Fordlandia (24 page)

Murray tried to send advance word through priests, traders, and steamboat pilots that he would be arriving in a given village on an approximate date so that those who lived inland looking for work could gather in their village plaza. But he found local elites none too cooperative. Many feared that the Ford Motor Company, and the cash it paid, would disrupt the patronage relations that governed life on the river.

When Murray landed in the town of Monte Alegre, he had hopes that he would be able to find some workers among what appeared to be a largely idle and poor population. But he had a run-in with the mayor, who not only “flatly refused to help in any way” but threatened to charge the company a tax of fifteen dollars for every inhabitant Murray took from his town. An election was coming up, and the politician didn’t want to lose any potential voters. On the town’s outskirts, the recruiter spoke with a number of migrant families who had settled in Pará because of severe drought in their home states of Ceará and Maranhão. They were interested in Fordlandia work. But they were indebted to the state government for the land and tools advanced them and were not permitted to leave, as their labor was contracted to a local cotton plantation owner.

Then there were the steamboat operators who shuttled recruiters around river towns and carried contracted labor back to Fordlandia. That Ford agents might have to spend days in a forlorn village waiting for a boat to arrive tended to weaken their ability to negotiate reasonable fares. When the
Santa Maria
finally showed up in Parintins, an island town in the Amazon River, Murray went aboard and asked how much it would cost to take him and the twenty-three men he had signed up back to the plantation. The captain first said he was too busy to take the job. Then, when pressed, he quoted a price of four dollars a head. Murray said he was crazy and walked away. But stuck on an island with few other options, he returned to the dock and pleaded the price down to three dollars. Murray tried to pass this expense on to his recruits, but they balked. Twenty of them changed their minds and decided not to take the job. Two others said they would get to Fordlandia in their own canoe.

Murray also saw many men who seemed to be unoccupied in the town of Alenquer, across the river from Santarém, so many that he wrote the plantation to say that he had “a feeling of confidence that labour is available.” But he was quickly disappointed. “There are many men around, but when you talk to them and suggest working a hoe they tell you flatly that this type of work does not interest them.” Instead of the constant work Fordlandia was offering, Murray reported that local residents preferred seasonal labor, tapping rubber or gathering nuts on expeditions financed by local merchants. Most showed “little interest in Fordlandia. Claim passage rates too high, too far from home, and high cost of living.” Likewise in Santarém, another Ford man complained that while there were “hundreds (maybe 2000) idle men” who didn’t “have one thin dime,” they didn’t “want to work.”
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Steamboat on the Tapajós
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Henry Ford sent instructions that Fordlandia was to pay at least 25 to 35 percent more than the local wage. But it was impossible for Fordlandia’s staff to translate that differential into cash, since so much of the river economy was calculated in kind and credit. “No fixed scale of wages exist,” Murray wrote. “What the
caboclo
earns is secondary to him.” How much, he asked, was to be added to a Ford wage that would compensate a worker for the ability to throw a line into the river and fish for that night’s dinner, even as he sat on a dock and sorted brazil nuts for some merchant who hired him for the day?
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If Ford paid too little, he wouldn’t attract enough workers to begin with. If he paid too much, there was nothing to stop those who did come from melting back into the jungle once they earned enough to live for a few months without work. Labor in exchange for goods advanced on credit created a familiar set of expectations, against which pure cash wages and a fixed schedule often couldn’t compete. Murray wrote that what tappers “like is to be free and go and come when they think fit.” It’s a sentiment confirmed more recently by anthropologist Edviges Marta Ioris. In the course of fieldwork in rural communities in the Tapajós National Forest, which today overlaps with what was Fordlandia, she met a few surviving Ford workers who told her that they would stay on the plantation for a time but leave when they needed to “plant the field crops, go fishing.”
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Murray and other recruiters mostly scouted among the river
caboclo
communities, made up of descendants of migrants from Brazil’s northeastern departments who had come to the region during the rubber boom. These communities, whose economy rested solely on rubber tapping, were hard-hit when the latex economy crashed. Ford, however, was arriving nearly two decades after the bust, when some of them had managed to revive and diversify their survival strategies, planting crops, keeping animals, and fishing to provide a basic level of subsistence, taking jobs with local patrons as needed.

But there were also settlements of desperately poor, hungry indigenous peoples around the Tapajós who had managed to survive, just barely, rubber’s heyday. Whether or not Fordlandia would have been able to draw a significant amount of labor from these communities is debatable, as a combination of racism and ignorance precluded anyone’s even trying. At one point, a labor recruiter indicated that there was a group of “2000 starving Indians” recently settled by the government on the banks of the Xingu, a river running roughly parallel to the Tapajós, to the east, and that they would probably welcome working at Fordlandia, which would provide them with “free housing, free medical attention, free hospital, good water, free school, and a steady job for steady men.” Yet before an agent could be dispatched to the Xingu, Edmar Jovita, an Oxford-educated Brazilian who worked for the company but was then traveling, sent a telegram urging the plantation to “have nothing to do with these Indians as they are not tamed.” Fordlandia wired back asking if Jovita thought that just a hundred men could be hired, with the “distinct understanding that they are subject to discipline.” But the Brazilian responded forcefully: “Today more than ever have the opinion that we should not have any [Indians] in the plantation either these or others. . . . You would have trouble ahead. Even if they were tame they are lazy and undisciplined. Besides all other defects they are treacherous, even the tamest.” Fordlandia relented. “Okay on Indians. We repeat we don’t want them. Glad you got right information.”
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FROM BEYOND THE Amazon, where wage labor was more institutionalized, many impoverished Brazilians did travel to Fordlandia at their own expense, too many for Oxholm to handle, either as plantation manager or town administrator. Soon more than five thousand people lived in and around the plantation, about double Santarém’s population. There existed little infrastructure to support such a fast-growing community. Through 1929 and into 1930, there was no permanent dock or reception hall for Fordlandia’s new arrivals. So when job seekers got off the steamboats, they spread out along the riverfront, setting up family camps, building cooking fires, and hanging their hammocks. A jungle shantytown quickly took shape. “Sometimes it is several days before they present themselves at the employment office,” complained one foreman.

