graft took, the process had to be performed twice or sometimes three times until the graft bonded. But until a suitable hybrid could be created and multiplied in sufficient quantities, crown-grafted rubber was the only potentially competitive alternative to mass-produced Southeast Asian latex. And it held enough promise that US agricultural scientists—who, with Japan on the march through China and Germany gearing up its military and munitions industry, had once again been mobilized by Washington to find a secure source of “war rubber”—began to copy the method in experimental stations in Costa Rica and the Panama Canal Zone.

  After Weir’s departure, Johnston stepped up planting at Belterra. Over the next couple of years, work crews cleared over twenty thousand acres and planted close to two million trees, about a third of them top grafted. The plantation continued to suffer from chronic insect invasions, yet Belterra finally began to look like a true commercial estate, with its level groves blocked out in twenty-square-acre sections in an orderly fashion and its technicians keeping precise records of where they planted which seeds, seedlings, and bud grafts, so as to control for and develop better strains of Hevea.

  But then Johnston lost his two best men. In late 1937, as John Rogge was traveling to Fordlandia to deliver a payroll, his boat was tipped by a late afternoon Tapajós storm, the kind that can come out of nowhere and call up oceanlike waves. Rogge fell overboard and drowned. A year later, Pringle, who had survived his fight with Weir relatively unscathed, had a nervous breakdown. He had been in the Amazon for a decade, having taken very little of his assigned vacation time. He became entangled in a series of petty fights with fellow staff members and started to suffer from insomnia, aggravated by drinking cup after cup of coffee “day and night, and through the night,” and chain-smoking strong Brazilian cigarettes. Belterra’s doctor diagnosed him as having all the symptoms of a “very nervous condition.” His hands grew cold despite the heat, “denoting,” the doctor said, a “general let down.” The sheriff’s wife also began to let herself go, ignoring a tooth abscess until the infection spread to her jaw.

  “So much for the Pringles,” wrote the doctor to officials in Dearborn, who ordered the couple to return to Michigan at the end of 1938.15

  MEANWHILE, OPINION MAKERS in Rio and São Paulo continued to clamor for a visit from Henry Ford. As they heard reports that his Amazon enterprise had solved many of its social problems only to be beset by natural ones, it seemed all the more important that he come to see his namesake plantation. Brazil’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry published an open letter in a Rio newspaper advising him to gain firsthand knowledge of the town that bore his name:

  Everything in life has its right and left side, its good and bad turn. With the wonderful enterprising spirit characteristic of Henry Ford, which makes him one of the greatest men of our times, he is ready to do everything in order to develop his large rubber plantation. . . . Unluckily, however, there was one principal element lacking for the success of his enterprise: personal knowledge of the region. . . . It would be very advantageous if Ford, who is already invited officially to visit Brazil, would visit the Tapajós, and give instructions to his representatives personally, instructions which would be capable of guaranteeing the success of the operations being undertaken in Pará.

  The invitations kept arriving. The president of a small college in São Paulo invited him to do a radio interview:

  Your books have been widely read in Brazil, and aside from your commercial interests in the country, through the automobile that bears your name, or your properties at Fordlandia, what you say and write is always read with very great interest. It has long been hoped that you would visit the country some day. The least that could be done to bring you in direct contact with the people would be a short fifteen minute interview over the radio, where your voice would be heard, expressing your own ideas on subjects of mutual interest to you and the Brazilians.

  “I think,” the president concluded his invitation, “this offers you a real opportunity to in some way establish a little more personal contact with the Brazilian people.”

  But as Ford advanced in years, the man who claimed to have invented the modern world began to develop a mild case of technophobia. Despite his promotion of air flight—PR for his company’s aviation division—he didn’t really like airplanes, so his long-promised arrival on Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was out of the question. As was, apparently, a radio interview.

  Ford’s secretary cabled the college president, simply saying, “Sorry Mr. Ford unable to comply with your request. Does not broadcast.”16

  CHAPTER 22

  FALLEN EMPIRE OF RUBBER

  THE FINAL YEARS OF FORDLANDIA AND BELTERRA MIRRORED THE final struggles of Ford’s life; one can read in the letters and reports Archie Johnston sent back to Dearborn the history of the Ford Motor Company during the Great Depression—particularly the battles fought against unions and the growing reach of the federal government into its economic affairs. Though a protégé of Charles Sorensen, who competed with Harry Bennett for Ford’s favor, Johnston was sympathetic to Bennett, writing him letters complaining of his graying hair and the jungle heat and sending him jaguar skins, hammocks, and other Amazonian curios. Bennett, who kept a number of tigers and lions as pets at his “castle”—as his house on Geddes Road in Ann Arbor was called—was grateful, and he kept Johnston updated on his efforts to beat back unionism at the Rouge.

  Ford was not alone in his opposition to collective bargaining. When Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935, leveling the playing field somewhat in the fight between capital and labor by protecting workers engaged in organizing from arbitrary dismissal, Detroit’s Big Three all stated their resolve to remain union free. The United Automobile Workers, founded in 1935 and led by Walter and Victor Reuther, was small and practically penniless. But its members found a powerful weapon in the sit-down strike, halting production not by picketing on the outside but by refusing to leave their workstations, a move that stopped owners from hiring scabs. GM fell in 1936, signing a contract with the UAW, followed shortly by Chrysler. That left only Ford.1

  The Rouge went into lockdown. Harry Bennett added more men to the ranks of his already bloated Service Department. His gunsels stepped up their surveillance, searching lockers and lunch pails for UAW litera
ture, following workers into bathrooms to make sure no union talk occurred, and breaking up gatherings of two or more employees. Ford wouldn’t let instruments of war be exhibited in his museum. Yet he let Bennett place machine guns atop the Rouge plant. The campaign against the UAW created a siege mentality among Ford’s managers, and Bennett used his free rein to go after not just labor organizers or potential union supporters but anyone showing any sign of disloyalty. Bennett’s men went undercover in the bars, markets, and churches that Ford workers frequented, reporting back on union sympathy and general grousing. In 1937, Bennett made front-page national headlines—just as he had five years earlier with the “Dearborn Massacre”—when photographers captured him and about forty of his men attacking Walter Reuther and other UAW members as they handed out union literature outside the factory’s Gate 4. The thugs beat Reuther bloody and then threw him down a set of stone steps. They stomped on other organizers and broke the back of a minister. One woman vomited blood after being kicked in the stomach. The assault took place outside the same gate where Bennett and his men murdered the hunger marchers.

  Edsel, who not only believed unionization to be inevitable but was broadly sympathetic to the New Deal as a step toward corporate rationalization, tried to intervene to limit Bennett’s power. But Henry Ford, now seventy-four and in failing health—he would suffer a stroke in 1938—repeatedly reaffirmed Bennett’s authority over labor issues. “He has my full confidence,” he told his son. “The Ford Motor Company would be carried away,” Henry said, “there wouldn’t be anything left, if it wasn’t for Harry.”2