Fordlandia (3 page)

As my boat made its way to Fordlandia’s dock, the wind cut the jungle humidity, which, in any case, really wasn’t that bad. Up a hill from the river’s edge stood the town’s Catholic church, built after the Ford Motor Company abandoned the place. Ford’s managers allowed priests to visit and minister to the population but refused the request of the local bishop to establish a permanent mission and run the town’s schools. Farther back loomed the famous water tower, along with the empty lumber mill and power plant. Everything was peaceful and calm, and indeed much more suggestive of Ford’s easy-chair arcadia than nature red in tooth and claw. It was difficult to picture the chaos that befell this shore eight decades ago.

The first years of the settlement were plagued by waste, violence, and vice, making Fordlandia more Deadwood than
Our Town
. The death rate from malaria and yellow fever was high. Bending to hack away at the underbrush with machetes, scores of frontline cutters died from viper bites. Those who fled the plantation brought with them tales of knife fights, riots, and strikes. They complained of rancid food and corrupt and incompetent overseers who defrauded them of pay and turned the forest into a mud hole, burning large swaths of the jungle without the slightest idea of how to plant rubber. In what was perhaps the biggest man-made fire in that part of the Amazon to date, burning leaves floated to the far side of the river as ash wafted across the sky, turning clouds of the rainy season sky into a blood orange haze. Building material sent from Dearborn rusted and rotted on the riverbank. Bags of cement turned to stone in the rain. Migrants desperate for jobs, many of them from Brazil’s drought- and famine-stricken northeast, poured into the work camp on rumors that Ford would be hiring tens of thousands of employees and paying five dollars a day. They trailed behind them wives, children, parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, building makeshift houses from packing crates and canvas tarps. Rather than a midwestern city of virtue springing from the Amazon green, local merchants set up thatched bordellos, bars, and gambling houses, turning Fordlandia into a rain forest boomtown. Managers eventually established sovereignty over the settlement and achieved something approximating their boss’s vision. But then nature rebelled.

“Landmarks are absent,” wrote the lay Anglican leader Kenneth Grubb about his travels around the Amazon in the late 1920s, “and there is nothing by which progress can be marked.” Fordlandia’s water tower was a rare exception
.

HUBRIS SEEMS THE obvious moral attached to Fordlandia, especially considering not just the disaster of its early years but also, even once order was established and the city was more or less functional, rubber’s refusal to submit to Ford-style regimentation. Yet surveying what remains of it left me with an almost elegiac feeling. Despite the promiscuous use of fire by its first managers, along with the running of what was billed as the most modern sawmill in all of Latin America, the town doesn’t so much invoke the plague of deforestation. That would be easy to rebuke. It rather brings to mind a different kind of loss: deindustrialization. There is in fact an uncanny resemblance between Fordlandia’s rusting water tower, broken-glassed sawmill, and empty power plant and the husks of the same structures in Iron Mountain, a depressed industrial city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that also used to be a Ford town.

About a mile and a half from the dock, on a hill hooked by a river bend, sits the abandoned “American neighborhood.” The wood-framed buildings are properly Protestant and not too ostentatious, complete with shingled roofs, plank floors, plaster walls, decorative moldings, tile bathrooms, electric refrigerators, and wall sconces. Decrepit and overrun by weeds, as could be expected, the houses are now home to colonies of bats, which have left a patina of guano on the walls and floors. The residences flank “Palm Avenue,” which is actually shaded by mango trees, a hint that the company made some concession to the jungle ecology. Elms or maples would have wilted in the wet heat. Yet concrete sidewalks, electric street-lamps, and those red fire hydrants confirm that it made such compromises reluctantly.

