Fordlandia (35 page)

Ostenfeld laughed. As de Jesus later testified, “it was as if he was making fun,” which “infuriated” those who were standing close by, following the argument. For his part, Ostenfeld claimed that de Jesus turned to the crowd and said: “I have done everything for you, now you can do the rest.”
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The response was furious, one observer recounted, like “putting a match to gasoline.” The “horrible noise” of the breaking pots, glass, plates, sinks, tables, and chairs served as a clarion, calling more workers to descend on the mess hall armed with knives, rocks, pipes, hammers, machetes, and clubs. Ostenfeld, along with Coleman, who had watched the whole scene unfold not knowing a word of Portuguese, jumped in a truck to escape. As they sped away to tell Rogge what was happening, they heard someone yell: “Let’s break everything, let’s get hold of Ostenfeld.”

With Ostenfeld in flight, the crowd went on a rampage. Having demolished the dining hall, the rioters destroyed “everything breakable within reach of their course, which took them to the office building, power house, sawmill, garage, radio station, and receiving building.” They cut the lights to the rest of the plantation, smashed windows, dumped a truckload of meat into the river, and broke pressure gauges. A group of men tried to pull out the pilings holding up the pier, while others set fire to the machine shop, burned company records, and looted the commissary. The rioters then set their sights on the things most closely associated with Ford, destroying every truck, tractor, and car on the plantation. Windshields and lights were shattered, gas tanks punctured, and tires slashed. A number of trucks were pushed into ditches, and at least one was rolled down the riverbank into the Tapajós. Then they turned to the time clocks, smashing them to bits.

One group broke away and headed to Pau d’Agua to get liquor, while another ran to rouse other protesters. Unaware of what was going on, Archie Weeks nearly drove a “touring car” straight into a group of men armed with clubs and knives. He spun the steering wheel hard and sped away, but not fast enough to avoid a rain of rocks that shattered his back window. Gaining some distance, Weeks ditched the car and made his way back on foot to where the Americans lived.

Learning of the uprising, Rogge, who himself was getting ready to eat dinner at his home in the American compound, dispatched a trusted Brazilian to cable Belém for reinforcements before the mob got to the radio. He then ordered Curtis Pringle, who by this point was in charge of Fordlandia’s rubber planting, to evacuate most of the Americans from the estate, especially the women, who were “in a very nervous condition.” Some left on the launch Rogge kept at the ready. Others availed themselves of “all means of transportation such as canoes, motor boats, horse back, etc.”

Rogge, with his remaining staff, headed out to meet a group of about forty workers who were advancing on the American houses.

Smashed time clock
.

“What are your grievances?” he asked them.

“We are mechanics, masons, and carpenters, not table waiters,” they replied.

Rogge said he was sympathetic and promised to address their concerns, but only if they would go and calm their fellow workers. But the men sent to find liquor had returned, and the riot was “in full swing.” When Rogge heard a group of drunken workers chanting “Brazil for Brazilians. Kill all the Americans,” he decided that it was time to leave. He ordered his men to make for the tugboat, but David Riker, just back from Acre, and Archie Weeks found themselves cut off from the evacuation route. Fleeing into the jungle, they hid out for two days while the riot raged on.
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Rogge and the rest of his staff made it on the boat safely, passing the night anchored in the middle of the Tapajós. As the river’s waves lapped against the hull, the “tremendous noise” that signaled the destruction of Fordlandia continued into the morning.

*   *   *

FORDLANDIA’S UPRISING WAS an aftershock of the revolution that had rocked Brazil a few months earlier, the one that brought Getúlio Vargas to power. Vargas’s ascension was relatively bloodless, yet the frisson generated by his insurrection created a sense that the old rules no longer held and the old hierarchies no longer had to be respected. In the weeks before the December riot a number of Fordlandia’s staff made mention of the charged atmosphere that enveloped the plantation—which is, perhaps, why Rogge kept a tug waiting. “A few radicals among the skilled workers,” wrote Fordlandia’s Belém agent, James Kennedy, to Dearborn, “misinterpreted the successful revolution all over Brazil which occurred in October and these radicals began agitating against anything pertaining to foreigners.” Workers even hoisted red flags over their bunkhouses, which the Americans decided to let fly. But the ascension of Vargas also undoubtedly saved Fordlandia, for the man he named to replace Pará’s governor, Eurico de Freitas Valle, who had led the campaign to revise Ford’s concession, immediately agreed to provide whatever aid was needed to retake the plantation.

The riot began on Monday, and that night Kennedy wired Juan Trippe, the legendary founder of Pan American Airways, at his office in New York to tell him that Fordlandia had fallen to “mob rule.” Trippe had recently established a trunk line between Belém and Manaus, with a mail and refueling stop in Santarém, and Kennedy asked if one of his planes could fly him and a few soldiers to the plantation. If they didn’t get there soon, Kennedy warned, the “place will be a total wreck in 24 hours.” Trippe immediately agreed.

The next morning, Tuesday, having secured a military detachment from the local army base, Kennedy, a Brazilian lieutenant named Ismaelino Castro, and three armed soldiers boarded a Pan Am twin-engine Sikorsky hydroplane, taking off from Belém’s riverfront. It took about seven hours for the plane to reach the area, and when it landed in the early afternoon outside the town of Aveiros, just downriver from Fordlandia, Kennedy and Castro were greeted by Rogge and a few other Americans (the rest of the staff had fled to Santarém). Kennedy and the lieutenant decided to spend the night in Aveiros and travel to Fordlandia the following day. The next morning, they received word that the plantation had awaked quiet. But later that day, “irate” residents of Pau d’Agua and other villages that ringed Fordlandia’s periphery marched on the estate’s office with guns and machetes. Angry at the company’s efforts to evict them, they were perhaps urged on by Francisco Franco, who after Oxholm’s departure had developed an increasingly antagonistic relationship with Fordlandia, aggravated by Kennedy’s heavy-handed efforts to force him to sell his property in Pau d’Agua.

