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

by Greg Grandin

  Archie Johnston watched these developments from afar, and he read his own ongoing battles with labor and the Brazilian government into them. He certainly was more partial to Bennett than was Edsel, whom he equated with James Weir. “FDR’s actions,” he wrote to Charles Sorensen following GM’s and Chrysler’s surrender, are “pitifully weak.” He reported his successful defeat of Fordlandia’s “first sit down strike” in June 1937, when about seventy-one men who cut wood for the boilers occupied the powerhouse. Johnston settled it in Bennett-like fashion, depriving the strikers of food and water until they vacated the building. “Now all is in order,” he wrote.3

  But Johnston in the jungle—stymied by a chronic labor shortage despite the global depression—found himself much more vulnerable than Bennett at the Rouge. Like FDR, Brazil’s president, Getúlio Vargas, presided over a process of economic and political modernization, challenging the extreme power of landed elites and provincial politicians—power roughly analogous to the autonomy of states in the United States prior to the New Deal.* Johnston had welcomed Rio’s intervention when it was used to rein in the local Amazonian elite, who had made life difficult for the company. Now, though, Rio had become part of the problem.

  Vargas’s government promoted new labor laws that made it easier for workers to unionize and required companies to provide paid vacations, severance pay, and pensions. Taking advantage of the new situation, workers at both Belterra and Fordlandia organized a union in early 1937 and began to file a growing number of complaints—mostly related to disputes over what union leaders described as arbitrary firings or efforts to claim newly mandated benefits—in federal labor court. As a result, government inspectors were regularly showing up at the plantations to demand access to company records and take testimony from employees. After a judge ruled that the company was subject to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor—and not the Ministry of Agriculture, as Ford lawyers tried to argue as a way to exempt Ford from a new labor code—activists had become increasingly “bold,” as Johnston wrote Dearborn, in their demands. Belterra was easily accessible to the Brazilian press, so he had to act with circumspection in dealings with organizers. At the more remote Fordlandia, though, Johnston fired a number of the most vocal, including the president and vice president of the union. But they continued their activities, simply moving offshore to set up their “headquarters on an island in the river.”4

  This was not the Island of the Innocents that held the brothels and bars but rather Francisco Franco’s Urucurituba, which became a refuge for Fordlandia’s labor leaders. In general terms, Vargas’s prolabor legislation, as part of his broader political and social agenda, was designed to undercut the local power of rural potentates like Franco. It was a Vargas appointee who in the weeks after the December 1930 riot not only forced Franco to sell Pau d’Agua to Ford for a pittance but also removed him from his position as mayor of the nearby municipality of Aveiros. But these actions had one consequence that Fordlandia managers could not have foreseen: in retaliation, Franco began to support Fordlandia’s labor organizers, creating an unlikely alliance between the modernizing thrust of unions and the feudal reaction of a provincial don.5

  As did his counterparts at the Rouge, Johnston tried to keep the union at bay. “The Company,” he warned his workers, “will not tolerate labor organizations.” But after Rogge’s death and Pringle’s collapse, Johnston found himself shorthanded. The replacements Dearborn sent down lacked hands-on experience in running a plantation labor force, leaving Johnston in Belém to rely on a team of untested managers. And the law was against him. Johnston had no choice but to yield when a local judge ruled in 1939 that Ford’s rubber plantations were indeed subject to Vargas’s new federal labor law guaranteeing workers the right to organize; that same year a federal judge in the United States found the Ford Motor Company guilty of violating the Wagner Act.

  Years before the River Rouge was forced to negotiate a contract with the United Automobile Workers, Fordlandia and Belterra had a union.

