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

by Greg Grandin

  On Sundays, when outlying Mundurucú traveled to the mission to trade their rubber, the priests and nuns urged them to attend mass. Most did, motivated less by faith than by deference to the respected Franciscans. Children sat in the front with the nuns, men took the pews, remaining in a “rigid kneeling position” throughout the service, and women sat cross-legged on the floor of the center aisle, nursing their babies as the priest said mass.

  Well into the 1950s, the Mundurucú continued to have their own creation myth, as well as enchanted explanations for the mundane suffering and joys of life, some of which harmonized with Catholic theology: During the time before the beginning of time, they believed, gardens bloomed without labor and axes cut of their own accord and the only requirement was a divine injunction not to look directly at the work taking place. But the Mundurucú looked. The “axes stopped chopping, the tree trunks grew hard, and men thereafter have had to swing the axes themselves.”

  Yet the idea of original sin did not take hold, nor did the concept of damnation. To the degree the Mundurucú believed in hell, they thought it a “particular destination of white people.”15

  ROGGE FINALLY CAUGHT up with Johansen and Tolksdorf a day upriver from the mission. He found the two men presiding over a large Mundurucú work crew and paying them in kind, with material purchased from a downriver trading post. After all the derelictions of the two renegades, it was their defiance of the company directive to pay wages that put an end to their adventures. Ford was adamant on this point. Indeed, when he discussed the benefits his rubber plantation would bring to Amazon dwellers, he usually did so in terms of wages. “What the people of the interior of Brazil need,” Ford declared, just at the moment Captain Oxholm was bungling the unloading of the Ormoc and Farge in Santarém, “is to have their economic life stabilized by fair returns for their labor paid in cash.”16

  Among the Mundurucú, however, money as a standard of value was unknown. Gift giving was the defining feature of their culture and economy; the exchange of food, knives, guns, and cooking utensils created a sense of identity and bound individuals, households, and settlements together in a diffuse network of reciprocity. By the time of Rogge’s arrival, the Mundurucú system of generalized sharing was being increasingly replaced by barter relations whereby individuals negotiated their exchange item for item.* Still, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, each transaction remained highly personalized, unlike the kind of cold, faceless exchanges associated with cash economies.†

  Rogge himself was well aware of Mundurucú custom in that regard. An observant Catholic, he had attended Christmas Eve mass at the mission and was particularly fascinated by the nuns’ handing out presents after the service ended. Over the years, the Catholic outpost had accumulated a large collection of dolls of “all shapes and sizes,” which had been donated by “every country on the globe.” And each Christmas the nuns would gather up the dolls distributed the previous year, dress them in newly sewn clothes, and hand them out to the next generation of girls. Rogge understood that the nuns were trying to imbue gift giving with a specific religious meaning to celebrate the birth of Christ (as well as to teach young children the virtue of wearing clothes). But when he was confronted with the wayward agents, Rogge’s ethnographic sensibility failed him. He accused Johansen and Tolksdorf of theft, of paying their indigenous laborers with cheap goods and pocketing the money. The two tried to defend themselves, insisting that the Mundurucú didn’t “want money.” Rogge would not relent, and after reciting the litany of scandalous stories he had heard about the men during his travels, he stripped them of their account book and discharged them. Yet whatever the motives of Johansen and Tolksdorf, when Rogge requested that the Mundurucú continue collecting rubber seeds, they refused to be paid in cash and instead demanded merchandise for the labor. So he negotiated exactly what they wanted in order to continue their gathering.

  It was late January when Rogge finally headed back to Fordlandia. Carried quickly on waters made swift by the seasonal rains, the lumberjack descended in twenty minutes rapids that took three or four hours to climb. He thought about the gifts he had received from the Franciscan missionaries, which included a photograph of “Indian life,” a small wooden toy, and “some Indian relics,” and pledged to always keep them as a “remembrance of my Christmas spent among the Mundurucú Indians in the interior of Brazil.” As he approached Fordlandia, Rogge felt satisfied that he had accomplished the job that he had been “sent into the heart of Brazil to do.” Dearborn, perhaps kept in the dark about his accommodation to local custom, was too. Henry Ford named him plantation manager shortly after his return, following Victor Perini’s sudden departure owing to health reasons.

