by Greg Grandin
Debt slavery, LaRue wrote, left frontline Amazon workers uncared for and disposable. Most were uneducated and illiterate, living in “mere huts” thatched with palm leaves. “Dirt floors are universal and when dry are not so bad, but when wet with the leakage from the roof, are terrible.” The workers went months without seeing other human beings, he said. “The loneliness is appalling.” Beds or any kind of furniture were uncommon, and a “family is lucky if there are hammocks enough to go around”; most slept “two or three to a hammock.” Children sold themselves to riverboats, “glad to work, like dogs for nothing but their food.”
LaRue told Ford that his team tried to give quinine to a man with malaria “almost in dying condition” only to have it snatched away by his creditor, who “laughed at the poor devil as he drove him back to work. It made our blood boil, but we were helpless.”
Above the traders stood Brazil’s aristocratic elite, “young men of wealth” who lived in the Amazon’s provincial cities, unconcerned with “bettering the condition of the forest people.” Indeed, the very word upriver filled them with “dread.” Here again LaRue’s account seems finely tuned to Ford’s fixations, for the carmaker must have imagined Belém to be the Amazon’s version of Detroit’s Grosse Pointe, home to the pampered scions of inherited wealth—Ford called them “parasites”—untroubled in their manors and mansions by the problems of the world from which they profited. If the Amazon’s urban rich were to brave the jungle’s “terrors and discomforts,” LaRue wrote, it would be to execute a program not of reform but of exploitation. Most of the local elite occupied themselves with “dress and dissipation,” a Brazilian variation of the trumpery-and-trinket consumerism Ford preached against at home, or with “politics,” which for Ford was indistinguishable from corruption.7
Native rubber-tapper family on the Tapajós, around the time of Cal LaRue’s trip.
The real lords of the rubber trade, LaRue told his boss, were the foreign-owned export houses and financial firms, which were “utterly heartless toward their victims.” Because of their monopoly, they paid next to nothing to the traders who floated the latex downriver to Belém. Of these foreign interests, LaRue singled out the British as being particularly indifferent to the value of human life. Whether or not this was true, his charge of British callowness tapped into Ford’s Anglophobia. LaRue’s account was particularly resonant in the wake of the two-decade-old Putumayo scandal, which in 1907 exposed the profiting of a British rubber corporation from the enslavement, torture, starvation, murder, and rape of thousands of Amazonian Indians. These atrocities occurred much farther to the west, in the borderlands that separated Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, but LaRue suggested that London’s mercantile ruthlessness continued unabated on the Tapajós. British companies were sending “families up the Tapajós to collect rubber without any provision for their care and shelter whatever.” When Ford’s emissary inquired as to how these people, especially the children, would fare, a company representative cavalierly said, “Oh, none of these children will ever come back anyway.”8
LaRue ended his report with a prediction sure to arouse Ford’s self-image as a man with the power to pull humanity from the brink: “They will all die.”
A DECADE HAD passed since Ford’s feud with Theodore Roosevelt over their competing visions of Americanism, and Ford seemed to be at the top of not only his industry but American, and therefore world, capitalism. Yet as is often the case in the course of great empires, periods experienced as triumphs can be understood with the benefit of hindsight as quietly marking a change in fortune; 1927 was such a moment for Ford’s motor company.
At the end of that year, the company rolled out its Model A. The new car was a critical and commercial triumph, putting the company again in the forefront of its industry, taking over 45 percent of the market by the eve of the Great Depression. But in retrospect, the switchover forced Ford to revise a number of his most cherished beliefs.
