Fordlandia (30 page)

Ford pioneers on their way to the Amazon but dressed for Michigan winter
.

As to the adults, Curtis Pringle, a lean ex-sheriff from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who sported a thin Clark Gable mustache and was described by a colleague as “absolutely fearless in the jungle,” stayed for over a decade, earning a reputation as a practical-minded foreman. Dr. Beaton, thirty-one and single, also enjoyed the assignment, sweetened as it was by having his pay tripled from what he earned in Detroit. When his first tour was up, he signed on for another two-year turn. He put himself to learning Portuguese and soon spoke the language more fluently than any other Michigan transplant. “Extremely well liked,” his personnel file said; Beaton “fit his job like an old shoe.” And, importantly considering the high attrition rate of Americans due to jungle illnesses (he replaced Fordlandia’s first doctor, who couldn’t stand the heat), he enjoyed good health.
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The sawyer Matt Mulrooney was also never sick, not even for a day during his year in Fordlandia. His immediate supervisor thought he had a “chip on his shoulder,” but what was interpreted as disaffection was in fact a wry Irish sense of the absurd. Mulrooney thought it was funny that he could turn on his radio and listen to American music patched in from the United States via relays in Managua, Nicaragua, and Santa Marta, Colombia. One night, he and his wife danced to a Rudy Vallee concert broadcast live from Green Bay, Wisconsin. America’s original pop idol, Vallee was the first singer to master the intimate, disembodied tone of new radio technology. At the time of his Green Bay concert, he was riding high on a parade of movie musicals and hit songs, including “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover” and “Deep Night,” the lyrics of which wafted through Fordlandia’s American village, as Mulrooney held his wife close:

Deep night, stars in the sky above

Moonlight, lighting our place of love

Night winds seem to have gone to rest

Two eyes, brightly with love are gleaming.

. . . . . . . . .

Deep night, whispering trees above

Kind night, bringing you nearer and nearer and dearer

Deep night, deep in the arms of love.

“Where others have played to thousands,” ran the ad for one of the singer’s movies, “Vallee sings nightly to millions,” including those who found themselves deep in the Tapajós valley, his voice competing with the nighttime sounds of howler monkeys, frogs, and a cacophony of crickets.
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The Mulrooneys
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MANY OF THE Americans, though, did not welcome their posting to the Amazon. The jungle pressed heavy on them, with its incessant rains that gave way to baking sun. “It was like living in a steam bath!” thought Constance Perini. There were flying bugs with “claws just like lobsters,” heat rashes and sunburns, insect bites, ticks, skin funguses, and dysentery. The Ford staff was introduced to an array of minor pests bearing strange names, such as
piums
, small biting black flies, as well as minuscule fleas that dug under fingernails, leaving their eggs to fester and infect the skin. At night, vampire bats often worked their way past window screens to feed, and since their razor-sharp incisors could painlessly pierce flesh, the Americans would sleep through an attack, waking up to find their toes and ankles bloodied. And if malaria didn’t get you, the nightmares brought on by the daily quinine pills would. “Dope every day,” was how Mulrooney remembered the prophylactic.

Illness, often the kind of undiagnosed fevers that took the lives of Oxholm’s children, became a chronic condition. William Cowling was just one of the company officials who returned to Dearborn gaunt after some time in the Amazon. Malaria became as common as a Detroit cold, and many of the men and women spent their days recovering from an attack or expecting a new one. “Some had malaria two or three times,” recalled one worker. “Rogge had it three times. Bricker had it I don’t know how many times. Casson had it. They all had it.”

Dr. Beaton sent a steady flow of telegrams to Dr. Roy McClure, his Dearborn superior and head of surgery at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital:

Mrs. Oxholm has had recurring attacks apparently cholelthiasis (gallstones) probably also functional nervous disturbance. One aggravates other. Needs also considerable dental work her daughter needs tonsils extracted. Recommend both go Ford hospital soon.

Mr. Carr’s son had a recurrent attack of acute rheumatic fever with cardiac decompensation during the voyage up the Amazon River.

Advisable to return Mr. Babcock by first available boat he continues to lose weight.

Mrs. Johnston keeps losing weight, she was 127, and is now 106. I have tried to persuade her to go home, but she is not keen about that, however.

Mr. and Mrs. Runge are leaving for Miami. Mr. Runge did not get along too well in this country but that may be the fault of the country.

Mrs. Bradshaw has suffered during the month from gastric hyperacidity with attacks of dull hunger like pain accentuated if anything by meals and relieved temporarily by alkalis. At times the highly acid stomach contents are vomited with relief. . . . [Her illness is] provoked by the nervous strain inherent with life here. She is very soon returning to the States. . . . The unrelieved stretch of two years work under tension in a tropical climate is too long and its effects continue to manifest themselves. The cities of Belém and Manaus are no health resorts but visits to them or . . . quiet rests on ranches, hunting trips, etc. . . . would steady nerves, calm ruffled tempers, distract attention from petty exasperations and infuse one with new and more worthwhile interests.

