Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City

The ideas that humanity could be perfected through social engineering and that nature could be subjugated by the hand of man were fundamental to the modern project. In the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps no one exemplified that project as well as Henry Ford, he of the Five Dollar Day and the Sociological Department, the assembly line and the speed-up.In this book Greg Grandin explores one of the most fascinating and least studied of Henry Ford’s initiatives: the production of rubber and men in the Amazon in the 1930s. He does it with depth, creativity, and erudition, using a rich body of sources from the periodical press, correspondence, technical reports, interviews, and documents of the governments of Brazil and the United States as well as the Ford Motor Company.Fordlandia and its sequel, Belterra, rise from Grandin’s pages like Henry Ford’s failed dream of imposing his sense of order not only on rubber tappers but on the rubber trees themselves. This study convincingly demonstrates that Ford was driven by a complex logic, one in which profit seeking was not the only goal. Far from characterizing Fordlandia as an isolated project, Grandin sees it as part of the singular worldview of the entrepreneur, one also seen in Ford’s industrial villages on Michigan’s upper penninsula, in Greenfield Village, or even in his WWI peace inititiatives and his obstinate anti-Semitism.This worldview is presented as a modern pastoral utopia, which led Ford to spend rivers of money on golf courses, modern hospitals, houses surrounded by neat lawns, swimming pools, and recreation centers in the middle of the Amazon jungle. In trying to save the small town values of family and community that his system of production itself helped to undermine, Ford emerges as an almost tragic figure. Here is the frustrated social reformer converted to brutal treatment of his workers, the man who wanted to impose on his Amazonian employees a diet of soybeans for breakfast and puritanical sexual practices, and consequently faced rebellion and mutiny; who tried to speed up nature itself in his exploitation of the rubber groves, bringing on plagues and loss of the plantations.The book also reveals the wide network of actors and interests, both Brazilian and North American, involved in the project. There were corrupt public officials, land speculators, labor contractors, adventurers, failures, seed smugglers, scientists seeking the wealth of Amazonian biodiversity, and American managers, who like their boss had no preparation for understanding the cultural differences of the Brazilian workers. These workers included tappers looking for employment in the aftermath of the rubber boom and Northeasterners fleeing drought and poverty, along with minor power seekers. One of the book’s sources of richness is this full and fascinating spectacle of human types. It moves with considerable agility from the micro to the macro, between overarching themes and individual stories, showing how the analysis of these two dimensions can be complementary and mutually enriching.Of course, a work of such sweep includes interpretations that might be brought into question. One is the claim that Vargas’s Estado Novo approved labor laws that facilitated unionization. Vargas’s labor legislation is a well-studied theme in Brazilian scholarship in the fields of sociology, political science, and history, giving rise to long and deep theoretical and interpretive polemics. If Grandin had dealt with that literature in a more systematic way he could have better supported his argument, or perhaps revised and put it in a more developed context. The book could have provided an even richer analysis by going deeper into the Brazilian side of Fordlandia, such as a more detailed study of the interventions of the Vargas government with regard to the land issues related to the project.Mentioning such issues does not in any way call into question the quality of Grandin’s work or the contribution it makes. It is aimed at a wider public, beyond the community of professional historians, and thus is written in a direct and agreeable style. It is a very important book for anyone interested in the history of the automobile industry, the history and sociology of labor, in Fordism, and not least, in the Amazon. At a time when the world faces great environmental challenges, it is without doubt timely to understand an episode in which the forest was treated as an object, as a resource to be exploited in a way that was completely different from its own dynamic. Grandin’s work raises provocative questions regarding the limits of man’s ability to impose order on nature, and about authoritarian solutions of social engineering.