Fordlandia (2 page)

In the months that followed, as the excitement of the Model A died down, journalists and opinion makers began to pay attention to Fordlandia, as Ford’s Brazilian project soon came to be called. And they reported the enterprise as a contest between two irrepressible forces. On one side stood the industrialist who had perfected the assembly line and broken down the manufacturing process into ever simpler components geared toward making one single infinitely reproducible product, the first indistinguishable from the millionth. “My effort is in the direction of simplicity,” Ford once said. On the other was the storied Amazon basin, spilling over into nine countries and comprising a full third of South America, a place so wild and diverse that the waters just around where Ford planned to establish his plantation contained more species of fish than all the rivers of Europe combined.
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It was billed as a proxy fight: Ford represented vigor, dynamism, and the rushing energy that defined American capitalism in the early twentieth century; the Amazon embodied primal stillness, an ancient world that had so far proved unconquerable. “If the machine, the tractor, can open a breach in the great green wall of the Amazon jungle, if Ford plants millions of rubber trees where there used to be nothing but jungle solitude,” wrote a German daily, “then the romantic history of rubber will have a new chapter. A new and titanic fight between nature and modern man is beginning.” One Brazilian writer predicted that Ford would finally fulfill the prophecy of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist who over a century earlier said that the Amazon was destined to become the “world’s granary.” And as if to underscore the danger of the challenge, just at the moment Ford was deciding to get into the rubber business, the public’s attention was captivated by reports of the disappearance of the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett. Having convinced himself, based on a combination of archival research, deduction, and clairvoyance, of the existence of a lost city (which he decided to name “Z”) just south of where Ford would establish his plantation, Fawcett entered the jungle to find it. He was never heard from again.
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In the case of Ford, who had all the resources of the industrial world at his disposal, journalists had no doubt about the outcome, and they reported on his civilizing mission in expectant prose.
Time
reported that Ford intended to increase its rubber planting every year “until the whole jungle is industrialized,” cheered on by the forest’s inhabitants: “soon boa constrictors will slip down into the jungle centers; monkeys will set up a great chattering. Black Indians armed with heavy blades will slash down their one-time haunts to make way for future windshield wipers, floor mats, balloon tires.” Ford was bringing “white man’s magic” to the wilderness, the
Washington Post
wrote, intending to cultivate not only “rubber but the rubber gatherers as well.”
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Since the sixteenth century, stories of El Dorado, an Indian king so rich that he powdered himself with gold, lured countless fortune hunters on futile quests. The word
quixotic
has its origins in a story set on the Spanish plains, in the same century when Europeans were first entering the Amazon. It’s often applied to those entranced by the promise of jungle riches, as certain of the existence of the object of their pursuit as the Man from La Mancha was that the windmills he tilted at were giants. “I call it Z,” said Colonel Fawcett of his fabled city, “for the sake of convenience.”
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Ford, though, turned the El Dorado myth inside out. The richest man in the world, he was the gilded one—the “Jesus Christ of industry,” one Brazilian writer called him, while another called him a New World “Moses”—and salvation of Brazil’s long-moribund rubber industry and the Amazon itself was to come from his touch. The “Kingdom of Fordlandia,” however, was decidedly secular, and its magic technological. Ford’s move into northern Brazil took place on the cusp of two eras, as the age of adventure gave way to the age of commerce.
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Their time passing, explorers acted as Ford’s John the Baptists, walking through a fallen land and heralding its deliverance even as they faded from the scene. Theodore Roosevelt’s
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
