To call Fordlandia a disaster is to be charitable. Henry Ford’s plantation was an American town – Cape Cod houses, fire hydrants, golf course – transplanted into Brazil. Fordlandia, on the eastern side of the Tapajos River, owed its existence to Ford’s desire for an independent source of rubber and a growing obsession with “turn[ing] the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination.”
What began in 1927 as an investment for the Ford Motor Company slowly shifted into a personal madness. NYU professor Greg Grandin casts a wide net over Fordlandia’s decline, infusing what could have been simply a comedy of errors with smart economics, ecology and cultural criticism. Grandin’s achievement is to present the jungle city’s unending struggles as an abject example of a capitalistic New World approach to colonialism.
The story couldn’t be told without delving into Ford, who becomes more unknowable the more he’s studied. Grandin’s Ford champions personal freedoms but has an Orwellian ‘Service Department’ to keep tabs on employees. Grandin’s Ford obsesses over small-town USA while his production methods lead to urban migration and a county veined with highways. Ford had a Futurist’s eye for efficiency and recycling, but there was an undeniable dark side: anti-Semitism, dehumanisation of assembly line workers and anti-union venom.
Opportunistic Brazilian businessmen oversold the Amazon as a fantastic location to produce rubber, and Ford bit happily. He got a sweetheart deal (he acquired 2.5 million acres of forest and was only required to plant rubber trees on 1,000 acres), and those doing the legwork received nice kickbacks. Conceived through a tangle of shady business deals, Fordlandia quickly soured. There was a revolving door of disastrous managers (some drunk, some domineering, some perpetually sick from tropical heat), worker riots, and blight that destroyed the trees time and time again.
Why didn’t Ford abandon his Amazonian city? Grandin explains that by the early 1930s, an increasingly paranoid and hostile Ford was more interested in creating a perfect America. Like a hoarder’s nest or the immaculate placement of an obsessive compulsive, Fordlandia became a sort of psychic terrain for one individual’s unique obsessions. And Ford was certainly getting weird. Residents were expected to plant flowers, learn square dances, and eat strange foods. His imposing nonsense conjures Turkmenbashi’s cult of self. It was the logic that built houses that bake like ovens in the tropics.
Grandin’s research is filled with novelistic detours that keep the Fordlandia story enthralling despite the slow death the city experienced. The workers’ riot was in 1930 but the city hung on until 1945. Then, to stop the bleed out of money, Ford’s grandson gave the territory back to Brazil.
Ironically, the Fordlandian utopia ultimately came down to assets and liabilities. In Grandin’s hands, Ford’s bizarre hubris serves as a microcosm for the imperfect philosophies that have shaped today’s world.
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: