Fordlandia (47 page)

Pringle, “like the rest of us, is by no means perfect,” Johnston wrote to Dearborn, but if he “never took a cooperative attitude with Mr. Weir” it was because the pathologist “never took this attitude with Mr. Pringle; one cannot assume that all superior air and command either attention or respect.” Johnson tried talking to Weir several times, telling him that his attitude was antagonizing the rest of the staff. But Weir shrugged it off. “At present,” Johnston told Dearborn, Weir “can neither work in harmony with Pringle nor the writer.”
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Weir was a prima donna. Though he presumed to tell Pringle how to build Belterra, he refused to spend a night there because the site was still under construction and there was no “privacy” and “no good bathroom.” Johnston tried to order Weir to move to the new plantation. But Weir said he wouldn’t until a proper house was built for him. Until then, he insisted on staying at Fordlandia, where Johnston ordered him to bunk with other single men and work in the “engineering office.” Weir balked, adamant on remaining in one of the well-equipped houses built for married American managers. Johnston unsuccessfully tried to get Dearborn to back him up, writing that if Weir was allowed to work from home there would be no way to make sure he wasn’t slacking. “We cannot control a man if he is at home,” he said, since “he might be in bed.”

Weir took credit for the accomplishments of others. “There is little or nothing in what he writes, nothing we do not already know, nothing we are not doing or intend on doing in the proper season,” Johnston complained. “Everything he writes is meant to convey the idea to Dearborn that no one here knows anything about rubber. This condition does not exist, we know what we are doing.” Weir even claimed to be the first to extract the poison rotenone, found in the roots of the timbo plant and used locally to kill piranhas, as an insecticide. “The timbo business is our idea,” said Johnston, who claimed to have developed the pesticide himself.
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But Weir’s worst vice, in Johnston’s eyes, was that he valued theory over practice. Weir never stayed at Fordlandia for long periods of time, the manager said, always finding one reason or another to travel to Belém or Rio, or even back to the States. Therefore he hadn’t actually observed the complete Tapajós annual planting cycle. That didn’t stop him, Johnston said, from making sweeping generalizations about Fordlandia’s planting methods. Weir, he told Dearborn, “is not acquainted with the conditions here through an entire season,” making him “scarcely qualified to talk on certain subjects.” Johnston heaped particular scorn on Weir’s planting instructions, which the company had adopted as “law” shortly after Edsel had hired him. “He continually refers to his General Letters, and Standard Procedures, etc.,” Johnston groused, accusing Weir of having imposed practices common on Southeast Asian plantations “before he had an opportunity to qualify as an expert about what should be Standard Practices in Brazil.”

To support his cause, Johnston enlisted the services of another expert, Walter Bangham. A former colleague of Weir’s who worked for Goodyear in Central America, Bangham supported Johnston’s contention that they could make a go of rubber at Fordlandia. Johnston asked Bangham if Weir had indeed written Goodyear’s “Standard Practices,” as he claimed he had. “No, not one,” replied Bangham. Johnston’s new ally reported that Weir, having taken the Ford job, wrote him several times asking to be sent copies of Goodyear’s plantation handbook, which he then passed off to Dearborn as his own work. Bangham also confirmed Johnston’s suspicion that Weir was treating the whole operation more as an opportunity to conduct experiments than as a practical business venture. Weir’s “Standard Practices as written are not standard practices, but experimental practices,” Bangham said, “and the way you have done things here is more practical than what is written.”
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“So it makes you wonder,” complained Johnston to his Michigan superiors, “if Mr. Weir is sincere, does he know what he is talking about?”
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WEIR, FOR HIS part, sent Dearborn a series of progressively gloomier reports, blaming the plantation’s lack of success on a combination of pestilence and incompetence. In early 1936, he “threw quite a bomb,” in his words, at Dearborn officials, recommending that Fordlandia be scaled back dramatically and that planting in Belterra be extended only gradually. Contradicting his own initial enthusiasm, Weir declared that “no rubber man would have gone to Brazil in the first place to build estates.” Having already convinced the company to move the whole operation downriver to Belterra—at this point still under construction—the pathologist now recommended to Dearborn that it start over in Central America.
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There may be some truth to Johnston’s claim that Weir was taking advantage of his employment with Ford to test pet theories. Not only had the pathologist managed to convince Dearborn to turn Fordlandia into his own personal research laboratory, Weir himself admitted in his original survey that Ford’s operations presented a wonderful opportunity to research a question that had long preoccupied rubber specialists: Did the seeds gathered by Henry Wickham represent Amazon’s best
Hevea
, or could a sturdier and more profitable variety be identified? He wrote:

It is a common opinion among those, familiar with rubbers of the Amazon and the East, that certain very characteristic forms, known to exist in Brazil, are not found in the population of trees on eastern plantations. With the possession of the eastern, tested, material to serve as standards and comparison, Boa Vista would have an unusual opportunity to accomplish what every planting Company in the East has planned to do, viz: investigate genetically the wild rubbers of the Amazon River drainage.

“Every effort,” Weir said, “should be made to study the rubbers of the Amazon, for it is not unlikely, that some of the finest families of trees escaped the first collection of seeds that went to the East.”