—an account of the former president’s last jungle expedition, taken in 1914, just a few years before his death, to survey a heretofore uncharted Amazon river—predicted that the treacherous rapids that nearly cost him his life would eventually provide enough hydropower to support a “number of big manufacturing communities, knit by railroads to one another.” Francis Gow Smith, a member of New York’s Explorers Club, was in Brazil searching for Colonel Fawcett when news got out that Ford had secured his Brazilian concession. In a lengthy dispatch from the field, Smith described his near lethal encounter with the “King of the Xingu”—a rich and ruthless rubber baron on the Xingu River who “typifies the feudal tyranny of plantation methods in Brazil just as his new competitor” Henry Ford “typifies North America’s industrial enterprise.” The “jungle millionaire” terrorized his “peons,” keeping them in a state of perpetual debt, locking those who dared to challenge his authority in stockades, beating them unmercifully, and leaving them to lie for hours on the ground as vampire bats “feast upon their blood and hordes of ants gnaw at their bare skins.” Henry Ford “has never met his jungle rival,” Smith wrote, but his “Brazilian project will be the wiping out of the King of Xingu’s rubber monopoly, the liberation of his peons and the dawn of a new day for Brazilian prosperity.”
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THE AMAZON IS a temptress: its chroniclers can’t seem to resist invoking the jungle not as an ecological system but as a metaphysical testing ground, a place that seduces man to impose his will only to expose that will as impotent. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century explorers and missionaries often portrayed the jungle either as evil inherent or as revealing the evil men carry inside. Traveling through the region in 1930, the Anglican lay leader Kenneth Grubb wrote that the forest brings out the “worst instincts of man, brutalizes the affections, hardens the emotions, and draws out with malign and terrible intention every evil and sordid lust.” Theodore Roosevelt’s account of his expedition, which first ran as a serial in
Scribner’s
, likewise painted the Amazon as a malevolent place, where things “sinister and evil” lurked in the “dark stillness” of its groves. Ancient trees didn’t just fall and decompose but were “murdered,” garroted by the ever tighter twists of vines. Roosevelt described the jungle as being largely “uninhabited by human beings,” portraying its challenges as nearly wholly natural, even preternatural, captured in gothic depictions of “blood-crazy” fish and “bloodsucking” vampire bats. The jungle was “entirely indifferent to good or evil,” he wrote, working “out her ends or no ends with utter disregard of pain and woe.” For those readers not familiar with the theology that hell is the absence of God, the Rough Rider left little doubt as to the analogy he was implicitly drawing: he began his tale with a detailed seventeen-page description of treacherous serpents.
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Even more recently, those who survive encounters with the jungle primeval are often compelled to search for some larger meaning in its severity, holding it up as a touchstone to expose the charade of human progress. “We are challenging nature itself and it hits back, it just hits back, that’s all,” said the German film director Werner Herzog of the hardships he encountered in making his 1982 film
Fitzcarraldo
. Herzog’s notorious attempt to replicate the compulsion of his title character, played by Klaus Kinski, and pull a 340-ton steamship over an Amazon mountain (the movie is based on the life of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald López, who had the good sense to dismantle the boat before proceeding) leads him to ponder the ethical vacuity of the natural world: “Kinski always says [nature] is full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic. I see it more as full of obscenity. . . . Nature here is violent, base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication, and asphyxiation, and choking, and fighting for survival, . . . just rotting away. Of course there is lots of misery but it is to say misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, the birds here are in misery. They don’t sing, they just screech in pain.”
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But Henry Ford, along with the men and women he sent down to build his settlement, proved tone-deaf to these kinds of musings, to the metaphors and clichés that entangle much of the writing on the Amazon. There was a stubborn literalness about the midwesterners, engineers mostly but also lumberjacks and sawyers, many of them from Ford’s timber operations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Confronted by the jungle, they didn’t turn philosophical. When they looked up in the sky and saw vultures, those rank, jowled carrion eaters that induced in other Amazon wanderers a sense of their transience, they thought of Detroit’s pigeons. Life in the dense river forest was hard on many of the Ford staff. Boredom could be overpowering, and a few succumbed to disease and death. Yet rather than provoking thoughts of morality or mortality, the Amazon tended to instill melancholy in Ford’s pioneers, a desire to re-create a bygone America, an America that the Ford Motor Company played no small part in dispatching.

