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

by Greg Grandin

  The Brazilian Amazon, despite the millions of dollars invested by Ford, was supplying less than 1 percent of the world’s latex. In exchange for a $100 million loan, which included $5 million to invest in Amazon rubber, Vargas promised to sell all of his country’s exportable rubber to the United States at a fixed price until December 1946. Rio began to work closely with US government agencies such as the Rubber Development Corporation, the Board of Economic Warfare, and the Office of Inter-American Affairs—headed by the peripatetic Nelson Rockefeller, who because of his deep business ties in the region became FDR’s most influential envoy to Latin America. The idea was to encourage the migration of tens of thousands of laborers to the Amazon in the hope of jump-starting rubber production. These “rubber soldiers” were promised credit and tools, decent housing, clothing, medical attention, beefed-up labor protection against local rubber bosses, and a fixed, honest, and livable price for their latex—in short, a New Deal–style guarantee to protect them against all those miseries cataloged so vividly in Carl LaRue’s 1927 report, miseries that the coming of Henry Ford to the Amazon was supposed to have ended.

  Archie Johnston by temperament and training was ill-disposed to welcome the attentions of the federal government—be they Rio’s or Washington’s—into Fordlandia’s affairs, and he still resented having been forced to recognize the plantation worker’s union. Yet having just witnessed the last, consuming blight infestation and caterpillar invasion at Belterra, he had run out of ideas about how to move forward in Brazil. He told Edsel that partnership with the government could perhaps finally make Ford’s rubber estates profitable and that Washington’s promise to pay an above-market price for latex could offset the estate’s cost overruns. He also thought the hyped “war for rubber” might provide much needed labor.

  So at the same time that Ford Motors in the United States was suspending production of civilian vehicles to meet the exclusive needs of its now single customer—building jeeps, planes, and tanks and allowing federal representatives to monitor production—Fordlandia, too, was opened up to Washington. Botanists from the Department of Agriculture set up shop in Fordlandia and Belterra to study Ford’s top-grafting and cross-fertilization techniques. Federal scientists watched workers furiously bud graft trees in an attempt to outrun leaf disease and caterpillar infestations, and they took samples of the plantation’s rubber stock back with them to US government tropical research stations in the Panama Canal Zone. In May 1942, Edsel wrote a letter to Johnston, certainly not vetted by his father, saying he had “no objection” to the Department of Agriculture’s distributing Fordlandia clones to other Latin American countries.2

  AS THE AMERICAN press geared itself toward promoting the war effort, Ford’s Amazon plantations assumed their final incarnation: useful embassies of FDR’s wartime Good Neighbor Policy, staging grounds for New Deal diplomacy in the Amazon. As part of the war effort, Johnston ordered plantation managers to push forward on a frantic program of expansion. By the end of March 1943, field workers had top grafted more than 820,000 trees and performed about 60,000 hand pollinations to breed high-yielding, disease-resistant stock. The nursery had produced enough clones to graft hundreds of thousands of crowns onto trees already planted in the field, and for a stretch of 1944, workers were performing tens of thousands of top grafts a month. “Mr. Johnston and assistants are soberly confident,” wrote one journalist, “but without overflowing enthusiasm. They have battled Amazonia too long for that. The successful trees I saw, their leaves glistening and green as they should be, confront the Amazonian jungle as forerunners of millions of scions being prepared for other advance bases. Someone close to the development of plantation rubber in the Amazon Basin told me that anyone except Henry Ford would have surrendered long ago.” Admittedly, Ford’s rubber output might be but a “drop in the bucket,” but it was enough to “help plug the serious leak in our stock pile.” And it would “increase geometrically year after year.” As late as 1945, one writer was forecasting that Fordlandia would be producing five hundred tons of latex by 1950.3

  But the blight and the bugs continued to undermine all efforts. Though Belterra and Fordlandia were finally producing some latex, their operating cost was much higher than what rubber was trading for on the international market, despite the war. With large blocks of rubber trees ravaged by leaf blight, Belterra workers were collecting only about 165 pounds of latex per acre, a woefully low yield considering the amount of capital that had been invested. Peasants in Sumatra in the 1930s, in contrast, tapped about twice that amount in the same acreage.4

