Following on from the relative success of the derelict Detroit thread retrorides.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=141872 and in a kinda linked genre, it seemed mandatory to put up a thread about Fordlândia.
Never heard of it? I expect the ghost of Henry Ford would prefer it if no-one remembered. It was his Heart of Darkness, perhaps his greatest blunder and certainly his most expensive. No, not even the horses' collar of the Edsel could rival its folly ;D. It was not merely an industrial failure, but an ideological one, and marked the death of a part of Ford's American Dream in the heat and blight and disease of the tropical Amazon
Ford wasn't just a visionary in terms of automotive progress but also in terms of societical manipulation, as I'm sure you're all aware. His beliefs on how a Protestant, good American should live were forced upon his workers and he saw no reason why this practice could not become universal in all areas of the globe where his influence reached. Unfortunately, in 1928 the irresistible force of his will was destined to meet the immovable barrier of the rainforest. Having been rankled by the fact that rubber was the one component of his cars' manufacture he had absolutely no control over, Ford resolved to set up his own rubber plantation in Brazil.
He was motivated as much by the challenge as the financial considerations, and by now into his sixties, the intractability and headstrong attitude that had carried him so far was perhaps as much a hindrance as a strength. Undeterred by his and his companies' complete lack of botanical expertise or understand of the local environment and culture, he purchased 25,000 square kilometres along the Amazon and set up a schedule for clearance of the land in order to plant rubber trees.
From the outset, times were tough and nothing went as "planned". Workers were difficult to hold, despite Ford extending his policy of high wages to the rainforest just as he had at Dearborn. Unfortunately, in Michigan the workers weren't faced by hazards such as poisonous wildlife, extreme jungle, disease and the need to return to their own homes to tend their fields and families. Many workers would simply drift away having received a wage packet, thinking that was the end of their job. Many more died, cutting back brush led to fatal snakebites; living in temporary huts led to infection from fevers, toxic vampire bat bites, insect bites and so on; there were even instances of jaguars and other large predators taking babies and unsuspecting adults as prey.
The crosses in the graveyard grew faster than the rubber trees
...in fact, for the longest time, the trees didn't grow at all. The terrain was incompatible with rubber trees, being hilly, prone to erosion and pooling water. Ford hadn't "given in" to suggestions that botanists rather than engineers were what the project needed. He apparently gave forth the aphorism that "if the light is strong, you may place machines closer together" as justification for planting intensively. He was either ignorant or chose to ignore the fact that rubber trees in the wild grew very sparsely, separated from each other by many metres. The early Fordlândia plantations looked more like a WWI battleground than the way of the future
The terrain was hostile not just to the people trying to subjugate it, but also to the vehicles and machines they brought. A river trip of several hours was needed to access Fordlândia, with the attendant problems for supply chains. Generators ran out of fuel, parts were hours and miles away when desperately needed. The Ford vehicles that were so persuasive as marketing tools to the impressionable local workforce, struggled in the quagmires caused by intensive felling
However, despite all the overwhelming difficulties, and perhaps buoyed on the irrepressible tide of Henry Ford's unyielding iron will, eventually the jungle gave way to the cleared spaces that would ultimately hold the township of Fordlândia. This was an achievement of Herculean proportions in itself
However, the real enemy proved to come from within. The fall of Fordlândia came from two main factors. The first was the clash of cultures. The locals were used to working seasonally, and during the cool times of the day. They certainly did not fall in easily to Ford's insistence on observing an American nine-to-five regime. They also had no real impetus to slave, literally risking death, for even the inflated wages. There was little for them to spend these wages on, after all. Ford had finally reached the impassable end of his "sell the people what they want to buy" philosophy. This only worked if there was anything to buy. Fordlândia was by now modelled on a smalltown America settlement, but outside it's neatly-trimmed lawns the paved roads petered out into the hostility of the rainforest, there was nowhere to drive your new Ford even once you could afford one. Subsequent managers had imprved on the higgeldy arrangement of adobe huts with straight, named avenues of clapboard U.S-style houses. Then came the clearing of the bordellos, gambling houses and speakeasies...
...and this was the real cultural clash. Ford was as puritanical towards his Brazilian employees as his American ones. His ethical tyranny extended to the rainforest, his dictat about how his employers could live. Prohibition was in Michigan, so he saw no reason it shouldn't be in Brazil. Whoring was abhorrent to him, so it was not permitted in Fordlândia. Instead, poetry recitals and choir practice were encouraged. The buildings, so reminiscent of a New England homestead, were horribly inadequate to stave off the Amazon climate; asbestos and steel roofs may be more durable than the palm leaves the indigenous population preferred, but they were like a furnace in the heat of the day. They were "hotter than the gates of hell" in the words of one of the priests who visited to minister.
