Fordlandia (16 page)

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 operette 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.

Like the Mississippi, the Amazon and its tributaries have been worked on over the centuries. Man-made canals and footpaths have transformed nature’s baroque into human rococo, weaving an already bedazzling ecology of waterways into an even more intricate set of nested trading systems, connecting nine (of thirteen) South American countries—Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana—and, via Venezuela’s Orinoco River, numerous Caribbean nations. Retaining walls protect settlements from the tides and seasons, as do dams, which permit the drying of wetlands and seasonal floodplains. Dredges keep sediment from building up around ports and buoy lights guide ships, especially during low water. But the Mississippi is truly an industrial river; its stepped locks, levees, dikes, dams, navigation signals, and excavated channels make it the most managed and manipulated water system in the world. In contrast, the Amazon, despite its grandeur, is—as it was at the time of Ide and Blakeley’s arrival—an artisanal river. Its pilots rely on a lifetime of experience and skill to navigate shifting bars, fast-changing depths, and a powerful tidal bore that could travel inland from the Atlantic, rushing “up the river in a sheer wall with a rumble like a regiment of light artillery on the stampede” as far as ten miles, raising the largest of ships and leaving them aground on its recession. And unlike the delta of the Mississippi, which over the last two centuries has been reduced from a patchwork of barely navigable bayous, islands, shifting sandbars, and estuaries into a rationalized sluice, the Amazon’s terminus remains democratic, with many metamorphosing paths in and out.
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ONE OF THE calmest entry points in terms of the tides, and thus the most trafficked, is the Baía de Marajó, along with the smaller Baía de Guajará, which gives way to a water channel that connects inland to the Amazon proper. On the southeastern shores of the Guajará presides Nossa Senhora de Belém—Our Lady of Bethlehem. As the
Cuthbert
closed on the city, the shimmering constant green of the dense jungle gave way to red tile roofs and blue- and cream-colored walls. Though the rubber boom had ended more than a decade earlier, the port was still busy. The harbor was crowded with many different kinds of ships, from single-masted canoelike sailboats, called
vigilengas
, and flat-bottom barges that served as floating markets, filled with fish, turtles, birds, vegetables, and fruit, to ocean liners bound from Portugal or New Orleans to Iquitos or Manaus, cities that, like Belém, had flourished during the boom but had since lost much of their shine. The most distinctive vessels were the multileveled steamboats, known as
gaiolas
, “birdcages,” whose hammock-lined bowed decks made it seem as if they were sagging in the middle.

Everything felt “strange and new,” Ide thought, as the Ford party transferred to a small government launch to take them to shore. The entourage proceeded to a long stone water wall, above which worked cranes, winches, steam trolleys, and stevedores. Along the quay sat a line of metal-roofed brick cargo warehouses flanked by the customs building, and terminals for the major shipping companies, like the Booth Line. To the right of the warehouses was the city’s fish market—known as
ver-o-peso
, or “check-the-weight”—a green metal and concrete cavern, its four-cornered ornate turrets a reminder of the city’s military origins. Inside, mongers working over makeshift butcher blocks sliced from Amazonian hardwood trees sold an array of the river’s harvest, including incalculable variations of catfish. Farther back from the water stood a row of three-storied export houses, shops, and merchant homes, behind which, on Rua Gaspar Viana, the Ford Motor Company would open an office to coordinate the arrival of cargo from Dearborn and the hiring of laborers.

On shore to greet the Ford delegation was John Minter, the American consul, and Gordon Pickerell, a local Ford dealer who had himself just retired from a thirteen-year run as US consul. Also present was Jorge Villares, whom Blakeley greeted warmly, which Ide thought peculiar since he didn’t recall his partner’s mentioning any contacts on his previous trip other than Pickerell and Minter. Blakeley made the introductions, yet he did so in an awkward way, only mumbling Villares’s name.

The sun glared and the heat felt intense as the Dearborn emissaries left the dock, turning onto the broad Boulevard of the Republic, which took them to their hotel. Ide had never traveled much beyond Michigan, so he took care to record his impressions of his arrival in Belém in a diary. They passed shops selling turtle shells, baskets, snake skins, parrots, monkeys, and “strange birds of beautiful plumage.” The streets were filled with “handsome dark men in white suits, strikingly pretty girls of doubtful cast, probably half breed,” and “niggers or natives with great loads on their heads.” The midwestern Ide thought the architecture “odd,” almost “oriental or Mexican,” by which he was probably referring to the glazed bluish tiles that adorned the faces of many of Belém’s best buildings. He recognized the buzzards, though, that flew high over the city. They reminded him of Detroit pigeons. And the potholes that filled the streets made him think of Detroit’s notoriously bumpy Gratiot Avenue.

AS IN ANY diplomatic corps, divisions and rivalries at the home office played out abroad. Since its founding, the Ford Motor Company was famed for its factionalism, which created competing spheres of loyalty among employees. Henry Ford’s delegating yet incorrigibly controlling and manipulating managing style aggravated the divisions, as did his reliance on men with strong personalities and even stronger egos. The company’s most famous schism—described by historians as Shakespearean—was between Edsel, Ford’s only child, and Harry Bennett, the head of Ford’s Service Department.

