Fordlandia (51 page)

Vargas rose to share his impressions of the plantation, expressing “great satisfaction” that Ford was doing so much to “plant” not just rubber but “health, comfort and happiness.” Echoing Braunstein’s admission that so far the project had proved viable more in humanitarian terms than in economic ones, he emphasized the carmaker’s generosity: Ford had not “as yet received any material compensation” despite his considerable expenditure. The rest of the evening and the next day involved more mutual expressions of admiration. There was, though, one piece of business Braunstein wanted to bring up with the president. Just before Vargas left, Braunstein, speaking in the name of Henry Ford, requested that he transfer Belterra and Fordlandia out of the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor and place them under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture—which would in effect make the company immune to labor law. Vargas said he would consider the request but promised nothing as he boarded his plane to fly to Manaus.

There, Vargas gave a speech that is considered by historians to mark the beginning of a long campaign by Brazil’s federal government to populate and industrialize the Amazon. The address echoed Ford’s technological optimism and advocacy of large-scale development projects. Yet perhaps influenced by his visit to Belterra, where he witnessed the failure of Ford’s millions to revive the rubber economy, Vargas seemed to repudiate the kind of rural/industrial holism, driven by a respect for nature, the carmaker believed he could achieve in the Upper Peninsula, Muscle Shoals, the Tapajós, and elsewhere. Known as the “March to the West,” Vargas’s speech gave nature no quarter. “The highest task of civilizing man,” the Brazilian president said, was to conquer and dominate the valleys of the great equatorial torrents,” transforming their blind force and the extraordinary fertility into disciplined energy. The Amazon . . . shall become a chapter in the history of civilization.”
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Following Vargas, one administration after another established government agencies and announced new schemes to rapidly modernize the region, to achieve “fifty years in five,” as one of Vargas’s successors put it, or to send “people without land” to a “land without people,” as the military government of the 1960s described its colonization plan. Most of these efforts would fail on their own terms—that is, they did not bring sustainable, humane development to the region. They did, however, accelerate rapid deforestation, beginning what William Woodsworth might have called a “rash assault” on the largest intact tropical rain forest left on the planet.