  VARGAS REMAINED APPRECIATIVE of Ford, despite the support his administration gave to the plantation’s workers. Like Ford, the Brazilian president considered himself a modernizer. During his administration, Brazil’s road network doubled in size and the number of airports increased from 31 to 512. In any case, once it was established that Ford’s plantations were subject to new labor and social welfare legislation, government arbiters usually dismissed most of the specific complaints brought against the company by employees. Dependent on the goodwill of a president who by the end of the 1930s had assumed dictatorial powers, Edsel Ford, upon learning that Vargas intended to tour northern Brazil in late 1940 to promote the development of the region, sent him a telegram inviting him to review Belterra. Since Archie Johnston was out of the country on vacation, he asked Harry Braunstein, executive manager of Ford’s Rio assembly plant, to receive Vargas in his and his father’s name.6

  Vargas arrived at Belterra on October 8 in a hydroplane, circling overhead a few times to survey the town and planting fields before landing. As the plane pulled up to the dock and the president stepped out, Braunstein gave the signal to the band to strike up Brazil’s national anthem, sung by several hundred children from the Henry Ford and Edsel Ford schools, “properly dressed in uniforms.” When Vargas and his staff climbed into a waiting Lincoln to drive the ten miles to the plateau where Belterra was located, a number of men in the crowd asked that the motor be turned off and they be allowed to pull the president to the plantation, “signifying in that way their happiness and joy.” Braunstein prevailed on them to abandon the idea as impractical, suggesting instead that sixty or so bicyclists form an escort. Along the way, cheered by crowds of onlookers, Vargas commented on the neatness of the children’s dress and the “excellence of the road,” noting that Brazil “certainly needed more such roads.” His aide-de-camp remarked that he himself was from northern Brazil and he had never seen “as healthy a group of men as greeted the President” anywhere in the region. Once in Belterra, Vargas found much else to praise—the hospital, the dentist’s office, schools that supplied books, pencils, and uniforms free of charge to the students, a spacious dance hall and other recreation facilities, and clean, tidy houses with colorful front gardens. The presidential entourage went on a “mosquito hunt” in a number of the plantation’s screened buildings and found not a one.7

  That afternoon, Vargas gave a speech in Belterra’s new park, telling Ford’s workers that the main objective of his government was to “create social laws which would serve to establish social harmony among all, to establish frank and sincere collaboration and co-operation between employer and employee, with all working toward the same end.” Of course, he said, if there were “more men like Mr. Ford in this world no social legislation would be necessary.” He then led a round of cheers for Henry and Edsel Ford. That night at dinner, Braunstein apologized that the two Fords couldn’t be there in person to welcome him but presented Vargas with their signed photographs. He raised his glass to the president’s commitment to progress and to advancing the well-being of workers. “Mr. Ford,” Braunstein said, was the “first industrialist in the world who revolutionized the relations between worker and employer by giving them that which contributed to a life of comfort and equality, and we are doing everything within our power to follow in his footsteps in the treatment of those who work, produce, and co-operate in this project.” One day, he said, admitting that the long-promised recovery of the latex trade had so far remained elusive, it “may possibly mean the re-birth of the Amazon Valley,” the revival of the “fallen Empire of Rubber.”

  Vargas rose to share his impressions of the plantation, expressing “great satisfaction” that Ford was doing so much to “plant” not just rubber but “health, comfort and happiness.” Echoing Braunstein’s admission that so far the project had proved viable more in humanitarian terms than in economic ones, he emphasized the carmaker’s generosity: Ford had not “as yet received any material compens
ation” despite his considerable expenditure. The rest of the evening and the next day involved more mutual expressions of admiration. There was, though, one piece of business Braunstein wanted to bring up with the president. Just before Vargas left, Braunstein, speaking in the name of Henry Ford, requested that he transfer Belterra and Fordlandia out of the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor and place them under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture—which would in effect make the company immune to labor law. Vargas said he would consider the request but promised nothing as he boarded his plane to fly to Manaus.