  Yet while the two plantations were economic failures, their well-ordered towns stood as shining examples of the American dream. Travel writers poured into Latin America to report on the state of the wartime Good Neighbor Alliance, and for those traveling through the Amazon, Fordlandia and Belterra became obligatory layovers, places where they gladly traded the promise of a good story for a good bed. After a rough time up the Tapajós, Henry Albert Phillips was happy to find at Belterra a “guest house that might have been in Dearborn, Michigan, or even in Paradise, after what I had come through to get there. Hot shower, frozen fresh food dinner, electric fans, Beauty Rest Mattress, and the first sleep in weeks that was not like a steam bath.” Ford’s first Amazon plantation might have been a “multiple-million-dollar failure,” Phillips wrote in a book called Brazil: Bulwark of Inter-American Relations, but in Belterra he found the “living image of the ghostly Fordlandia,” a place where “Fordlandia’s brightest dreams were being substantiated.”

  Walt Disney visited Fordlandia in 1941 on a tour organized by Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs, as part of the agency’s mission to promote the commercial, cultural, and scientific integration of the Americas. Three years later, using film footage supplied by the Ford Motor Company, Disney released a documentary under the auspices of Rockefeller’s agency called The Amazon Awakens, which celebrated the Ford town as one of the Amazon’s four great cities, along with Iquitos, Manaus, and Belém. The film, typical of others made during the war to highlight pan-American goodwill, included images of Americans playing golf on a course that looked like it could have been located in California, right where Disney after the war would build his own namesake model town. Like Fordlandia, which promised to wrench the Amazon into modernity while simultaneously organizing square dances and pastoral poetry readings for its workers, Disneyland’s themed parks would mix and match different experiences of time: the stage coaches, river-boats, and railroads of Frontierland, along with Main Street USA, modeled on Disney’s hometown of Marceline, Missouri, captured a bygone America, while Tomorrowland pointed to the future. Adventureland featured a jungle river cruise on a boat called the Amazon Belle.5

  Fordlandia’s and Belterra’s laboratories and hospitals were put to use as federal experimental stations, in an effort to improve the health and nutritional conditions of the Amazon and support large-scale migration. Plantation doctors cooperated closely with the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which in support of the war for rubber was carrying out a large-scale campaign to eliminate the diseases that stood in the way of maintaining a large, concentrated labor force in the jungle. They shared their research with government public health reformers on how to fight malaria, hookworm, and other infectious diseases. Johnston even ordered a new building constructed to house a corps of Brazilian nurses who would work under the auspices of Rockefeller’s health program.6

  In 1942, air force officials requested that the Ford Motor Company build a runway in Belterra to conceal a stash of planes. German U-boats had been targeting Allied ships off Brazil’s coasts, and the air force was nervous that Belém’s airport—considered one of the most critical along the US–Latin American–African route—was vulnerable. After consulting with Edsel, Johnston agreed. But he hoped at least to get some labor in exchange for this cooperation. “You of course are aware,” he wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Wooley, “that there is a great shortage of labor, an
d the entire project is only possible if more men are obtainable.” But no help was forthcoming, and he had to build the airstrip with the plantation workers he had on hand.7

  Fordlandia and Belterra were in effect nationalized, both practically—their clones distributed to other plantations to support the war effort, their doctors and technicians placed under the command of Rockefeller’s government health campaign, and their land and labor put to the service of the US military—and symbolically. Henry Ford of course intended Fordlandia to be an example of his particular American dream, of how Ford-style capitalism—high wages, humane benefits, and moral improvement—could bring prosperity to a benighted land, free of government meddling. Yet by the early 1940s, Fordlandia’s economic failure actually strengthened the hand of those who advocated for increased government investment in, and regulation of, the rubber industry, while its clean streets, functioning utilities, and impressive record in hygiene and health care made it an effective symbol of what the New Deal–style political and economic cooperation could accomplish abroad, even in a place as remote and underdeveloped as the Amazon.