  “WE LIVE AS we dream, alone,” is just one of the many thoughts that move Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, as he journeys upriver in search of Kurtz. Rogge, too, found the jungle educative, although decidedly less existential. “One of the things I learned on this trip,” he recounted a few years later as he reflected on his travels in the upper Tapajós, “is that no white man can live and be healthy on native diet and no matter how much good food you may have with you it is advisable to have a cook along that is known to be clean and can prepare food under trying conditions.” The lesson could seem trivial, except for the fact that food was indeed a significant source of woe, and often conflict, in the jungle. In fact, exactly one year after his pursuit of Johansen and Tolksdorf, a fight over food, sparked by a hastily made decision by Rogge himself, nearly caused the destruction of Fordlandia.

  ____________

  *Historian Bryan McCann, who has written widely on Brazilian music and popular culture, notes that at this time the upper Tapajós was only tenuously linked to southern Brazil and relatively recent migrant communities were receptive to new dance and music trends coming in from the Atlantic. The animated, African-based swing of the Charleston would have lent itself to the kind of informal communal celebration Luxmoore describes at Villa Nova. Residents of the village probably had seen one of the many short films or cartoons from the mid-1920s featuring the dance, either in Santarém or in one of the moving cinemas set up by itinerant movie men who roamed the backlands (figures memorialized in Bye Bye Brasil [1979] and Cinema Aspirina e Urubus [2006]). McCann also reports that the Charleston was a dance form that could easily be translated into many different cultures; in 1927, Jean Renoir’s Charleston Parade featured an alien who lands in postapocalypse Paris and learns to do the Charleston (Devon Record Office, Exeter, UK, Charles Luxmoore, Journal 2, 1928, 521 M–1/SS/9).

  *It would not be until the 1980s, when gold was found on their land, that the Mundurucú would completely adopt money as a universal standard of value and exchange.

  †There is a temptation to think of this kind of personalized network of gift giving as the antithesis of the rationalized industrial wage system the Ford Motor Company helped pioneer back in Michigan. Yet “wages” for Ford were always more than a simple unit of value. They were a state of mind, the key to his success both as a manufacturer and as a social engineer, as enchanted and filled with cultural meaning as was Mundurucú gift giving and bartering. “On the cost sheet,” Ford said, “wages are mere figures; out in the world, wages are bread boxes and coal bins, babies’ cradles and children’s education—family comforts and contentment.” Nor was he above using gifts to create personal bonds of loyalty. He paid Harry Bennett, for instance, only a small yearly salary yet showered him with presents, including several yachts, houses, and even an island mansion in the Huron River. “Never,” he once tutored Bennett, “give anything without strings attached to it” (Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 132; “Life with Henry,” Time, October 8, 1951).

  CHAPTER 15

  KILL ALL THE AMERICANS

  IN DECEMBER 1930, WORKERS HAD FINISHED PAINTING THE FORD logo on the landmark that distinguishes Fordlandia to this day: its 150-foot tower and 150,000-gallon water tank. “When the view is had from the deck of a river steamer,” wrote Ogden Pierrot,
an assistant commercial attaché assigned to the US embassy in Rio, of his trip to Fordlandia, “the imposing structures of the industrial section of the town, with the tremendous water tank and the smokestack of the power house, catch the view and create a sensation of real wonderment.”

