Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
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Tappers, known as seringueiros, lived scattered along the river, sometimes with their families but often alone, with their huts located at the head of one or two looped rubber trails that ran a few miles, connecting between a hundred and two hundred trees. In the morning, starting before sunrise, when the latex flowed freest through the thin vessels that run up the tree’s bark, the tapper would make his first round, slashing each Hevea with diagonal cuts and then placing tin cans or cups to catch the falling sap. After lunch, and a nap to escape the worst of the heat, the seringueiro made a second round to collect the latex. Back at his hut, he smoked it on a spit over an earthenware oven fired by dampened palm nuts, which produced a toxic smoke that took its toll on tapper lungs, until it formed a black ball of rubber, weighing between seventy and ninety pounds. He then brought the ball to a trading post, handing it over to a merchant either as rent for the trails or to pay off goods purchased on credit. The rubber then made its way downriver to Belém’s receivers and export houses. The excruciatingly unhurried drip, drip, drip of the sap into a battered cup, latched onto the tree with a piece of rope or leather, was about as far removed from the synchronized speed of Henry Ford’s assembly line as one could imagine. Back in Michigan, Ford was obsessed with rooting out “slack” from not just the workday but the work year—trying to find ways to combine agricultural and industrial seasonal labor that maximized the efficiency of both. But along the Amazon, seringueiros often spent the “grey and sad” months of the rainy season, when latex ran too slow to tap, “in his hammock without any profitable occupation,” accumulating more debt that they would never work off. Their thatched huts were often perched on poles, and as the water rose around them they passed the rainy days in isolation, as one traveler described, alone with “dogs, fowls, and a host of insects, all unable to move far owing to the water that surrounds them.”13
Two tappers smoking latex under a thatched lean-to.
It was a system that produced enormous riches when Brazil had a monopoly on the world’s rubber trade and therefore largely set the global market price. But the wealth it created was fleeting and unsustainable. The tapping system itself could quickly deplete man and tree. As the seasons passed, cuts on the bark would scab over to be bled again, successively yielding less and less latex. With care, Hevea can produce for up to three decades, starting in its fifth or sixth year of growth, but under pressure to deliver more latex, seringueiros cut too often, too deep, causing stunted growth and early exhaustion. And profit was generated by what was essentially an elaborate pyramid scheme: at the apex were foreign commercial and financial houses; in the middle stood Brazilian merchants, traders, and a few exporters; and the whole thing rested on the backs of indebted tappers, who, as one critic put it, received goods on credit charged at fifty but in reality worth ten, in exchange for latex that the local merchant assessed at ten but that was actually worth fifty. As another writer noted, the “potentates of the forest have no credit beyond that on their books—against peons who never pay (unless with their lives).” Euclides da Cunha, one of the Amazon’s great chroniclers, described the trade as the “most criminal employment organization ever spawned by unbridled selfishness.”14
The first generation of early-nineteenth-century-boom rubber tappers came from the Amazon’s native population. Things were bad for many indigenous communities prior to the rubber trade; slave raiding had already devastated many groups. “Every manner of persuasion,” one anthropologist observed, “from torture to degeneration by cachaça”—a cheap rum distilled from sugar cane juice—was used to make natives collect wild jungle products. Prior to the expansion of the latex economy, these included nuts, feathers, snake skins, dyes, fibers, pelts, timber, spices, fruit, and medicinal herbs and barks, most notably from the cinchona tree, found in the higher reaches of the upper Amazon, which produced the antimalarial alkaloid quinine, indispensable in hastening the spread of European colonialism in Asia and Africa.15
But the rubber trade was by far more extensive, and thus more disruptive, than anything that had come before it, organizing under its regime the whole of the Amazon wherever Hevea was found. The Apiaca, for instance, were just one of many groups practically wiped out as a distinct tribal society, their men pressed into service either as tappers or to paddle or pole trading boats, and their women as servants or concubines. After native sources of labor were exhausted, migrants, mostly from Brazil’s drought-prone northeast, made up subsequent generations of tappers. They arrived at Manaus and Belém by the boatful, withered, sunken-faced, and already bonded to pay for their transport. Between 1800 and 1900, the lower Amazon’s population increased tenfold, with desperately poor, eternally indebted families living in small, isolated clusters of huts along the river’s many waterways or in the sprawling shantytowns that spread out behind Manaus and Belém’s Belle Époque façade.16
But by 1925, when Ford and Firestone were thinking of getting into the rubber business, this boom had long turned to bust, largely because of the actions of another Henry, who arrived in the Amazon over half a century earlier to commit what observers today call “bio-piracy,” which would eventually unravel Brazil’s latex monopoly.
