Fordlandia (13 page)

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 bankers, 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.”

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