  He went on:

  This is not unusual when it is considered that for several days the only signs of life that have relieved the monotony of the trip have been occasional settlements consisting of two or three thatched huts against a background of green jungle. A feeling akin to disbelief comes over the visitor on suddenly seeing projected before him a picture which may be considered a miniature of a modern industrial city. Smokestacks belching forth a heavy cloud formed by waste wood used as fuel, a locomotive industriously puffing along ahead of flat cars laden with machinery just received from the United States, steam cranes performing their endless half turns and reverses for the purposes of retrieving heavy cargo from the holds of lighters moored alongside the long dock, heavy tractors creeping around the sides of the hills dragging implements behind them for loosening and leveling the earth, others heaving at taut cables attached to stumps of tremendous proportions—all combine to increase the astonishment caused in the uninitiated visitors to this district, who had no conceptions of what had been accomplished in the brief space of slightly over two years.

  Industrial sublime: Fordlandia’s powerhouse turbine.

  Much of the piping that would provide indoor plumbing to the town was scheduled to be completed the following year. But as Christmas approached, workers bolted to the tower one feature that had nothing to do with water.1

  IT TOOK DEARBORN’S purchasing agents some effort to find a factory whistle that wouldn’t rust from the jungle humidity. Once they did, they shipped it to Fordlandia, where it was perched on top of the water tower, above the tall trees, giving it a seven-mile range. The whistle was piercing enough not only to reach dispersed road gangs and fieldhands but to be heard across the river, where even those not affiliated with Fordlandia began to pace their day to its regularly scheduled blows. The whistle was supplemented by another icon of industrial factory work: pendulum punch time clocks, placed at different locations around the plantation, that recorded exactly when each employee began and ended his workday.2

  In Detroit, immigrant workers by the time they got to Ford’s factories, even if they were peasants and shepherds, had had ample opportunity to adjust to the meter of industrial life. The long lines at Ellis Island, the clocks that hung on the walls of depots and waiting rooms, the fairly precise schedules of ships and trains, and standardized time that chopped the sun’s daily arc into zones combined to guide their motions and change their inner sense of how the days passed.

  But in the Amazon, the transition between agricultural time and industrial time was much more precipitous. Prior to showing up at Fordlandia, many of the plantation’s workers who had lived in the region had set their pace by two distinct yet complementary timepieces. The first was the sun, its rise and fall marking the beginning and end of the day, its apex signaling the time to take to the shade and sleep. The second was the turn of the seasons: most of the labor needed to survive was performed during the relatively dry months of June to November. Rainless days made rubber tapping possible, while the recession of the floods exposed newly enriched soils, ready to plant, and concentrated fish, making them easier to catch. But nothing was set in stone. Excessive rain or prolonged periods of drought or heat led to adjustments of schedules. Before the coming of Ford, Tapajós workers lived time, they didn’t measure it—most rarely ever heard church bells, much less a factory whistle. It was difficult, therefore, as David Riker, who performed many jobs for Ford, including labor recruiter, said, “to make 365-day machines out of these people.”3

  Fordlandia’s managers and foremen, in contrast, were mostly engineers, precise in their measurement of time and motion. One of the first things the Americans did was set their watches and clocks to Detroit time, where Fordlandia remains to this day (nearby Santarém runs an hour earlier).* They scratched their heads when confronted with workers they routinely described as “lazy.” Archie Weeks’s daughter remembers her father throwing his straw hat on the ground more than once in frustration. With a decided sense of purpose that grated against the established rhythms of Tapajós life (David Riker liked to say that hurry was an “obscene” word in the valley), proudly affiliated with a company renowned for its vanguard interlocking efficiency, Ford’s men tended to treat Brazilians as instruments. And called them such. Matt Mulrooney gave his workers nicknames. “This fellow I had named Telephone. When I wanted to send a message or an order down front, I’d just holler, ‘Telephone!’ and he’d show up.”4

  And they used themselves as standards to measure the value of Brazilian labor. “Two of our people easily carried some timbers which twelve Brazilians did not seem to be able to handle,” observed a Dearborn official at the end of 1930. What a man could do in a Dearborn day “would take one of them guys three days to do it down there.”5