  Though nothing came of it, James G. McDonald, head of FDR’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, even secured Henry Ford’s tentative permission to resettle European Jewish refugees at Fordlandia. McDonald met with Ford at Dearborn on April 1, 1941, along with Harry Bennett, Archie Johnston, and Albert Kahn, to discuss the matter. The Nazis had overrun Eastern Europe and invaded North Africa, but Pearl Harbor was still a few months in the future, so the River Rouge had yet to be turned over to wartime production. As McDonald laid out his proposal, Bennett kept interrupting the conference to take phone calls. As it turned out, the meeting was taking place on the very day the UAW launched its strike of River Rouge, and Bennett was issuing a series of urgent orders in an effort to contain the situation. Ford himself didn’t look well, McDonald thought. He had “aged markedly” since the last time the two had met. He was “vague” in his responses and seemed distracted, drifting off on tangents. “We are on this earth to work and for nothing else,” he said; laziness was the cause of most of the world’s ills, including the war. Archie Johnston related the history of Fordlandia to FDR’s emissary and said that he wasn’t optimistic about settling large numbers of European Jews on the plantation, since “for them to work the land would be to lose caste because almost all of the laborers today are colored natives.” Johnston thought it would be better to send them to southern Brazil, around São Paulo. Three times in the conversation, Ford let McDonald know that he thought synthetic rubber would replace natural latex and that his Brazilian plantations would be better used for the large-scale relocation of small farmers. He agreed in principle to settle Jewish exiles on them, though he refused to commit to a specific plan for action. And at a number of points, both Bennett and Ford interrupted the discussion to declare “they were not interested in this scheme in any sense as a means of easing criticism at Mr. Ford’s alleged anti-Semitism.”8

  EDSEL DIED IN 1943, and for a dangerously long moment Harry Bennett tottered on the edge of taking complete control of the Ford Motor Company. After the first UAW contract was signed in 1941, Bennett had managed to retain and even tighten his hold over the increasingly senile Ford. He even dubiously claimed that Henry added a codicil to his will putting him in charge of the company upon his death—which, after Ford’s passing, Bennett claimed to have burned. Yet the recognition of the UAW and the establishment of a grievance procedure began to erode Bennett’s power, whose chief source of authority—the ability to terrorize workers—was taken away from him. After another, this time major stroke, Henry, again urged on by his wife, Clara, turned over the company to his grandson. In this, she had a little help from the Roosevelt administration. Alarmed that the company it depended on for war matériel was being crippled by infighting and mismanagement, the White House had arranged the early release of the young Henry from the navy, hoping that he might be able to bring some sanity to his grandfather’s company.

  Henry Ford II took over a business worth over a billion dollars and employing more than 130,000 workers—75,000 of them in the Rouge alone. Yet it had no system of oversight (a few years earlier, Henry Ford had abolished the Accounting Department when he learned that Edsel had, without consulting him, ordered the construction of a new office building) save the remnants of Bennett’s vast spy network, and it was wracked by years of corruption and pilfering. Millions of dollars of material were stolen yearly from Ford plants. Bennett himself siphoned a substantial cut from numerous contracts. With “no cost control, no mechanism for establishing or checking plans,” the Ford Motor Company was not just a metaphorical labyrinth. It actually had secret lairs where midlevel thugs enjoyed illicit pleasures. Henry II busted one up personally, using an iron club to break down the door. The internal disaster of the Ford Motor Company actually made Fordlandia look like a model of efficiency and transparency. And the company hadn’t made a civilian vehicle in over three years.9

  So considering the pressure on Henry II to rebuild the company and get it ready for postwar production, his decision to sell off his grandfather’s many money-losing village industries, including holdings in the Upper Peninsula, didn’t take much thought. The economic boom that took place in the decades after World War II would “decentralize” American life, but in its own way—through the growth of the interstate highway system, suburban development, and the migration of industry from the Northeast and Midwest to the South, the Southwest, and then abroad. And it wouldn’t be propelled, as Ford once predicted, by “little factories along the little streams” or powered by waterwheels, steam, or beet juice.