Henry Wickham was a prime example of the kind of imperial rogue chronicled by Rudyard Kipling. Only Wickham didn’t travel east to make a name for himself in Britain’s formal colonies; instead he went west to Latin America, where London in the late nineteenth century was extending its commercial and financial reach. He landed first in Nicaragua, where he tried to turn a profit exporting colorful bird plumage back to his mother’s London millinery shop, located on a small street just off what is now Piccadilly Circus. He was a bad shot, though, and soon decided to better his luck in Brazil.17
In 1871, Wickham and his wife settled in Santarém, where the Tapajós River flows into the Amazon. Attempting to establish himself as a rubber expert, he quickly fell into destitution, surviving only thanks to the kindness of a community of U.S. Confederate exiles who, moved by, as one of the Southern expatriates put it, Wickham’s “aristocratic appearance” and “lonesome, melancholy aspect,” took the couple in. A failure at most everything in life, Wickham enjoyed one reported success, the illegal spiriting of seventy thousand Amazonian seeds, gathered from a site not far from where Fordlandia would be founded, out of Brazil in 1876. These he turned over to London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, where they were nurtured into the seedlings used to develop Asia’s latex competition. Actually, Wickham’s real success was in gaining fame for stealing the seeds, for historians of rubber have subsequently questioned key aspects of his derring-do story. Whatever the case, Queen Victoria knighted Wickham, securing his place in history as a British imperial hero and a Brazilian imperialist villain, and the Amazon began its long descent into economic stupor.18
The seeds Wickham collected and shipped to London provided the genetic stock of all subsequent rubber plantations in the British, French, and Dutch colonies. Hevea was able to grow closer together in Asia, and later Africa, because the insects and fungi that feed off rubber didn’t exist in that part of the world. And when the trees began to run sufficient amounts of cheap latex to meet the world’s demand, Brazil’s rubber pyramid came toppling down. No matter how exploited the Amazonian tapper, the price of producing rubber in large estates was considerably lower than what it cost to extract it from wild groves. Asian plantations were close to major ports, which cut down on transportation expense. They used low-wage labor, often imported from China, and by the early twentieth century had selected and crossbred trees, leading to much greater sap yields. In 1912, estates in Malaya and Sumatra were producing 8,500 tons of latex, compared with the Amazon’s 38,000 tons. Two years later, Asia was exporting over 71,000 tons. Less than nine years later, that number rose to 370,000 tons. Manaus fell into fast decline, its opera house ridiculed as an emblem of folly, of the excess wealth and European strivings of rubber barons who spent their money on gold leaf, red velvet, and murals of Greek and Roman gods cavorting i
n the jungle, rather than on developing a sustainable economy. Belém gave way to Singapore as the world’s premier rubber exporting port, and the Amazon languished, subject of any number of plans to restore the region to glory—until Ford tried to make one happen.19
*Unlike Brazilians, who upon returning from the jungle usually immediately bathed, shaved, and brought a new suit of clothes, Americans, one observer noted, had the “irritating habit of stalking through the streets, and calling on the highest officials” in their “ten-gallon hats, campaign boots, and cartridge-belts” (Earl Parker Hanson, Journey to Manaos, New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1938, p. 292).
