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

by Greg Grandin

  Met a physic

  Met a physical

  Met a physician

  Met a fizishan

  Met a physics

  Coming upon his boss in his Fair Lane sitting room reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reverend Marquis, the minister who headed the Sociological Department, asked Ford what he thought of the “Concord philosopher.” “Emerson’s a pup,” Ford replied. “Why a ‘pup’?” Marquis asked. “Well,” Ford said, “I just get comfortably settled to the reading of him, when he uses a word I don’t understand, and that makes me get up and look for a dictionary.”4

  Of all of Henry Ford’s many intellectual influences, Emerson was his most enduring muse. Ford appreciated the Concord philosopher’s optimism and celebration of individualism and self-reliance. But he also found in Emerson a useful corrective to the writings of other nineteenth-century pastoralists, who saw industry as a violation of nature. William Wordsworth, for instance, protested the coming of the railroad to England’s lake country in 1844, warning against the spread of the mechanical “fever of the world.” “Is then,” he asked, “no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” Emerson, in contrast, celebrated steam power, railroads, and factories as rejuvenating forces that would help man fully realize the wonders of the natural world. Mechanization opened up the West, dissolved Old World hierarchies and stifling customs, turned deserts into gardens, and freed the mind from meaningless labor to allow more contemplative thought. In answer to the poet who feared that the railway and the “factory-village” would break the “poetry of the landscape,” Emerson insisted that both “fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own.” In the years after World War I ended the optimism of the Progressive Era, Ford would prescribe a similar holism as a solution for America’s problems, setting out on an increasingly manic quest to restore order to a world off-kilter.5

  THE IMMEDIATE CATALYST for Ford’s initiative was America’s 1920 recession. The downturn lasted less than two years, short compared to either the six-year contraction that began in 1873 or the great desolation that would come in 1929. Yet the drop in economic output was acute, revealing the vulnerability of both urban and rural society under the new regime of mass consumer capitalism. Banks failed and businesses closed. Unemployment skyrocketed in cities and families went hungry. The recession and its aftermath were a blow to one of Ford’s mostly loyal constituencies, farmers, who still made up about a third of the US labor force. The price of agricultural products plummeted by as much as 40 percent, never to fully recover, even after the economy began to grow again in 1922. It was the first serious downswing since Ford had put his industrial and social system into place in Detroit the decade previous, and it galvanized him into action. For the rest of his life he would commit a good part of his great wealth to addressing the problem of industry and agriculture by trying to harmonize the two. “We cannot eat or wear our machines,” said Ford. “If the world were one vast machine shop it would die. When it comes to sustaining life we go to the fields. With one foot in agriculture and the other in industry, America is safe.”

  Ford increasingly began to preach, and then tried to implement, what he called his “village industry” program. More and more after 1920, his conversations with reporters were dominated by different iterations on one topic: a way to reconcile farm and factory work. A return to the fields, he said, would solve urban poverty, the application of industrial technology to farm life could relieve rural drudgery, and decentralized hydroelectric plants could liberate manufacturing and farming communities from the high prices charged by the parasitical “energy trusts.” Having helped do away with the horse as a source of transportation, he believed that in the “future farm animals of all kinds will be out. We don’t need them. We will be better off without them.” And to prove his point, he set up a small, fully mechanized farm just outside Dearborn. But mechanization was part of the problem, for the formula that provided Ford so much success in Detroit and Dearborn—machinery to lower prices, lower prices to increase demand, increased demand to make up for slimmer profit margins—didn’t work for agriculture. New mechanized farm equipment, including Ford’s Model Ts and Fordson tractors, might have relieved the slog of farmwork, but it continued to drive down prices by increasing yield. Corn, wheat, and other commodities poured into America’s great industrial centers, selling at prices well below what many small to midsize farmers could live on.6

