When Henry Ford Tried to Build a City in the Amazon - Past Gas #12

what is a utopia how does a society come together and become self-sufficient can such a thing be built or is it doomed to fail Henry Ford thought he had it figured out but as we'll learn he was wrong hello and welcome to passed gas podcast boy donut media I am your host James pumpkin as always I'm joined by your other host Nolan J Sykes hello thank you for listening so much let me introduce this this is part one of our two-part series on Fordlandia Henry Ford's utopian vision for a rubber plantation down in Brazil it is one of the more bizarre things that we have encountered in our you know three years digging through yeah digging through automotive history here on Dona definitely in this but also unsurprising no for Henry entirely unsurprising oh of course Henry Ford wanted to build a utopia in Brazil of course so in this episode we're gonna lay some background for Henry Ford himself and the weird guy that he was eight grass he what else did he do that was weird he he was a huge not only did he eat grass literal weeds that were outside of his house cuz he knew they were natural but he was a huge proponent early adopter of soy bean consumption he loved soy believed it was boy Henry for the original soy he thought it was like the answer to the world's hunger problems which is partially true but also terrible for the environment absolutely not not great um what else as we'll find out he was a little just a little bit racist he's very fairly raised had some interesting ideas about the Jewish people also invented the Model T so inventing the Model T and invented the assembly assembly so to put it lightly it complicated yeah the word for Henry Ford we'd still be making even like Pagani has an assembly line yeah I mean I'm sure we would have thought of it eventually yeah you and me would have thought of it like the world would have been without it for about a hundred years I mean once you and I get together of course we're gonna come up with a great idea I mean it's basically an assembly line of content that we're pumping out here right guys yeah it's only me and James there's no team behind us oh I'm just kidding okay we have we have a million in the room yeah we have a million editors we love them all a lot of them have really a lot better facial hair than I do that's for certain Philippe you have a mustache and just the light kind of beard going on yeah you look dangerous yeah you look good like dangerously good all right so enough flirting with let's just get into it as get into part one of Ford Landy a AKA ford topia sure that's what I call it okay it all started in 1925 Henry Ford was having lunch in his Dearborn Michigan mansion with his good friend business partner and tire magnate Harvey Firestone Harvey and Ford had been friends and partners since Ford started building cars decades earlier so yeah I just remember like he invented the Model T which is the first like cheap car and basically he brought the car to the mass exactly mister Firestone had begun ranting at this time primarily focused on the impending rubber cartel that had been proposed in England by one Winston Churchill I am NOT a crook with a cigar and he's like on this day I am NOT a crook and it will live in him for me yep that's him the purpose he was also this was Churchill the king the purpose of the rubber cartel was to limit the export of rubber in order to not overextend national resources in case there was another world 19:25 probably a good idea but Harvey Firestone didn't like that idea he believed that rubber prices were going to spike in the US as a result and therefore negatively affect Firestone tires some things never change Harvey Firestone was not alone in this fear even presidential candidate FDR feared the effects of a rubber tariff rubber was viewed as the automotive industries choke point seen as even more crucial than oil it's crazy the automotive industry relied on vulcanized rubber for literally everything from tires to hoses and gaskets a price increase of any kind could sink the young business so there was a legitimate fear of Churchill's plane passing yeah seems somewhat reasonable it's kind of like okay here newsflash guys if you listen to this might lose some you know one and I believe in climate change and it's sort of like yeah making some changes like you know not dumping tons of poisons into rivers and stuff might be more expensive for some people but in the at the end of the day it's good not to have poison rivers and it's also probably good to have like rubber to defeat the Nazis yeah Germany was totally destroyed and they were afraid of something all again all of Europe yeah they were afraid of something like that happening again because those wounds had not been healed at all and Churchill was just saying like hey fellas I love it listen listen fellows the wounds of war are still fresh and salty I say that maybe we just save some of our surprise in case of fright Mike's out to again blah blah blah blah horrible I blame yeah that's all he's saying all he's saying he's like hey guys the whole world was just at war I think it might happen again maybe we should just like chill and be ready mm-hmm and these guys are like so Harvey Firestone was fed up with living in constant fear of this so he decided the best course of action would