For some, the isolation of the plantation increased fears born of loneliness, making some feel as if they were “prisoners.” Moody and unable to concentrate, Mr. Groth, a chemist doing lab work on parasitical infections for the plantation, kept asking to be allowed to return to the United States. His supervisor dismissed his complaints as “imaginary ills” stemming from a fear of catching some of the diseases he was studying. “Take hold of yourself,” he scolded Groth, telling him that “as a man thinks so he is.” This may not have soothed the chemist’s nerves, but it did keep him quiet for a while. But when he again demanded to be allowed to leave, management relented. “We are not trying to persuade him any more. We believe he is lonesome and has had some trouble with his sweetheart and he feels that he can’t carry on.”
20

The most striking defection was Victor Perini’s. Henry Ford had hoped Perini would turn things around, but Perini couldn’t take the Amazon heat. He hated the jungle and from his first day in Belém began to suffer from “edema of legs and puffiness of face.”

“Awaiting instructions,” a distressed Dr. Beaton wired Dearborn, “on what to do with Victor Perini.” Diagnosed with chronic exhaustion, Victor eventually took his family and sailed back to Dearborn in May 1930 on the
Ormoc
, only two months after his arrival.

MOST OF THE rubber Oxholm had planted in the middle of 1929, during the dry season, under the hot sun in burnt ground, with seeds and seedlings of doubtful quality, had come up weak. And in April, before he left the plantation, Perini had decided to plow the field over and start again. Which meant that it would be at least another five years before Fordlandia would produce latex. The lumber mill, too, was a mess, its blades and saws ill suited for the very hard or very soft jungle wood. Hired to be a sawyer, Matt Mulrooney felt more like an undertaker: “They averaged about a man a day dying. I used to get orders every so often to cut this lumber for coffins. There was a certain thickness and a certain width they used to make the coffins out of. They’d bring an order up every so often and give it to me. I’d say, ‘What, some more of them gone?’ ‘Yep, better fix up for about ten, Matt.’ ”

Fordlandia cemetery
.

Like many of the other men Ford sent to Brazil, Mulrooney belonged to the generation of skilled carpenters, miners, and lumberjacks that had presided over the transformation of Michigan’s natural resources into wealth; they had seen the conversion of the state’s forests, minerals, and waterways into the energy and capital that fed the great industrial factories and cities of the Midwest. Sawyers like Mulrooney had witnessed in their lifetimes the seemingly inexhaustible white pine forests of upper Michigan thin out, leaving first inferior stocks of yellow pine, birch, and deciduous aspen and then wastelands of cutovers, trunks, shrubs, and branches of no economic value. Yet they also saw the rise of cities that spoke of prosperity enjoyed not just by the lords and barons in the manor houses of Chicago and Detroit but by increasingly affluent working- and middle-class communities that spread out from these cities.
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So Mulrooney could take pride as the gnarl of the Amazon gave way, slowly, to the order of the plantation. “You know, an old sawyer likes the looks of a sawed log,” he said. “There was some nice-looking logs there, some nice-looking timber, awful nice-looking. To go out and look at a bunch of that timber cut up in the woods, it was really a picture to look at, straight and not a limb or a knot in it.”

But the sawyer also knew that a “very, very big percentage” of the cut wood was “no good.” Watching the absurdity of it all—Oxholm’s bungling, the silliness of trying to impose Henry Ford’s ideas concerning diet and morality, the enormous expense and waste of resources, the impossibility of making the mill work right—Mulrooney had a distinct sense of futility. At the end of the workday, he and his pal Earl Casson, also from Iron Mountain, would “grin and wonder how we’d ever wound up in a madhouse, or if we’d ever win. We tagged it as a game.”

____________

*
More than a half century earlier, Henry Wickham wrote about the sensation of sitting in the forest and gazing up at the “leafy arches above” and becoming “lost in the wonderful beauty of that upper system—a world of life complete within itself.” The British explorer Charles Luxmoore, traveling up the Tapajós in 1928 trying to locate Percy Fawcett, complained incessantly in his journal about everything he encountered—people, food, insects, heat, and the landscape. Yet upon taking a hike in the forest, “lit up by the sun,” he pronounced it “very beautiful.” “I would not have missed this part of the journey for anything,” Luxmoore conceded. (Joc Jackson,
The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
, New York: Viking, 2008; 99; Devon Record Office, Exeter, UK, Charles Luxmoore, Journal 2, 1928, 521 M–1/SS/9.)

CHAPTER 14

LET’S WANDER OUT YONDER

IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL THE STORY OF FORDLANDIA WITHout invoking Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, that great, indelible allegory of European colonialism in general and Belgian brutality in particular. Here, the Rouge River stands in for the Thames, the starting point of Conrad’s tale, and the
Ormoc
for the
Nellie
, which carries Marlow to his rendezvous with tropical madness. Any number of Ford agents—Blakeley, for instance, or Oxholm—could double for Kurtz, defying the “whited sepulchre” of Dearborn puritanism and giving in to their lusts.