For years, Ford had ignored the advance of rivals like General Motors, led by Alfred Sloan, who cut into Model T sales by offering cars with shock absorbers, gas gauges, gearshifts, and speedometers. Ford believed his competitors’ use of cheap credit and their yearly stylistic changes were perversions of the consumer society he had helped create. “We have lost our buying sense and fallen entirely under the spell of salesmanship,” Ford said. “The American of a generation ago was a shrewd buyer. He knew values in terms of utility and dollars. But nowadays the American people seem to listen and be sold; that is, they do not buy. They are sold things; things are pushed on them.” Cheap credit was distorting the market, he thought. “We have dotted lines for this, that and the other thing—all of them taking up income before it is earned.” He remained committed—at times violently so—to his ideal of manufacturing one infinitely interchangeable product year after year. Once, while he was away on a trip to Europe, Ford’s engineers made a number of style changes to the Model T, stretching it out a few inches and giving it a smoother ride. On his return, Ford circled the new model a few times and then proceeded to destroy it, ripping off its doors and shattering its windows before walking away. He repeated throughout the first months of 1927 that “the Ford car,” sales of which by that point had plummeted to an all-time low, “will continue to be made the same way.”9
Until it wasn’t. In reluctantly agreeing to abandon the car he had made for two decades and had built the River Rouge to make for two decades more, Ford accommodated himself to the new consumerism. Henceforth, he would have to learn how to satisfy the diverse tastes of consumers rather than lecture them about what their tastes should be. He began spending heavily on advertising, pitching yearly superficial style changes as part of his company’s sales strategy. Ford also grudgingly accepted the fact that future sales growth was no longer based on driving the sales price of a new car as low as it would go—which only led to competition with America’s growing stock of used cars—but on expanding the customer base for new automobiles through easy loans. So Ford established the Universal Credit Corporation, which allowed Americans to sign on the dotted line and purchase a new $550 Model A roadster for $150 down and $12.50 a month. Yearly style changes also meant he had to abandon a cherished component of his village industry program: the policy that allowed factory workers to take off part of the year (usually May to August) to go farm. When Ford was making the same car year in and year out, it was possible to overproduce parts and then stockpile them for use during the months the worker would be in the field. But after 1927, workers had to stay at the factory year-round, as such stockpiling was no longer possible (the production of parts had to be closely calibrated to the rhythm of actual sales) and the assembly line had to be annually retooled to make the next year’s model part.10
The year 1927 also marked the completion of the River Rouge plant, hailed the world over as a monument to industrial modernism. But it also meant the ascension of Harry Bennett and the complete defeat of the humane industrialism that for many, particularly those outside Detroit, Ford came to represent with his Five Dollar Day. Workers at Highland Park had already experienced both the speedup and increased coercion and surveillance. Yet those were nothing compared with the monstrous pace of the new factory.
“Highland Park was civilized,” said Walter Reuther, who as head of the United Auto Workers union was the man most responsible, years later, for ending Bennett’s reign of terror, “but the Rouge was a jungle.” With the transition to the Rouge also came the purging of a number of the company’s best engineers and officials, often for no reason other than that they represented a threat to Bennett’s power or because their intelligence and independence challenged Ford’s autocracy. The firings were vicious and cruel, and most often carried out by Bennett himself. In a notable instance, Bennett asked Frank Kulick, a respected engineer who got on Ford’s bad side for having suggested, a few years earlier, that the T be upgraded for more power, to take a look at a car that was supposedly making an odd noise. When Kulick climbed on the f
ender and bent his head under the hood, Bennett stepped on the gas and sped the car out the factory gates, swerving so that Kulick was thrown to the ground. Bennett then turned the car back into the factory yard and locked the gates, and the engineer was never allowed in again. Another twenty-year Ford man, driving with his family on vacation in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, was pulled over by a state trooper who relayed a message that his job was terminated. Ford repeatedly humiliated William Knudsen, the engineer credited with creating a network of Model T assembly plants around the world, pushing him to quit and take a job with GM, where he would turn its Chevrolet division into one of Ford’s chief competitors. Ford felt Knudsen was too independent and too allied with his son Edsel, who was trying to modernize the company. “I let him go,” Ford later admitted in a moment of candor, “not because he wasn’t good, but because he was too good—for me.”11