While he avoided the more feverish adjectives often attached to the Amazon, Ford nonetheless saw the jungle as a challenge, but it had less to do with overcoming and dominating nature than it did with salvaging a vision of Americana that was slipping out of his grasp at home. That vision was rooted in his experience growing up on a farm in Dearborn and entailed using his wealth and industrial method to safeguard rural virtues and remedy urban ills. He was in his sixties when he founded Fordlandia—or Fordlândia in Brazilian Portuguese, the circumflex indicating a closed, pinched vowel, the final three letters pronounced “jee-ah”—and the settlement became the terminus for a lifetime of venturesome notions about the best way to organize society.

Ford’s idea of a worthy life was chivalrous, especially in its promotion of ballroom dancing. But it was distinctly not adventurous, in contrast to the privations of war, frontier living, and jungle exploration that someone like Theodore Roosevelt celebrated for their ability to strengthen character. “The man who works hard,” Ford once said, “should have his easy-chair, his comfortable fireside, his pleasant surroundings.” And so in the Amazon, Ford built Cape Cod–style shingled houses for his Brazilian workers and urged them to tend flower and vegetable gardens and eat whole wheat bread and unpolished rice. Coming upon Fordlandia after a trip of hundreds of miles through the jungle, the US military attaché to Brazil, Major Lester Baker, called Fordlandia an oasis, a midwestern “dream,” complete with “electric lights, telephones, washing machines, victrolas, and electric refrigerators.” Managers enforced Prohibition, or at least tried to, though it wasn’t a Brazilian law, and nurseries experimented with giving soy milk to babies, because Henry Ford hated cows. On weekends, the plantation sponsored square dances and recitations of poetry by William Wordsworth and Henry Longfellow. The workers, most of them born and raised in the Amazon, were shown documentaries on African and Antarctic expeditions, including Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1929 journey to the South Pole, as well as shorts promoting tourism in Yellowstone Park and celebrating the new, streamlined Lincoln Zephyr. “Henry Ford has transplanted a large slice of twentieth century civilization” to the Amazon, reported Michigan’s
Iron Mountain Daily News
, bringing “a prosperity to the natives that they never before experienced.”
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Over the course of nearly two decades, Ford would spend tens of millions of dollars founding not one but, after the first plantation was devastated by leaf blight, two American towns, complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and, of course, Model Ts and As rolling down their paved streets.

Back in America, newspapers kept up their drumbeat celebration, only obliquely referencing reports that things were not progressing as the company had hoped. But there was one note of skepticism. In late 1928, the
Washington Post
ran an editorial that read in its entirety: “Ford will govern a rubber plantation in Brazil larger than North Carolina. This is the first time he has applied quantity production methods to trouble.”
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IT STILL TAKES about eighteen hours on a slow riverboat to get to Fordlandia from the nearest provincial city, as long as it did eighty years ago when Ford first sent a crew of Michigan engineers and lumberjacks to begin construction on his town. I’ve made the trip twice, and the second time it was no less jolting after hours of passing little but green to round a river bend and come upon a 150-foot tower bursting from the forest canopy holding aloft a 150,000-gallon water tank. Decades of rain have since scrubbed off its cursive white Ford logo, yet at the time of its construction the tower was the tallest man-made structure in the Amazon, save for a pair of now dismantled smokestacks that had been attached to the powerhouse. It was the crown jewel of an elaborate water system that daily pumped half a million gallons of filtered and chlorinated water drawn from the river to the town, plantation, and ice plant. Miles of buried pipes fed into indoor sinks and toilets, sewers carried away household waste, and fire hydrants—still a novelty in even the largest Latin American cities—dotted the town’s sidewalks. The water system was run by an electric plant made up of steam boilers, generators, turbines, and engines salvaged from decommissioned navy ships stripped down to scrap at the River Rouge plant a few years earlier, Ford being a pioneer in industrial recycling.

Fordlandia stands on the eastern side of the Tapajós River, the Amazon’s fifth largest tributary. Flowing south to north and intersecting with the Amazon about six hundred miles from the Atlantic, the Tapajós is a broad river, with sloping sandy banks that give way to a gradual rise, and at no point on the trip does one feel that the jungle is closing in. It is home to a staggering number of fish, insects, plants, and animals. Yet the valley’s big-sky openness often instills in travelers a sensation of tedium. “The prevailing note in the Amazon is one of monotony,” thought Kenneth Grubb, “the same green lines the river-bank, the same gloom fills the forest. . . . Each successive bend in the river is rounded in expectancy, only to reveal another identical stretch ahead.” But then one beholds Ford’s miragelike industrial plant. “When the view is had from the deck of a river steamer,” wrote Ogden Pierrot, a U.S. diplomat stationed in Rio, “the imposing structures of the industrial section of the town, with the tremendous water tank and the smokestack of the power house, catch the view and create a sensation of real wonderment.”
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