Fordlandia: America In Brazil (RCR Car Stories)

how do you talk about henry ford in the modern era you know what i mean even in his own time the man was a controversial figure i mean on the one hand he paid some of the highest wages of his era and instituted an eight-hour workday while also making the products the workers produced affordable to them but henry ford also held deeply ignorant and hateful views that he routinely printed in his newspaper the dearborn independent ford was anti-labor unions for reasons he claimed in his autobiography were due to the men in charge of those unions causing more issues than they resolved but okay i would argue it's just as likely that ford simply felt he knew better that there would be no need for unions in a world where he already gave his workers as much as he did henry ford had a clear-cut idea of the world around him and what that world could be if steered by the right hand and the right hand was typically his own it's ego plain and simple and maybe that's what made him an automotive pioneer and a legendary businessman i don't know but a lot of the positive qualities as they can be said to exist are often overshadowed by practices that hurt ford's bottom line views that run contrary to human decency and a paranoia that would fester so deeply within him that he would become almost impossible to work with as he ignored the advice of experts and dove headlong into one of the worst debacles in automotive history a 20 million dollar loss for the ford motor company that stands as a towering failure of unrestricted ambition henry ford envisioned saving american industry through one vision a utopia of his own creation on foreign soil and bearing his name a taste of uncle sam's consumerism low-cost goods mass-produced at high wages a sample of ford's american dream to prove the beacon-on-a-hill narrative of american exceptionalism a fine idea in theory but something quite different in practice this is about a town in brazil created by henry ford as a monument to limitless aspiration that stands to this very day as a record of what happens when manifest destiny moves southward and runs up against the insurmountable forces of mother nature and the limitations of the human spirit this is rcr stories fordlandia the year is 1928 and the decade has been characterized by a british stranglehold on the sri lankan rubber market and no that's not a euphemism for something else i'm talking actual rubber you see in the 1800s brazil had developed a reputation as a prime source for rubber thanks to the ease of transport along the waterways of the amazon and the proliferation of rubber trees in the amazon river basin which is not to say the process itself wasn't taxing basically rubber tappers would find a tree slash it and then tap it painstakingly extracting the latex boiling the viscous fluid and eventually turning it into rubber for everything from tires to gaskets and valves now you gotta remember the workers are doing this in three digit heat and often for very little money if any at all this is because rubber barons were literally enslaving the indigenous people to do all this work as author joe jackson describes in his book the thief at the end of the world conditions were so bad for the rubber workers that the end result was a death rate of one worker per rubber tire produced now one would think that there would be an easier more humane way of doing this a way that didn't involve actually enslaving people and forcing them to do your work and if there's not then do you even really need to be in the rubber industry in the first place i mean really the answer here is to not enslave people and maybe just get into another industry altogether but that just wasn't going to happen and so rubber barons were all about finding ways to get more money out of this rubber industry and that usually meant trying to turn rubber tree growth and the business into a sort of plantation but this was difficult because these trees were notoriously dramatic and grown in an environment that didn't like to cooperate planting them next to each other would risk blight infecting the whole group if so much as one tree became affected and while i'm not exactly a horticulturalist or anything of the sort i can only imagine that it didn't really help to potentially have the root systems interfering with one another you know in confined spaces this could impede the trees from growing to their full potential so that even if they thrived they didn't really produce at the level that they could have but that's just one aspect of the difficulty the real issue here was the infestation of parasites native to brazil this naturally made rubber trees difficult to keep viable thereby making the trees themselves as precious as the product they helped churn out and since these trees were native to brazil the theory was that they were unlikely to survive elsewhere not that attempts weren't made because if you could get rubber trees growing in a place with little risk of blight and no native parasites that have developed over time to feed on rubber then you could essentially own the rubber industry and set prices to your liking enter the british an explorer by the name of henry wickham embarked upon a bold adventure in the name of the crown it was 1876 and wickham was already in brazil when he received a mission from across the sea to help britain finally build a rubber plantation in southeast asia he would do this by smuggling seeds of the javea brasiliensis or the rubber trees out of the country this happened over the course of 1876 as wickham had the seeds classified as academic specimens to avoid detection and potential arrests for biopiracy which i'm just now learning is a thing that exists the academic specimen classification usually applied only to dead animals or non-viable plant life but wickham had inside help from the operators of the rubber grove plantations and was able to circumvent the academic specimen classification all of which flies in the face of wickham's tall tales of international piracy where he's out running gunships like crockett and tubs but whatever here we are little by little over the course of the year in brazil's santa rem area wickham smuggled out 70 000 seeds and that's a figure that might not actually be accurate since a lot of it relies on wickham's braggadocio it's like wwe inflating the attendance of every wrestlemania you just sort of come to expect it at this point but regardless of the actual number fewer than 3 000 of the alleged tens of thousands