  These American managers and foremen did, after all, work for a man whose obsession with time long predated his drive to root out “lost motion” and “slack” in the workday by dividing the labor needed to build the Model T into ever smaller tasks: 7,882 to be exact, according to Ford’s own calculations. As a boy, Ford regularly took apart and reassembled watches and clocks. “Every clock in the Ford home,” a neighbor once recalled, “shuddered when it saw him coming.” He even invented a two-faced watch, one to keep “sun time” and the other Chicago time—that is, central standard time. Thirteen when his mother died giving birth to her ninth child, Henry later described his home after her passing as “a watch without a mainspring.”6

  He also knew that attempts to change the measure of time could lead to resistance—again, well before he met labor opposition to his assembly line speedup. He was twenty-two when, in 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a municipal ordinance to promote the “unification of time,” as the campaign to get the United States to accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called. “Considerable confusion” prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as Detroit “showed her usual conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time.” It took more than two decades to get the city to fully “abandon solar time” and set its clocks back twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the rest of the Midwest (the city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city’s factories with New York banks).7

  In Fordlandia, industrial regimentation entailed a host of other initiatives besides whistles and punch card clocks. The paying of set bimonthly wages, based on those punched cards, was the most obvious. So was a conception of the workday that made as little concession as possible to the weather, keeping workers “on the clock” when rain poured down in sheets and the temperature soared past 105 degrees. The effort to rationalize life reached into the smallest details of a worker’s day. As in Dearborn, plantation employees were required to wear a metal Ford badge, embossed with their ID number and an industrial panorama that included a factory complex, an airplane, two ships (the Ormoc and Farge?), and a water tower. The fieldhands who cleared the jungle and tended to the young rubber trees often took off their shirts in the heat, and so they pinned their badges to their belt buckles. The cost of a lost badge was deducted from wages.

  Men line up to receive their pay.

  A worker’s badge depicting the Fordlandia ideal.

  Regimentation also extended into hygiene and health. The company required workers to submit to blood draws to test for disease and injections to vaccinate against smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, and diphtheria. When workers went to punch out at the end of the day, they were met at the clocks by members of the medical team, who gave them their daily quinine pill. They were often reluctant to take it, though, as the high dosage prescribed by Ford’s doctors caused nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, skin r
ashes, and nightmares. Hiding the pills under their tongues, the workers, once out of sight, would compete to see who could spit theirs the farthest. Plantation doctors also insisted that all workers take the antiparasitical chenopodium, without, as one employee complained, examining them to see if the medicine was required. “The Americans suppose that we are all full of worms,” he said.8

  AT DAWN, WHEN the whistle gave its first blast summoning workers to their stations, Fordlandia was often still shrouded in mist. Its managers would soon learn that the fog that wafted off the Tapajós early in the morning accelerated the spread of the rubber-destroying fungi. Yet in those early days, before the blight hit, they thought it beautiful, especially when the mist mingled with light’s first rays through standing trees. The undulating hills and hollows of the planting area no longer looked like a wasteland, as over two thousand acres of six-feet-tall rubber trees, lined up in neat rows, had begun to sport young crowns of leaves. The estate was especially enchanting around the American compound. Though it was set back from the dock about a mile and a half, the row of houses nestled on a rise above a bend in the Tapajós, gave its residents a panoramic sunset view of the broad river. Behind the houses, as a buffer to the rest of the plantation, Archie Weeks had left a stand of forest, creating what residents described as a “nature park.” With most of the jungle’s dangers removed, it was easier to contemplate its pleasures. Paths raked clean of the rank, rotting leaves that normally cover the forest floor meandered through ferns, tropical palms, false cedars, and kapoks garlanded with climbers, bromeliads, bignonias, and other tropical flowers; large morpho butterflies flitted over the blossoms, their wings shining blue and black. And that December, Dearborn had sent down about a dozen live pines, to be used as Christmas trees in the American houses, so its homesick American staff could have a proper American holiday.