be to grow his own rubber smart this wasn't the first time he had some crazy idea in fact Harvey had tried to declare economic independence from the UK and fly rubber under the American flag a few years earlier but that was truly the ramblings of a madman who doesn't seem to understand that you can't just not claim in other countries resources by saying I want this cheaper so I'm just going to say it's American now although now that I think back on it that's kind of how we did a lot of stuff oh yeah but Harvey actually had a plan he decided that he was going to start his own plantation in Liberia where the conditions were almost perfect for growing rubber trees by keeping the production in-house he could avoid all the excess fees associated with importation from other countries Henry Ford had also tried growing his own rubber a year earlier in 1924 he had purchased large quantities of land in the Florida Everglades only to eventually do nothing with them it was cheaper for Ford to import the rubber the idea of a dramatic price increase was still only speculation but still Harvey's plans had peaked and reports interests and after the lunch meeting was over he requested that his personal aide lea bold would find out where the best place to grow rubber is hey Leopold come over here boy where is the best place to grow up I'll go find out Liberia was the obvious choice Harvey Firestone discovered it had the perfect climate when he put his plantation there but unfortunately Henry Ford was very very very racist and he would not dare step foot in such an uncivilized and African society so they came to the conclusion that the rubber should be grown where it originated in the Amazon so rubber comes from both vines and trees and you let it grow and then when you chop it you squeeze the vines in latex literal latex comes out the trees yeah so it's a liquid and then they put it out on to like big flat like drying areas then when it dries you can pull it up like a sheet of latex and then you take a bunch of that latex ya stack into big bales and then that's what gets shipped out to like vulcanization plants and stuff like that so these plantations are really only concerned with growing the vines and extracting that latex from him game and library had the perfect climate well what about the amazon amazon also big is clearly great climate only problem it's a lot harder to get into the rainforest than it is in africa got you throughout the 19th century the amazon river basin supplied all of the world's rubber and made up 40% of brazil's exports at the height of the rubber boom in the second half of the 19th century but the amazon's rubber boom quickly turned to bust as plantations in asia and england were able to grow rubber in much denser populations and much more efficiently in the amazon many natural species that are not present in other countries limit the growth of trees so by organizing plantations in other countries the efficiency was greatly increased henry had another incentive to go to south america besides his racism in Theodore Roosevelt's book through the brazilian wilderness he accounts his experiences traveling through the Amazonian rainforests one of his most significant observations is that many fast flowing rivers could provide an almost perfect power source for any industry bold enough to be born there he claimed that the right kind of said others such as enterprising businessman a foresight coolness and suggested II who would be willing to put migrants to work for an advantage that would be mutually beneficial will give rise to a great industrial civilization money money if anyone thought they could fill that descriptor it was Henry Ford now Henry Ford did not really make cars Henry Ford thought that he made men the maker of men he's like me this builder of men the cars they produced were simply a byproduct of his training he was praised as a sociologist manufacturer if anyone could reshape the native Brazilians into prosperous factory workers it was Henry Ford and they don't want to be or so he thought they don't want that no [Music] big thanks to simply safe for sponsoring this episode simply safe home security is like getting commercial grade enterprise level security but for your own home think about the security fortune 500 companies use I think about that stuff literally all the time it keeps me up at night how do I get in there how do I get all your secrets they need to know police are going to be on the scene immediately after I break in this is exactly the kind of security you get with simply safe you might say my doors are safe James but what if a Hamburglar tries 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earbuds guys seriously get yourself some rate cons they are incredible after the Great Depression in the 1920s Ford thought his village industry plan would solve all urban poverty he once said I believe that industry in agriculture are natural partners he was obsessed with powering his industry through natural means specifically hydropower Ford saw himself as a conservationist of sorts he had grown up on the family farm in Michigan and learned to have an appreciation for nature Henry Ford believed that a hydroelectric power would free industrial communities from the grip of energy trust and that the future of industry would rely on building self-sufficient little factories