of seeds that wickham smuggled out were actually viable yet that was apparently enough to kick-start the sri lankan rubber market along with seedlings that were sent out to british colonies in singapore malaysia and indonesia just to name a few suddenly britain had rubber plantations all throughout southeast asia and other areas giving them a near monopoly on a globally in-demand resource now did wickham ever face repercussions for his actions well no in fact the man was knighted for his actions in 1920 knighted he's literally remembered as sir henry wickham the most serious repercussion his trip to brazil seemed to have was the death of well pretty much his entire family which is to be fair a pretty serious repercussion let me explain wickham married the love of his life a woman named violet case carter and she would accompany him on his expeditions all over the world but things went differently on his trip to santarem a city in the brazilian state of para where the rubber trees grew for the 1871 trip to santarem henry wickham and violet case carter were accompanied by wickham's mother his sister harriet and his younger brother john while both harriet and john married their respective fiances within two years of the journey it wasn't a happy time for very long as things took a turn for the worst by 1876 the very year of wickham's smuggling operation the climate was fierce and far harsher than anticipated to the extent that not only did wickham's mother and sister perish from illness but so did john's mother-in-law among the other casualties were a laborer in the wickham's employ and a fourteen-year-old servant girl wickham had dreamed of one day getting rich growing some high value crop in tropical regions something like coffee or bananas or in this case rubber trees but all he'd really achieved on the farm was a withering crop and land disturbed by the graves of his loved ones stuck on a failing patch of land henry wickham was abandoned by his brother and his sister-in-law who returned home but even after everything violet continued to stand by her man even after the deaths the awful climates the uncomfortable travel all of it violet continued to remain with her husband perhaps believing that he would one day make his fortune it was an unforgiving existence but when you're in love i suppose you find ways to put up with it the wickhams traveled the tropical climates of the world in the hopes of finally growing their fortune from the deep earth but they failed in every single place they visited to the point where violet eventually got fed up and honestly it was more than just being fed up with travel or with hardship and privation and not having a whole lot of money the breaking point was the occasion where henry left violet behind on an allegedly cannibalistic island in new guinea for close to a month and yeah i really don't know that many marriages could have survived that violet couldn't take anymore and so she finally left henry both were heartbroken about it yet neither wavered in their commitment henry to his agricultural pursuits and violet to her desire not to live on an island of alleged cannibals in a sense you might be able to argue henry wickham was compelled by desperation to do what he did to salvage something from all that he'd lost to make the trip worth some small victory so that the deaths and the devastation wouldn't all be in vain and it seemed that the solution in smuggling the seeds was a sound option as far as the theft was concerned it wasn't technically against the law to export the seeds as long as you had an export license which wickham did have i mean sure he lied to get it but the license was still good and if you ignore the irresponsibility of messing with the ecosystem like that and focus solely on what would make the most money wickham would have had the right idea we were long before the age of synthetic rubber and the needs for the real thing were multitudinous as they had both commercial and military applications ethically this was the wrong thing to do hell legally it was the wrong thing to do even if there were loopholes that allowed it to happen but somebody was eventually going to do this and wickham wanted to be that man the amazon rubber boom was in full effect creating an economy that sustained the area at least until wickham did what he did and the smuggled seeds gave britain the chance to sustain rubber plantations of their own yet for all of his bravado academics actually resented wickham for his lack of any real credentials in the botanical field and by the time he was actually knighted it hardly mattered anyway since he was old broke and desperately lonely without violet and that's exactly how he left this world as joe jackson writes in the thief at the end of the world which is a biography of henry wickham henry and violet loved one another passionately quote but rubber and the madness and greed it spawned had come between them both died alone end quote of course wickham's actions gutted amazonian rubber production as other tropical climates didn't have the same native parasites as brazil and the asian plantations were more adaptable to mass commercial production as a result it's said that many of the commercial rubber trees still in use are descendants of the seeds wickham smuggled out of brazil so what does any of this have to do with henry ford well ford was taking a shellacking due to the rising cost of rubber and so he needed a way for ford motor company to get into the business of producing their own rubber to make their own tires enter teddy roosevelt the 26th president of the united states who was talking about his own journeys to the amazon and the rainforests of brazil one night allegedly henry ford listened to roosevelt and saw a potential solution to his rubber problem an idea to recreate an american industrial utopia on foreign soil a second opportunity at erecting a town whose sole purpose would be to produce for ford motor company long story short ford visited muscle shoals alabama along with thomas edison a friend of his in 1922. the two friends discussed a plan in which ford proclaimed quote i will employ 1 million workers at muscle shoals and i will build a city 75 miles long end quote i i have no idea what henry ford sounds like and i don't really care and even if i looked it up right now i probably couldn't recreate it i know you're all devastated but yeah a city 75 miles long powered by the wilson dam an unfinished project intended to power plants that would produce nitrates for ammunition during world