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

by Greg Grandin

  IF DE LIMA, quoted widely in the Brazilian press on the success of his Dearborn meeting, was the public face of the campaign to draw Ford to the Amazon, Jorge Dumont Villares played a stealthier role. From a wealthy and politically connected São Paulo coffee-growing family, Villares had arrived in Belém, the capital city of the Amazonian state of Pará, in the early 1920s. Despite the collapse of the rubber economy, there was still money to be made in the many schemes floated to revive the trade. As the nephew of the famed aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, the man Brazilians insist invented the airplane only to have the credit stolen by the Wright brothers, Villares, partial to linen suits and Panama hats, was relatively well known in elite circles. He was tall, thin, and a bit fussy, and he had a flair for the covert. Shortly after his arrival, he began to cobble together a loose confederacy of politicians, diplomats, and Ford officials, all with their own interests in luring Henry Ford to Brazil.6

  Villares’s first and most important ally in getting things moving was William Schurz, who served as Washington’s commercial attaché in Rio, though to the annoyance of the US ambassador he spent most of his time in the Amazon. “Generations of little men have nibbled, like mice, at the edges of the Amazonia,” Schurz later wrote in a book he authored on Brazil—a remark that could be taken as autobiographical. Schurz had joined the Department of Commerce in the early 1920s, just at the moment that its secretary, Herbert Hoover, was greatly expanding its reach. Hoover tripled Commerce’s budget and added three thousand employees, many of them attachés like Schurz, traveling salesmen of America’s growing economic ambition. These “hounds” for American business, as Hoover called them, tended to ignore the big-picture geopolitics that so occupied State Department diplomats. Instead they lobbied, often with a Glengarry Glen Ross–like aggressiveness, on behalf of a narrower range of interests specific to US corporations—as well as to themselves.7

  Schurz had been a member of the 1923 commission organized by Hoover’s Department of Commerce to study the possibility of reviving rubber production in the Amazon, part of Hoover’s campaign to counter Churchill’s proposed cartel. It was most likely from his experience on this commission that Schurz first realized the possibilities for profit, especially after the 1925 announcement by Pará’s new governor, Dionysio Bentes, that he would make jungle property available at no cost to anyone willing to cultivate rubber. As a US diplomat, Schurz couldn’t petition for land directly, so he allied with Villares, with the idea that they would use Hoover’s rubber crusade to sell their concession to an American corporation. Joining Schurz and Villares was Maurice Greite, an Englishman who lived in Belém and called himself “captain,” though no one knew of what. A longtime resident of the Amazon always on the lookout for the main chance, be it a lead mine or a land scheme, Greite quickly became more of a burden than an asset to Villares. But he did perform one useful service. He introduced Villares to Belém’s mayor, António Castro, and to Governor Bentes, two men whose allegiances would need to be secured if the plan was to have any chance of success. In exchange for a cut of the money, both officials pledged their support. The mayor promised not to oppose the transaction and the governor, in September 1926, granted Villares, Schurz, and Greite an option on 2.5 million acres in the lower Tapajós valley—one of the many places experts considered suitable for large-scale rubber cultivation. The three men had two years to either develop or sell the property. If they failed to do one or the other, they would lose their option and the land would revert back to the state.8

  At first, Schurz, from his embassy office in Rio, tried to interest Harvey Firestone. But when Firestone settled on Liberia, he turned his attention to the Ford Motor Company, writing letters to both Ford and his secretary, Ernest Liebold, hyping the possibilities of Amazonian rubber. As commercial attaché, Schurz had access to US government-funded research being carried out on rubber, which he passed on to Liebold before the Commerce Department could process it and make it available to other potential investors. At the same time, both he and Villares established contact with two men, W. L. Reeves Blakeley and William McCullough, whom Ford had sent to Belém after his meeting with de Lima to scout out potential locations for a rubber plantation. There is no evidence that Blakeley took money, yet documents indicate that McCullough did. Villares promised to pay him $18,000 for whatever help he could provide in making the deal move forward.9

