Fordlandia (41 page)

Johnston eventually did contract with enough concessionaires to open a bakery, barber shop, shoe store, tailor, a store selling “notions and perfumery,” two grocery stores, a vegetable and fish market, and a butcher. He also found someone to take over the repaired dining hall, now divided between the larger “Ford Restaurant” on one side and a slightly more upscale eating place for skilled workers on the other.
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Then he turned to Fordlandia’s housing crisis. The plantation’s original plans from 1928 called for the building of four hundred two-room houses “per Ford Motor Co. drawings,” at a cost of $1,500 each—clearly insufficient for the thousands of workers and their families who had come to the settlement. In truth, this failure to address workers’ housing needs was not that different from what was happening in Michigan. Despite his famed paternalism and acquisition of towns like Pequaming, Ford, except for a small experimental community of 250 homes, largely tried to avoid providing houses for his Dearborn and Detroit workers, believing his high wages would be enough to create prosperous neighborhoods. He steadfastly ignored the city’s mounting housing problems, which had dogged the automobile industry since the beginning of its expansion. Workers lived in overcrowded slums, flophouses, and tenements, most without decent plumbing, electricity, or heat, with African Americans consigned to the worst of the lot.
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“There was nothing down there to absorb their earnings,” said Ernest Liebold. So Fordlandia opened a series of shops, including a shoe store
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But on the Tapajós, the Ford Motor Company recognized that it couldn’t escape the responsibility for supplying decent living quarters, and Johnston, in the wake of the riot, was determined to get it right. He demolished the “disreputable straw village” where workers with families had crowded, replacing it with over a hundred new palm-roofed adobe houses equipped with water and electricity and laid out in “good lines, straight and true.” He cleaned up the riverfront and graded, paved, and named the streets that ran through what was finally beginning to look like a midwestern town, with sidewalks, streetlamps, and red fire hydrants. Dearborn, though, wasn’t happy with the thatched houses and ordered Johnston to build proper midwestern-style clapboard bungalows. Johnston tried to reason with his superiors, saying that the huts were “no disgrace to the Amazon region.” He explained that “the natives are quite happy and willing to live in them and as long as they are no detriment to the health of Boa Vista, we feel that they should be allowed to use them so why build more wood houses now?”
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A snug bungalow on the Tapajós
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But it was not thatched roofs and mud walls that impressed visiting reporters, who inevitably pointed to Fordlandia’s handful of “Swiss cottage type” homes and “snug bungalows” as exemplars of a “model colonial town.” So Johnston and Rogge got to work, and by the end of 1933 there were over two hundred “modern houses” for laborers and foremen.

Designed in Michigan, the houses proved to be totally inappropriate for the Amazon climate. Brazilians objected to the window screens that Ford officials insisted be used, believing that they served not to keep bugs out but to trap them in, “much as an old-fashioned fly-trap collects flies.” Amazon dwellers also preferred dirt floors, which were cooler than wood or concrete ones. But Victor Perini, who during his first visit had inspected housing conditions with Dr. Beaton, believed that beriberi was caused by sleeping in low-slung hammocks with one’s back close to the cold clay. So Dearborn ordered that all houses have poured concrete for flooring.
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Straight and true: Fordlandia’s Riverside Avenue, with Tapajós River to the right
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Metal roofs lined with asbestos, chosen by Ford engineers to repel the sun’s rays, in fact kept heat in. The “workers’ houses were hotter than the gates of hell,” recalled a priest who ministered in Fordlandia, “because some faraway engineer decided that a metal roof was better than something more traditional like thatch.” They were “galvanized iron bake ovens,” said Carl LaRue, commenting on Fordlandia’s foibles years later. “It is incredible that anyone should build a house like that in the tropics.” Another visitor described them as “midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares.” They seemed to be “designed by Detroit architects who probably couldn’t envision a land without snow.”
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Ford managers, said the priest, “never really figured out what country they were in.”

They never really figured out who their workers were, either. In addition to inappropriate housing, Ford managers laid on a program of civic education and wholesome recreation that had little to do with the Amazon—and everything to do with America, or at least Henry Ford’s understanding of America.

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Urban poverty in America is often presented as a result of industrial decline. Yet historian Thomas Sugrue, in his
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), argues that the roots of poverty and housing discrimination are inextricably linked to the consolidation—not the decline—of American industrial capitalism, not only to the refusal of corporate leaders like Ford to take responsibility for providing adequate housing for a growing urban working class but to specific choices made by companies to relocate in suburbs and other hard-to-unionize rural areas. Meanwhile, in Dearborn, Ford’s River Rouge African American workers, 12 percent of his total workforce, were isolated in poor surrounding townships like Inkster, living in pitiful bungalows, with little access to basic services like decent schools for their children. The Great Depression finally forced Ford to spend tens of thousands of dollars to rehabilitate Inkster. But it was too little, too late and served only to reinforce segregation in Dearborn, which the Ford Motor Company never contested and which lasted well into the 1970s. Detroit continued its slide into urban poverty as Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler moved more and more of their work out of the city.