war one however the end of the first world war left the government without a need for the dam so ford got into contact with secretary of war john weeks who was pretty much the project manager of the dam at that point and he made an offer of 5 million dollars for a 100 year lease on the dam and the adjoining nitrate plants to turn the area into a booming economic hub for the auto industry that could rival detroit but it didn't pan out that way largely due to then-us senator george norris of nebraska as outlined in the column henry ford's muscle shoals for the site urban utopia quote senator norris a republican from nebraska stood against popular opinion he believed that wilson dam could do more good in public hands than anything henry ford could establish in a january 1922 article ford claimed he would turn the completed project over to government control before half his 100 year lease was up and ensured that neither he nor his heirs may realize any monetary benefit norris didn't seem to believe these claims and if he did he didn't care he considered ford's 5 million offer a waste of the tens of millions taxpayers had already spent on the dam and nitrate works end quote the house of representatives approved ford's offer but the sale died in the senate and so ford's muscle shoal's dream died with it and although the government did eventually finish wilson dam it was cold comfort to the speculators who had bought land in anticipation of the deal and the farmers expanding their operations to accommodate the influx of workers and visitors alike it was least of all comfort to henry ford whose anti-semitic side came out when announcing where he placed all the blame but brazil brazil presented a new opportunity at an even grander vision an american town in the midst of the amazon that would produce rubber directly for ford motor company a town that would bring the american character to a land that needed a steady hand to tame it it was ford's chance to bring that vision to life and stick it to the george norrises of the world however by 1928 britain's monopoly on rubber had been decreasing which meant ford wouldn't have been as desperate for rubber as he would have been a few years earlier yet henry ford was already in love with the idea so he sent two intermediaries to represent his interests in brazil the result was ford setting up a deal with the brazilian state of para from which henry wickham famously smuggled the rubber tree seeds for a plot of land measuring 5625 square miles and 2.5 million acres the land would be located in the amazon river basin in an area known as boa vista and it was a location selected because it was elevated which would come in handy should there ever be flooding in the vicinity but there were two downsides here first ford's men whether inadvertently or otherwise had screwed him on the deal as ford paid some 125 000 or 1.85 million dollars today when the land itself was worth far less than that price i can't find exact figures but needless to say henry ford overpaid and while ford was exempted from taxes on exporting anything he produced in brazil he still had to fork over nine percent of the profits to the state and local governments of the country in exchange and then there's the second downside the plot of land selected was insulated against flooding by its elevated height yes but its inland location meant that the cargo ships carrying manufacturing and construction materials wouldn't actually be able to reach the site at any other time of year but the rainy season when the water levels would be high enough to accommodate the vessels this meant that construction on ford landia couldn't actually start until 1929 but the die had been cast as henry ford had committed heart and dollar to the project and so he sought to make a new american midwest out of a swath of land in the depths of the amazon which would be great except the plan had one big problem pretty much all of it as construction finally began in early 1929 the manager placed in charge of overseeing things was a norwegian-born sea captain by the name of einar oxholm who would be responsible for the general layout of ford landia's grid in addition to being the first of the town's many many managers because in a general sense fordlandia's managers never seem to have much in the way of agricultural experience if any at all and oxholme was just such a man but hey your boss pays you a lot of money to do a job you're not all that qualified to do you do it anyway and hope you fail upwards because otherwise he'll just get some other unqualified yahoo to do it do people still say yahoo outside the context of like the search engine is it even a search engine anymore is it like so the trees were chopped down and the land cleared out to make way for the town's piece de resistance a water tower proudly displaying the ford logo an icon of the progressive american spirit coming to birth itself all over the untamed land in no mood to deliver it the founding of fort landia would be a grueling experience ford who grew up on a farm modeled fort landia after a midwestern town presumably due to an immense nostalgia for a romanticized place and time as we'll see moving forward it was the type of environment he was used to working with and the type of people he was used to employing and a place he felt best represented american values i suppose and so it was done rose upon rows of american-style homes buttressed by sources of recreation education and worship a school a library a church a swimming pool a golf course a playground and a hotel for the inevitable rush of people seeking to take part in henry ford's utopian vision this along with the factories and warehouses and a sawmill where the workers would perform the labor with which they were tasked like taking raw latex and producing the tires valves and other products that would be sent back to detroit the managers brought down from the states to oversee the operation would live in a place known as vila americana or the american village which would be considerably nicer than the place where all the workers lived because i guess ford had no sense for irony with regards to replacing the old rubber barons with new ones author greg grandin whose book ford landia the rise and fall of henry ford's forgotten city which is more or less the definitive work on this subject noted that the american village wouldn't just have the best view of the area it would also be the only part of town with running water everybody else would have to use wells because i guess