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

by Greg Grandin

  Ford responded by committing even more to his village industries, which he hoped would slow the flow of migrants to the cities, save farms by bringing wage-paying industry to rural areas, and keep families intact—with women in the kitchen and men on the shop floors and in the fields. They also allowed Ford to continue to play humanity’s redeemer, even as he was fending off criticism that his anti-Semitism was perilously inflammatory and his factory system had become a soul-crushing thing. “I sometimes think that the prejudice and narrowness of the present day,” he said, “is due to our intense specialization.” Get workers out into the country. Have them work under an open sky. “If we saw more sides of life . . . we should be better balanced,” he observed. “I think farmers are going to disappear in the course of time. Yes, and factory workers too. Every man will be a farmer some day, and every man will work in a factory or office. We’ve proven that already. I’ve built little factories along the little rivers.”31

  Yet his little factories along the little rivers were no match for the raw power of the changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the 1920s, and in any case, Congress, after years of debate, had definitively rejected his Muscle Shoals proposal. An alliance of economic and regional political interests made the case that the US government was about to hand to Ford too good, too vague a concession. Would he own the mineral rights to the land? What about timber? What would happen to the project when Ford died?

  Building on the criticism, Nebraska’s Republican senator George Norris led the charge against the deal. A committed Progressive—and, particularly irksome to Ford, a close ally of the late Theodore Roosevelt—Norris believed that a project of the scope Ford was proposing should be carried out under the auspices of the federal government and not private interests. The senator was disturbed by the wild land speculations that had gripped the Tennessee Valley upon rumors of Ford’s interest. The Muscle Shoals Land Corporation, founded in Detroit, staked out a tract of land on the banks of the Tennessee River, laid out boulevards with names such as Dearborn Avenue and Michigan Street, and incorporated the site as a city, dubbed “Highland Park.” A group of newspapermen in Detroit pooled their money and bought up a square mile of the “dreamland,” hoping to flip it for a profit. In New York, another start-up cashed in by selling twenty-foot lots of land. “Would you, if you could,” promotional material asked potential customers, “associate yourself with the world’s greatest manufacturer and industrial genius—HENRY FORD? Thousands of people have become independently wealthy through the development of Ford’s gigantic industrial plants in Detroit, Michigan. Mr. Ford has recently stated that he would employ one million men and build a city seventy-five miles long at MUSCLE SHOALS.” After reading of Ford’s plans for the Tennessee Valley in the African American Chicago Defender, East Texas bluesman George Thomas captured the get-rich-quick spirit of the times in a song recorded by Bourbon Street–born Lizzie Miles: “Hurry up, Papa, we must leave this town, got the blues for Muscle Shoals, that’s where we sure can get gold.”

  Norris was especially repelled to hear poor Southern farmers chanting, “ ‘When Ford comes, . . . when Ford comes,’ as if they were expecting the second coming of Jesus Christ.” Muscle Shoals, he said, was the “most wonderful real estate speculation since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Ford’s offer to buy Muscle Shoals passed the House, but Norris and other Progressives opposed to the privatization of national resources, such as Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, killed it in Senate committee in mid-1924. The streets of Highland Park, with not one house built, soon “disappeared into cotton fields,” wrote an observer, “the sidewalks, under brambles.”32

  So Ford began to look abroad to implement a plan of reform that was failing at home. Having been denied the opportunity to redeem a poor rural river valley in Appalachia, he would find another in the Amazon.

  ____________

  *Despite the peculiarity of many of Ford’s ideas, contemporary social reformers offered similar schemes to commingle urban life and nature and reconcile if not Emersonian then Jeffersonian democracy with the industrial world. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, shared Ford’s criticisms of the modern city, particularly the way its immense scale and density threatened to wipe out community and individualism. Wright was directly influenced by Ford’s proposed valley city. He often cited it as inspiration for his own Broadacre City, a planned community meant to showcase an architectural style that would blend organically with the landscape and allow “all that was human in the city to go to the country and grow up with it” (Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings, 1894–1940, ed. Frederick Gutheim, New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1941, p. 144; Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 108–9).