on the rivers that's a quote little factories on the rivers his dream was to achieve self-sufficiency for the industrial age that's not bad it was in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that Ford constructed a powerful hydroelectric plant that he paired with an absolutely massive sawmill at Iron Mountain sawmill workers would produce huge quantities of lumber for wooden automobile framework for boards and even wheels his purchase of Iron Mountain meant Ford had to do something that was a little outside I was real [Music] you tube Ford had to manage a small town as it turned out Iron Mountain was home to ten thousand people who already live there Iron Mountain had everything from that giant sawmill and a processing plant to a five-story chemical laboratory it was said that they used every part of the tree except the shade Iron Mountain was the epitome of a self-sustaining factory village Ford had dreamed of Ford pushed for his vision of incorporating agriculture into factory life Ford would offer low-interest mortgages so workers could buy land to build a home and farm and then would pay high wages and provide access to machinery like tractors to allow the farmers to prosper the dream was to bridge the divide between agriculture and Industry and proved that he could build the perfect self-sufficient city and create his ideal America he did not offer the standard city on a hill that was so popular in American mythology instead Ford offered an alternative a city in a valley powered by hydroelectricity and even had its own food supply grown by Ford employees and many people were intrigued now about this time Ford's famous five dollar day strategy of employment was starting to not have the same impact it used to over his workers in 1914 Ford started paying his employees five bucks a day for their labor which was unheard of at the time but you know naturally inflation happens and living expenses had risen since then so Henry changed his governing strategies in order to increase efficiency and the corporate dependency on his employees he had two major methods of doing this the first one was called the speed up basically Ford would slowly increase the speed of the assembly lines until employees were forced to do nothing else but work for him this Titan of industry who once boasted on his Pleasant working conditions was now nearly working his employees to death simply to ensure they could not leave to find new careers elsewhere sounds familiar met the wife of one worker described the speed up as a method to turn factory workers into mere containers of labour as Ford neglected the uniquely personal connections he had once so proudly boasted it sounds like a cult almost yeah cults start out just being SiC like we all got these jumpsuits we all just like hanging out and dancing maybe do some LSD we eat lots of fruit everyone's really healthy we exercise together and then all of a sudden one guys like you know what I'm God and I get to everybody's wife that's always gonna go south now the second method of governing his factories came by the limitation of unions within his corporation he hired his new right-hand man Harry Bennett who was no more than a thug in a suit he was tasked with making connections with the Detroit mafia in order to fight unionization in his factories Bennett took a very totalitarian approach to management within the company even once gathering all employees in a mandatory meeting to inform them that if there must be bloodshed to prevent any mention of the word union within these walls then I'm afraid I will shed every last drop to make that happen that's insane yeah Harry Bennett I remember reading that he carried a gun with him yeah a big revolver and yeah this guy did not have any business being in a factory he had no management experience he was literally just the muscle yeah the muscle with a gun and I think at some point not in this story per se but there was a riot at the factory where Harry Bennett's men were like shooting Ford employees who were finally back throwing rocks and all that kind of stuff they went on strike they had enough they said we can't do this anymore and they died yeah Wow Ford's factory reconditioning that's a light one for that was not widely known by the public at the time but one thing though it's almost unavoidable was his rampant anti-semitism Henry Ford actually purchased his own newspaper called the Dearborn independent for the sole purpose of spreading anti-semitic propaganda it's kind of funny that he purchased a newspaper considering his never a big fan of reading in fact years earlier he had sued the Chicago Tribune from plying that he was illiterate according to Ford he needed to maintain the white man's code which is a roast in the early 1920s a new phrase had been and that phrase was Fordism Henry Ford success was grounded in the power of high wages to create prosperous healthy working-class communities with private profit dependent on continual expansion of consumer markets or as Ford clearly would state the ideals of Fordism are buying classes are working class and our working class must become our leisure class if our immense production needs to be balanced by consumption he believed that the fulfillment of this vision could result in a restoration of small-town American life which I mean back then what would you want to make