Kennedy and Castro had the pilot of the Sikorsky swoop down and buzz the protesters, dispersing the threat. The plane then landed in the Tapajós and pulled up along Fordlandia’s dock. Calm seemed to be restored, though Castro and his men went ashore on their own, telling Kennedy to wait behind.
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A delegation appointed by the workers received the lieutenant with a list of grievances they wanted to be presented to the company. High on the list was the demand that Ostenfeld be fired. The rest of the complaints had to do mostly with the right of free movement. Workers demanded to eat where, and what, they chose. They were tired of being fed whole wheat bread and unpolished rice “for health reasons,” as per Henry Ford’s instructions. They wanted to be able to frequent the cafes and restaurants that had sprung up around the work camp and be allowed to board steamboats, presumably to buy liquor, without first having to obtain permission. Single men complained about being jammed fifty to a bunkhouse.
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In the weeks after the riot, regional newspapers ran stories featuring other criticisms of the plantation’s management. Manuel Caetano de Jesus, the mason fingered as the riot’s instigator, told the
Estado do Pará
that the workers hated the time clocks, not just because they were unaccustomed to such regimentation but because the clocks were impractically placed too far from their work stations, making it difficult to punch in as required to do “under penalty of losing wages.” Mario Pinheiro do Nascimento complained not just about being charged for food, which was not part of the deal when he contracted for work, but about the “very poor quality” of the food itself. The kitchen staff, he said, often served “rotten” fish “not fit for a dog kept hungry for three days.”
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Others groused that come payday, the company, dependent on shipments of cash from Belém, was frequently short. So it handed out “cards” as markers. But if someone tried to leave, the plantation made it difficult to “exchange those cards for money.” The hospital and medical staff had done much to improve the health conditions of the residents in the center of Fordlandia. Yet the death rate remained high from “beri-beri and other unknown fevers” for those who worked on the estate’s outskirts building roads, gathering palm for thatch and timber, or clearing forest to plant more rubber. Pit vipers—large, thick-bodied snakes with a triangle-shaped head and rounded snout—continued to strike at the hands of workers as they chopped at the jungle’s undergrowth.
*
Others made mention of cramped living conditions, of being made to work in the rain, or of mandatory trips to the hospital without reason or explanation.
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FORD VISCERALLY OPPOSED the notion of workers representing themselves collectively; he once called unions the “worst thing that ever struck the earth.” And as unions gained in popularity and strength, he seamlessly added labor leaders to his gallery of enemies. At the time of the 1930 riot, Ford could claim a series of victories against organizing campaigns led by the militant Industrial Workers of the World and the AFL-affiliated Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers Union, and he would settle for nothing less in the Amazon. The men he sent down to Brazil, along with their supervisors back in Dearborn, were well versed in their boss’s thinking when it came to labor unrest, and they took it as an article of faith that, as Sorensen would repeatedly remind Fordlandia’s management, the company would not “let any strikers dictate how our business must be run.”

So Kennedy told Lieutenant Castro flat out that he would not meet the protesters’ demands “under any circumstances.” Instead, he decided to use the opportunity presented by the riot to, as the sawyer Matt Mulrooney put it, “clean house.” He wired José Antunes, owner of the namesake riverboat
Zeantunes
—Zé being short for José—who was in Belém waiting to bring a shipment of goods recently arrived from New York, along with two hundred newly contracted employees, to Fordlandia. Kennedy told him to unload the cargo, dismiss the workers, and go to the Bank of London and withdraw an emergency shipment of cash.

As Kennedy waited for the money, a boat carrying thirty-five soldiers “fully armed and equipped with machine guns” docked at Fordlandia on Christmas Eve. The troops inspected the plantation, confiscating knives, guns, and any other implement that could be used as a weapon. Kennedy then ordered the soldiers to evict the residents of Pau d’Agua and the other shantytowns that surrounded Fordlandia and close down the bars, restaurants, and brothels that had long bedeviled the plantation. “Entirely clean them out,” he told the soldiers. After the families were forced out and their houses torn down, Kennedy sent in the sanitation squad to “clean it up,” to burn the latrines and pour quicklime into the pits. Shortly thereafter, with the backing of Vargas’s government, he finally forced Francisco Franco to sell him the land where Pau d’Agua had stood for, as Eimar Franco puts it, “the price of a banana.”
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The
Zeantunes
arrived on New Year’s Day with the requested cash. Flanked by armed Brazilian soldiers, Kennedy gathered the plantation’s workers together and paid them “for all time up to and including December 22.” He then fired the entire labor force save a skeleton crew of a few hundred men.
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With Fordlandia in ruins and damages estimated to run over twenty-five thousand dollars, he waited to hear from Dearborn what to do next.

____________

*
Brazil resisted for over a decade an international agreement that would set the Greenwich meridian as the base for reckoning international zones, holding out for the use of its own coordinates to standardize time. It dropped its opposition in 1913 and accepted Greenwich time, though most interior regions, especially those without train lines such as the Amazon, continued to keep “God’s time.”

*
Also known as a bushmaster, this snake is among the most lethal in the world. Its Latin name,
Lachesis muta muta
, derives from Lachesis, one of the Fates in Greek mythology who decides individual destiny, and can be translated as “bringing silent death in the night,” since, though it vibrates its tail prior to striking, it has no rattle.

PART III