  *The term Fordism evolved after the Washington Post, condemning Ford in 1922 for briefly shutting down his factory rather than pay high coal prices, defined it as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations,” a category in which the paper included the peace ship. Around this time, the term was often interchangeable with Taylorism, after Fredrick Taylor, the pioneer of motion analysis who aimed to extract ever greater productivity out of workers through the isolation of the individual tasks needed to make a product. It also denoted standardization, efficiency, and mass production. By the late 1920s, Fordism began to take on its more comprehensive meaning, used to suggest a modernization of economic thought that appreciated the value of high wages as a motor of industrial growth. And sociologists and intellectuals, particularly those in industrialized European countries, started using it in tandem with Americanism. In 1927, for instance, an article in London’s New Statesman identified Americanism/Fordism as an industrial system in which the pace of the factory determined productivity (as opposed to pace being set by a wage system that rewarded output): “The worker under Fordism is speeded up, whether he likes it or not, by the pace at which the factory runs, by the endless stream of articles ceaselessly propelled toward him by the remorseless chain of machines. He must work at the factory’s pace, or go; and go he will, unless he is offered a special inducement to remain.” But the article also acknowledged that high wages, in addition to serving as an inducement to remain on the line, actually created large markets, which allowed industrialists to increase their takings even as profit margins were reduced: “It was found, not merely that high wages were fully compatible with low costs of production, but that the offer of higher wages still might be so used to stimulate a further fall in cost. High wages therefore became, with some employers, not merely a necessity that had to be faced, but a positive policy” (reprinted in the Living Age, May 15, 1927). By the 1950s, the term Fordism had worked its way into social science terminology, as scholars began to consider the foundations and implications of the United States’ unprecedented postwar economic expansion.

  CHAPTER 5

  FORDVILLE

  SHORTLY AFTER HIS SUMMER LUNCH WITH HARVEY FIRESTONE where they discussed the proposed British cartel, Henry Ford granted a long-sought audience to Brazil’s New York–based consular inspector, José Custódio Alves de Lima. The Brazilian diplomat had been courting Ford for two years, since reading about his interest in growing rubber in the Florida Everglades, and had sent him samples of Amazon rubber and minerals along with an elegantly carved cabinet made out of assorted rare rain forest hardwoods, all with the purpose of turning his attention to Brazil. De Lima had received permission from the governor of Pará—one of the largest of the Amazonian states—to offer Ford “special inducements,” tax and land concessions, in the hope that the industrialist would help revive the regional economy, depressed since 1910, when Brazil lost its rubber monopoly to Asia.1

  As he traveled from New York to Dearborn by train, de Lima reflected on Ford and what his investment in the Amazon would mean for Brazil. By that point, the Model T was more than a car: its speed, simplicity, and durab
ility chanted freedom, its affordability spoke democracy. And Ford Motors had become more than a company. Notwithstanding the criticism its assembly and speedup had provoked, its method of industrial relations, for many the world over, it had become synonymous with modern life, offering the promise of not only efficient production but the increased leisure time needed to enjoy the fruits of efficiency. Fordism, fordismo, fordismus, or fordizatsia—in whatever language, countries hoping to shake off the scent of farm animals and catch up with the United States adopted some aspect of the system pioneered in Detroit and Dearborn. In countries with strong artisanal and mechanic traditions like France, England, Germany, and even the United States, intellectuals and craft unionists condemned Fordism for replacing the craftsman and skilled worker with mindless “jerks, twists, and turns.” Yet by the early twentieth century, the world was increasingly divided between the industrial and the hoped-to-be-industrial. And in the larger latter half, few harped on the downside of steady wages and mass, standardized production of low-cost goods.2

  Ford himself, lanky, “incessantly moving,” “swift as a shadow,” as the journalists John Reed and John Gunther respectively described him, embodied for many the vitality and quickness of the modern age. Carl Sandburg said that “one feels in talking with Ford that he is a man of power rather than of material riches.” His half-cultivated, half-innate Delphic opaqueness—“I’m going to see that no man comes to know me,” he wrote in one of his notebooks—allowed his followers to pick and choose what they liked from his philosophizing, uniting admirers as diverse as Lenin and Hitler, Trotsky and Mussolini.3

  By the time of de Lima’s Dearborn visit, the Ford Motor Company was well established throughout Latin America. In 1914, it already operated sales offices in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela, and when World War I closed Europe off to business, the region served as the site of Ford’s first extensive overseas expansion. Production began in Buenos Aires in 1917 and in São Paulo in 1920 and quickly spread to most major Latin American cities. By 1925 Ford had a near monopoly on the car and truck trade in Brazil—60 percent to 17 percent for General Motors—with over four million in sales and dealers throughout the country, including in Belém, the Amazon’s major Atlantic port. Three years later, Ford would have seven hundred agencies and more than two thousand service garages in Brazil. The sturdy, high-off-the-ground Model T was particularly popular in the country’s rugged backlands, serving, as it did in the rural United States, as an all-terrain vehicle for unpaved and rutted roads. Ford dealers sent caravans of cars, tractors, and trucks on publicity tours, parading them before audiences of up to a hundred thousand people in dozens of cities and towns during the day and screening films depicting Ford assembly lines and factories at night. In some regions, Ford trucks were converted into public buses and Model T engines were used to run cotton gins and sugar mills.4