America great again I guess but like I can't imagine what small-town American life what small-town American life he was imagining right I mean there are cities big cities back then but like you look at old pictures of like New York and LA and like everything was a small town Chicago it was a small town in his pursuit to become a self-sufficient automobile manufacturer Henry Ford wanted to expand his ideals of village industry throughout the country his massive 313 thousand acre factory village iron mountain was proving to be incredibly successful and he had proposed to Congress to purchase multiple large areas of land in the Appalachian River Valley the poor people of that area had seen the magic transformation that had occurred in iron mountain and could not wait for Henry forward to show up at their front door with a new life just as promised when Ford comes became a famous slogan in the area and it demonstrated just how important Ford's presence really was in the area unfortunately for Ford Congress saw this attempted purchase as the beginning of a monopoly and denied the deal so he was forced to look outside of the country for his newest land claim as we kind of mentioned earlier the Amazon River Basin saw a huge economic collapse in 1910 after rubber plantations in Asia began to dominate the market in the rubber trade but Ford believed that his presence alone would be enough to restore the area to its former glory by 1925 Ford already held a monopoly on the Latin American car truck trade so it wasn't too far-fetched for him to expand his industry there even further Ford went public with his plan to industrialize the Amazon and people went bananas despite his hatred for the Jewish people Ford ironically was pronounced the Moses of the 20th century who would turn the Amazon into the Promised Land and he was also called the Jesus of Industry by the inhabitants of Brazil Ford's autobiography had just been translated into Portuguese and released in Brazil and the people there were amazed by the wonders that he had achieved they were like primed for him to show they're stoked in 1925 he met with Brazilian consul de Lima to negotiate purchase of his own chunk of land Ford saw the Amazon as a fresh start in a place uncorrupted by unions politicians Jewish people lawyers militarists and New York bankers he believed in his dream of that was a quote mm-hmm there was a quote that he said that was yeah he believed in his dream of a factory town that would help the native people of the Amazon they would be schools experiment stations don't like a song canteens stores amusement parks cinemas athletic sports hospitals etc for the comfort and happiness of those who work on the plantation he believed that the best way to run a business was to create a paradise where your workers would never have to leave your business to get what they need it sort of like the old company store adage but without all the crippling debt to the company it's had me thinking about was a Playa del Mar Playa Vista yeah Playa Vista yeah I live like I don't live in Playa Vista but I live around around there like that's the where the grocery store we go to is and it's 1,000% that cuz they got the big Google yeah that's where all the companies oh yeah and there it's really weird sometimes because there's like Google has a headquarters there and then all around it are just these giant apartment buildings that are also malls yeah and then there's like basketball courts and tennis courts and like a soccer field I was driving over there you know this weekend and I saw I came of basketball where every dude had a top but yeah that's what it is it's like you have everything here so like you don't have to leave I mean it seemed why would you want to leave it's already weird enough living in LA because it feels like it takes forever to get out of here sometimes like if I want to go visit my parents it'll take me two hours to get from the office in West LA to Santa Clarita yeah which I know this is very inside LA right now but like that's like 20 miles 20 miles takes for two hours yeah it looks like the planet in guardians of the galaxy where Peter gets like captured mm-hmm that first time oh yeah yeah yeah just like a weird utopia yeah it's very strange anyway so that's what's happening yeah I'd like to take a second to thank Valvoline for sponsoring this week's episode we it passed gas love history and one of the most impressive things about Valvoline is their long rich history they've been around for over 150 years making high-quality motor oil they actually filed the first patent for motor oil which makes them the original motor oil by definition they're the only motor oil with a dedicated engine lab where smart ass scientists run specialized engine tests and figure out all kinds of science stuff that makes your engine work good since 1866 they haven't stopped innovating and it shows Valvoline is responsible for the first high mileage oil the first racing oil and the first synthetic oil blend that's a lot of freakin first guys I've only had one first and that's losing my virginity all Valvoline oils exceed the industry standards to provide ultimate protection for every engine that's why some of the best in the biz use it like racing legend and my second best friend Mario Andretti and my other best friend Chris Forsberg they both use Valvoline but