making this more like modernized america was only true if you were already american yet like the alabama community surrounding the prospective muscle shoals plant several years earlier many natives were excited by the possibility of working for henry ford he was offering them free health care access to a formal education and great wages for the time some five dollars usd per hour along with eight hour work days rather than the back-breaking all-day labor of the rubber slavers it was an attractive proposition well except for the eight hour work days you see in between the era of the rubber barons and 1929 labor expectations had sort of changed the workers typically schedule their day around the immense heat of the rainforest you get up early and you do as much work as you can in the morning take a break around lunchtime for a few hours and finish up the day strong as the heat subsides with the setting sun man that's a lot of sibilance but henry ford believed the american work schedule could be universally applied with no repercussions so when the time came to actually build this town it didn't exactly go well roger weber host of the podcast mismatch goes into detail on the perils faced by the workforce in episode 298 of the podcast series 99 invisible which covers ford landia at length quote you have for example the workers who are trying to clear the land they'd be working out there bare-chested and would be suddenly covered with biting ants and hornets and scorpions and even worse they would reach in and suddenly a pit viper would bite them and kill them so they were dealing with a life and death struggle here end quote this is backed up by grandin who details the hellish experience in his book writing quote in the best of conditions clearing jungle is brutal close in work but as october ran into november high temperatures were hitting degrees exhaustion and sickness overcame the contracted laborers who made up fordlandia's first crew as they hacked their way into the dense dank wood with machetes and cutlasses they worked stripped to the waist throughout the day as the sun rose and the humidity increased their bodies covered with sweat were scraped by thorns and branches and punctured by the bites of ticks jiggers black flies and ants the workers were not provided hats though these were indispensable when making the first pass at jungle clearing as often the chopping of a creeper or a vine could disturb insect nests reigning scorpions wasps or hornets on those below just a touch of a branch or a vine and within seconds a swarm of ants could cover a body leaving workers red with festering bites the mortality rate was high as workers bending low to chop the undergrowth died quickly from snake bites or suffered a more prolonged wasting away from fever infection or dysentery end quote it was beyond what anybody anticipated when setting out to build this place and the responsibility largely rested with inr oxholm who was in way over his head for the role asked of him by this point he was more than a manager and sea captain he was also having to plant rubber himself provide health care to his workers as best he could and oversee construction and town planning in addition to being the freaking undertaker once his men started to die it was as if the land was hostile to the workers presence as accounts of jaguars stealing babies from their homes wasn't uncommon to say nothing of oxhome's own maid having her arm bitten off by an alligator adjacent creature known as a caiman while bathing in the tapajo's river she bled to death as a result of these injuries and that was hardly the worst of it before 1929 was done some 90 people had perished and been buried in the company cemetery 62 of whom were workers and the remainder of whom were outside visitors to the property which presented a bit of an issue and it was a situation which sadly would only get worse for oxhome in particular who tried explaining the situation to the home office in dearborn michigan grandin writes quote as oxhome explained to dearborn brazil's civil code required that if strangers come to our property and we render them aid we are responsible for their burial in the event of death a law that invoked a bond between death community and soil reminiscent of gabriel garcia marquez's observation made in a novel about the foundation of another doomed town that a person doesn't belong to a place until there is someone dead underground a year later there were three times as many graves including four that contained oxholm's own children end quote ox home lost a lot and it didn't help that he was constantly being badgered by the home office back in michigan sure he was roundly unqualified for the job he was tasked with doing right but i also think this ended up being much more than oxholm probably signed up for and so he was either fired or quit by may 1930 the records don't specify leaving brazil behind with his devastated wife and their remaining daughter now the town was eventually finished to a livable condition if not to 100 completion but creating a midwestern american town in the middle of the amazon is one thing making it a desirable place in which to live is another matter entirely once the town was ready for full-time residents a problem presented itself namely it was kind of a boring place for instance you add wives moving down to fort landia from michigan with their husbands only to find there was very little for them to actually do except sit around while their husbands laid the groundwork for a town that for all its attempts at recreating midwestern america didn't have much of a consumer mentality in its construction sure you could get essentials but where were the outlets for entertainment yeah you had a swimming pool and a golf course and the kids got a playground and even the chance to join the boy scouts but for adults well it's not like you were going on a shopping excursion to get the latest fashions or going out for an evening show followed by dinner at some fancy restaurant i mean yeah money was coming in but what was there to really do with it it's not like you could save up and then move into a nicer house at least from what i could find all in all it was a pretty bad time especially the food situation which became a real sticking point for the workers you see henry ford imposed his diet on everyone he was a vegetarian who believed in clean healthy eating which honestly isn't a bad idea but it's wrong to force that same mentality on everyone especially when some of the items aren't a part of the