  The Ford Motor Company’s board of directors named Henry Ford II president on September 21, 1945. One of his first acts, in early October, was to fire Harry Bennett. Then, on November 5, he turned Fordlandia and Belterra, valued at nearly $8 million, with $20 million invested in them, over to the Brazilian government for $244,200—which covered the amount the company owed its plantation workers under Vargas’s laws guaranteeing severance pay.

  HENRY FORD TOOK Edsel’s death hard. The carmaker had taunted his son during his last years, as he wasted away from what is now called Zollinger-Ellison syndrome, stomach tumors that overproduce corroding acid. Ford told Edsel that his symptoms were caused by his Grosse Pointe “high living,” by what he ate, or didn’t eat, how he chewed, what he drank, and when he exercised. Shortly after Edsel died, Ford told the wife of an employee, as they wandered around Greenfield Village, that he knew that “in life, he and Edsel had not always understood each other and at times could not see eye to eye.” But Ford, the perfecter of mechanical reproduction, believed in spiritual reproduction, that is, reincarnation, and he hoped that “before too long, he and Edsel would be together again” and that “there would be better understanding and they could continue working together.”10

  Ruins of the sawmill at Iron Mountain in the Upper Peninsula.

  Ford’s health declined rapidly. He spent more and more time in Greenfield Village, as well as in some of the other towns and mills he owned throughout Michigan. But even before Henry II began to unload Ford’s village industries, company officials, trying to consolidate operations to make wartime production more efficient, had quietly closed two of his favorites. Both were located near his summer home, on the shore of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: Pequaming, which Henry purchased in 1923, and Alberta, which he had constructed from scratch in 1936, around the time that he and Edsel approved the creation of Belterra.

  Though the company increasingly distanced itself from its controversial founder—for more than half a century, Ford Motors would rarely mention Henry in its advertising—many in the Upper Peninsula continued to invoke Ford’s name. “Everybody is calling our village a ghost town,” said one Pequaming resident in 1942, after the company began to remove equipment from its mill. Yet its residents still held out hope. “As long as there’s a Henry Ford, Pequaming will still be here.”11
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  Ford did visit Pequaming once more, in the summer after Edsel’s passing. No one in the company told him that the mill had been shut down, so he was saddened to learn that the town’s clapboard houses had been boarded up and its saw stilled. Ford walked around the village and talked with a few of its remaining families. Just a few years earlier more than four hundred people called Pequaming home. Now only a handful of its seventy-four houses were occupied. Its school had been a special source of pride for Ford, reminiscent of his own boyhood single-room schoolhouse. But that day all he saw was a “shell of walls and floors,” its desks sold off and its doors padlocked. The town’s caretaker asked if he wanted to go in. Ford said no. He “preferred to remember it as it was with the sound of children’s voices.”

  Ruins of Pequaming sawmill.

  The Pequaming mill whistle blew one last time in 1947, an old-timer thinks she remembers, to mark Ford’s death.

  EPILOGUE

  STILL WAITING FOR HENRY FORD

  WHEN THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY ABANDONED ITS AMAZON holdings in November 1945, many of its workers didn’t know the Americans were leaving until the day they boarded ship and embarked down the Tapajós. “Goodbye, we’re going back to Michigan,” said the wife of Fordlandia’s last manager to her nanny, América Lobato. “They didn’t take anything with them, they just left, like that,” Lobato recalled.

  In Belterra, the departure was just as quick. Workers from the rubber nurseries, some of whom had learned bud-grafting techniques from James Weir, were assembled and told that both plantations were being turned over to the Brazilian government’s Instituto Agronômico do Norte, headed by Felisberto Camargo. A progressive agronomist, Camargo believed that the rational application of science, technology, and hygiene could bring about a peaceful, satisfied world—a view obviously related to Henry Ford’s earlier technological optimism. Yet henceforth the agent of that application would be not an individual or a private corporation but a government organization of the kind Camargo worked for.