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

I love the cover of Fordlandia. It shows an idealised American suburb with mothers and children walking down a street of bungalows, complete with white picket fences bordering the gardens, and newly-planted apple trees. However, the backdrop is undeniably the tall trees of the South American jungle, for this illustration shows Fordlandia, Henry Ford's attempt to build a new model community in Amazonia where rubber would be harvested to provide the raw materials for his ever-growing factories.

Reality in these squalid bungalows did not conform to this idealised picture. Designed in Michigan and shipped in pre-fabricated form to Brazil, the houses had poured concrete floors and metal roofs lined with asbestos, and turned out to be "midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night " and then "undergoes a fierce siege of heat provoking nightmares" in the second.

But let's start at the beginning. By 1928, Ford had seen considerable success with the Model T Ford, but sales were slipping drastically as newer competitors came to the market. The Model A was about to be launched and the company seemed to be about to make a startling come-back, having received orders for 700,000 model A cars. Less well-known was that the Ford Motor Company had acquired a vast land concession in the Amazon, about the same size as a mid-ranged US state. It was Henry Ford's plan to plant millions of rubber trees, but also tame the jungle, to sanitise it, and to form an idealised community with all the values of middle-America transported thousands of miles south into this notoriously inhospitable region.

The actual execution of the Fordlandia vision was an organisational nightmare. Quite apart from the chaotic conditions in the run-down ports at which Ford's ships had to land, the jungle was a difficult beast to tame. Ford's emissaries burned hundreds of hectares of jungle, creating fires that burned out of control for days at a time, wreaking terrible devastation on the ecology. Smoke blocked out the sun and ash fell several kilometres away. Ford's managers began to fall our among themselves and soon no-one was visibly in charge and conditions among the hundreds of workers soon began to deteriorate. Discipline among the Ford managers was now so poor that they were defrauding the company of large sums of money, even hiding their stash in hollowed out tree trunks.

When eventually an American-style compound was created for Ford's expatriate worker, it was found that many of them succumbed to ill-health, starting with malaria and ending with a variety of serious illnesses requiring repatriation.

Even the industrial development of Fordlandia proved impossibly hard to get underway with the rubber crop failing, inappropriate equipment at the lumber mill. When eventually some sort of ordered industrial processes had been put in place, labour relations turned out to be a huge problem with even riots and up-risings taking place which threatened the lives of the American workers.

I found this a fascinating book. Greg Grandin skilfully blends company history and personal stories to create a very readable account of this almost unbelievable industrial hubris.
It would be a compliment to the author to say that I was reminded of Jonathan Raban's classic story of the American Dream gone wrong, Bad Land, which details the homesteading confidence trick perpetrated on poor European immigrants who were promised plots of fertile land in Montana, only to find dust and rocks.

The book is illustrated throughout with contemporary photographs from Fordlandia. I much appreciated these because without them I might have been tempted to doubt some of the more incredible stories told in these unusual book.

Ford's emblematic Model-T automobile and his pioneering production methods made him a very rich man in the early part of the twentieth century. He was also a man of contradictions. On one hand he was talking up combined agricultural-industrial small communities, promoting pacifism and "freedom", paid high wages and was very critical of concentrated economic power whether on Wall Street or in the Energy Trusts. But at the same time his company was one of the biggest in the States, he manufactured arms during World War 1, was a very public anti-Semite and hired a notorious thug with Mafia connections along with 3,000 Goons to make sure his workers were divided, unable to form unions and policed at work and in their private lives. Not a man one would mark down as being balanced.

One expression of his lack of balance was the purchasing of a vast tract of the Amazon to turn into a vast rubber plantation to make his company independent of the Imperial rubber concerns of Asia. The story of this enterprise forms the subject of Grandin's book "Fordlandia".

The author is a specialist on Latin America, who served on the UN commission into human rights abuses during the Guatemalan Civil War and has written copiously on the continent including the excellent Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. This background serves him admirably well in this book, though it isn't quite as compelling as the earlier work. He flits back and forth between Dearborn in Michigan (Ford's base) and the Amazon to tell the story of Fordlandia's conception, development and eventual collapse. The story of Fordlandia is intertwined with that of Ford, the man and the motor company, and I learned much that I didn't know of about both. Grandin doesn't stint on the background either, included are brief histories of rubber and its ecology, of Brazil, of the many personalities involved in the project in Brazil and the United States, and much else besides. The book goes beyond Fordlandia's demise and tells the story of what happened after it was sold to the Brazilian government at the end of World War 2 for a pittance after Ford had sunk tens of millions of dollars into it with little rubber to show. The last chapter covers recent developments, and prospects, for the Amazon basin as a whole and makes for sober reading.

The book contains a number of contemporary photographs, is generally clearly written, though the occasional flitting back and forward in time as well as space can be a little disconcerting. The Story of Fordlandia itself doesn't live up to the blurb on the back cover - "haunting... Conrad's Heart of Darkness resonates on every page". Well not in the book I read. What the reader will instead get is a history of Ford himself, his colony and his company - and it is the interaction between the three that makes for an interesting read.

"Pride goes before destruction,
And a haughty spirit before a fall." -- Proverbs 16:18 (NKJV)

Henry Ford prided himself on rationalizing the economic model of the assembly line by preparing, if necessary, to develop his own raw materials so that neither shortages nor costs would derail his search for ultimate efficiency. Like many before him and many since then, Ford found out the limits of his business concept the hard way . . . by seeing others develop better alternatives that undermined his company's success.

One of these concepts involved avoiding the risk of paying too much for rubber, an essential raw material for tires and components. Rubber originally came from wild harvesting in the Amazon before some seeds were taken to Southeast Asia where plantation operations revolutionized production and lowered costs. Ford dreamed of creating massive, industrial-style plantations in the Amazon. His only problem was that he didn't bother to check out the agricultural facts: It was a bad idea because rubber plants are very vulnerable to disease in the Amazon when planted close together. Employ the same idea in other parts of the world, as Firestone did in Africa, and it would have worked.

A series of other miscalculations and errors followed so that Fordlandia became an expensive social experiment into creating Midwestern-style living in the jungle. Historian Greg Grandin expands the story to provide a glimpse into Henry Ford's personal philosophies and management style.

The results of trying to establish Fordlandia and the later developments were bad for virtually everyone, the typical consequences of ill-considered ventures.

The book will tell you more than you could expect to learn on your own about this obscure Ford venture. You will also probably learn more about Henry Ford and his weaknesses than you wanted to learn. I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been briefer and more focused on just telling the Amazon part of the story.