average native diet there's nothing inherently bad about whole grains or brown rice or oatmeal and plenty of veggies or fruits like canned peaches but in a holistic sense the people just didn't like being restricted to that sort of diet and some of the other american foods that ford allowed like hamburgers just didn't sit well to the point that workers complained about stomach problems it led to major resentment from the citizenry especially when you take into account how boring it was to live there this was a town that celebrated holidays like christmas new year's eve and the 4th of july but celebration never seemed to encompass all that much which brings us back to what passed for entertainment in ford landia henry ford's idea for the town's amusement hub wasn't the swimming pool or even the golf course but a dance hall and look i i swing dance i i enjoy it and i i mean i haven't done it in a while due to everything going on in the world but it's a good time and who doesn't like music and dancing if anything is transmittable across cultures and geographical borders one would think it'd be a love of music and a desire to move to it in principle the dance hall should have worked but the idea for it was steepened like a tea bag in ford's desire to recreate his own past as fort landia continued to be a recursive town folding back in on itself by repeating the customs of a place ill-equipped for those seeds to take root in this case because ford met his beloved wife clara at a square dance he figured everyone would want a dance hall where they could socialize and it wasn't a bad idea in theory but some cultural aspects don't transfer that well and when ford opened the dance hall for square dancing it well at best it didn't catch on and at worst it was downright unpopular and the one thing that could have helped it catch on or at least make the experience more enjoyable for the locals was not allowed in henry ford's midwestern wonder town that's right because henry ford didn't drink he didn't want anybody else to either you kind of see it in america today with dry counties and municipalities and stuff like that and you were certainly seeing it in america then as prohibition was still very much in effect but despite drinking being perfectly legal in brazil it was outlawed in ford landia this stems from henry ford's own belief that prohibition was a success in america yet all that really happened both at home and in fort landia was that people started looking to get their kicks elsewhere in secret because don't get it twisted this law was in no way enforceable and the brazilian government were not going to help ford enforce it so residents traveled to a nearby island to get their drink on with the added bonus of a brothel to fulfill their other needs and what was the place called the island of innocence because what's more innocent than hedonism you know hell what's more honest that period from 1929 to 1930 was a brief stretch that probably felt like an eternity in the sense that everything that could go wrong kinda did the men who replaced einar ox home over that time hardly did much better in the managerial role and as tensions escalated the final straw finally snapped what pushed the workers over the edge well it wasn't the work hours or the entertainment options or lack thereof or even the booze or the houses which were poorly equipped to defend against disease-carrying insects in the way the natives raised palm-thatched roof homes had been no it was the food the food because you don't mess with people's stomachs man and you certainly don't mess with how they're fed from the time of its inception fordlandia's workers were served lunch in the style of a proper restaurant with waiters and everything it was a chance for the workers to relax to be waited on and treated like valued members of the ford team but this was eventually changed for efficiency's sake gone were the waiters and the amenities of a cafe experience and in its place was a dreary spirit compromising arrangement and i get it on its face it's probably not a big deal to just go up stand in line and get your own food but the issue here is that these workers already felt disrespected like they were being treated as nothing more than cogs in a machine very much like the products on the factory line on which they worked and this change to cafeteria dining arrangements appeared to confirm that intuition for them it all came to a head on december 20th 1930. as drew reed recounts in his 2016 article for the guardian lost cities number 10 ford landia the failure of henry ford's utopian city in the amazon quote at the workers cafe in which skilled workers were separated from manual laborers an argument between supervisor kaj austinfeld and manuel caytano a brick mason working at the city quickly escalated workers rallied behind kaitano vandalizing the city destroying generators manufacturing equipment and even their own homes ford landis managerial staff managed to escape by ship they were eventually able to subdue the violence but only by appealing to pan am air magnate juan tripp to assist them by flying in brazilian military personnel on one of his planes end quote armed with machetes the workers performed the sort of riot that would have made the 1958 new year's eve riots in rapture look like the stuff of make-believe okay those were make-believe but you get what i'm trying to say it wasn't just the skilled workers who lashed out here but the manual laborers as well who joined together to destroy time clocks and telegraph wires and even sending the town cook fleeing for his life into the jungle where he was hunted for several days like a character out of a richard connell story ford landia was in a state of ruin badly in need of immediate repair which of course is a very tall order that's easier said than done but what's even wilder about all of this is that it wouldn't even be the last of the riots in ford landia in one infamous tale henry ford supposedly planned to bring in workers from barbados to beef up the relatively thin workforce however a rumor allegedly spread that these workers would be earning higher wages which played into the brazilian's resentment for these workers from barbados coming in to supposedly take their jobs this led to a hectic brawl that injured multiple brazilian workers and left one west indian man stabbed so yeah fort landia was a complete mess one of einar oxholm's successors as manager a man named archibald johnson helped turn things around for a brief period by seeing to it that