Fordlandia (48 page)

South American leaf blight appeared in epidemic form in 1915 along the Caribbean coast, in Suriname, British Guyana, and the island of Trinidad, where planters first tried to grow estate rubber. In Suriname, it took just one year to decimate a two-year-old plantation of twenty thousand trees.
Hevea
can survive by shedding its leaves to shake off an infestation. But grouping trees in close-cropped rows made them vulnerable to not just one bout of blight but an endless barrage: even as an infected tree drops its leaves from the first assault, spores amassed on a neighboring tree attack again after a new bloom, then again and again.

This is why by the late 1910s estate rubber production had largely been abandoned in the Americas—until Henry Ford came along.

Johnston tried to fumigate with antifungal pesticides, but
Hevea
grows tall, up to thirty meters in height, and requires special water-powered sprayers that, since rubber was not a plantation crop in the Amazon, Belém merchants didn’t have in stock. Dearborn shipped some down, but the plantation’s hilly terrain made their use a time-consuming, costly, and ultimately ineffective response. By mid-1936, Fordlandia stood patchy and ragged, just at the moment it should have begun producing latex for export. Weir condemned large swaths of the plantation and Johnston couldn’t argue.

The construction of Belterra was just about finished. Workers had built a city center and residential houses and cleared and planted thousands of acres with rubber. So a decision was finally made to switch the bulk of operations to the new site, with Fordlandia converted into a research center, bud-grafting school, and nursery for hybrid clones to be planted at the new estate. The train stopped running along Fordlandia’s three-mile stretch, as workers packed up the locomotive and cars and shipped them back to Detroit. A few staff families remained, rattling around the American neighborhood, as did a skeleton crew of Brazilian laborers. Some of them learned how to bud graft, while others kept up the nurseries, surviving rubber groves, and the Henry Ford Hospital, as well as their own lawns, gardens, and sidewalks.

“The growth of the rubber on Fordlandia is in striking contrast,” Walter Bangham said after a visit in 1936, “to the excellent town site and industrial buildings that have been erected on the Fordlandia estate.” But soon the town, too, began to take on a ghostly cast. A few years later, a visitor reported that the “jungle was beginning to creep back over it and blot out the signs and lines of a supercivilization which men had transported and transplanted at the cost of incredible effort, money, and human life.”
2

WHEN HENRY FORD approved Weir’s proposal to acquire Belterra, it provided an opportunity for Weir and Johnston to find at least a narrow slip of common ground, as both men thought a successful rubber plantation did not need a concentrated company town along the lines of Fordlandia. Johnston was tired of caring for workers and their families from cradle to grave, while Weir believed “decentralization of the field force . . . would save much time in going to and from distant parts of the estate.” Rubber tapping had to begin at dawn, when sap flowed the freest. So Weir suggested that when the time came to tap latex at Belterra the company give plots of land to workers where they could build a house, close to a designated grove they would be responsible for maintaining and harvesting—in other words, he proposed a labor system pretty much like what existed in the Tapajós before the establishment of Fordlandia.

Ford disagreed, and once he authorized the swap of a piece of his original concession for land farther down the Tapajós, he sent instructions to build a new town, centered on a city square, complete with a church, a recreation room, an outdoor movie theater, a golf course, a swimming pool, a water tower, and even windmills to produce electricity. Ford had once told a village reporter, more than a decade earlier, when he was just getting started promoting decentralized “village industries,” that he was strictly opposed to the idea of building “model towns” from scratch. “I’m against that sort of thing,” he insisted, saying that he would instead locate his factories and mills in already established communities like Pequaming, which he purchased in 1923. But throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, as his village industry projects became less a realistic remedy for the dislocations of boom-and-bust capitalism and more a symptom of his intensifying obsessions, he did exactly “that sort of thing”—in the Upper Peninsula with his logging camps, in Dearborn with Greenfield Village, and in the Amazon with Fordlandia. At nearly the precise moment he was telling Johnston to proceed with the building of Belterra, Ford, upon driving through an Upper Peninsula forest he found especially pretty, sent a work crew to dig a mill lake and raise a prim twelve-bungalow town surrounding a village green. Named by Ford after the daughter of the manager of his UP operations, Alberta became the newest addition to his village industry program, its workers expected to divide their time lumbering, milling, and farming.
3

Over the next couple of years, Alberta and Belterra proceeded on similar lines, with the company promoting wholesome living in both, through gardening, education, health care, and recreation. Even the clapboard bungalows of the two towns looked alike. White with green trim, they were Cape Cod style, with steep roofs and front gables. Alberta, which today stands intact and is run by Michigan Technical University as a forest research station and tourist attraction, would prove to be marginally more successful than Belterra—it provided a steady, if inconsequential, amount of milled timber to be kilned in Iron Mountain. But it was ultimately as unsustainable as Ford’s Amazonian venture. Over the next decade, company executives were forever trying to quietly close the money-draining town, only to be countermanded by Henry Ford himself. “Get it running by Monday,” he told his Upper Peninsula manager on Thursday, upon learning that the mill had been shut down.
4