The migration of the lion’s share of production to the Rouge, Ford’s purging of many of the men who made the T a world phenomenon, his growing dependence on Bennett and other thugs, his increasing resort to shop-floor intimidation, and his growing nativism coincided with a psychic turn inward. By 1927, Ford was into the sixth decade of his life, and what was in the past taken as shy awkwardness had rigidified into fortresslike solitude, garrisoned by blasts of intense paranoia and cruelty, increasingly directed at his only son, whom he taunted and tormented mercilessly. Ford constantly embarrassed him in public, countermanding his initiatives and making it clear that while Edsel was nominally the company’s president he had no real authority save that granted by his father. When Edsel, for instance, as part of his effort to rationalize the company’s notoriously anarchic bookkeeping system, had a new office building constructed at the Rouge to house accountants, Henry vindictively abolished the Accounting Department. Increasingly, the kind of expansive goodwill on display for Consul de Lima was reserved exclusively for public relations spectacles. “The isolation of Henry Ford’s mind is about as near perfect as it is possible to make it,” was how Samuel Marquis, the minister who headed the Sociological Department in its early, benevolent years, described his aging former employer.12
It was also in 1927 that Ford’s anti-Semitism finally caught up with him. Since 1924, the Dearborn Independent had focused much of its anti-Jewish venom against Aaron Sapiro, a lawyer and activist who had organized farm cooperatives throughout the United States and Canada. In Sapiro, Ford undoubtedly saw a competitor for the affections of farmers, someone who produced more tangible results in helping them obtain better prices for crops than any of Ford’s many schemes could. “Jewish Exploitation of Farmers’ Organization,” ran the headline of the inaugural attack on Sapiro. “Monopoly Traps Operate under Guise of ‘Marketing Associations.’ ” The organization, the article explained, was “born in the fertile, fortune-seeking brain of a young Jew”—Sapiro. After suffering months of similar attacks, linking him to a broader conspiracy intent on subordinating American farms to Jewish money interests, Sapiro filed suit against Ford, claiming defamation and demanding a million dollars in damages. The press salivated at the idea of seeing Ford on the witness stand, hoping for a repeat of the kind of spectacle that occurred in 1919 when Ford sued the Chicago Tribune for libel and gave the impression that he was illiterate. Ford had avoided the process server for weeks, until one day, while he was sitting in his car watching planes take off from Ford Field with his window rolled down, a summons dropped in his lap. The carmaker said that he would refuse to appear but finally settled on a March 31 court date after being threatened with legal action. In the week leading up to his scheduled testimony, thousands of people crowded the small Michigan courtroom in anticipation, while the New York Times issued a challenge: “If Mr. Ford is convinced, as he must be if he is an honest man, that the matter printed in the Dearborn Independent truthfully states an abhorrent and appalling menace to the people of the United States, it is hard to see how he can refrain” from using the publicity generated by the trial to paint “the danger in such colors before the eyes of this entire country, and in fact of the whole world, that the facts will be established beyond challenge.” But if he didn’t truly believe the threat was real, the Times continued, he needed to denounce the “race calumny” that had brought “pain and suffering” to “millions of American citizens.” The trial offered Ford an unparalleled opportunity to clearly state his belief. “Will he seize it?” the paper asked. “Will he rise to it?”13
He didn’t. On the eve of his scheduled appearance, while driving home on Michigan Avenue, Ford claimed, he was sideswiped by a Studebaker and pushed off the side of the road. Many at the time, and a number of historians since, believe the accident, which sent him to the hospital but spared him his court date, to have been staged. His lawyer rescheduled his appearance, but in the end Ford settled out of court.14
Ford also agreed to issue a statement apologizing for his anti-Semitism, written by Louis Marshall, head of the American Jewish Committee and one of Ford’s chief critics. It was “pretty bad,” said Harry Bennett, who tried to read Marshall’s prepared text over the phone to his boss. “I don’t care how bad it is, you just settle it up,” Ford cut him off. The retraction was published worldwide on July 8, 1927, carried by Hearst newspapers, the International News, the Universal Service, the Associated Press, and the United Press news services: “I deem it to be my duty as an honorable man to make amends for the wrong done to the Jews as fellow-men and brothers, by asking their forgiveness for the harm that I have unintentionally committed, by retracting so far as lies within my power the offensive charges laid at their door.” Later that year, Ford shuttered the Independent and sold off its presses.15
It is in this context of domestic constraint, contraction, and compromise that Ford sought out a new space of freedom.