the roads were paved and the houses were completed he also saw many of ford's laws more strictly enforced like the diet he was even able to get the dance hall occasionally converted into a sort of movie theater to screen movies from hollywood to give people a little more to do with their free time and to introduce a little bit more american culture to the town and in this regard i admit to being uncertain of the exact timeline of this turnaround but in the grand scheme of things this was about as good as fordlandia ever got and at best these measures weren't much more than a temporary solution because fordlandia had a much bigger problem even bigger than the workers revolting it was a problem henry ford wasn't prepared to face because he chose not to be prepared to face it the years added up as people lived in fort landia making the best of a genuinely weird situation because even with the decidedly american layout of the town it was still unmistakably set in the midst of the amazonian wilds many of the native workers had their own farms and crops to attend to and would inevitably leave to care for their own farms before returning the following year to work for ford again it drove the managers nuts but there wasn't a whole lot of choice considering the men ford brought down from michigan were already fighting the elements in ways they weren't prepared to handle ford could solve the turnover stateside through better wages and reasonable hours but that didn't apply in brazil when weighed against those elements however the biggest problem facing fordlandia was an issue that threatened the very reason for its existence had ford consulted anyone with even the slightest understanding of agriculture in these climates he might have been told just how difficult if not downright impossible it would be for an industrialized rubber tree plantation to actually work in the amazon river basin for one the nutrient dense soil needed to cultivate and facilitate the growth of these trees was continuously being washed away by the downright oppressive reigns of the region attempts were made to mitigate this issue through irrigation methods like terracing or the process of cutting slope terrain into a series of steps that would carry the rain away but without eroding the soil but then you have the issue of imbalance if the land is too wet you're in a worse position than when you started if it's too dry then the land becomes home for the aforementioned disease insects that made it their personal mission to sicken the workers and blight the trees red spiders ants and a particularly nasty fungus that took hold of the tree leaves all wreaked havoc even the trees that thrived ultimately fell victim to blight as a scourge swept through what ford had perceived as fertile land for his purposes but one of the worst predators of all was an adaptable enemy waging a war ford's men just couldn't win as the 99 invincible story recounts quote there was one species of caterpillar for instance that would usually eat leaves from the bottom where they were visible workers would pick these off and pile them into bonfires but within a few years the caterpillars had adapted eating the leaves from the top instead where workers couldn't see them again and again they replanted the trees only to have them killed off by pests this went on for years devastating the plantation end quote for now fort landia was simply failing to produce much rubber at all even after ford finally brought in james r weir a renowned botanist the situation didn't improve this is largely due to both ford's skepticism and his distrust towards experts and experts would have been the ones to impress upon for just how difficult it would be to make an amazonian rubber plantation viable i mean hell if he had just spoken to the natives they would have been able to tell him that matt anderson of the henry ford museum elaborated on ford's stubbornness with regards to his belief in the plantation quote that was part of the problem thinking that he could just go down there and take this raw jungle and turn it into an industrial enterprise his ambitions got ahead of his abilities in this case end quote as fort landia inched closer to its first full decade in operation botanist james weir insisted on the construction of a new factory outside ford landia but within the bounds of the 2.5 million acres ford had purchased a territory known as beltera in essence it was a full-scale relocation of part of the ford landia project belterra was located about 80 miles south of fort landia where it was believed that the conditions would be more conducive to the type of plantation that henry ford was looking to establish as non-profit the henryford.org recounts in their history of fort landia weir was very focused on doing what he could to turn this whole project around quote as henry wickham had originally spirited away rubber tree seedlings from brazil half a century earlier weir obtained 2046 buddings from high producing trees in the far east and brought them back to brazil to start growing at belterra weir founded a research laboratory and nursery at belterra to experiment with producing high yielding and disease resistant strains of rubber ford landia was not abandoned but the major operations of the plantation were transferred to belterra by 1940 500 employees were working at fort landia while 500 employees were working at belterra the early success of belterra partially had to do with ford being more accommodating to the needs of the natives than at fordlandia a former sheriff curtis pringle was hired to manage the plantation and he relaxed the dearborn style regulations that had been a problem at ford landia deferring to local brazilian customs for meals and entertainment belterra grew into a successful community in 1940 the president of brazil visited beltera and praised it as a model community in 1942 the first commercial tapping of the rubber trees began and 750 tons of latex were produced this was well short of the 38 000 tons ford needed annually but it was estimated that by 1950 the two plantations would produce that amount end quote it genuinely seemed for a moment that things could potentially change for the better now with the strain of production no longer being limited to the singular fordlandia but being shared with its sister town of belterra but as the natural history museum's biography of james weir explains not everything could be solved by relocation after resigning in 1938 when his new proposal for a plantation in central america was rejected