A Lincoln Zephyr gets stuck in the mud at Fordlandia
Henry Ford, the American industrialist, was a genius, a visionary and a philanthropist. He was also an anti-Semite – who toyed with the fringes of fascism – a union buster and right-wing populist who was quite prepared to have his security squad murder protesting workers in Detroit. In his factories and towns he imposed an absolute discipline with no sitting down during working hours and no smoking, drinking or cows at home (because he favoured soy over milk). Henry also had more money than sense which he proved by pouring some of it into a series of half-backed utopian ventures.
The most colourful of these was Fordlandia. Ford wanted vertical integration of every aspect of car production. Ford barges, trucks and freight trains brought silica and limestone, coal and iron ore, wood and charcoal, brass, bronze, and copper from Ford forests, quarries, mines and smelters. When Winston Churchill advocated an Anglo-Dutch rubber cartel in 1925 to limit production and maintain prices Ford decided he needed his own plantation.
He decided to take the rubber tree home. Until the end of the 19th century Brazilian wild rubber supplied global demand and generated enormous wealth, particularly for the city of Manaus, the Paris of the tropics. After an English adventurer, Henry Wickham, smuggled out 70,000 seeds – for which piece of thievery Queen Victoria gave him a knighthood – rubber plantations were established in Sumatra, Malaya and elsewhere and that pushed down prices and destroyed the Brazilian rubber industry. In 1928 Henry Ford leased 2.5 million acres of land to produce 2.4 million tonnes of rubber a year, five times what was then the world production.
It’s not entirely clear whether Ford’s sociology was worst than his biology, but both were abysmal. Attempts to remodel itinerant native labourers into caricatures of suburban Americans – with houses shipped over from the States that made no concession to the tropics rather than where heavy winter snows were the norm – were only made worse by the brutal enforcement of Ford’s policy of no tobacco, no drink and, for single men, no sex.
The logic of the factory was laid on agriculture with factory whistles and punch-card machines to clock in and out. Entertainment comprised compulsory barn dances. The result? Strikes, riots and mayhem requiring Brazilian troops and machine guns to restore order.
For 17 years, before Henry’s grandson abandoned the site to the Brazilian government in 1945, $20 million of investment led to the production of, at best, hundreds of tonnes of rubber each year. In 1942 it was 750 tonnes of latex. The problem was that while rubber plantations worked away from the Amazon because the trees were away from their natural predators, back home plantations were incubators for disease of Biblical proportions as blight was followed by caterpillars and ants. On one famous occasion they collected 250,000 caterpillars off one group of trees in five hours which they doused in petrol and burned alive. But they came back with new generations of moth that laid their eggs at the top of the trees and couldn’t be seen until it was too late as they swarmed down the trees, eating all before them.
It could have been worse. Henry Ford was not the only person to try to fit together people with no land and land with no people. Between World War One and World War Two more than 180,000 Japanese, including many Okinawans, emigrated to Brazil, exchanging poverty in one place for poverty half a world away. Although Brazil did not declare war against Japan until June 1945 it did break diplomatic relations in January 1942, leaving the emigrants isolated. The result was the emergence of a cult that refused to acknowledge Japan’s defeat in 1945 with the kachigumi or victory faction assassinating members of the makegumi faction. As late as 1972 there were still true believers in Brazil. Henry’s, by then, was a name never mentioned in Fordlandia.
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