the biggest reason I like Valvoline is because their headquarters are in Kentucky which is where I'm freakin from ladies and gents so take it from the Kentucky Cobra Valvoline is great motor oil Valvoline guys support the companies that support on it we could not make any of this stuff without these people believing in us I got a question for you guys how often do you think about your socks if you're like I used to be not much but I recently discovered socks that change the way I'll think about socks forever they're called bombas I got a free pair of these when I went to the for by far festival and at first I was like why would they give me socks in a music festival and then when I got home I put this freaking socks on and I was like dang I wish I would have taken more than one pair because these johns are comfy AF probably one of the comfiest socks I've ever worn they're made from super soft super natural cotton and every sock has arch support and a cushioned footbed that padding is great for me when I'm on a long shoot and I'm standing all day waiting for Philippe and Eddie to get the freaking cameras and lights ready Christina why am I called to set at 8 a.m. if I'm not working till 11 a.m. that's a conversation for later I didn't mean to pull you guys into it I digress the best part about bombas is when you buy a pair of them they donate a pair to someone in need and that's really admirable because socks are super important in fact they're the most requested item from homeless people by your bombas at bombas comm slash gas today and get 20% off your first purchase that's be OMB a s.com slash gas for 20% off bombers comm slash gas I'm literally wearing bombers right now I know this is a podcast but if I could take a picture and show it to you guys I would and I could holler they got great colors there was something surprising about Ford's plan it was how much faith the people of Brazil had in fort a Brazilian politician had this to say in a letter sent to Ford about a previous visit to Brazil when you were down here did you notice a curious thing the faith everyone has in Ford the magic in that name has penetrated into the hearts of the most humble it has got into mine they have faith in Ford so have I thousands away his coming he will come yeah I mean there's a lot of Brazilian politicians who probably like aren't don't necessarily have the people's best interests in mind so I wonder how much of that is true like I wonder how much like the people who are actually gonna be working here are excited and not just like the politician who's gonna get a bunch of money when he brings forward to Brazil yeah I think I should preface this by saying I don't have any I think about Brazil so if it's anything like what I know about American politics yeah it's like this guy doesn't really give a what the people think yeah regardless that positive letter was about the last bit of convincing Ford needed to finally put his money where his mouth was he sent University of Michigan botanist Carl D LaRue to Brazil to find a good location for his rubber plantation when to report back any other remarkable findings along the way one thing LaRue immediately noticed was just how sick people in the jungle were about one person in every household was ill or dying from some sort of jungle illness such as malaria or hookworm LaRue also noticed that most of the current workers in the rubber fields were practically held as slaves to the company because of debt slavery also known as slavery yeah front line Amazon workers were uncared-for and viewed as disposable the real lords of the rubber trade were the Heartless foreign owned export houses in control of the fields but that was fine Ford insisted that he would not be enslaving them to the company in fact the opposite I promise I will not enslave you I promise I'll be the opposite of a slave owning he promised a life of luxury on the plantation so amazing that workers would never be forced to stay but would join of their own volition in his current existing factory cities he even established a credit union and factory commissaries that would provide employees with a wide array of high-quality products at low prices often way below cost Ford was insistent that he was not trying to enslave people I just want to be clear I am NOT trying to make you guys slaves at all even 1% okay I insist I'm not trying to enslave any of my employees okay you can take that to the bank you can take that to the bank or credit union the credit union that I own bar as much money as you want from me and you can't quit till you pay back in okay interesting wrinkle you said that a lot so I believe you I want to hear you say it you are definitely not going to and you're definitely not trying to answer yeah I'm definitely not trying to oh right you're definitely not trying to enslave us I'm not trying to enslave you I'm just so good at it that it happens naturally without even trying that different story in 1927 Ford unveiled the Model A to a commercial triumph Ford immediately took control of 45% of the automotive market share with the new car that's incredible things were at an all-time high for Ford he had just finished the massive River Rouge Factory in Dearborn Michigan the largest integrated Factory in the entire world and he was making more money than he knew what to do with nothing could really go