  In the Amazon, Villares also began to enlist the services of the Belém-based US consul, John Minter. In this case, no money was proffered. But Villares’s conspiratorial air had a way of pulling in confidants. He whispered to Minter that plans were afoot to infect Southeast Asian rubber plantations with South American leaf blight, a fungus native to the Amazon that was often lethal to rubber trees. It would take only one epidemic of blight, in Ceylon or Malaysia, Villares told the US diplomat, to restore Brazil’s domination of the global market. “A word to the wise is sufficient,” Villares said to the consul. He fed Minter bits and pieces of information regarding his negotiations with US corporations, including the contacts he had made with the Ford Motor Company, drawing the American official into his intrigues. He said that he had “secretly planted a nursery of 500,000 seedlings on hidden unclaimed property adjacent to that which Ford is likely to take up,” so that Ford would have a ready stock of Hevea to begin planting once he committed to the project. The reason the nursery had to remain a secret, Villares said, was that powerful local interests were conspiring to stop the deal from going forward. Before long, Minter was cabling his superiors back in the State Department telling them that he was putting his office and staff at the service of Villares in his dealings with Ford. Villares’s next step, in late summer 1926, was to travel to Dearborn to pitch his proposal directly to Henry and Edsel Ford, having secured an audience probably through either McCullough or Blakeley, with whom Villares had established a friendship.

  Villares was a skilled sycophant, and in his meeting with father and son Ford, he tacked back and forth between fear and flattery to make his case. The Brazilian presented them with a rough-drawn map of the property, which included two towns named “Fordville” and “Edselville.”10 Building on Schurz’s spadework, he painted a fantastical picture of what could be accomplished in the Amazon, “the most fertile and healthy region in the tropical world.” The Brazilian drew up a wish-list contract, naming himself executor of the project and granting the company the unfettered right to extract gold, oil, timber, and even diamonds. Villares also promised Ford that he could harness hydroelectricity, import and export any material free of taxes and tariffs, and build roads, including two that would run three hundred miles up both banks of the Tapajós “into the vast wild rubber forests” of its headwaters, which would give Ford a complete monopoly over the valley’s latex production. He told Henry and Edsel that he would greatly prefer to make the land available to an American, but if no one came forward he might be forced to transfer it to other interests before his option expired. It was painful, Villares told the Fords, to “even think that some of my homeland will go into the hands of Japs, Britishers, and Germans.” “The call has been heard,” Villares concluded his presentation, “and the surest guarantee that the enterprise will be a great success is that the first to answer the call was Ford. He never retreats. He never fails.”11

  The meeting left Villares hopeful. From Detroit’s Cadillac Hotel, he wrote his fellow conspirator Greite and urged him to be patient: “Say nothing,” for things with Dearborn were going well. “Tear this letter up,” he instructed the captain.12

  Ford seemed to be hooked. Still, Villares was anxious. He left Detroit for New York, where he composed another letter, this one to Blakeley. If Ford didn’t act quickly, he wrote his closest ally in the company, “Some one will realize it soon.” “When you were down there,” he asked, “did you notice a curious thing: ‘The faith everyone has in Ford?’ The magic in that name has penetrated into the hearts of the most humble; it has got into mine. They have faith in Ford, so have I. Tho
usands await his coming; he will come.”13

  ____________

  *The work of fiction most associated with Henry Ford is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, which describes a future in which a dystopic Fordism reigns supreme: babies are manufactured on assembly lines, the T has replaced the Christian Cross, and “History is bunk” stands as the official motto of an indolent, purposeless society overcome by a narcissism spawned by technological abundance. But six years earlier Lobato wrote a novel set in 2228, in an America transformed by Ford’s “pragmatic idealism” into an exemplar of mechanical efficiency and wealth, one that has allowed for the transcendence of class conflict. “Ford proved,” Lobato writes, “that there was no antagonism between capital and labor.” Yet “The Clash of Races,” as the novel was originally called in Portuguese, is as bleak as Huxley’s. Despite predicting the suppression of class struggle, the book imagines a world in which racial conflict has yet to be resolved. Its narrative focuses on a presidential contest where, as a result of a split in the white vote between a white man and woman, Jim Roy, an eloquent, intelligent black candidate, becomes president. The backlash against Roy’s victory leads to the sterilization of all African Americans and, in unclear circumstances, the president-elect’s death, which results in a restoration of white political power. Despite Lobato’s faith in Ford’s redemptive powers, his book, written in 1925, before Ford committed to the Amazon, envisioned a troubled future for the region: what was Brazil would be split in half, divided into a progressive and prosperous south, joined by Argentina and Uruguay, and a northern, stagnant “tropical republic” (José Bento Monteiro Lobato, A onda verde e O presidente Negro, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1956, pp. 202–6, 214).

