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

by Greg Grandin

  It is a common opinion among those, familiar with rubbers of the Amazon and the East, that certain very characteristic forms, known to exist in Brazil, are not found in the population of trees on eastern plantations. With the possession of the eastern, tested, material to serve as standards and comparison, Boa Vista would have an unusual opportunity to accomplish what every planting Company in the East has planned to do, viz: investigate genetically the wild rubbers of the Amazon River drainage.

  “Every effort,” Weir said, “should be made to study the rubbers of the Amazon, for it is not unlikely, that some of the finest families of trees escaped the first collection of seeds that went to the East.”

  By getting Edsel Ford to finance his trip to Sumatra, Weir did exactly that, securing representative samples of Southeast Asian Hevea to test against Brazilian varieties so as to identify blight-resistant strains that might not have been included in Wickham’s original seed consignment. In retrospect, it is perplexing why Weir, one of the world’s foremost experts on rubber blight, should have downplayed its danger as he did in his first positive report, the one where he praised all of Johnston’s “good work” and predicted a “great success” for Fordlandia. In that document, Weir recommended not only that rubber planting be expanded but that the trees be placed closer together than they so far had been. Where Oxholm and his successors spaced them about a hundred to an acre, Johnston, acting on Weir’s advice, doubled up in 1934, planting two hundred to the acre. It could be the case that Weir was actually hoping for an epidemic of South American leaf blight as a way of isolating truly resistant stock, which he believed existed throughout the Amazon basin but had yet to be identified. Since blight is not a problem in Southeast Asia, none of the clones he brought back were specifically bred to withstand fungi; if they proved to be susceptible, while other, locally gathered seeds demonstrated resistance, it would confirm that there existed in the Amazon a wider variety of Hevea than that currently available to plantations in Asia.

  Weir, despite his work with Goodyear and other corporations, was at heart a government agronomist, with a long and active affiliation with the Department of Agriculture. Just as State Department diplomats tended to cultivate a broader, stable investment climate rather than advance the immediate interests of specific companies (as did Commerce Department attachés), Weir seemed concerned less with making Fordlandia, or Belterra, work than with figuring out how to grow plantation rubber in the Amazon, even if it meant that a company other than Ford’s would benefit.

  So Johnston continued to fume. Weir, he said, has never been held accountable for his actions. Having left “others to carry on what he proposed,” he “returns and criticizes what has been done.” Johnston begged Dearborn to put Weir in charge of planting and insect control, letting him run “matters to suit himself.” This would at least make him responsible for results. Give him a “definite job,” he begged, “otherwise he will carry on as in the past.”18

  Caught up in his feud with Weir and pressed into not just running one plantation but building a second, Johnston probably missed the irony of what by late 1935 had become his main line of criticism about Weir, that the scientist had repeatedly advised the plantation to adopt methods not appropriate to the specific conditions of the Tapajós. “One does not have to be an expert,” Johnston said, “to know that a standard practice in one country can be detrimental to good practice in another.”19

  ____________

  *The Rockefeller Foundation had launched a mosquito-eradication program in Brazil a few years earlier.

  CHAPTER 21

  BONFIRE OF THE CATERPILLARS

  AS WEIR AND JOHNSTON BICKERED, THE FOLIAGE OF FORDLANDIA’S maturing trees began to close, forming a bridge over which South American leaf blight could march. Plantation managers had noticed the fungi, which feed off and spread among rubber leaves, from the moment the first trees began to bloom. But the Tapajós’s long dry season allowed workers to slow its spread through constant pruning and leaf washing. Then in 1935, the crowns of most of Fordlandia’s trees began to touch one another, and what was troublesome turned catastrophic.

  The spores hit the older groves the hardest. “Practically all the branches of the trees throughout the estate,” Weir wrote in a report to Dearborn, “terminate in naked stems. Each successive elongation of the shoot becomes smaller and smaller.” The fungi don’t kill trees straight out. But as they fight to refoliate, they grow successively weaker, either producing dwarf shoots or dying back altogether. Spores also attacked the estate’s nurseries, including the new budwood bed. None of Weir’s Dutch colonial clones, which held the hope of so many, proved resistant to the blight—expectedly so since South American leaf blight doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia and therefore planters there had no reason to select for resistance.1

  Fordlandia rubber planting.