Ford's insistence on the workers' adopting his tyrannical lifestyle criteria led to riots, the first sparked off in the cafeteria where something as seemingly minor as the switch from waiter service to Detroit-style self-service queues proved the final straw. The rioters sent the American overseers scurrying for their lives; some barricaded themsleves into their homes, some fled into the jungle, many made for the safety of the boats, drawing them into the river away from danger. The rioters smashed everything they could, concentrating on the visible emblems of the regime, the timeclocks and Ford vehicles.
Finally pacified, according to some accounts, with the aid of the Brazillian army, a work strategy returned and the plantation continued staggering on into the 1930s. The addition of further ludicrous American conceits such as a golfcourse did little to aleiviate the problems, though
the workers worked, in between fights and distrust, rumblings of dissatisfaction and many desertions, and they dutifully queued for their pointless paychecks. Many were now migrant workers lured by the money, rather than locals who understood the environmental issues rather better
...but the migrants brought with them more debauchery, setting up a mini red light district on a small island offshore in the river. The bordellos and gambling houses were built up on stilts due to the floods.
However, the real deathknell for Fordlândia came from the second front. Ford in his arrogance and refusal to consult experts in the field of botany (Ford is famously quoted as "disdaining expertise" because it led to people thinking they knew better than him) had ignored the fact that the area he purchased was totally unsuited to rubber plantations. The terrain was hilly and wet, the trees were planted too close together, and that was the real enemy within. As soon as they grew enough for their leaves to touch, Leaf Blight fungus spread through the crop like wildfire, killing the trees. Eventually forced to admit defeat, a further patch of land far more suitable was purchased fifty miles downstream at Belterra. In addition, Asian blight-resistant species of rubber plant were brought in.
Finally the trees grew! But it was too late. Belterra managed to limp through production to a peak of 750 tons of latex in 1942 (the proposed figures had been more like 38,000 tons!). Synthetic rubber and the healing action of time meant Ford could finally bow out gracefully, victorious in defeat. At least, as he saw it. The venture had always, he claimed, been about a cultural mission as much as a manufacturing and economical one. Which was just as well, since he had lost an estimated $20million over the duration of the Fordlândia project. This is often converted as around $200million in modern terms, quite a sum even to one of the richest and most influential men of the age.
Ford never visited in person, though often claimed he wanted to. Perhaps it was just as well, from a distance removed through time Fordlândia sounds like a terrible cauldron, a mixture of Jonestown blind morality and ethical tyranny and the random jungle chaos and descent into madness encapsulated with such purity in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Had Ford ever visited, now doubt he would have done well to have not crawled out of the chaos like Kurtz himself, muttering about "the horror... the horror"
The Americans left in November 1945, simply embarking onto their ships without any prior notice to the remaining workforce. One woman who worked as nanny for the manager's wife (and still lives near Fordlândia today) said the only warning they had was as her boss said "Goodbye, we're going back to Michigan," as she went to board the ship to carry her away down the Tapajós river. "They didn't take anything with them," América Lobato recalled, "they just left, like that."
Nowadays the buildings still stand on the banks of the river, a ghost town mostly deserted except for some squatter farmers and a few workers who still tend the township in a desultory fashion. Ford sold the land back to the Brazillian government for a desultory sum of $250,000, saving face not even covered.
It could be any back lot in middle America... except it takes hours by boat past verdant jungle to reach here, your first hint of the ghosts and history being taken back to the soil being the huge water tower poking through the canopy
telegraph poles loiter incongrously at languid angles as the Earth slowly takes back what's hers
the hospitals, dentists surgeries, theatres, and all the trappings of civilisation Ford insisted upon are of little use to the few inhabitants so far from supply and reliable power
Despite some abortive efforts since the abandonment to resurrect industry, such as a desultory condom-production plant, all have also been abandoned due to the sheer inaccessibility of the site
Triumphant views, though! Thanks to Henry Ford for the collossal arrogance and folly that perhaps is a requirement of all great men. When it works, history makes idolatory of them. When it all caves in, we sit back and marvel at such magnificent failures
Plenty of essays on the subject on the Web, including the ones where I shamefully stole these pics from. Some links below, heartily recommended for greater depth in history and personal recollections than in my brief precis here;
Good general account of the venture;
sometimes-interesting.com/2011/08/30/henry-ford%E2%80%99s-failed-town-fordlandia/
Extract form Greg Grandin's own personal experience of visiting the site;
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/7129385/Fordlandia-extract.html
Some excellent modern pics (from an Amazonia tourism site, no less!)