  There, Vargas gave a speech that is considered by historians to mark the beginning of a long campaign by Brazil’s federal government to populate and industrialize the Amazon. The address echoed Ford’s technological optimism and advocacy of large-scale development projects. Yet perhaps influenced by his visit to Belterra, where he witnessed the failure of Ford’s millions to revive the rubber economy, Vargas seemed to repudiate the kind of rural/industrial holism, driven by a respect for nature, the carmaker believed he could achieve in the Upper Peninsula, Muscle Shoals, the Tapajós, and elsewhere. Known as the “March to the West,” Vargas’s speech gave nature no quarter. “The highest task of civilizing man,” the Brazilian president said, was to conquer and dominate the valleys of the great equatorial torrents,” transforming their blind force and the extraordinary fertility into disciplined energy. The Amazon . . . shall become a chapter in the history of civilization.”8

  Following Vargas, one administration after another established government agencies and announced new schemes to rapidly modernize the region, to achieve “fifty years in five,” as one of Vargas’s successors put it, or to send “people without land” to a “land without people,” as the military government of the 1960s described its colonization plan. Most of these efforts would fail on their own terms—that is, they did not bring sustainable, humane development to the region. They did, however, accelerate rapid deforestation, beginning what William Woodsworth might have called a “rash assault” on the largest intact tropical rain forest left on the planet.

  IN DEARBORN, SOCIAL relations were decidedly less harmonious than either Braunstein or Vargas had painted them that night in Belterra. The UAW had grown rapidly at the River Rouge and other Ford plants since its founding in 1935. Having forced GM and Chrysler to the table, organizers could harness the union’s resources in their fight against the lone holdout of the Big Three. In early 1941, activists shut down the Rouge in protest over the widespread firing of labor activists. It was the first strike ever called against Henry Ford and union leaders were not sure how his employees would respond. Only a third of the Rouge’s workforce had by then signed with the UAW—Bennett’s “terrorism,” as the National Labor Relations Board described his reign, had its effects.9

  As the strike spread throughout the Rouge’s many divisions, Bennett first tried to label it communistic, an act of treason since the Ford Motor Company had just signed an agreement with the Roosevelt administration to begin war production. Workers answered by carrying pickets emblazoned with swastikas, equating Ford with Hitler. Why, one sign asked, did “Ford get a Nazi medal?”—a reference to the Grand Cross of the German Eagle bestowed by the German consul on Ford three years earlier on his seventy-fifth birthday. Unable to red-bait, Bennett next tried to race-bait. He hoped to capitalize on the loyalty some African American workers had for Ford based on his equal opportunity hiring (as well as their distrust of an all-white union leadership) to convince them to go back to work. This, too, failed. Most workers, including many African American workers, refused to return to their jobs.10

  Ford threatened to shut the plant down rather than bargain collectively with his workers. Yet within a few weeks, in one of the greatest about-faces in US labor history, he not only agreed to recognize the results of a union election but, after the UAW won that election with an overwhelming majority, signed a contract that gave the union everything it wanted, including job security, the highest wages in the industry, and back pay to more than four thousand wrongfully fired workers. Historians debate what led Ford, who once moved a whole factory from New England to Michigan to thwart a union drive, to relent. Some point to Edsel’s pleading, backed up with Clara Ford’s threat to leave Henry if he didn’t settle. Whatever the specific combination of motives that drove him to the bargaining table, when Ford finally met with Walter Reuther to congratulate him on his victory, he spun his surrender in the same conspiratorial web he used to explain most things in life. “You’ve been fighting General Motors and the Wall Street crowd,” he said, now “we fight General Motors and Wall Street together, eh?”11

  The deal also included a strong and binding grievance procedure that, considering what historians Peter Collier and David Horowitz call the “bizarre combination of feudal laws and naked power” that arbitrarily governed Ford’s factory floor, was the industrial equivalent of enforcing due process on the divine right of kings. Ford often said his company was revolutionary, yet it took militant labor organizers to make it so.12

  BACK IN THE Amazon, Johnston was having no better luck with rubber than he had holding off the union. By the time of Vargas’s visit, plantation workers at Belterra had cleared nearly thirty thousand acres and planted close to three million trees. About a third of them were top grafted, still too young to give latex but showing promising vigor and fortitude. Then in late 1940, leaf blight, always present yet contained at Belterra, turned epidemic. Johnston, back from vacation, responded by ordering his crew to quickly top graft all tainted trees. But by the following year, blight had infected 70 percent of the blocks with closed canopies, killing most of the estate’s trees.13

  After the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941, Johnston was recalled to Dearborn, where he joined Ford’s aviation division as it converted to the production of bombers and other wartime planes. But he remained the principal administrator of Ford’s Amazon plantations and enjoyed talking with reporters and other Ford workers about his ten years in the jungle. “No white man,” he liked to say, “can live in that country.” He also remained committed to the expansion of rubber production and continued to hold out hope that top grafting, given time, could overcome blight, pest, and scales. Partial vindication came earlier the next year when, despite two years of epidemic blight, Belterra yielded 750 tons of latex. It wasn’t high-quality rubber, and it was a far cry from Ford’s annual consumption of fifty million pounds. But Johnston thought it a start.14

  Then, on a return trip to Brazil in October 1942, Johnston witnessed what he called “the greatest swarm of caterpillars that has ever been seen in this area.” For years, Fordlandia’s caterpillar battalions had performed extensive and relentless handpicking to contain the pests. Now a new generation of moths had evolved and adapted to the threat by laying their eggs “only on the new shoots at the top of the trees.” At that height, pickers couldn’t see the hatched caterpillars until it was too late, until they had swarmed “down the tree eating all before them.”15 The trees recovered somewhat, putting out another shoot of leaves. But in what seemed to Johnston to be a coordinated follow-up, the leaves were then assaulted by leaf blight—the “most severe attack in the history of the plantation.” This time there was no rallying. “In many cases [the trees] had not strength to put out a third flush of foliate. With the excessive dry weather the trees started to die back. Some have died half way down the trunk and may die completely.”16

  “Some areas,” Johnston reported to Dearborn, “are now as bare as bean poles.”

  ____________

  *The New Deal’s most radical proposals came early, in a burst of laws Roosevelt shepherded through Congress soon after his 1933 inauguration, only to be diluted as time wore on; Vargas, in contrast, moved slowly, proposing only moderate changes upon taking power in 1930. But as opposition emerged, Vargas and his supporters, after suppressing a rebellion staged by São Paulo elites opposed to his efforts to concentrate federal power in Rio, became
more aggressive. They adopted a new centralizing constitution in 1934 and then three years later declared the Estado Novo, or New State, best thought of as a fusion of Mussolini-style corporatism and New Deal social welfare.

  CHAPTER 23

  TOMORROW LAND

  “MY DEAR HARVEY,” EDSEL FORD WROTE TO THE NAMESAKE SON OF his father’s old friend Harvey Firestone shortly after the United States had entered World War II, “I think I mentioned to you once something about selling our rubber plantation property on the Tapajós River in Brazil. If you would consider buying it, or have anything like that in mind, would you care to discuss the matter with me?” Firestone, who had taken over his deceased father’s company, had nothing like that in mind. He was already getting about ten thousand tons of latex a year from his plantation in Liberia. The tire maker politely declined the offer.

  By this point, Fordlandia and Belterra had practically become a subsidiary of the US government. Throughout his life, Ford had steadfastly opposed the fusion of business and government even as other American industrialists, particularly during the Great Depression, embraced it. But now in his late seventies he could do little but watch the marriage go forward.

  The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and its rubber fields led to a renewed interest among Washington officials, not just in the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture but in the Pentagon as well, to find new sources of “war rubber.” There had been advances over the last decade in the production of synthetic rubber, yet its production used up too much petroleum, an equally scarce resource. After war broke out, the Roosevelt administration signed treaties with sixteen Latin American countries to promote rubber production, promising government and private investment and guaranteeing high prices for their latex. Vargas, who flirted with fascism but quickly lined up with the Allies, signed on.1