  CHAPTER 6

  THEY WILL ALL DIE

  FORD REMAINED UNDECIDED, BUT HIS MEETING WITH JORGE Villares did prompt him to send Carl D. LaRue, a botanist at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, to Brazil to “find a good area somewhere” to plant rubber. LaRue had been to the Amazon once before, in 1923 as the head of Herbert Hoover’s Department of Commerce–sponsored expedition aimed at surveying locations for rubber production, the same one US commercial attaché William Schurz was on. On that trip, the botanist covered a wide radius of over 25,000 miles, and his findings, along with those of other expeditions, identified several suitable locations scattered up and down the Tapajós River. These were mostly on public property, which Ford could have obtained directly through a government concession at little or no cost. This time, though, LaRue didn’t revisit any of the sites he had scouted earlier but rather made a beeline for a fifty-mile strip along the east bank of the Tapajós, part of the land optioned to Villares, Schurz, and Greite. Later, once the details of the deal surfaced—a deal in which Ford essentially purchased property he probably could have gotten for free—rumors started to circulate that the Michigan professor was part of the con. LaRue denied the allegations, yet Ford never trusted him again. “Do not think we would benefit any by using him,” was Ford’s handwritten comment in the margins of LaRue’s subsequent offer to help get the rubber plantation up and running.1

  Whether or not LaRue was involved in Villares’s swindle, his report—the main source of most everything Ford would know of the Amazon before committing to his rubber project—was like catnip to the industrialist-philosopher. Its first half made the botanical case for the Tapajós valley. “The vegetation is very luxuriant,” with plenty of rainfall and good drainage, LaRue wrote. Its soil was rich, a palette of dark hues, red and yellow. “We saw very fine old trees,” and “there is no question” that many of them would yield up to a gallon of latex a day. The site sat high enough to be out of the reach of mosquitoes, composed mostly of plateaus cut with a few streams and no swamps, making it a perfect place for a settlement. The forests could be timbered for profitable export to the United States, and the potential for hydropower was “considerable.” The Tapajós valley, LaRue concluded, was superior, often vastly so, to other established rubber-producing regions, such as Sumatra in Southeast Asia.2

  But it was the second section of the report, laying out the living conditions of the valley, that must have entranced Ford. It was his vision of hell.

  TRAVELING ALONG THE Tapajós during the second decade of Brazilian rubber’s long twilight, LaRue painted a picture Dickensian in its attention to misery, one that in every way was the opposite of the world Ford believed he had created back in Michigan. “The people are everywhere poor and forlorn,” the botanist wrote Ford, “most of them are penniless and without hope for the future. Many of them have not even had a piece of money in their hands for years.” Children enjoy “no school, no play, no advancement and no hope even of life itself, for they are doomed to an early death from hard work, poor food and disease,” he recounted. “Thin, yellow and weak,” with “drawn set faces,” they have “nothing” but despair “until death overtakes them. They have ceased to hope for any amelioration of their lot.”