Closer to the river, Brazilians, including some surviving Ford employees, continue to live in smaller mill town bungalows, along three long avenues that follow the contours of the land. Though they have since been renamed, the street closest to the Tapajós was called “Riverside Avenue,” the farthest, hugging the beginning of an incline, “Hillside.” In the middle was Main Street. The powerhouse and sawmill, both with walls of floor-to-ceiling windows, separate the two residential areas. The turbines and generators have been removed from the engine room, but industrial ephemera are still scattered around the mill. Nuts and bolts fill wooden boxes carrying the name Standard Oil of Brazil, which did some exploratory work on the estate. About a dozen Landis Machine Company presses, dies, and stamps bear the mark “Made in the USA.” Outside, buried in the jungle grass, are twisted rails, what’s left of a three-mile train line that carried logs to the mill, though it’s bewildering to think what force of nature or how the passing of time could have produced their current mangled state.

Fordlandia’s most striking building is set back from the river, on a knoll about half a mile in. It’s a wreck of a hundred-bed hospital built from a sketch by Albert Kahn, the architect of Ford’s Highland Park and River Rouge plants. Gracefully proportioned, well ventilated, with generous eaves and dormer windows jutting out of a pitched roof, the long and narrow jungle sanatorium seems lower to the ground than it really is, much like Kahn’s celebrated enormous Highland Park factory. Inside, two dormitory wings are united by a series of rooms marked by signs indicating their former function. Most of the beds are gone, but some equipment, made of metal and glass that today looks menacing but in the 1930s was state of the art, remains. In the sterilization room there’s a large apparatus that suggests a front-load washing machine, and the gynecology room still has its examination table. The surgery and X-ray rooms are bare, but the laboratory has some bottles and test tubes lying around and the records of the hospital’s last patients strewn on the floor.

Unlike nineteenth-century British writers who lamented the coming of industrialization, Henry Ford saw the machine not as defiling the garden but rather as harmonizing with it. And Ford’s Amazon town does seem to complement its setting, perhaps because the conceit that underwrote Fordlandia has been muted by its weed-entwined buildings, rotten floor planks, and guano-glazed walls. This impression is reinforced by the memories of residents, most too young to have experienced the company firsthand, who speak approvingly about the good wages Ford offered and the free health care provided by the town’s hospital. Things were
bom demais
, almost too good, says a man who moved to the town from downriver as a boy, when his father took a job on the plantation. Undoubtedly paternalistic, Ford’s social program compares well with what is available to much of the world today. One doctor who accompanied a team of São Paulo medical students on a visit to the town in 2006 said contemporary Fordlandia residents who are sick have two options: those with money travel by river to a doctor; those who don’t have money learn to suffer their illness. América Lobato, eighty-one years old on my first trip to Fordlandia, in 2005, was in the lucky group, but barely. She began working at the age of sixteen as a babysitter for a Ford administrator and therefore enjoyed a small pension from the Brazilian government. América remembers that the hospital didn’t just treat company employees but took in patients from all over Brazil. “They couldn’t do complicated operations like heart surgery,” she said, but things like “the appendix or liver they took care of.” América has since passed away, but during the last years of her life she had to travel nearly a full day by riverboat to a specialist to attend to her failing eyes and bad legs.
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THE FOND MEMORIES with which América and others recalled the heyday of Fordlandia are understandable, considering the lack of opportunities, decent jobs, and basic services available to most residents of the region. But there’s something particular to Henry Ford that summons a deeper poignancy than one would hear from residents in similarly derelict company towns elsewhere in Latin America, ruins from a time when US corporations rapidly expanded their operations throughout the hemisphere, built around mines, mills, and plantations. In 1917, Milton Hershey began work on a sugar mill town outside the city of Santa Cruz, Cuba, which he named Hershey and which, when finished, included American-style bungalows, luxurious houses for staff, schools, a hospital, a baseball diamond, and a number of movie theaters. At the height of the banana boom of the 1920s, one could tour Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Cuba, and Colombia and not for a moment leave United Fruit Company property, traveling on its trains and ships, passing through its ports, staying in its many towns, with their tree-lined streets and modern amenities, in a company hotel or guest house, playing golf on its links, taking in a Hollywood movie in one of its theaters, and being tended to in its hospital if sick.