  Ford hoped to solve this problem by finding industrial uses for agricultural products, and he directed his chemists to synthesize beans, corn, flax, and wood chips into grease, fuel, paint, artificial leather, organic plastics, and assorted chemical compounds. “I believe,” Ford said, “that industry and agriculture are natural partners. Agriculture suffers from lack of a market for its product. Industry suffers from a lack of employment for its surplus men.” The time would come, he thought, when “a farmer not only will raise raw materials for industry, but will do the initial processing on his farm. He will stand on both his feet—one foot on soil for his livelihood; the other in industry for the cash he needs. Thus he will have a double security. That is what I’m working for.” No crop better promised to achieve this balance than soybeans, and over the next two decades Ford would spend four million dollars on soy research and more than twice that amount on soy processing equipment and physical plant facilities. His laboratories turned its oil into car enamel and house paint, varnish, linoleum, printer’s ink, glycerin, fatty acids, soap, and diesel, and its meal and stalks into horn buttons, gearshift knobs, distributor parts, light switches, timing gears, glues and adhesives, and pressed cardboard. Ford even began to talk about the possibility of “growing cars” and had the body of one made entirely of plastic. Dubbed the “soybean car,” it was ditched soon after it became clear that the strong mortuary smell from the formaldehyde used to process the plastic was not going to subside.7

  Ford also promoted soy as a wonder food. He hired Edsel Ruddiman, a childhood friend and scientist after whom he named his only child, to develop novel foodstuffs from soy. He forced his associates to eat soy “biscuits,” described by one employee as the “most vile-tasting things you ever put in your mouth,” and served his dinner guests soy banquets, course after course of dishes made from soybeans, including puree of soybean, soybean crackers, soybean croquettes with tomato sauce, buttered green soybeans, pineapple rings with soybean cheese, soybean bread with soybean butter, apple pie with soy crust, roasted soybean coffee, and soymilk ice cream. Ford thought soy’s most promising food use would be as vegetable shortening, oleomargarine, and, of course, milk, which would allow him once and for all to eliminate cows. “It is a simple matter to take the same cereals that the cows eat and make them into a milk that is superior to the natural article and much cleaner,” Ford said in 1921. “The cow is the crudest machine in the world. Our laboratories have already demonstrated that cow’s milk can be done away with and the concentration of the elements of milk can be manufactured into scientific food by machines far cleaner than cows.”8

  Henry Ford, sitting in a wheat field, dressed in a suit made of soy fiber.

  FORD’S FIRST SUSTAINED attempt to put his “one foot in agriculture, one foot in industry” program into effect took place in Michigan’s remote and sparsely populated Upper Peninsula, a region connected to Wisconsin in the west and bounded by Lake Superior to the north, the St. Mary’s River to the east, and Lake Huron to the south. The Upper Peninsula’s economy was based largely on copper and timber, both of which had been exploited to the point of exhaustion by the time Ford, in 1919, dispatched an agent to buy large tracts of land, sight unseen, in the region—just as he would do later in the decade in Brazil. By the mid-1920s, he had purchased property in the Upper Peninsula roughly the size of what he would a few years later own in the Amazon, sprawling across four counties and encompassing a number of small mill t
owns, including Pequaming, Munising, L’Anse, and Iron Mountain. The economic motive was to acquire the forests to provide the lumber needed for his Model T. Each car required 250 board feet of hardwood, the price of which was rising steadily as industrial demand increased and timber stocks decreased.9

  “I was forced to get ahold of the forests,” Ford said.

  Yet as would be the case in the Amazon, Ford’s objective was much more ambitious than merely gaining direct access to a single raw material. While every component of his expanding empire was to feed into the Rouge, he imagined each to be a model of integration on its own, generating hydropower if possible and finding new uses for its byproducts—updating Emerson’s ideal of self-sufficiency for the industrial age.