  Upon arriving at Fordlandia two years earlier, Weir had minimized the threat of blight and the valley’s erratic rain distribution and urged Johnston to plant even closer rows. Yet he now declared unequivocally that the disease had assumed “epidemic proportions with every change of humidity.” Fordlandia’s proximity to the Tapajós accelerated the disease, as the morning fog nurtured the fungi, which were now “spreading directly from tree to tree, without some intermittent controllable stage” and could not “be combated at Fordlandia successfully or economically.” The Ford Motor Company, with the endorsement of a well-respected pathologist with experience on three continents, had in effect created an incubator.

  SOUTH AMERICAN LEAF blight was well known to tropical botanists and planters at the time of Fordlandia’s founding. By the early 1910s, pathologists had identified different manifestations of blight that had occurred throughout the Amazon basin as variations of a single disease. The blight is spread by airborne spores that move from leaf to leaf, entering their epidermis and reproducing between their cells. The fungi attack seedlings and mature trees alike, as well as a variety of latex-producing trees, not just Hevea brasiliensis. New leaves turn black and wither, while mature ones become pockmarked, with the infected tissue turning greenish black before rotting away completely.

  Hevea is what botanists call a climax plant, meaning that it developed in an ecosystem—in this case the Amazon—that was at the apex of its complexity. Unlike relatively new pioneer crops like wheat, corn, or rice, which grow rapidly and throw off many fertile seeds and flourish in a variety of habitats, including large plantations, Hevea is not so adaptable. Its genetic composition is as old and evolved as the jungle that surrounds it. To use a metaphor associated with human behavior, Hevea is set in its ways. It grows slowly, its girth is thick, its seeds need coaxing, and it likes to hide from predators by mixing with other jungle trees. Yet despite these survival strategies, rubber, like many other tropical plants, can be a successful commercial crop when completely removed from its home environment, freed from the pests and plagues that evolved and adapted with it. While Southeast Asia was similar enough in climate to the Amazon, its native insects, parasites, and spores ignored South American rubber and so trees could be planted in close rows. In their original context, on the other hand, rubber trees grown near one another proved susceptible to pestilence, as Weir put it, with “every change of humidity.”

  South American leaf blight appeared in epidemic form in 1915 along the Caribbean coast, in Suriname, British Guyana, and the island of Trinidad, where planters first tried to grow estate rubber. In Suriname, it took just one year to decimate a two-year-old plantation of twenty thousand trees. Hevea can survive by shedding its leaves to shake off an infestation. But grouping trees in close-cropped rows made them vulnerable to not just one bout of blight but an endless barrage: even as an infected tree drops its leaves from the first assault, spores amassed on a neighboring tree attack again after a new bloom, then again and again.

  This is why by the late 1910s estate rubber production had largely been abandoned in the Americas—until Henry Ford came along.

  Joh
nston tried to fumigate with antifungal pesticides, but Hevea grows tall, up to thirty meters in height, and requires special water-powered sprayers that, since rubber was not a plantation crop in the Amazon, Belém merchants didn’t have in stock. Dearborn shipped some down, but the plantation’s hilly terrain made their use a time-consuming, costly, and ultimately ineffective response. By mid-1936, Fordlandia stood patchy and ragged, just at the moment it should have begun producing latex for export. Weir condemned large swaths of the plantation and Johnston couldn’t argue.

  The construction of Belterra was just about finished. Workers had built a city center and residential houses and cleared and planted thousands of acres with rubber. So a decision was finally made to switch the bulk of operations to the new site, with Fordlandia converted into a research center, bud-grafting school, and nursery for hybrid clones to be planted at the new estate. The train stopped running along Fordlandia’s three-mile stretch, as workers packed up the locomotive and cars and shipped them back to Detroit. A few staff families remained, rattling around the American neighborhood, as did a skeleton crew of Brazilian laborers. Some of them learned how to bud graft, while others kept up the nurseries, surviving rubber groves, and the Henry Ford Hospital, as well as their own lawns, gardens, and sidewalks.