CHAPTER 18

MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON

THE FIRST TIME CONSTANCE PERINI MET HENRY FORD WAS IN 1926 as she was lying in bed in his namesake Detroit hospital, recovering from a long illness. “Stay right there,” he said to family members who made to leave when he came in. “I’m not going to hurt anybody.”

“Are you comfortable here?” Ford asked Mrs. Perini.

“Very much.”

“How do you like Iron Mountain?” he inquired.

It was winter when the Perinis arrived in the Upper Pensinsula, having come from Manchester, England, where Victor worked in the Ford plant, and the Michigan town was covered in twelve feet of snow.

“I don’t know what Iron Mountain looks like. All I’ve seen is roofs and snow. They don’t even have sidewalks.”

“Oh yes, they have sidewalks up there. You’ll see them when the snow goes away.”

“I don’t know . . . we’ll see when the snow goes away.”

“You’ll see,” Ford replied, “there are plenty of sidewalks there and dandelions. You will be able to put flowers in and show them how to do it.”

On his way out, she heard Ford tell her husband, “I knew she would come out all right. You can be proud. You’ve got a good wife. She is a good housekeeper and a good mother. Take care of her.”

Constance recovered her health and returned to Iron Mountain, where she took Ford’s advice. She planted flowers that spring, and sure enough, she said, “the idea must have taken hold on the rest of the town because the next year everyone got to work planting flowers and bushes. You would be surprised at what a difference it made.” Ford, when he visited, “was quite pleased with the looks of the places on this visit,” said Mrs. Perini. “He said so to several people.”
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Here then, summed up, is Ford’s civilizing injunction, issued in his home state years before he made his move into the Amazon: Go forth and plant flowers.

FOR HENRY FORD, gardening captured his vision of holistic Emersonian self-sufficiency, in which aesthetics and economics, nature and mechanics worked as one. At his Fair Lane estate in Dearborn, his wife, Clara, presided over twenty gardeners, three greenhouses, a sprawling general garden, a ten-thousand-plant rose garden, and the restoration, under the guidance of the naturalist John Burroughs, of a great portion of their land to its forested state. Ford also promoted gardening as an integral part of the curriculum of the many schools he supported in the United States, including those in Greenfield Village and his village industries. He gave his Upper Peninsula lumberjacks, jobbers, sawyers, and other mill workers plots of land to grow vegetables for their own use. In Dearborn, starting in 1918, the company began to make 35-by-60-foot plots available to employees on Ford property and encouraged homeowning workers to keep flower and vegetable gardens in their yards. Colored posters appeared around the Highland Park and Rouge plants letting workers know about Ford’s Garden Education Service. A “company-gardener” was “on hand during all daylight hours to answer all questions” on how best to lay out plots, when to plant, and how to prepare and fertilize the soil. Workers paid a dollar for these services, which included the provision of seeds. The fee was “totally inadequate to cover the cost,” noted an internal memo, but “sufficient to give each participant a ‘stake’ in the project.” Through the Great Depression of the 1930s, Ford pushed gardening as an alternative to government relief. And by the end of the decade, some fifty-five thousand of his employees kept home gardens and another three thousand workers maintained garden plots on Ford-allotted land.
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And so in Fordlandia, as part of the post-riot rebuilding program, both Henry and Clara Ford became personally involved in promoting gardening, saying that it was their “expressed wish that the planting of flowers and vegetables be incorporated into the estate’s school curriculum and encouraged among its workers.” Roy McClure, chief of surgery at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, wrote to Archie Johnston that “Mr. Ford expressed considerable interest in the schools and in the hope that the medical program and perhaps gardening projects might be started as they have been at Dearborn, Georgia, Northern Michigan, as well as Wayside Inn.”
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As with housing, Archie Johnston did what he could to comply. But here, too, he found the gap wide between Dearborn principles and Tapajós practice. “We are aware that Mr. Ford wants every home to have a small plot of ground in connection with same,” Johnston wrote Carnegie in Dearborn, “but we wonder if the picture of Boa Vista has been properly presented to him.” He pointed out that because the Brazilian settlement was nestled tight between the river and a hill, to give each house the 12,000 square feet of land Ford suggested would stretch out the population center. “One might say, what does that matter, but let us consider the costs, this means miles and miles of water mains, electric poles, wire, sewers, time lost in maintenance.”