CHAPTER 2
THE COW MUST GO
ONE OF THE BOOKS ERNEST LIEBOLD READ IN HIS DELIBERATIONS on where best to grow rubber was Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Theodore Roosevelt’s account of his triumphant Amazon expedition, in which he and his son Kermit almost lost their lives charting the unexplored thousand-mile-long River of Doubt. Roosevelt made only passing reference to the contracting rubber economy, mostly to relate the hard-luck life of tappers. But there was one passage that must have caught Liebold’s attention.
In describing his journey to the headwaters of the Tapajós River, Roosevelt observed that the area’s many fast rivers could provide nearly “unlimited motive force to populous manufacturing communities.” Telegraph lines had to be run, followed by railroads, but there were no “serious natural obstacles” to either task. Once communication and transportation had been established, the “right kind” of settlers would arrive, followed by “enterprising businessmen of foresight, coolness and sagacity” willing to put the migrants to work for “an advantage that would be mutual.” And thus would rise a “great industrial civilization.”1
If anyone could make it happen—or at least if anyone was sure of his ability to make such a vision happen—it would be Henry Ford. When Roosevelt left for Brazil in late 1913, Ford was already well known as the creator of the world’s first affordable, mass-produced automobile. But when he returned in early 1914, the industrialist had been catapulted to the heights of world fame, lauded as a “sociologist manufacturer” who didn’t just attract the “right kind” of worker but assembled them from whole cloth. “The impression has somehow got around,” said the Reverend Samuel Marquis, who for a time headed Ford’s employee relations office, “that Henry Ford is in the automobile business. It isn’t true. Mr. Ford shoots about fifteen hundred cars out of the back door of his factory every day just to get rid of them. They are the by-products of his real business, which is the making of men.”2
SUCCESS CAME LATE to Ford. Born on a Michigan farm in 1863, he was forty years old when he founded the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, forty-five when he introduced the Model T, and fifty when he put assembly line production into place and began to pay workers a wage high enough to let them buy the product they themselves made. So while he came of age during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the America he lived in for the first half of his life was still mostly rural, and the changes he helped set in motion came stunningly fast.
Ford didn’t invent the assembly line. He claimed he got the idea of having workers remain at one location and perform a single task from the “disassembly lines” found in Chicago’s and Cincinnati’s slaughterhouses, where butchers hacked off parts as pig and cow carcasses passed in front of them on conveyor hooks. Nor did he conceive the other central idea of modern mass production, that is, making parts as identical as possible to one another so that they would be interchangeable. But Ford did fuse these two ideas together as never before, perfecting the idea of a factory as a complex system of ever more integrated subassembly processes.
Most of this innovation took place in Ford’s new Highland Park plant, opened in 1910 and designed by the architect Albert Kahn, who prior to his work with Ford had been associated with the anti–mass production arts and crafts movement. Located a few miles north of downtown Detroit along Woodward Avenue, the factory was enormous. It was four stories high, 865 feet long, 700,000 square feet in total, holding eight thousand machines, and was dubbed the Crystal Palace for the tens of thousands of windowpanes that bathed its shop floor in radiant sunlight. Highland Park was powered not so much by steam or diesel but, as historian Douglas Brinkley puts it, management’s restless search to “save time, money, and manpower through further mechanization.” Within eighteen months of the introduction in April 1913 of the first assembly line to make flywheels, every major component of Ford’s car was being produced on moving lines, including the final confection of the finished product. Highland Park had become a machine itself, which by the midteens was dedicated to making one cheap yet sturdy thing: the Model T.3
The economics of Ford-style mass production were demonstrably simple. In 1911–12, it took just under seven thousand Ford workers to make 78,440 Model Ts. The following year, both production and the workforce more than doubled. Then in 1913–14, with the introduction of the assembly line and other innovations, the number of cars the factory produced doubled yet again, while the labor force decreased from 14,336 to 12,880 men. At the same time, the cost of manufacturing a Model T continued to decline, which allowed for a reduction in price, which increased demand, which generated more profit, which could be poured back into the factory to synchronize and mechanize production even further, to start the whole process over again. By 1921, Ford had captured more than 50 percent of the American car market, producing more than two million Model Ts a year at a production cost 60 percent cheaper than a decade earlier.4
In 1914, the British journalist Julian Street visited Detroit and described the raw energy of Ford’s Highland Park plant:
The whole room, with its interminable aisles, its whirling shafts and wheels, its forest of roof-supporting posts and flapping, flying, leather belting, its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population—to my mind it expressed but one thing and that was delirium. . . . Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms—of men, machinery and movement—add to it every kind of sound you can imagine: the sound of a million squirrels chirking, a million monkeys quarreling, a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants smashing through a forest of sheet iron, a million boys whistling on their fingers, a million others coughing with the whooping cough, a million sinners groaning as they are dragged to hell—imagine all of this happening at the very edge of Niagara Falls, with the everlasting roar of the cataract as a perpetual background, and you may acquire a vague conception of that place.5
Highland Park’s crankshaft assembly room, 1915.