wrong for him except James for a lawsuit no in 1927 Ford's anti-semitism finally caught up with him his newspaper the Dearborn independent had been focusing a majority of its anti-jewish hate speech against one Erin Sapiro a lawyer and activist who helped organize farm cooperatives throughout the US and Canada Ford undoubtedly saw a competition for the affection of farmers in Sapiro so he had the Dearborn independent focused directly on him attempting to link Sapiro to a fictitious Jewish conspiracy that linked American farms to Jewish money interests when you publicly attack a lawyer chances are you're gonna get sued yeah not a kaboom for defamation right of course upon finding out about the lawsuit Ford published an article claiming that the idea was this is a quote this is a quote against is it born in the Fertile fortune-seeking brain of a young Jew Ford was absolutely insane and people knew it and people were excited to watch his legal battle as they knew there was no way that Ford could win people were hoping for a repeat of the 1919 spectacle when Ford sued the Chicago Tribune for giving the impression that he was illiterate a lawsuit which he lost hey I can read you guys are telling people that I can't read I can read on July 8 1927 Ford settled the lawsuit and issued a public apology I deem it to be my duty as an honorable man to make amends for the wrong done to the Jews as fellow men and brothers by asking for their forgiveness consequently in the Dearborn independent closed its doors forever as a side note you can still buy a transcript of all of Ford's anti-semitic hate speech on amazon.com in his book the International Jew it is rated four out of five stars and the biggest complaint is that the font is too small so it is difficult to read complicated guy complicated guy that's some nearsighted race it's like can you make it can you print it in their big vault I can't read this I want to read this so bad any Semitism can't read this I wish that I could be an anti-semite easy okay incidentally 1927 was a big year in terms of rubber importation which was actually bad for Ford's plan the proposed rubber cartel by Winston Churchill failed to get any other European countries on board so it crumbled beneath him causing the price of latex and rubber products to tumble to values lower than its previous record in 1910 at this point it did not make any fiscal sense for Ford to continue with opening a plantation in the Amazon as importing rubber was not substantially cheaper it was recommended that he just construct a purchasing office instead but he decided he wasn't gonna listen to any logical reason and went ahead with the plans to build the plantation anyway completely ignoring the supply and demand curve screw it it's good screw it I'm doing it anyway I'll see you in Brazil Ford put in an order to purchase the land recommended to him by LaRue and began seeking approval for the Brazilian plantation at this point it wasn't being built to save the company money or allowed Ford to be self-sufficient Ford was gonna live out his own heart of darkness fantasy by building an industrial Arcadia in the jungle Ford purchased 2.5 million acres of land for 125,000 dollars on September 30th 1927 state legislators ratified the concession of land equal to about the size of the state of Connecticut all in all it took less than three months to get the entire purchase approved proving to Ford that it was much easier to become a global powerhouse than just the national one yeah I just buy some land and buy some land I know what you're doing I guess the Ford Motor Company has always been filled with rivalries and of course there were fair share at the time his son Etzel who is also an executive afford at the time was imaginative and creative and Ford hated that about him Ford preferred Henry Bennett and Henry Ford made it very clear who his favorites were at times he would intentionally dismantle Edsel work behind his back just to make him angry well Bennett received the constant stream of praise what a dick what a Diggs is like taking your kids but now Bennett was needed back in Dearborn to rule the factories with an iron anti-union fist so he was granted a protege a man named Blakely was brought on and found himself immediately visiting a city about a hundred miles away from the proposed site of Ford's industrial city he quickly gained a reputation among both his code occurs and among the city as a drunkard and exhibitionist his favorite pastime in Brazil was making love to his wife in full view of a taxicab station so everyone could see he was reckless and intense just like Bennett which was exactly why Ford loved him cool guy sounds like a cool guy but this is like this stuff that we're talking about almost a hundred years later he imagined all the other stuff that he did that weird that didn't last a hundred years this guy I mean he was probably like doing that thing where he left his parking lights on or hazard lights are in the park where he wanted he was probably given people one star reviews on uber even though they were totally fine he was he it was the only two dickish movies I can think of yeah because you're not a dick that's guy after the land had been purchased Henry Ford immediately placed Blakely in charge despite unanimous disapproval of Blakely from everyone around him Ford selected him to head