BACK IN BRAZIL at Belterra, hundreds of boys dressed in shorts, shirts, and caps and girls in white blouses and dark skirts began attending schools named after Henry’s son and grandchildren: Edsel, Henry II, and Benson. Belterra was indeed flat, which was good not just for planting rubber but for laying out level, symmetrical streets. Even more than Fordlandia, which made some concessions to the ups and downs, backs and forths of river topography, Belterra looked like a squared midwestern town. Model Ts and As rolled down its straight streets, which were lined with fire hydrants, sidewalks, streetlamps, and white-and-green worker bungalows, with neat lawns and front gardens.

Belterra schoolchildren
.

Cape Cod traditional I: Alberta.

Cape Cod traditional II: Belterra.

A new hospital, dubbed the “Mayo Clinic of the Amazon,” was even more modern than Fordlandia’s Henry Ford Hospital, complete with X-ray machines and blood transfusion equipment. The hospital serviced the workforce and the surrounding area, which was more populated than Fordlandia; its staff received the latest medical journals with the mail, which arrived daily from Santarém by horse—much quicker than the chuggingly slow riverboats needed to reach Fordlandia. Doctors performed more innovative operations than they did at Fordlandia, such as the removal of cataracts, an eye condition prevalent in the Amazon owing to the strong equatorial sun. Belterra medical personnel, chemists, and lab technicians made important advances in treating parasitical diseases and other infections that in later years would help other enterprises maintain a large force in the jungle. “In the interest of science,” all of Fordlandia’s Brazilian employees had to sign a waiver allowing the hospital to perform autopsies if they passed away on the estate.
5

The sanitation squad continued to hunt wild dogs, drain swampy areas and cover them with oil so that mosquitoes couldn’t breed, and inspect company houses to make sure kitchens and bathrooms were clean and laundry was hung to dry on lines. Still, Belterra represented a lessening of the feudal control that the company instituted, or at least tried to institute, at Fordlandia, more closely approximating modern labor relations based on wages and benefits—of the kind often extolled by Ford even as he was undercutting them with his social engineering and paternalistic manipulation. The town was set back from the river a few miles, providing it with a natural buffer from the riverboat liquor trade; the company didn’t have to enforce Prohibition as strictly as it did upriver, which helped reduce conflict. The settlement was within relatively easy reach of Santarém, so Belterra workers enjoyed some leverage in dealing with the company: at Fordlandia, accessible only by river, workers often felt trapped and utterly dependent on the plantation, especially after the razing of Pau d’Agua and other shantytowns did away with potential refuges for those who wanted to quit. At Belterra they could just walk away. At the same time, proximity to Santarém lightened the social burden of the plantation management. Though they still showed movies and provided other forms of recreation, finding something to alleviate worker boredom was no longer a pressing concern of the American staff.

Opposite page: The houses at Belterra were more self-consciously traditional than the ones at Fordlandia, as if mirroring Ford’s increased cultural conservatism. The bungalows built by Archie Johnston at Fordlandia in the wake of the 1930 riot, though inappropriate for the climate, sported simple, clean, and functional lines. In contrast, Belterra’s residences seem mannered, with gabled roofs, shutters, and painted trim. They were also, except for want of chimneys, indistinguishable from the houses Ford had built in Alberta, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, around the same time.

For the Americans, too, life felt a little less isolated at Belterra than it did at Fordlandia. The mail, including American newspapers and magazines, got there quicker and it was easier to get to Santarém or even Belém for a visit. They lived in comfortable dwellings along a shady thoroughfare, not as picturesque as Fordlandia but more familiar, level, like a proper “American suburb.” They were attended to by Barbadian servants and played golf on a “completely flat 9 hole, par 38 course.” And they celebrated Christmas, New Year’s, and July Fourth with parties and dances.
6

With the switch from Fordlandia to Belterra, Archie Johnston began to supervise operations from Belém, leaving Curtis Pringle and John Rogge to oversee the construction of the new town and plantation. Setting aside his irritation with Weir, Sheriff Pringle, named general supervisor of Belterra, turned out to be reasonable and pragmatic. He faithfully built the new town center, along with houses for laborers and staff, but he tempered the puritanism that nearly wrecked Fordlandia, going easy on attempts to regulate the social life and eating habits of the plantation’s workforce. As a reporter for
Harper’s
put it after a visit, “Mr. Ford and Brazil are still somewhat in disagreement in matters of doors, screening, and heights of ceiling, but the ex-sheriff has proved himself an excellent arbiter. He does not insist upon square-dancing or wholesome Detroit-style cooking.”
7