When Ford got stuck in first gear

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City,By Greg Grandlin, Icon Books, 416pp £14.99

The story of the American motor tycoon’s attempts to start a rubber plantation – and build a city – in the Amazon makes for an engaging read

HISTORY IS MORE or less bunk, said Henry Ford, maker of the eponymous car and a man who transcended history to assume near mythical proportions. But he was to find out that history has a way of catching up with you nevertheless, as the story of one of his less well-known ventures shows.

When another Henry, Henry Wickham, smuggled 70,000 seeds of the species Hevea brasiliensisout of the Amazon in 1876 his action had many consequences. The most immediate one was that it deprived Brazil of the monopoly of the world's rubber that it had enjoyed since the start of the century, and helped destroy an industry that had made up 40 per cent of Brazil's exports.

Wickham’s seeds, brought to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, provided the genetic stock of all subsequent rubber plantations in the British, French and Dutch colonies. Growing wild in the Amazon, rubber trees were well spaced out, and tapping the latex was a laborious business. In Asia, however, the trees thrived in close plantations because they were not subject to the leaf blight, lace bugs and caterpillars of their natural habitat.

But 50 years after Wickham’s roguery, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, believed that the best way to deal with a British rubber cartel was to return to the tree’s country of origin and grow it in plantations there. Ford had as little time for experts as he had for history, so his plans for the Amazon were drawn up not by horticulturalists or anyone acquainted with the region but by the men who had exploited the wilds of Michigan for the raw materials of his huge car factories.

Henry Ford was born on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1863, and paradoxically for a great industrialist he held to a pastoral view of the ideal life. The notion of building Fordlandia in Brazil was in keeping with experiments he had carried out in the US, where “farmer mechanics” in small towns around his home state took the summer months off to cut hay, tend their gardens and raise poultry, then spent the rest of the year manufacturing small parts for cars.

He believed in paying workers well, not least so that they could afford to buy the cars they made – the Model T had been the car of choice for half the world’s motorists since 1908. But they were not allowed to join trade unions and had to submit to the company’s so-called Sociological Department investigating all aspects of their lives, including their sex lives, to ensure what Eamon de Valera was later to call “right living”.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had explored the Amazon, wrote of the Tapajos River, the fifth-largest tributary, that it was a place which could provide nearly “unlimited motive force to populous manufacturing communities”. And it was there, 1,000km from the Atlantic, that the company chose in 1927 to start its rubber plantation, on a million-hectare site. There was general enthusiasm in the US for this plan to conquer the primeval jungle. As Time magazine put it: “Black Indians armed with heavy blades will slash down their one-time haunts to make way for future windshield wipers, floor mats, balloon tires.”

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University, and his engaging book is well written and researched. The genius of Henry Ford, Grandin explains, was to have perfected the assembly line and broken down a complex manufacturing process into simple components geared toward making one single, infinitely reproducible product.

Setting up a plantation of rubber trees in the jungle, however, was another matter. This new town in the middle of nowhere was founded on the imported Ford principles of right living; paternalistic, if laudable, medical and school plans; company housing straight out of an MGM movie; and indoor plumbing, street lighting and golf courses. But it was plagued from the beginning by bad policy, poor appointments and serious mismanagement – extraordinary in a company renowned for its efficiency.

The strange thing is that if Ford had applied his old theory of the working man with one foot in the soil and the other in industry – in keeping with the actual way of life locally – and adapted his housing to suit the climate, industrial relations with the native people and local latex tappers who were his source of labour might well have prospered.

But even when that side of things was settled after a fashion, the enterprise foundered on the horticultural reality that rubber, when grown intensively in that place, was subject to pests and disease, and that even after 1,300 hectares were planted, there would never be any financial return for the tens of millions of dollars spent by Ford.

In 1945, finally, the failed Fordlandia was handed over to the Brazilian government. The Americans, inscrutable as ever to the local population, did not disclose this until the day they boarded the ship to leave. “Goodbye, we’re going back to Michigan,” said the manager’s wife to her nanny. “They didn’t take anything with them, they just left, like that,” said America Lobato.

With a nice eye for the kind of bizarre detail that would not be out of place in Heart of Darknessor the works of García Márquez, Grandin tells this extravagant story on its own terms but also shows us the larger frame of the global motor company, and the world itself, stumbling from depression to war.

John S Doyle is a freelance journalist