weir continued studying javea brasiliensis and the ways in which it might be cultivated as it turns out he got out of fort landia and belterra just in time a three-year drought followed his departure and the subsequent return of the rain caused severe wilting of the leaves during his time studying javea braziliansis around the country weir became so formidable and expert that he was enlisted as an advisor to the venezuelan government on the subject of rubber production but before long the work became too much for weir he returned home to indiana before passing away suddenly due to a brain hemorrhage in 1943 at the age of 61. like henry ford weir was born and raised on a farm unlike ford it was to that farm where we're returned in death buried in the place he called home by this point fort landia had been around for over a decade and the second world war was taking its toll the american auto industry took a hit when the government froze all new car production to redirect resources to the war effort yet the plantations continued producing rubber even in spite of an epidemic of leaf disease that spread throughout the plantation ultimately the plantations never reached the initial optimistic projection numbers as the project had long outlived whatever economic necessity had compelled its creation in the first place the war years saw the advent of synthetic rubber which put the final nail in fordlandia which had now become downright pointless for ford all the more so once rubber operations reopened in the far east at the end of the war and even if fordlandia had somehow been a success henry ford himself was becoming an increasingly controversial figure in the public eye author joshua hammer recounts at length just the extent to which henry ford faced criticism domestically quote as his pet project floundered in brazil ford was becoming unpopular at home his progressive qualities had always been shadowed by resentments he was an admirer of fascists and nazis an anti-semite he did much to popularize the protocols of the elders of zion and a deadly enemy of labor unions his aid to comp harry bennett a former boxer ran a 3 000 man private army that spied on ford workers and attacked employees suspected of union sympathies with guns whips blackjacks and other persuaders the onset of the great depression deepened ford's antipathies and intensified his search for scapegoats he became an admirer of the anti-semitic radio host father coughlin who defended nazi violence against the jews during krystal knocked in 1938 his battle against workers rights grew more brutal on march 7 1932 bennett's servicemen opened fire on laid off ford employees marching to his river rouge plant to demand jobs and food relief killing five reporters and photographers on the scene recorded the killings ford who had fallen out of favor with both american workers and leading journalists was scorned by edmund wilson in scribner's as the despot of dearborn sinclair lewis wrote an expose about bennett describing him as a general of the gangster army and boone companion of the old man sitting in his estate on the hill well within hearing of the shooting ford was caught up in a tangle of contradictions he was a suffragist who didn't offer women the same five dollar a day wage he did men he passionately advocated placing u.s sovereignty under the authority of the league of nations and talked about the need to establish a world government well into the 1940s but then condemned jews for their internationalism he called for the nationalization of the railroads and telegraph and telephone service yet he hated franklin delano roosevelt and refused to abide by new deal regulation he exalted the dignity of the worker and fashioned himself a scourge of the capitalist but was violently opposed to unionism and he was a radical pacifist who once conceded that one last great war might be needed to finally bring about world disarmament ford clung to his vision of the industrial agricultural utopia he regarded ford landia as an idyllic counterpoint to troubled america and he exhorted his administrators and scientists to perfect the new society end quote of course this didn't happen because well ford was now in declining health and the ford motor company was being run by harry bennett following the death of ford's son edsel due to stomach cancer in 1943. henry ford briefly resumed the presidency before passing it to his grandson henry ford ii after he returned from the navy at the end of the war but as president henry ford ii simply couldn't justify indulging his grandfather's pipe dreams it was very much a case of cutting off the leg to save the body here henry ford ii ordered ford landia to essentially be abandoned with the american workers and managers packing everything up and getting out of dodge and to hell with the locals i guess as grandin recounts in his book henry ford ii just wanted to wash his hands of the entire brazilian enterprise altogether and to break from the regime of his grandfather by squaring away the company's debt to its workforce under brazilian president getulio vargas henry ford ii assumed the presidency of the ford motor company on september 21 1945 and went straight to work grandin writes quote one of his first acts in early october was to fire harry bennett then on november 5th he turned for landia and belterra valued at nearly 8 million dollars with 20 million dollars invested in them over to the brazilian government for thousand 244 hundred dollars which covered the amount the company owed its plantation workers under vargas's laws guaranteeing severance pay end quote that 20 million dollar company loss comes out to over 300 million dollars in 2021. in an eerie parallel to botanist james weir with whom he'd clashed henry ford also suffered a brain hemorrhage and on april 7 1947 henry ford passed away surprisingly in the roughly 15 years ford landia was active henry ford never once actually visited the town into which he'd invested so much of his personal hopes and dreams he ran for landia from the comfort of his michigan offices and estate and while it is said that he was planning to travel to boa vista at one point the death of his son edsel just 40 days before he planned to leave ultimately curtailed those plans yet it doesn't really explain why he never visited in the previous decade unless he was so committed to his domestic work at ford that he couldn't spare the travel which would then beg the question of why he'd invest so much into ford landia in the first place if he wasn't truly all