the plantation and in 1928 Blakely loaded up two large cargo ships with enough equipment and supplies to establish a small town they had bought the ship's used from a Great Lakes shipping company as Henry Ford was a strong believer in recycling again complicated among the ship was also a decently sized crew of Ford employees and other miscellaneous fellows including the ex sheriff of Kalamazoo every town needs a sheriff yeah well I got fired from being the sheriff for Kalamazoo I guess I'm gonna go down to Brazil I hear that you can have sex with your wife in front of a taxi station Ford's great endeavour was all coming together he had made smaller versions of his plan work in the States but now he was gonna try to build a city that house 25,000 employees and another 100,000 residents that could be self-sufficient the New York Times had estimated that the plant would be capable of producing upwards of 6 billion pounds of rubber per year enough to make 1 billion Ford tires mmm that's a lot of cars it's a lot of course once they arrived they decided they would settle in a small city named boa vista they were greeted by a a few small huts but decided they would deal with the squatters after they had established the plantation never mind that those squatters were really the ten thousand people that already lived there it's kind of like iron mountain although there probably kinder to the iron mountain people there yeah these people the ford crew immediately found a problem though the two merchant ships they arrived in the Fajr and Ormoc really cool name yeah we're nearly 250 feet long and 50 feet across much larger than the shallow canals could allow and worst of all they arrived during the dry season looking idiots the Amazon River Basin sees anywhere between 60 to 100 inches of rainfall each year a majority of which is during the rainy season but Blakely had not only missed time their arrival with the weather but he also managed to arrive during a severe drought so water levels were at an all-time low basically the two ships and their crew and their 3800 tons of equipment were stranded just outside the entrance to Ford's planned paradise the ship's had to be unloaded onto smaller ships just to reach boa vista which took weeks and this caused the crew to get restless every day there were nasty accidents and small scuffles on deck on the final day of unloading their cargo one crew member known as sailor study SH was on deck of the or Mac while teasing fireman Patrick apparently stood eesh opened his mouth when he wasn't meant to and the next thing he knew fireman Patrick was charging at him with an iron bar when stood each took a step back to dodge the attack he fell into an open hatch above the cargo hold falling about 25 feet and fracturing his skull and that would not be the last major injury that would happen in the pursuit of Portland the ships had arrived to bring quote redemption to the Amazon yet it had taken almost until the end of January for them to finally unload they had been there for three months and they were finally off their freakin ships but that was the least of their worries it wasn't until they finally unloaded that trouble really be done and that's what we'll pick up next week on part two of Fordlandia when Henry Ford went to Brazil to try and start a utopia and failed yep so again obviously foreperson what a weird but just everybody I know like that like just like businessmen like this like huge titans of industry are just dicks and like because you don't become a Titan of industry unless you're a dick like he was making plenty of money he was printing money he had like 45% of the entire automobile industry no why do you need more you just kind of keep eating I guess and then sending the Blakeley guy down there like okay yeah imagine Matt tells you to go to the Amazon to start donut Brazil mm-hmm as the satellite office yeah he's just like all right James get a team go down there and you're just like hell yeah yeah I think you'd be like why do you want to go down so better like cause I'm gonna fight it's just again hubris playing that role and just like yeah just feeling like you have the right to everything you know like we'll deal with these guys like you literally traveled across the world to kick these people out of where do they live mm-hmm the other their dicks yeah all right well we'll learn just how big of dicks they are next week again thank you guys so much for listening to this podcast Thanks to everyone who left a review thank you we really love reading them follow Nolan on instagram at Nolan J Sykes and Twitter follow me on Instagram and Twitter at James pump repos donut at donut media check out our YouTube we got some really really exciting stuff coming up until next time I love you be nice let's cast on this pod let's pod on this cast let's talk about cars get past gas well we are gonna part on this cast everybody get some of your pass gas

Channel: Donut Podcasts

Views: 137,228

Keywords: past gas, past gas podcast, donut media podcast, donut podcasts, donut podcast, donut, donut media, james pumphrey, nolan sykes, car podcast, podcast, cars, Ford, Henry Ford, Amazon, Rainforest, Utopia, Brazil, Dystopia, Rubber Factory, Factory, Fordlandia, Plantation, Rubber Plantation, Amazon Rainforest

Id: fG3nMAPh6fo

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020