For Street, the jungle trope was not to suggest, as it did for Upton Sinclair in his novel about the Chicago meatpacking industry, the anarchic brutality of capitalism, which drains the life out of workers and then casts them off to wither away like so many dead leaves. On the contrary, the British journalist saw the assembly line method as the taming of the industrial jungle, a “relentless system” yielding “terrible efficiency.” “Like a river and its tributaries,” Ford’s integrated assembly lines flowed inexorably to their final destination: a finished Model T.6
“PEOPLE DON’T STAY put,” Ford once said to explain why communism would never work in the Soviet Union. But neither did they remain still during the first decades of industrial capitalism. At the Ford factory, worker absenteeism averaged 10 percent a day between 1912 and 1913, and the yearly turnover rate of 380 percent was crippling the factory’s production capacity. Ford’s emphasis on synchronization and mechanization only aggravated the already high labor turnover. For the majority of Ford’s ever growing workforce, the slightly better-than-average pay the company offered was not sufficient incentive to be turned into repeating machines.7
The second stage of Ford’s revolution, then, had to do with human relations, with making people stay put. Ford came to believe that the key to creating loyal, more efficient workers was to h
elp them find fulfillment, as he understood it, outside the factory.
In early 1914, Ford made an announcement that sent seismic shocks across the globe. Henceforth, he proclaimed, the Ford Motor Company would pay an incentive wage of five dollars for an eight-hour day, nearly double the average industrial standard. The Wall Street Journal charged Henry Ford with class treason, with “economic blunders if not crimes.” Yet his absentee and turnover rate plummeted and Ford was jolted into the ranks of the world’s most admired men, “an international symbol of the new industrialization.”8
But high wages alone were not enough to ensure either factory-floor efficiency or individual responsibility. A better salary could just lead to quicker dissipation through gambling, drinking, and whoring. There was no shortage of temptations in iniquitous Detroit. There were more brothels in the city than churches, and workers often lived crowded in fetid slums, in flophouses that fronted for gambling halls, bars, and opium dens. So Ford conditioned his Five Dollar Day plan with the obligation that workers live a wholesome life.9
And to make sure they did, the carmaker dispatched inspectors from his Sociological Department to probe into the most intimate corners of Ford workers’ lives, including their sex lives. Denounced as a system of paternal surveillance as often as it was lauded as a program of civic reform, by 1919 the Sociological Department employed hundreds of agents who spread out over Dearborn and Detroit asking questions, taking notes, and writing up personnel reports. They wanted to know if workers had insurance and how they spent their money and free time. Did they have a bank account? How much debt did they carry? How many times were they married? Did they send money home to the old country? Sociological men came around not just once but two, three, or four times interviewing family members, friends, and landlords to make sure previous reports of probity were accurate. They of course discouraged drinking, smoking, and gambling and encouraged saving, clean living habits, keeping flies off food, maintaining an orderly house, backyard, and front porch, and sleeping in beds. They also frowned on the taking in of boarders since, “next to liquor, dissension in the home is due to people other than the family being there.”10