  At Iron Mountain, an economically depressed city of eight thousand residents—most of its mines had been shut down and the surrounding forests had been stripped of their valuable hardwoods—Ford built a state-of-the-art industrial sawmill, the most efficient and modern the United States had yet seen. Dubbed the River Rouge of the North, the complex included fifty-two dry kilns, three factories making parts for the Model T, and its own electricity plant powered by a Ford-built dam. Ford had become obsessed with the potential of hydroelectricity as a way of freeing industrial communities from the grip of “energy trusts.” On his camping trips with his friends Thomas Edison and John Burroughs, Ford would walk up and down every stream they came across, speculating how much horsepower could be harnessed from its currents, and by the end of the 1920s he had built or acquired at least ten hydroelectric plants throughout the US.10

  Unlike the lumber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who ravaged northern Michigan’s yellow pine groves, leaving behind cutovers of high stumps and waste, Ford saw himself as a conservationist. He insisted that, wherever possible, his lumbermen use “selective logging” practices to prevent deforestation, cutting only mature trees or targeted species. In areas where a clear cut was required, he ordered his lumberjacks to saw trees as low to the ground as possible, no more than six inches high, as opposed to the two-foot or higher trunks the logging companies left. These clean forest cuts allowed for quicker and fuller second growth, limited forest fires, and made it possible for Ford’s managers to conduct reforestation experiments, something that the “commercial mills”—as Ford’s men labeled other logging companies operating in the Upper Peninsula—rarely practiced. Much of Ford’s conservation instinct came from his childhood growing up on his father’s Dearborn farm, which maintained large forest reserves from which timber for construction was culled. “We don’t want to destroy all the growth there is there just because we are going to operate this mill today,” Ford told the head of his Iron Mountain operations. “Look out for tomorrow, next month, next year.”11

  Iron Mountain also included a five-story chemical laboratory. As at the Rouge, Iron Mountain managers and chemists pursued a restless quest to recycle all waste products. They used “every part of the tree except the shade,” as historian Tom McCarthy puts it, producing $11,000 worth of value every day from mill waste, including 125 pounds of acetate of lime, sixty-one gallons of methyl alcohol (one-fifth of America’s total production), antifreeze, artificial leather, and fifteen gallons of tar, oil, and creosote. Sawdust, underbrush, branches, wood chips, and cull lumber—that is, defective logs pulled from piles of otherwise serviceable timber—were turned into charcoal “briquettes” (which today continue to be sold under the brand name Kingsford) or burned to power steam engines and heat worker bunkhouses.12

  THE LAND FORD purchased in the Upper Peninsula came with people. Iron Mountain was a relatively large city for the region, full of mining and timbering old-timers and new arrivals hoping to make good on the coming of Ford. Ford could react only piecemeal to its boom-bust-boom problems—its shortage of adequate housing, its speculators driving up land prices, its lack of health care, schools, and sanitation, and its many brothels, speakeasies, and morphine dens. But elsewhere in the Upper Peninsula Ford acquired large tracts of virgin timberland, dotted with small, remote lumber camps and mining towns. He imagined them to be blank canvases on which to paint his vision of industrial-rural wholeness.

  “Your vacation is over, boys,” announced Ford’s manager to the thirteen workers who ran a very small mill in the village of Pequaming, purchased by Ford in 1923. Nearly overnight the hundred or so families saw their backwater village transformed, as the Ford Motor Company became the de facto municipal authority, responsible for its sanitation, schools, power, and even churches. Ford paid Pequaming lumberjacks and sawyers more than double the prevailing wage, but he would also impose Ford-style regimentation. “One was not even permitted to lean against a lumber pile or sit down for five minutes to figure up a lumber tally,” remembered one sawyer. “It was compulsory to stand up perfectly straight on two feet.” Smoking was prohibited while on the clock, and town commissaries were forbidden to sell tobacco products and alcohol. All workers were required to undergo a medical examination, the cost of which was deducted from their newly increased salaries.