Edsel, just twenty-six when his father made him the nominal president of the company in 1919, and Harry were polar opposites. Bennett, about the same age as Edsel, was a thug with organized crime connections and a reputation for getting into fistfights—during his boxing days in the navy he fought under the name Sailor Reese—car chases, and gun battles, stories of which delighted Henry. Ford “liked the look of the man—the colored silk shirts, the Western belt buckle, and the snap-brim felt hat. He liked the Damon Runyonesque quality—the fact that Bennett had real experience in a masculine world.” And he liked his loyalty. “If Mr. Ford told me to blacken out the sun tomorrow,” Bennett once said, “I might have trouble fixing it. But you’d see a hundred thousand sons-of-bitches coming through the Rouge gates in the morning all wearing dark glasses.”
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In contrast, Edsel, interested in the aesthetics of industrial design and modern art, forever disappointed his father, though many now credit him with holding the company together through the twenties and thirties. “Where Edsel was gentle,” the historian Thomas Bonsall remarks, “Henry saw weakness. Where Edsel was imaginative, Henry saw frivolity.” If Bennett ruled the factory floor as if industry were an extension of the Wild West, Edsel with his “martyr’s smile” quietly worked to bring professionalism to the company, to mitigate not just Bennett’s violence but the arbitrariness that governed Ford’s labor relations. Much to his father’s contempt, he even admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt and moved to accommodate the company to the New Deal. During the 1930s, Henry would come to despise FDR, not just for being a member of the East Coast elite (and Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin) and for supporting legislation making it easier for unions to organize. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which extended the power of government to regulate industry, in effect directly competed with Ford’s decentralization and village industry program for how best to tame capitalism. It was, for example, FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority, largely a nationalization of Ford’s Muscle Shoals proposal, that would bring electricity and jobs to the poor farmers of lower Appalachia.
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Of the two men, Henry didn’t hide whom he preferred. Not only did he do nothing to douse the fires that burned between Bennett and Edsel, he fanned them. The elder Ford backed Bennett in his fights with Edsel in a way to encourage jealousy, while telling Bennett, at any sign of rapprochement, “Harry, you think you’re getting along with Edsel, but he’s no friend of yours.” Once, while Edsel was in the process of having a new row of coke ovens built at the Rouge’s foundry, Ford told Bennett, “Harry, as soon as Edsel gets those ovens built I’m going to tear them down.” And he did.
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WILLIS LONG REEVES Blakeley was a Bennett man, and he acted it. Born in 1890 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Blakeley, after serving in World War I, joined the march of migrants up the Ohio Valley to the factories of the Midwest, and he found a job in Bennett’s Service Department as an assistant employment manager. On the
Cuthbert
, he tried to boss Ide around, peacocking like a “big shot” and telling everybody on the boat about their mission even though Henry Ford himself insisted that “this thing should be kept secret until we got well into it.”
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Blakeley took well to Belém, which combined the grandeur of an old colonial city, energized by rubber riches and then exhausted by their evaporation, with the ribald pleasures of a boomtown, still considerable despite the economy’s collapse. Its architecture might have been European, but its soul was New World frontier. The writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro, around the time of Blakeley and Ide’s visit, called the city the “Mecca of the world’s harlotry,” its brothels filled with Parisian and Eastern European courtesans. Much of the wealth that could be pulled out of the Amazon passed through its port, and it attracted adventurers and fortune seekers from the world over. They gravitated toward one another, frequenting the same casinos, bars, and brothels.

Blakeley quickly gained a reputation among the rogues and expatriates as a drunkard and an exhibitionist. He stayed in the best corner suite on the second floor of the Grande Hotel, Belém’s finest, with a veranda and floor-to-ceiling windows, the shutters of which he left open as he walked around naked and made love to his wife. The hotel, since demolished, was located on the city’s central plaza, and Blakeley’s room faced the majestic Theatro da Paz, where the city’s gentry promenaded every evening, coiffed and bedecked in formal wear. “Everyone on the street could see,” complained the hotel manager to Ide. To make matters worse, Blakeley’s window was just above a major taxi stand, and the drivers circulated gossip about the scandalous behavior of the Ford man throughout the city. “It’s the talk of the town,” said the manager, who tried unsuccessfully to evict Blakeley.
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Like his boss, Bennett, who as his power grew in Dearborn brokered contracts with outside suppliers in which he received healthy kickbacks, Blakeley saw a convergence between his interests and those of the company. He began to work on a plan with Consul Minter in which as Ford’s representative he would buy bonds issued by Pará’s deeply indebted state treasury, with the idea that their value would soar once word got out that Ford had committed to investing in a rubber plantation. Minter told his superiors in the Department of State that he thought it a win-win-win proposition: “taking over the bonds at or near their recent quotation would not only mean ultimate profit to the Ford Motor Company” but also entrench the company more “solidly in this state, increasing its prestige and power therein.” This, in turn, would please the Brazilians, who, Minter believed, “would prefer to have the state developed by American capital than by British.”
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It is doubtful that Dearborn would have approved of any transaction that might have exposed the company to charges of engaging in speculation. And given Henry Ford’s well-known aversion to finance capital, it’s likely that the bond scheme was wholly initiated by Blakeley. In any case, the State Department quickly nixed the idea, instructing Minter to “strictly confine” his activities on behalf of Ford’s representatives to the provision of statistical information, “without comment or advice.”
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