IN DEARBORN, SOCIAL relations were decidedly less harmonious than either Braunstein or Vargas had painted them that night in Belterra. The UAW had grown rapidly at the River Rouge and other Ford plants since its founding in 1935. Having forced GM and Chrysler to the table, organizers could harness the union’s resources in their fight against the lone holdout of the Big Three. In early 1941, activists shut down the Rouge in protest over the widespread firing of labor activists. It was the first strike ever called against Henry Ford and union leaders were not sure how his employees would respond. Only a third of the Rouge’s workforce had by then signed with the UAW—Bennett’s “terrorism,” as the National Labor Relations Board described his reign, had its effects.
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As the strike spread throughout the Rouge’s many divisions, Bennett first tried to label it communistic, an act of treason since the Ford Motor Company had just signed an agreement with the Roosevelt administration to begin war production. Workers answered by carrying pickets emblazoned with swastikas, equating Ford with Hitler. Why, one sign asked, did “Ford get a Nazi medal?”—a reference to the Grand Cross of the German Eagle bestowed by the German consul on Ford three years earlier on his seventy-fifth birthday. Unable to red-bait, Bennett next tried to race-bait. He hoped to capitalize on the loyalty some African American workers had for Ford based on his equal opportunity hiring (as well as their distrust of an all-white union leadership) to convince them to go back to work. This, too, failed. Most workers, including many African American workers, refused to return to their jobs.
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Ford threatened to shut the plant down rather than bargain collectively with his workers. Yet within a few weeks, in one of the greatest about-faces in US labor history, he not only agreed to recognize the results of a union election but, after the UAW won that election with an overwhelming majority, signed a contract that gave the union everything it wanted, including job security, the highest wages in the industry, and back pay to more than four thousand wrongfully fired workers. Historians debate what led Ford, who once moved a whole factory from New England to Michigan to thwart a union drive, to relent. Some point to Edsel’s pleading, backed up with Clara Ford’s threat to leave Henry if he didn’t settle. Whatever the specific combination of motives that drove him to the bargaining table, when Ford finally met with Walter Reuther to congratulate him on his victory, he spun his surrender in the same conspiratorial web he used to explain most things in life. “You’ve been fighting General Motors and the Wall Street crowd,” he said, now “we fight General Motors and Wall Street together, eh?”
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The deal also included a strong and binding grievance procedure that, considering what historians Peter Collier and David Horowitz call the “bizarre combination of feudal laws and naked power” that arbitrarily governed Ford’s factory floor, was the industrial equivalent of enforcing due process on the divine right of kings. Ford often said his company was revolutionary, yet it took militant labor organizers to make it so.
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BACK IN THE Amazon, Johnston was having no better luck with rubber than he had holding off the union. By the time of Vargas’s visit, plantation workers at Belterra had cleared nearly thirty thousand acres and planted close to three million trees. About a third of them were top grafted, still too young to give latex but showing promising vigor and fortitude. Then in late 1940, leaf blight, always present yet contained at Belterra, turned epidemic. Johnston, back from vacation, responded by ordering his crew to quickly top graft all tainted trees. But by the following year, blight had infected 70 percent of the blocks with closed canopies, killing most of the estate’s trees.
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After the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941, Johnston was recalled to Dearborn, where he joined Ford’s aviation division as it converted to the production of bombers and other wartime planes. But he remained the principal administrator of Ford’s Amazon plantations and enjoyed talking with reporters and other Ford workers about his ten years in the jungle. “No white man,” he liked to say, “can live in that country.” He also remained committed to the expansion of rubber production and continued to hold out hope that top grafting, given time, could overcome blight, pest, and scales. Partial vindication came earlier the next year when, despite two years of epidemic blight, Belterra yielded 750 tons of latex. It wasn’t high-quality rubber, and it was a far cry from Ford’s annual consumption of fifty million pounds. But Johnston thought it a start.
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Then, on a return trip to Brazil in October 1942, Johnston witnessed what he called “the greatest swarm of caterpillars that has ever been seen in this area.” For years, Fordlandia’s caterpillar battalions had performed extensive and relentless handpicking to contain the pests. Now a new generation of moths had evolved and adapted to the threat by laying their eggs “only on the new shoots at the top of the trees.” At that height, pickers couldn’t see the hatched caterpillars until it was too late, until they had swarmed “down the tree eating all before them.”
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The trees recovered somewhat, putting out another shoot of leaves. But in what seemed to Johnston to be a coordinated follow-up, the leaves were then assaulted by leaf blight—the “most severe attack in the history of the plantation.” This time there was no rallying. “In many cases [the trees] had not strength to put out a third flush of foliate. With the excessive dry weather the trees started to die back. Some have died half way down the trunk and may die completely.”
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“Some areas,” Johnston reported to Dearborn, “are now as bare as bean poles.”

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The New Deal’s most radical proposals came early, in a burst of laws Roosevelt shepherded through Congress soon after his 1933 inauguration, only to be diluted as time wore on; Vargas, in contrast, moved slowly, proposing only moderate changes upon taking power in 1930. But as opposition emerged, Vargas and his supporters, after suppressing a rebellion staged by São Paulo elites opposed to his efforts to concentrate federal power in Rio, became more aggressive. They adopted a new centralizing constitution in 1934 and then three years later declared the Estado Novo, or New State, best thought of as a fusion of Mussolini-style corporatism and New Deal social welfare.