CHAPTER 7
EVERYTHING JAKE
AS IF TO CONFIRM THAT THE LOGIC PUSHING FORD TO THE AMAZON had moved beyond the laws of supply and demand, by the time Carl LaRue issued his report on the Tapajós valley, the economic rationale behind Ford’s interest in rubber no longer held. Two years earlier, just after his lunch with Firestone, Ford was told by one of his men that high prices had stimulated rubber planting on such a large scale that the cost of latex was bound to fall. Also the Dutch were clearly not going to join the British cartel after all, which rendered Churchill’s proposal toothless. It made more sense, Ford was advised, to forgo the plantation idea and just open a purchasing office in the Amazon. And sure enough, even before Ford gave the final go-ahead, world rubber prices began to tumble; soon the cost of latex would be substantially lower than it was in the 1910s.1
Ford pressed forward. In June 1927, he assigned power of attorney to two of his employees, O. Z. Ide and W. L. Reeves Blakeley, and dispatched them to Brazil. The men were charged with negotiating a land concession with the governor of the state of Pará, the jurisdiction where the property recommended by LaRue was located, and incorporating a subsidiary company under Brazilian law to oversee the plantation.
IDE AND BLAKELEY, both thirty-seven years old, and their wives traveled to New York by train in late June. If Ford thought himself an internationalist, his far-flung company provided him with a useful foreign service. For whatever mission, his agents could rely on Ford dealers to organize the trip, establish contacts, arrange accommodations, and provide transportation—a Lincoln if status warranted, otherwise a Model T or A.
In Manhattan, the Dearborn emissaries were shepherded around in a “Lincoln car” by “Mr. Leahr, of the branch,” who helped them obtain their visas and prepare for their departure on the British Booth Line’s SS Cuthbert. The two couples took in the city and enjoyed a few meals, including one at the Waldorf-Astoria. They also caught Oscar Hammerstein’s Desert Song at the Casino Theater, the story of a French general sent to Morocco to suppress an anticolonial Arab uprising led by the mysterious “Red Shadow,” who turns out to be the general’s son. Ide wrote in his diary that it was “as pretty and interesting an ope
rette as I have ever seen.”
Ide was enjoying himself. But just before setting sail he got a sense of his partner’s temperament and what he saw didn’t bode well for the success of their charge. Blakeley got “hot” when shown his sleeping quarters. They weren’t up to his standards, he said, and he threatened to call the whole trip off. Blakeley, of course, didn’t have the power to do anything of the kind, but he did bully the captain to move a ship officer out of his stateroom. Placated, Blakeley and his wife boarded the ship.
On the Cuthbert, Ide eyed Blakeley warily, yet the two-week cruise to Belém was uneventful. Blakeley had already been sent to Brazil once before by Ford, on a trip where he had met Jorge Villares. But it was Ide’s first sea voyage, and as the ship pulled away from the Brooklyn dock and sailed out of the Narrows, he wistfully noted the “filigree of Coney Island and Atlantic City.” He brought a dictionary with him and tried to learn Portuguese, but his interest soon waned. Ide’s “flesh and spirit” proved “a bit too weak to overcome the blissful lethargy and temptation to do nothing.” He surrendered to an endless bridge game, and within a few days the ship’s passengers, with the conventions of shore life behind them, gave up wearing their coats and neckties.
On July 7, the Cuthbert entered the Baía de Marajó, one of the Amazon’s many mouths, so enormous that land was not sighted until the eighth. Roughly four thousand miles long and beginning just a sliver east of the Pacific Ocean, the Amazon is the largest river system in the world, comprising about 15 percent of all the earth’s river water. The Mississippi discharges 41 percent of the runoff of the continental United States, but the Amazon expels twelve times as much—fifty-seven million gallons of water per second. Oceangoing vessels can travel deep into it, as far west as Iquitos in Peru.