  Consul de Lima was from southern São Paulo, the prosperous heart of his country’s industrializing south, whose elites viewed the equatorial Amazon much the way northern US industrialists looked at southern states, as torpidly rural, economically backward, and beset by racial conflicts. Ford’s first autobiography, My Life and Work, had recently been translated into Portuguese and was widely read among members of São Paulo’s business and political class. Throughout the 1920s, paulistas, as residents of São Paulo are called, took the lead in building Brazil’s modern highway system and practically erected a cult of Henry Ford, understanding Fordism to be the antithesis of what the rest of Brazil was and the model of what it needed to become if it was to progress: industrial, rational, wage-based, and prosperous. A graduate of Syracuse University and a longtime resident of New York, de Lima had to have known Ford’s opinion of Jews. He nonetheless pronounced the carmaker the “Moses of the twentieth century,” who would turn the Amazon into the Promised Land. Ford’s translator, José Bento Monteiro Lobato, also from São Paulo, called him the “Jesus Christ of industry” and described his life story as the “Messianic Gospel of the Future.”* “For Brazil,” he said, “there is no literature or study more fruitful than Henry Ford’s book.” Farther north of São Paulo, in the provincial town of Uberabinha, around the time of de Lima’s campaign to woo Ford’s attention, a local newspaper worked with business leaders to raise money to erect a statue to Henry Ford, in honor of the role his car played in opening up the back-land states of Goiás and Mato Grosso.5

  FOR HIS PART, Ford must have welcomed de Lima’s attentions and the unreserved admiration of men like Lobato and other paulistas. He was sixty-one years old in 1925 and, though unparalleled in wealth and prominence, had, starting with his opposition to World War I, suffered a string of political rebukes. And having been denied Muscle Shoals by, in his opinion, shortsighted and self-interested politicians, he must have viewed the cooperation offered by de Lima and other Brazilian statesmen as evidence that the Amazon valley provided a better opportunity to realize his industrial pastoralism than did the lower Tennessee River.

  Ford greeted Consul de Lima in his office at the new River Rouge complex and, though still uncommitted, took the opportunity of the meeting to recapture a lost innocence. On display for the Brazilian diplomat in Dearborn that day was not the Henry Ford who swore by the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and increasingly defended a “white man’s code.” Nor was it the man who loosed Harry Bennett’s “service men” on his factory floor, with their “guns, sticks, and other weapons, . . . enforcing obscure rules at their whim” and refusing to let workers sit, ever. It was not the Ford who presided over a factory where workers, not allowed to talk, learned how to speak without moving their lips, a skill they called “fordization of the face.” It was not the Ford of the speedup, the man who by the late 1920s embodied the inhumanity of assembly line production, which turned the workers themselves into machines. Not the Ford who by that time was condemned in countless exposés and novels as the sponsor of the worst dehumanizing effects of mass industrial production.

  Rather, de Lima met a Henry Ford thrust back to the mid-1910s, a man confident that he could wed industrial efficiency to human fulfillment. The Brazilian recounted the “simple speech and modest manner” with which Ford received him. Throughout their meeting, Ford remained standing, which a more observant guest with firsthand knowledge of the Rouge would have taken as an example of Ford’s ability to turn his own manias into industrial policy, a subtle caution against the promises to come. But de Lima was an enthusiast, and he saw Ford’s restlessness as vitality. After the two men discussed the nuts and bolts of the matter, how much land Brazil was willing to concede to the motor company, along with tax and tariff issues, Ford became expansive.

  He asked the Brazilian about the wages rubber tappers received. Thirty-six to fifty cents a day, de Lima answered; Ford replied that he had “no doubt that he would pay up to five dollars a day for a good worker.” Brazilians, he said, had the right to work as “free men,” not as “slaves.” His principal concern was not the number of hours he got for his wages but the productivity of the labor force. True, he told de Lima, he strove for efficiency and took no stock in charity. Yet he asked that each worker only give to the job what he could. His factories, he said, employed the “blind, crippled and dumb,” who “work only three hours per day, without feeling humiliated about it.”

  Also making an appearance at that meeting was the Ford who absolutely believed that his system of industrial fairness was all that was needed to prevent wars and revolutions. When “Peter tries to rob Paul of that which he prizes most, making him do extra work without due compensation, then naturally reaction ensues,” he said. Ford even rehearsed his old Tennysonian internationalism for his Brazilian guest, telling the diplomat that when he did business he forgot that he was an American, “because a business man knows no country. He is born by chance in this or that country.” For Ford, the Amazon offered a fresh start in a place he imagined to be uncorrupted by unions, politicians, Jews, lawyers, militarists, and New York bank
ers, a chance to join not just factory and field but industry and community in a union that would yield, in addition to greater efficiency, fully realized men.

  “There will be schools,” Ford said of his plans for the Amazon, “experiment stations, canteens, stores, amusement parks, cinemas, athletic sports, hospitals, etc. for the comfort and happiness of those who work on the plantation.”