gilserique.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/post-fordlandia-documentary.html
Before-and-after photo essay by Brendan McFadden
www.rogerallen.net/blog/archives/4233/
Brief version of Allan Bellows' e-book
www.damninteresting.com/the-ruins-of-fordlandia/
Never heard of it? I expect the ghost of Henry Ford would prefer it if no-one remembered. It was his Heart of Darkness, perhaps his greatest blunder and certainly his most expensive. No, not even the horses' collar of the Edsel could rival its folly ;D. It was not merely an industrial failure, but an ideological one, and marked the death of a part of Ford's American Dream in the heat and blight and disease of the tropical Amazon
Ford wasn't just a visionary in terms of automotive progress but also in terms of societical manipulation, as I'm sure you're all aware. His beliefs on how a Protestant, good American should live were forced upon his workers and he saw no reason why this practice could not become universal in all areas of the globe where his influence reached. Unfortunately, in 1928 the irresistible force of his will was destined to meet the immovable barrier of the rainforest. Having been rankled by the fact that rubber was the one component of his cars' manufacture he had absolutely no control over, Ford resolved to set up his own rubber plantation in Brazil.
He was motivated as much by the challenge as the financial considerations, and by now into his sixties, the intractability and headstrong attitude that had carried him so far was perhaps as much a hindrance as a strength. Undeterred by his and his companies' complete lack of botanical expertise or understand of the local environment and culture, he purchased 25,000 square kilometres along the Amazon and set up a schedule for clearance of the land in order to plant rubber trees.
From the outset, times were tough and nothing went as "planned". Workers were difficult to hold, despite Ford extending his policy of high wages to the rainforest just as he had at Dearborn. Unfortunately, in Michigan the workers weren't faced by hazards such as poisonous wildlife, extreme jungle, disease and the need to return to their own homes to tend their fields and families. Many workers would simply drift away having received a wage packet, thinking that was the end of their job. Many more died, cutting back brush led to fatal snakebites; living in temporary huts led to infection from fevers, toxic vampire bat bites, insect bites and so on; there were even instances of jaguars and other large predators taking babies and unsuspecting adults as prey.
The crosses in the graveyard grew faster than the rubber trees
...in fact, for the longest time, the trees didn't grow at all. The terrain was incompatible with rubber trees, being hilly, prone to erosion and pooling water. Ford hadn't "given in" to suggestions that botanists rather than engineers were what the project needed. He apparently gave forth the aphorism that "if the light is strong, you may place machines closer together" as justification for planting intensively. He was either ignorant or chose to ignore the fact that rubber trees in the wild grew very sparsely, separated from each other by many metres. The early Fordlândia plantations looked more like a WWI battleground than the way of the future
The terrain was hostile not just to the people trying to subjugate it, but also to the vehicles and machines they brought. A river trip of several hours was needed to access Fordlândia, with the attendant problems for supply chains. Generators ran out of fuel, parts were hours and miles away when desperately needed. The Ford vehicles that were so persuasive as marketing tools to the impressionable local workforce, struggled in the quagmires caused by intensive felling
However, despite all the overwhelming difficulties, and perhaps buoyed on the irrepressible tide of Henry Ford's unyielding iron will, eventually the jungle gave way to the cleared spaces that would ultimately hold the township of Fordlândia. This was an achievement of Herculean proportions in itself
However, the real enemy proved to come from within. The fall of Fordlândia came from two main factors. The first was the clash of cultures. The locals were used to working seasonally, and during the cool times of the day. They certainly did not fall in easily to Ford's insistence on observing an American nine-to-five regime. They also had no real impetus to slave, literally risking death, for even the inflated wages. There was little for them to spend these wages on, after all. Ford had finally reached the impassable end of his "sell the people what they want to buy" philosophy. This only worked if there was anything to buy. Fordlândia was by now modelled on a smalltown America settlement, but outside it's neatly-trimmed lawns the paved roads petered out into the hostility of the rainforest, there was nowhere to drive your new Ford even once you could afford one. Subsequent managers had imprved on the higgeldy arrangement of adobe huts with straight, named avenues of clapboard U.S-style houses. Then came the clearing of the bordellos, gambling houses and speakeasies...
...and this was the real cultural clash. Ford was as puritanical towards his Brazilian employees as his American ones. His ethical tyranny extended to the rainforest, his dictat about how his employers could live. Prohibition was in Michigan, so he saw no reason it shouldn't be in Brazil. Whoring was abhorrent to him, so it was not permitted in Fordlândia. Instead, poetry recitals and choir practice were encouraged. The buildings, so reminiscent of a New England homestead, were horribly inadequate to stave off the Amazon climate; asbestos and steel roofs may be more durable than the palm leaves the indigenous population preferred, but they were like a furnace in the heat of the day. They were "hotter than the gates of hell" in the words of one of the priests who visited to minister.