in to such an extent that he could trouble himself to visit the place grandin suggests ford was intent on cultivating workers as much as he was the rubber trees and i could kinda see that but i also have to believe this was at some level an exercise of the ego because while there might have been cause for him to embark on this enterprise earlier in the 1920s the need wasn't as prevalent once ford finally decided to do it ultimately fordlandia was a study in paradoxical detachment to be so devoted to the success of a single idea while seeming combative to any suggestions that might allow it to work and simultaneously avoiding ever having to set foot in this alleged utopia he was creating citizens truly hoped that henry ford would one day visit them in ford landia believing that if he ever did it would renew his commitment to seeing the land thrive a brazilian travel guide sums up the elegiac quality of the town that remains quote fordlandia was born and died expecting a visit from its patron end quote the travel guide goes on to add that the town would keep quote one of the rooms of the best house in the american neighborhood in a permanent state of preparation end quote yet the day of henry ford's arrival never came and the town was locked in a spell of broken clocks a citizenry teeming with miss havisham figures frozen forever in the moment they were let down and so ends the tale of fordlandia sort of when fort landia was abandoned by the ford motor company and sold back to the brazilian government their ministry of agriculture attempted to get value out of the project for roughly 20 years between the 1950s and the 70s ministry employees were moved into the old ford landia abodes with their families for work but the land was no more forgiving to native brazilians than the americans who tried to tame it a 1931 article in the indian rubber journal foretold of just this issue long before the fall of fort landia a town which one could argue had never been seen to rise quote mr ford's presumed object is to grow his own rubber but it only requires a few months stay on the concession to realize that although rubber may eventually be grown there the cost both of bringing the area into bearing and producing the rubber will be so fantastically enormous that the whole scheme from a commercial point of view is doomed to failure at any rate it is the writer's contention that the eastern planter need not worry from any competition from rubber produced by the ford company on the amazon for at least another hundred years that is judging by the rate of progress made up to date end quote yet even when the brazilian government themselves gave up on fordlandia the people remained not many as it became something of a ghost town over time but descendants of the ministry of agriculture employees who were born raised and lived in fort landia remained in their homes even as the population dwindled by the end of the 2000s only about 90 people remained there 90 9-0 to whom medical services were offered by doctors being brought in for relatively infrequent visits by boat the decades rolled on and on and the artifacts of the period were victim to the environment and human action the sawmill and its equipment were overrun by scavengers the warehouses reclaimed by citizens and converted into a museum of ford's utopia it could be used for little else since the second floor of the three-story building had its wood rotted by the oil by-products of a poorly thought out seed processing initiative in later years looters took the hospital apart piece by piece until there wasn't much remaining but boxes of potentially radioactive materials the populace demanded the government remove the iconic water tower still stands proudly albeit without the ford logo as anything more than the hint of a faded brand the water treatment plant still works and the original plumbing is intact and even the american village where the managers lived separately from the natives still stands however it was plundered of its silverware and other valuables in the years since the sudden abandonment and you know more power to the populace no one was coming back for any of those things any more than henry ford would have set foot there to see for himself in the first place for a guy who claimed to be a man of principles there were many many marks against henry ford as a human being and even as a businessman fordlandia's diminishment can be read as proxy for the moral and ethical decay of a man who too easily gave in to the rhetoric of hatred and subordination yet useful things can still spring forth from even the most ignorantly inclined the town which would become a district of aveiro a municipality in the state of para would eventually catch a second wind in the 2010s whether through coverage in documentaries or in albums economic considerations or just plain curiosity fordlandia has seen a population growth reaching between 2 000 to 3 000 residents as of around 2017. it's a modest town with very little in the way of conventional businesses and amenities but many of the buildings of ford's era remain dilapidated and in disrepair as they may be citizens walk these american adjacent streets and children play and shout and go to school people are born live and die in this town that it ultimately didn't become what its founder set out to make it is almost immaterial to what it is now a town with a less than rosy past but that describes so many towns you know fort landia may have failed as a sociological experiment but it ultimately succeeded perhaps indirectly in actually recreating the pre-industrialist minimalism of a midwestern small town where people farm fall in love live their lives have their kids and trouble themselves with the larger world only when it suits them not every place is going to be an ideal spot to manufacture the elements necessary for the automotive industry to thrive but building a place people can call home whether by intention or circumstance can be something larger than an industry itself you

Channel: Regular Car Reviews

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Keywords: Regular, Car, Reviews, Regular Car Reveiws, Car Review, Car Satire, Mr Regular, RCR, RCR Stories, Fordlandia, Brazil, Brasil, RCR Car Stories, Henry Ford, Life of Henry Ford, Death of Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company, Regular Car Reviews, documentary, rubber, botany, regular cars

Id: gN5JjScdB3g

Length: 62min 27sec (3747 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/hazardjackson]

Oh, Henry!