  There were other deductions as well, for laundering, for instance, even if the worker didn’t avail himself of the service. The idea was that if he paid for it he would use it and therefore wear clean clothes. Ford raised rents, more than compensated for by better wages, and he used the money to completely make over the villages. In Pequaming and other towns and villages, construction crews repaved streets, built new schools, and repaired and reroofed buildings. And they painted. “Paint, paint, paint. He had six or eight men painting the year ’round,” said one worker in Ford’s Upper Peninsular operation. “They painted every house and every one of the company shops. Then they’d go back and start all over again.” In grimy mining towns, “lawns were cut and flowers were planted.”13

  Located on the shores of Lake Superior, rustic Pequaming became a Ford favorite. He built a summer bungalow there, traveling to the town at least a few times a year, reviewing the modernization of its sawmill and its experimental plantings of soybeans, potatoes, and other crops. He and his wife, Clara, took a personal interest in Pequaming’s schoolhouse. By this point in their lives, the Fords were patronizing a number of experimental schools throughout the Midwest, rejecting mass public education in favor of small, personalized classrooms and experiential learning, which were to cultivate not just job skills but manners and character. Ford’s curriculum emphasized “learning by doing”—in addition to reading, writing, and math, girls were instructed in homemaking skills, and boys in vocational training, and all children were taught how to garden. Pequaming’s school became a model of Ford pedagogy, and Ford himself would participate in teaching the children old-style dances like the quadrille, the five-step schottische, and, Ford’s favorite, the varsovienne, a Polish round dance with a polka beat. “Unless Mr. Ford asked for something special,” remembered Oscar Olsen, a fiddler hired by Ford as Pequaming’s music instructor, “we would just dance along like we always had,” teaching the children how to round and square dance.14

  At times one Ford idea would contradict another. In Pequaming, for instance, he hoped to restore the importance of community in industrial life, yet children were no longer allowed to enter the mill to bring lunch to their fathers. He wanted to nurture self-reliant “farmer-mechanics,” giving his lumberjacks, sawyers, and miners garden plots to grow their own vegetables. But he also was committed to the idea of creating integrated consumer markets. So he ordered families to tear down their picket fences, which were used to corral cows, chickens, and pigs in their front yards. With their increased salaries, Pequaming’s residents were now expected to buy their own meat, eggs, and milk.

  Then there were the villages and camps Ford had built from whole cloth, deep in the woods, the “likes of which no sober lumberjack had ever dreamed,” wrote one company historian. Ford had the idea of founding one such town when he was driving through a densely wooded and isolated area of the Upper Peninsula between Pequaming and Iro
n Mountain. Coming upon a site he thought especially pretty, Ford ordered his men to dig an artificial lake and build a lumber mill. Deep in a remote hardwood forest, Alberta, as the settlement was named, became another of Ford’s Upper Peninsula showcases, its dozen or so workers all expected to divide their time lumbering, milling, and farming. Unlike the filthy, cold, and vermin-infested rough cabins woodsmen were used to, Alberta was an electrified oasis of modern America. It sported indoor lighting, streetlamps, cement sidewalks, showers, clean, screened private bunks, recreation rooms, and movies. The company put into place an innovative steam heat system to keep the bunkhouses warm during the extremely cold winters and served wholesome food “in a large, clean dining hall.” “It is spick-and-span all over,” said one observer of Alberta. “You don’t see sawdust and bark and dirt. It is always clean. It is a lovely little setting there in the woods by the man-made river pond. There are some beautiful homes. From that standpoint it is marvelous.”15

  But from another standpoint, it was more Potemkin village than practical model for how to organize society. In Alberta, there were too few families to build the relations and institutions that integrated and tied a community together, and residents felt isolated, having to travel miles to buy anything beyond the most basic necessities, to see a doctor, or to attend church. And Alberta, along with Pequaming and other small Ford-subsidized communities, made little economic sense, as whatever milled wood it provided could be cut more economically at Ford’s industrial plants in L’Anse or Iron Mountain. It was, as historians Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill put it, all the “stuff of a backwoods fairy tale.” Yet through the 1920s, Ford purchased or created scores of similar small towns in Michigan and elsewhere, including nineteen on rivers within the vicinity of his River Rouge complex. These lower Michigan villages were more directly integrated into the production of Ford cars than Upper Peninsula lumber towns. “Farmer mechanics” took the summer months off to go farm, cut hay, pick berries, tend gardens, and raise squab and spent the rest of the year manufacturing small parts that Ford outsourced from Highland Park and the River Rouge, such as valves, ignition locks, keys, carburetors, starter switches, and lamps.16