  During the previous decade, Ford, as part of his broader restructuring of industrial and human relations, had become interested in health care and worker safety. However much his concern may have been driven by a desire to create a more efficient workforce, Ford’s unrivaled wealth allowed him to move beyond self-interest to provide decent medical services to many in the larger Detroit community. In 1915, he established his flagship namesake hospital, filled with state-of-the-art equipment and renowned for its expertise, where “everyone, rich or poor, paid the same nominal fees for the best care possible.”3

  So LaRue was careful to record the health condition of the jungle’s rubber tappers and nut gatherers who would make up Ford’s labor force. “Some of these men are magnificent specimens,” the botanist said, “but one sees a great many fever-stricken bodies among them. Many also have horrible wounds and sores on their legs and feet. They are always nearly naked, covered merely by rags which have been mended upon mended until the whole costume is fairly quilted with patches; the patches themselves being full of holes.” LaRue would “never forget” the “sight of a little nursing baby quite naked and completely smeared over with clay from the wet dirt floor,” reporting that each household at any moment had at least one person laid low with malaria, groaning and tossing in bed.

  The majority of children suffered from hookworm, a disease that had received much attention from public health reformers in the United States, where it was prevalent among poor dirt farmers in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Left untreated, it resulted in extreme anemia, distended stomachs, and, as one study put it, a “craving for eating earth and all sorts of unnatural things.” LaRue told Ford that he saw many, many children in the “clay eating stage” of the infection who had only a “few weeks to live.” Matters were made worse by the poor diet—when “there is any food at all to be had”—consisting nearly entirely of dried pirarucu, an Amazonian catfish, and manioc. Milk and butter were “unknown,” bread was found “only in larger towns,” there was no fruit, not even bananas, and green vegetables were “very scarce.” Medicine, including quinine for malaria, was sold at prohibitive prices, out of the reach of most. The afflicted sought relief in “bark and leaves,” local remedies that LaRue allowed might have minor remedial benefits but were more likely “totally worthless, if not even injurious.”4

  LaRue explicitly linked the misery he witnessed to the region’s system of debt peonage, which he knew would be of particular interest to Ford. Born the year the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, Ford liked to contrast his industrial wage system with slavery (there was always a porous border between how he viewed the US South and the Amazon). And so did LaRue, who echoed a genre of reform writing common to the time, which opposed America’s rural, impoverished southern states to the industrialized and prosperous north. Rubber tappers, he told Ford, were “worse off than slaves were in any decent slave-keeping country,” since “slaves, like horses, had to be treated decently to make them profitable.” Cash, he explained, was practically never us
ed to pay for rubber, as tappers handed over their latex to “some Syrian on the river” to pay off a previously advanced “grub-stake”—food, clothing, a rifle and ammunition, knives to tap the trees, or some other necessity of life. By Syrian, LaRue was referring broadly to the Arab and Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Levant who stepped in to take over a good part of the rubber trade after the economic collapse wiped out the larger Brazilian merchants. These traders advanced “lowest in quality merchandise at three to twenty times its retail value, while buying nuts and latex at well below market price. Thus the rubber tapper was “enslaved through debt,” constantly “working to pay for produce he has already bought.”5

  LaRue illustrated his point with this story: “A man brought about a hundred pounds of Brazil nuts into a shop. The dealer threw them into a store room without even weighing them and asked the man what he wanted. He wanted some rope and took about thirty feet of smaller rope. Then he wanted some food. The buyer asked if he had any more nuts and said those he had brought only paid for the rope.” And this: “A man brought rubber on board a launch . . . on which we were traveling. The rubber was in small balls strung on light sticks. The stick weighed not over five pounds, but the buyer docked the man about three dollars for the wood and took two hides he had brought also, without allowing anything for them. The man protested and asked where his pay for the hides came in, but they were in the hold then, and the buyer merely shrugged his shoulders.”

  “Instances such as these,” LaRue told Ford, “could be found every day.”

  Ford certainly recognized this system, not just because when he saw “Syrian” he probably read “Jew,” but because he had confronted one like it back in Detroit, where “petty empires” run by ethnic bosses took advantage of the high wages Ford paid to immigrant workers, charging exorbitant amounts for apartments and retail goods. To free his employees from these mini-fiefdoms, Ford established a credit union, both to encourage savings and to make low-interest loans available so workers didn’t have to go to an “outside Shylock for assistance.” He also opened up factory pharmacies and commissaries, which, unlike the infamous “company store” that kept workers perpetually indebted, provided employees a wide array of high-quality products at low prices, often below cost.6