  “The growth of the rubber on Fordlandia is in striking contrast,” Walter Bangham said after a visit in 1936, “to the excellent town site and industrial buildings that have been erected on the Fordlandia estate.” But soon the town, too, began to take on a ghostly cast. A few years later, a visitor reported that the “jungle was beginning to creep back over it and blot out the signs and lines of a supercivilization which men had transported and transplanted at the cost of incredible effort, money, and human life.”2

  WHEN HENRY FORD approved Weir’s proposal to acquire Belterra, it provided an opportunity for Weir and Johnston to find at least a narrow slip of common ground, as both men thought a successful rubber plantation did not need a concentrated company town along the lines of Fordlandia. Johnston was tired of caring for workers and their families from cradle to grave, while Weir believed “decentralization of the field force . . . would save much time in going to and from distant parts of the estate.” Rubber tapping had to begin at dawn, when sap flowed the freest. So Weir suggested that when the time came to tap latex at Belterra the company give plots of land to workers where they could build a house, close to a designated grove they would be responsible for maintaining and harvesting—in other words, he proposed a labor system pretty much like what existed in the Tapajós before the establishment of Fordlandia.

  Ford disagreed, and once he authorized the swap of a piece of his original concession for land farther down the Tapajós, he sent instructions to build a new town, centered on a city square, complete with a church, a recreation room, an outdoor movie theater, a golf course, a swimming pool, a water tower, and even windmills to produce electricity. Ford had once told a village reporter, more than a decade earlier, when he was just getting started promoting decentralized “village industries,” that he was strictly opposed to the idea of building “model towns” from scratch. “I’m against that sort of thing,” he insisted, saying that he would instead locate his factories and mills in already established communities like Pequaming, which he purchased in 1923. But throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, as his village industry projects became less a realistic remedy for the dislocations of boom-and-bust capitalism and more a symptom of his intensifying obsessions, he did exactly “that sort of thing”—in the Upper Peninsula with his logging camps, in Dearborn with Greenfield Village, and in the Amazon with Fordlandia. At nearly the precise moment he was telling Johnston to proceed with the building of Belterra, Ford, upon driving through an Upper Peninsula forest he found especially pretty, sent a work crew to dig a mill lake and raise a prim twelve-bungalow town surrounding a village green. Named by Ford after the daughter of the manager of his UP operations, Alberta became the newest addition to his village industry program, its workers expected to divide their time lumbering, milling, and farming.3

  Over the next couple of years, Alberta and Belterra proceeded on similar lines, with the company promoting wholesome living in both, through gardening, education, health care, and recreation. Even the clapboard bungalows of the two towns looked alike. White with green trim, they were Cape Cod style, with steep roofs and front gables. Alberta, which today stands intact and is run by Michigan Technical University as a forest research station and tourist attraction, would prove to be marginally more successful than Belterra—it provided a steady, if inconsequential, amount of milled timber to be kilned in Iron Mountain. But it was ultimately as unsustainable as Ford’s Amazonian venture. Over the next decade, company executives were forever trying to quietly close the money-draining town, only to be countermanded by Henry Ford himself. “Get it running by Monday,” he told his Upper Peninsula manager on Thursday, upon learning that the mill had been shut down.4

  BACK IN BRAZIL at Belterra, hundreds of boys dressed in shorts, shirts, and caps and girls in white blouses and dark skirts began attending schools named after Henry’s son and grandchildren: Edsel, Henry II, and Benson. Belterra was indeed flat, which was good not just for planting rubber but for laying out level, symmetrical streets. Even more than Fordlandia, which made some concessions to the ups and downs, backs and forths of river topography, Belterra looked like a squared midwestern town. Model Ts and As rolled down its straight streets, which were lined with fire hydrants, sidewalks, streetlamps, and white-and-green worker bungalows, with neat lawns and front gardens.