All of these enterprises of course say something about the way the United States spread out in the world, capturing in clapboard simplicity the assuredness with which businessmen and politicians believed that the American way of life could be easily transplanted and eagerly welcomed elsewhere. In the United States, company towns were hailed not just for the earnings they generated for their companies but for the benefits they brought Latin Americans, and many observers explicitly thought them a New World alternative to European imperialism—that is, run by private interests rather than government ministries. Just as the “conquest by Europe of the tropics of Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific will be recounted by future historians as the monumental achievement of this age” for bringing “high civilization” to benighted lands, thought the business writer Frederick Upham Adams, so, too, would the United Fruit Company be celebrated for carving an “empire” in the “wilderness” that included not just modern industrial technology and up-to-date sanitary practices but “picturesque settlements,” complete with “places of amusement, well-kept streets, electric lights, and most of the accessories of civilization.”
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But the story of Fordlandia cuts deeper into the marrow of the American experience. Not because its trappings more faithfully represent the life and culture of the United States than those found in Hershey, Cuba, or in United Fruit Company towns: many of the features of Ford’s Amazon town most commented on for their incongruity in a jungle setting in fact reflected eccentricities particular to the carmaker. Rather, what makes Fordlandia more quintessentially American was the way frustrated idealism was built into its conception.

Over fifty years ago, the Harvard historian Perry Miller gave his famous “Errand into the Wilderness” lecture in which he tried to explain why English Puritans lit out for the New World to begin with, as opposed to, say, going to Holland. They went, Miller offered by way of an answer, not just to preserve their “posterity from the corruption of this evil world” as it was manifest in the Church of England but to complete the Protestant reformation of Christendom that had stalled in Europe. In a “bare land, devoid of already established (and corrupt) institutions, empty of bishops and courtiers,” they would “start
de novo
.” The Puritans did not flee to America, Miller said, but rather sought to give the faithful back in England a “working model” of a purer community. Thus, central from the start to American expansion was “deep disquietude,” a feeling that “something had gone wrong”—not only with the inability of the Reformation to redeem Europe but subsequently with the failure to achieve perfection, to found and maintain a “pure biblical polity” in New England. With the Massachusetts Bay Colony just a few decades old, a dissatisfied Cotton Mather began to learn Spanish, thinking that a better “New Jerusalem” could be raised in Mexico.
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The founding of Fordlandia was driven by a similar restlessness, a chafing sense that “something had gone wrong” in America. Other company towns, despite their much publicized altruism, lived and died by the economic logic that led to their establishment. Hershey, Cuba, supplied sugar to Hershey, Pennsylvania’s chocolate factories for decades, until 1945, when it made more sense to purchase the crop from independent mills. Fordlandia, however, moved to rhythms set not by supply and demand but rather by the ups and downs of American life, which Henry Ford pledged to reform. Ford’s frustrations with domestic politics and culture were legion: war, unions, Wall Street, energy monopolies, Jews, modern dance, cow’s milk, the Roosevelts, cigarettes, alcohol, and creeping government intervention. Yet churning beneath all these annoyances was the fact that the force of industrial capitalism he helped unleash was undermining the world he hoped to restore.

FORDLANDIA’S LESSON WOULD seem to be particularly resonant today. With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seems all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination. “What the people of the interior of Brazil need,” he declared at the outset of the project, “is to have their economic life stabilized by fair returns for their labor paid in cash and their mode of living brought up to modern standards in sanitation and in prevention and cure of disease.” This formula worked in Michigan and Ford saw no reason it couldn’t be exported to Brazil. “There will not be,” Ford said, “any great difficulty in accomplishing these things.”
Fordism
was a term that would go on to have many meanings, but its first usage captured the essence of cocksureness, defined by the
Washington Post
as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations.”
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