The migrants were a varied lot, described by one observer as made up of “the hopeless, the lame, the blind, the unemployed and everything else, along with some good men.” Some were hired. But those who weren’t stayed anyway, as did many who were initially employed yet quit soon after; with a 300 percent turnover rate, Fordlandia had to make about six thousand hires to keep a payroll of two thousand. Many of these new arrivals took up residence in the small villages that predated the Ford contract and dotted the periphery of the plantation, such as Pau d’Agua, a settlement of sharecroppers located about a half mile upriver from the cleared riverfront that, like Boa Vista before its sale to the company, was owned by the merchant Franco family. A whole service economy sprang up in these villages, and the plantation became, as one observer sent by Dearborn to see how Ford’s namesake town was progressing put it, a “mecca for all undesirables, even criminals, of the entire Amazon Valley.” These “troublemakers,” the Ford official went on, “endeavored in any way conceivable to make a living off of the men who were working for the company.” The sudden influx of cash gave bloom to “filthy small cafes, restaurants, meat and fruit shops,” gambling houses, and thatched bordellos established by local merchants and staffed mostly with women from Brazil’s poor northeast. Riverboats pulled up to Fordlandia’s makeshift dock daily, and workers “swarmed aboard” to buy beer and cachaça.
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Captain Oxholm and James Kennedy, Ford’s accountant, tried to have these villages destroyed, but they ran into resistance. Though the Francos had been willing to part with Boa Vista, they insisted on holding on to Pau d’Agua, which provided the family a useful monthly revenue in rubber, pigs, hens, ducks, and, increasingly as Ford’s wages began to seep into the local economy, cash. In addition to the Francos, a number of other landowners along the Tapajós and up the Cupary River refused to move or sell, even though property values had increased dramatically. What made this standoff even more intractable was that the Ford Motor Company refused to compensate residents who did not have a clear and legal deed. This meant that those who had occupied their land for decades without titles, a common enough situation in the Amazon, had little incentive to move. Kennedy wrote to Dearborn saying that he had managed to buy out a few families who did have deeds. Yet they refused to leave their homes, and when the accountant tried to have them evicted they complained to the press that Ford had swindled them, buying their land from illiterate family members without their authorization. The Ford Motor Company didn’t always get its way—Ford was, after all, frustrated at Muscle Shoals—yet it often did. In Michigan in 1923, when property owners refused to sell land where Ford wanted to build a hydroelectric dam to power one of his village industries, the company got the state legislature to pass an eminent domain law that allowed it to expropriate the property. But in the Brazilian state of Pará, with Governor Valle’s anti-Ford campaign in full swing, a judge issued an injunction ordering Kennedy to cease his eviction threats.
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PROHIBITION WAS ONE of the Ford principles Oxholm was sworn to uphold. It had been the law of the land in Michigan since 1916 (a law that Ford lobbied for, telling reporters that he would convert Detroit’s breweries to produce alcohol fuel for his cars) and in the United States since 1920. Prohibition of course didn’t stop drinking but rather provided fertile opportunities for the extension of organized crime. Detroit and Dearborn sprawled with bars and speakeasies. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Iron Mountain, where the Ford Motor Company paid high wages to a large workforce, also saw the spread of “unparalleled conditions of vice and prostitution.” Mob gangs with ties to Detroit’s Mafia moved in to set up whiskey “joints,” casinos, brothels, and morphine dens along its midway. “One pretty 18-year-old miss,” reported a local newspaper, “has found that there are shadows as well as bright lights along the primrose path of jazz,” having succumbed to the town’s ample supply of “white powders.”
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But the problems created by the criminalization of alcohol failed to diminish Ford’s sense of virtue. With reports coming in about drunken revelries in the Amazon, he insisted that what was law in America be company policy in Brazil. “Mr. Ford constantly impressed me with the fact that he didn’t want anyone around addicted to liquor,” Ernest Liebold recalled. “We were in prohibition, and he wanted it enforced, as far as our employees were concerned. Even though it was a foreign country, I think it was largely in line with Ford policy to carry it into that country. If we were to permit promiscuous use of liquor on our plantation, why, the employees might on certain occasions get beyond our control.”
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It was Ford’s will, but Sorensen was his enforcer. He fired off one directive after another to Oxholm, demanding strict compliance with Prohibition. “We absolutely will not have it,” meaning alcohol, “on our property. We know from events that have happened during the past year that drinking has taken place.” He insisted on “absolutely no tolerance.”
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In truth, Oxholm was powerless to stop the debauchery. He couldn’t even keep a leper named Castro from camping on the dock to solicit alms. Shooed away, the mendicant simply returned when the captain’s attentions were elsewhere. Similarly, when Oxholm did manage to shut down a few bordellos and bars, the proprietors simply set up shop on an island just off Fordlandia’s banks, building their brothels on stilts because the island was half wetlands and prone to floods. It was ironically dubbed the “Island of Innocence” since, as Eimar Franco put it, “no one on it was innocent.”