  Belterra schoolchildren.

  Cape Cod traditional I: Alberta.

  Cape Cod traditional II: Belterra.

  A new hospital, dubbed the “Mayo Clinic of the Amazon,” was even more modern than Fordlandia’s Henry Ford Hospital, complete with X-ray machines and blood transfusion equipment. The hospital serviced the workforce and the surrounding area, which was more populated than Fordlandia; its staff received the latest medical journals with the mail, which arrived daily from Santarém by horse—much quicker than the chuggingly slow riverboats needed to reach Fordlandia. Doctors performed more innovative operations than they did at Fordlandia, such as the removal of cataracts, an eye condition prevalent in the Amazon owing to the strong equatorial sun. Belterra medical personnel, chemists, and lab technicians made important advances in treating parasitical diseases and other infections that in later years would help other enterprises maintain a large force in the jungle. “In the interest of science,” all of Fordlandia’s Brazilian employees had to sign a waiver allowing the hospital to perform autopsies if they passed away on the estate.5

  The sanitation squad continued to hunt wild dogs, drain swampy areas and cover them with oil so that mosquitoes couldn’t breed, and inspect company houses to make sure kitchens and bathrooms were clean and laundry was hung to dry on lines. Still, Belterra represented a lessening of the feudal control that the company instituted, or at least tried to institute, at Fordlandia, more closely approximating modern labor relations based on wages and benefits—of the kind often extolled by Ford even as he was undercutting them with his social engineering and paternalistic manipulation. The town was set back from the river a few miles, providing it with a natural buffer from the riverboat liquor trade; the company didn’t have to enforce Prohibition as strictly as it did upriver, which helped reduce conflict. The settlement was within relatively easy reach of Santarém, so Belterra workers enjoyed some leverage in dealing with the company: at Fordlandia, accessible only by river, workers often felt trapped and utterly dependent on the plantation, especially after the razing of Pau d’Agua and other shantytowns did away with potential refuges for those who wanted to quit. At Belterra they could just walk away. At the same time, proximity to Santarém lightened the social burden of the plantation management. Though they still showed movies and provided other forms of recreation, finding something to alleviate worker boredom was no longer a pressing con
cern of the American staff.

  Opposite page: The houses at Belterra were more self-consciously traditional than the ones at Fordlandia, as if mirroring Ford’s increased cultural conservatism. The bungalows built by Archie Johnston at Fordlandia in the wake of the 1930 riot, though inappropriate for the climate, sported simple, clean, and functional lines. In contrast, Belterra’s residences seem mannered, with gabled roofs, shutters, and painted trim. They were also, except for want of chimneys, indistinguishable from the houses Ford had built in Alberta, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, around the same time.

  For the Americans, too, life felt a little less isolated at Belterra than it did at Fordlandia. The mail, including American newspapers and magazines, got there quicker and it was easier to get to Santarém or even Belém for a visit. They lived in comfortable dwellings along a shady thoroughfare, not as picturesque as Fordlandia but more familiar, level, like a proper “American suburb.” They were attended to by Barbadian servants and played golf on a “completely flat 9 hole, par 38 course.” And they celebrated Christmas, New Year’s, and July Fourth with parties and dances.6

  With the switch from Fordlandia to Belterra, Archie Johnston began to supervise operations from Belém, leaving Curtis Pringle and John Rogge to oversee the construction of the new town and plantation. Setting aside his irritation with Weir, Sheriff Pringle, named general supervisor of Belterra, turned out to be reasonable and pragmatic. He faithfully built the new town center, along with houses for laborers and staff, but he tempered the puritanism that nearly wrecked Fordlandia, going easy on attempts to regulate the social life and eating habits of the plantation’s workforce. As a reporter for Harper’s put it after a visit, “Mr. Ford and Brazil are still somewhat in disagreement in matters of doors, screening, and heights of ceiling, but the ex-sheriff has proved himself an excellent arbiter. He does not insist upon square-dancing or wholesome Detroit-style cooking.”7