By getting Edsel Ford to finance his trip to Sumatra, Weir did exactly that, securing representative samples of Southeast Asian
Hevea
to test against Brazilian varieties so as to identify blight-resistant strains that might not have been included in Wickham’s original seed consignment. In retrospect, it is perplexing why Weir, one of the world’s foremost experts on rubber blight, should have downplayed its danger as he did in his first positive report, the one where he praised all of Johnston’s “good work” and predicted a “great success” for Fordlandia. In that document, Weir recommended not only that rubber planting be expanded but that the trees be placed closer together than they so far had been. Where Oxholm and his successors spaced them about a hundred to an acre, Johnston, acting on Weir’s advice, doubled up in 1934, planting two hundred to the acre. It could be the case that Weir was actually hoping for an epidemic of South American leaf blight as a way of isolating truly resistant stock, which he believed existed throughout the Amazon basin but had yet to be identified. Since blight is not a problem in Southeast Asia, none of the clones he brought back were specifically bred to withstand fungi; if they proved to be susceptible, while other, locally gathered seeds demonstrated resistance, it would confirm that there existed in the Amazon a wider variety of
Hevea
than that currently available to plantations in Asia.

Weir, despite his work with Goodyear and other corporations, was at heart a government agronomist, with a long and active affiliation with the Department of Agriculture. Just as State Department diplomats tended to cultivate a broader, stable investment climate rather than advance the immediate interests of specific companies (as did Commerce Department attachés), Weir seemed concerned less with making Fordlandia, or Belterra, work than with figuring out how to grow plantation rubber in the Amazon, even if it meant that a company other than Ford’s would benefit.

So Johnston continued to fume. Weir, he said, has never been held accountable for his actions. Having left “others to carry on what he proposed,” he “returns and criticizes what has been done.” Johnston begged Dearborn to put Weir in charge of planting and insect control, letting him run “matters to suit himself.” This would at least make him responsible for results. Give him a “definite job,” he begged, “otherwise he will carry on as in the past.”
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Caught up in his feud with Weir and pressed into not just running one plantation but building a second, Johnston probably missed the irony of what by late 1935 had become his main line of criticism about Weir, that the scientist had repeatedly advised the plantation to adopt methods not appropriate to the specific conditions of the Tapajós. “One does not have to be an expert,” Johnston said, “to know that a standard practice in one country can be detrimental to good practice in another.”
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*
The Rockefeller Foundation had launched a mosquito-eradication program in Brazil a few years earlier.

CHAPTER 21

BONFIRE OF THE CATERPILLARS

AS WEIR AND JOHNSTON BICKERED, THE FOLIAGE OF FORDLANDIA’S maturing trees began to close, forming a bridge over which South American leaf blight could march. Plantation managers had noticed the fungi, which feed off and spread among rubber leaves, from the moment the first trees began to bloom. But the Tapajós’s long dry season allowed workers to slow its spread through constant pruning and leaf washing. Then in 1935, the crowns of most of Fordlandia’s trees began to touch one another, and what was troublesome turned catastrophic.

The spores hit the older groves the hardest. “Practically all the branches of the trees throughout the estate,” Weir wrote in a report to Dearborn, “terminate in naked stems. Each successive elongation of the shoot becomes smaller and smaller.” The fungi don’t kill trees straight out. But as they fight to refoliate, they grow successively weaker, either producing dwarf shoots or dying back altogether. Spores also attacked the estate’s nurseries, including the new budwood bed. None of Weir’s Dutch colonial clones, which held the hope of so many, proved resistant to the blight—expectedly so since South American leaf blight doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia and therefore planters there had no reason to select for resistance.
1

Fordlandia rubber planting
.

Upon arriving at Fordlandia two years earlier, Weir had minimized the threat of blight and the valley’s erratic rain distribution and urged Johnston to plant even closer rows. Yet he now declared unequivocally that the disease had assumed “epidemic proportions with every change of humidity.” Fordlandia’s proximity to the Tapajós accelerated the disease, as the morning fog nurtured the fungi, which were now “spreading directly from tree to tree, without some intermittent controllable stage” and could not “be combated at Fordlandia successfully or economically.” The Ford Motor Company, with the endorsement of a well-respected pathologist with experience on three continents, had in effect created an incubator.

SOUTH AMERICAN LEAF blight was well known to tropical botanists and planters at the time of Fordlandia’s founding. By the early 1910s, pathologists had identified different manifestations of blight that had occurred throughout the Amazon basin as variations of a single disease. The blight is spread by airborne spores that move from leaf to leaf, entering their epidermis and reproducing between their cells. The fungi attack seedlings and mature trees alike, as well as a variety of latex-producing trees, not just
Hevea brasiliensis
. New leaves turn black and wither, while mature ones become pockmarked, with the infected tissue turning greenish black before rotting away completely.

Hevea
is what botanists call a
climax
plant, meaning that it developed in an ecosystem—in this case the Amazon—that was at the apex of its complexity. Unlike relatively new
pioneer
crops like wheat, corn, or rice, which grow rapidly and throw off many fertile seeds and flourish in a variety of habitats, including large plantations,
Hevea
is not so adaptable. Its genetic composition is as old and evolved as the jungle that surrounds it. To use a metaphor associated with human behavior,
Hevea
is set in its ways. It grows slowly, its girth is thick, its seeds need coaxing, and it likes to hide from predators by mixing with other jungle trees. Yet despite these survival strategies, rubber, like many other tropical plants, can be a successful commercial crop when completely removed from its home environment, freed from the pests and plagues that evolved and adapted with it. While Southeast Asia was similar enough in climate to the Amazon, its native insects, parasites, and spores ignored South American rubber and so trees could be planted in close rows. In their original context, on the other hand, rubber trees grown near one another proved susceptible to pestilence, as Weir put it, with “every change of humidity.”