Ford's insistence on the workers' adopting his tyrannical lifestyle criteria led to riots, the first sparked off in the cafeteria where something as seemingly minor as the switch from waiter service to Detroit-style self-service queues proved the final straw. The rioters sent the American overseers scurrying for their lives; some barricaded themsleves into their homes, some fled into the jungle, many made for the safety of the boats, drawing them into the river away from danger. The rioters smashed everything they could, concentrating on the visible emblems of the regime, the timeclocks and Ford vehicles.
Finally pacified, according to some accounts, with the aid of the Brazillian army, a work strategy returned and the plantation continued staggering on into the 1930s. The addition of further ludicrous American conceits such as a golfcourse did little to aleiviate the problems, though
the workers worked, in between fights and distrust, rumblings of dissatisfaction and many desertions, and they dutifully queued for their pointless paychecks. Many were now migrant workers lured by the money, rather than locals who understood the environmental issues rather better
...but the migrants brought with them more debauchery, setting up a mini red light district on a small island offshore in the river. The bordellos and gambling houses were built up on stilts due to the floods.
However, the real deathknell for Fordlândia came from the second front. Ford in his arrogance and refusal to consult experts in the field of botany (Ford is famously quoted as "disdaining expertise" because it led to people thinking they knew better than him) had ignored the fact that the area he purchased was totally unsuited to rubber plantations. The terrain was hilly and wet, the trees were planted too close together, and that was the real enemy within. As soon as they grew enough for their leaves to touch, Leaf Blight fungus spread through the crop like wildfire, killing the trees. Eventually forced to admit defeat, a further patch of land far more suitable was purchased fifty miles downstream at Belterra. In addition, Asian blight-resistant species of rubber plant were brought in.
Finally the trees grew! But it was too late. Belterra managed to limp through production to a peak of 750 tons of latex in 1942 (the proposed figures had been more like 38,000 tons!). Synthetic rubber and the healing action of time meant Ford could finally bow out gracefully, victorious in defeat. At least, as he saw it. The venture had always, he claimed, been about a cultural mission as much as a manufacturing and economical one. Which was just as well, since he had lost an estimated $20million over the duration of the Fordlândia project. This is often converted as around $200million in modern terms, quite a sum even to one of the richest and most influential men of the age.
Ford never visited in person, though often claimed he wanted to. Perhaps it was just as well, from a distance removed through time Fordlândia sounds like a terrible cauldron, a mixture of Jonestown blind morality and ethical tyranny and the random jungle chaos and descent into madness encapsulated with such purity in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Had Ford ever visited, now doubt he would have done well to have not crawled out of the chaos like Kurtz himself, muttering about "the horror... the horror"
The Americans left in November 1945, simply embarking onto their ships without any prior notice to the remaining workforce. One woman who worked as nanny for the manager's wife (and still lives near Fordlândia today) said the only warning they had was as her boss said "Goodbye, we're going back to Michigan," as she went to board the ship to carry her away down the Tapajós river. "They didn't take anything with them," América Lobato recalled, "they just left, like that."
Nowadays the buildings still stand on the banks of the river, a ghost town mostly deserted except for some squatter farmers and a few workers who still tend the township in a desultory fashion. Ford sold the land back to the Brazillian government for a desultory sum of $250,000, saving face not even covered.
It could be any back lot in middle America... except it takes hours by boat past verdant jungle to reach here, your first hint of the ghosts and history being taken back to the soil being the huge water tower poking through the canopy
telegraph poles loiter incongrously at languid angles as the Earth slowly takes back what's hers
the hospitals, dentists surgeries, theatres, and all the trappings of civilisation Ford insisted upon are of little use to the few inhabitants so far from supply and reliable power
Despite some abortive efforts since the abandonment to resurrect industry, such as a desultory condom-production plant, all have also been abandoned due to the sheer inaccessibility of the site
Triumphant views, though! Thanks to Henry Ford for the collossal arrogance and folly that perhaps is a requirement of all great men. When it works, history makes idolatory of them. When it all caves in, we sit back and marvel at such magnificent failures
Plenty of essays on the subject on the Web, including the ones where I shamefully stole these pics from. Some links below, heartily recommended for greater depth in history and personal recollections than in my brief precis here;
Good general account of the venture;
sometimes-interesting.com/2011/08/30/henry-ford%E2%80%99s-failed-town-fordlandia/
Extract form Greg Grandin's own personal experience of visiting the site;
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/7129385/Fordlandia-extract.html
Some excellent modern pics (from an Amazonia tourism site, no less!)
gilserique.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/post-fordlandia-documentary.html
Before-and-after photo essay by Brendan McFadden
www.rogerallen.net/blog/archives/4233/
Brief version of Allan Bellows' e-book
www.damninteresting.com/the-ruins-of-fordlandia/
