(IMG) Fordlandia promotional image, Camazotz on Earth
Fordlandia: The Failure Of Ford's Jungle Utopia
June 6, 2009, 2:50 PM ET
Henry Ford didn't just want to be a maker of cars -- he wanted to b
maker of men. He thought he could perfect society by building model
factories and pristine villages to go with them. And he was pretty
successful at it in Michigan. But in the jungles of Brazil, he woul
ultimately be defeated.
It was 1927. Ford wanted his own supply of rubber -- and he decided
get it by carving a plantation and a miniature Midwest factory town
out of the Amazon jungle. It was called "Fordlandia."
Leonor Weeks DeCeco was 8 years old when she joined her father in
Henry Ford's jungle utopia. "We had everything that we really wante
We had a swimming pool, tennis court, golf course, and I had my
animals -- my Chico, which was a rare monkey."
"My dad was a construction engineer, and he was in charge of
everything, and I enjoyed being down there with him," she says.
But for pretty much everyone else, it was a green hell of riot and
blight. Author Greg Grandin tells the story in his new book,
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
The project didn't start out well, Grandin says. There was a huge
clash of culture between mechanized America, Ford's utopian ideals
and the way the indigenous people lived.
The first failure of Fordlandia was social. "The first years of the
settlement were plagued by waste and violence and vice," Grandin sa
"There were knife fights, there were riots over food and attempts t
impose Ford-style regimentation," Grandin says. "When people ask me
what Fordlandia was like, I tell them to think more of Deadwood tha
Our Town."
Things went bad over simple stuff, like serving food. "Ford had ver
particular understandings about what a proper diet should be," Gran
says. "He tried to impose brown rice and whole-wheat bread and cann
peaches and oatmeal -- and that itself created discontent."
But when a Ford engineer changed the way food was served -- from wa
service to cafeteria-style service -- the workers rebelled. Angry
workers destroyed the mess hall, pushed trucks into the river and
nearly ruined the whole operation. It cost tens of thousands of
dollars of damage, Grandin says.
But Ford didn't just want to tame men; he wanted to tame the jungle
itself -- and therein was his next failure.
"Ford basically tried to impose mass industrial production on the
diversity of the jungle," Grandin says. But the Amazon is one of th
most complex ecological systems in the world -- and didn't fit into
Ford's plan. "Nowhere was this more obvious and more acute than whe
it came to rubber production," Grandin says.
Ford was so distrustful of experts that he never even consulted one
about rubber trees. If he had, Grandin says, he would have learned
that plantation rubber can't be grown in the Amazon. "The pests and
the fungi and the blight that feed off of rubber are native to the
Amazon. Basically, when you put trees close together in the Amazon
what you in effect do is create an incubator -- but Ford insisted."
The resulting plantation actually accelerated the production of
caterpillars, leaf blight and other organisms that prey on rubber,
Grandin says.
Even when not worried about riots or leaf blight, the people runnin
the plantation -- brought down from Michigan -- had a hard time in
rainforest.
"They succumbed to the heat, the oppressive humidity," Grandin says
"Wives who accompanied the men down to Fordlandia had less to do. M
at least, were charged with trying to build the town, trying to bui
a plantation."
Fordlandia isn't just the story of a plantation; it's a story about
Ford's ego. As disaster after disaster struck, Ford continued to po
money into the project. Not one drop of latex from Fordlandia ever
made it into a Ford car.
But the more it failed, the more Ford justified the project in
idealistic terms. "It increasingly was justified as a work of
civilization, or as a sociological experiment," Grandin says. One
newspaper article even reported that Ford's intent wasn't just to
cultivate rubber, but to cultivate workers and human beings.
In the end, Ford's utopia failed. Fordlandia's residents, ever in h
their patriarch would someday visit their Midwestern industrial tow
in the middle of the jungle, gave up and left.
These days, Fordlandia is quite beautiful, Grandin says. The
"American" town where the managers and administrators lived is
abandoned and overgrown. Weeds grow over the American-style
bungalows, and bats roost in the rafters, and little red fire
hydrants sit covered in vines.
(HTM) From NPR story
(DIR) BenCollver - Phlog
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