CHAPTER 23

TOMORROW LAND

“MY DEAR HARVEY,” EDSEL FORD WROTE TO THE NAMESAKE SON OF his father’s old friend Harvey Firestone shortly after the United States had entered World War II, “I think I mentioned to you once something about selling our rubber plantation property on the Tapajós River in Brazil. If you would consider buying it, or have anything like that in mind, would you care to discuss the matter with me?” Firestone, who had taken over his deceased father’s company, had nothing like that in mind. He was already getting about ten thousand tons of latex a year from his plantation in Liberia. The tire maker politely declined the offer.

By this point, Fordlandia and Belterra had practically become a subsidiary of the US government. Throughout his life, Ford had steadfastly opposed the fusion of business and government even as other American industrialists, particularly during the Great Depression, embraced it. But now in his late seventies he could do little but watch the marriage go forward.

The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and its rubber fields led to a renewed interest among Washington officials, not just in the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture but in the Pentagon as well, to find new sources of “war rubber.” There had been advances over the last decade in the production of synthetic rubber, yet its production used up too much petroleum, an equally scarce resource. After war broke out, the Roosevelt administration signed treaties with sixteen Latin American countries to promote rubber production, promising government and private investment and guaranteeing high prices for their latex. Vargas, who flirted with fascism but quickly lined up with the Allies, signed on.
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The Brazilian Amazon, despite the millions of dollars invested by Ford, was supplying less than 1 percent of the world’s latex. In exchange for a $100 million loan, which included $5 million to invest in Amazon rubber, Vargas promised to sell all of his country’s exportable rubber to the United States at a fixed price until December 1946. Rio began to work closely with US government agencies such as the Rubber Development Corporation, the Board of Economic Warfare, and the Office of Inter-American Affairs—headed by the peripatetic Nelson Rockefeller, who because of his deep business ties in the region became FDR’s most influential envoy to Latin America. The idea was to encourage the migration of tens of thousands of laborers to the Amazon in the hope of jump-starting rubber production. These “rubber soldiers” were promised credit and tools, decent housing, clothing, medical attention, beefed-up labor protection against local rubber bosses, and a fixed, honest, and livable price for their latex—in short, a New Deal–style guarantee to protect them against all those miseries cataloged so vividly in Carl LaRue’s 1927 report, miseries that the coming of Henry Ford to the Amazon was supposed to have ended.

Archie Johnston by temperament and training was ill-disposed to welcome the attentions of the federal government—be they Rio’s or Washington’s—into Fordlandia’s affairs, and he still resented having been forced to recognize the plantation worker’s union. Yet having just witnessed the last, consuming blight infestation and caterpillar invasion at Belterra, he had run out of ideas about how to move forward in Brazil. He told Edsel that partnership with the government could perhaps finally make Ford’s rubber estates profitable and that Washington’s promise to pay an above-market price for latex could offset the estate’s cost overruns. He also thought the hyped “war for rubber” might provide much needed labor.

So at the same time that Ford Motors in the United States was suspending production of civilian vehicles to meet the exclusive needs of its now single customer—building jeeps, planes, and tanks and allowing federal representatives to monitor production—Fordlandia, too, was opened up to Washington. Botanists from the Department of Agriculture set up shop in Fordlandia and Belterra to study Ford’s top-grafting and cross-fertilization techniques. Federal scientists watched workers furiously bud graft trees in an attempt to outrun leaf disease and caterpillar infestations, and they took samples of the plantation’s rubber stock back with them to US government tropical research stations in the Panama Canal Zone. In May 1942, Edsel wrote a letter to Johnston, certainly not vetted by his father, saying he had “no objection” to the Department of Agriculture’s distributing Fordlandia clones to other Latin American countries.
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AS THE AMERICAN press geared itself toward promoting the war effort, Ford’s Amazon plantations assumed their final incarnation: useful embassies of FDR’s wartime Good Neighbor Policy, staging grounds for New Deal diplomacy in the Amazon. As part of the war effort, Johnston ordered plantation managers to push forward on a frantic program of expansion. By the end of March 1943, field workers had top grafted more than 820,000 trees and performed about 60,000 hand pollinations to breed high-yielding, disease-resistant stock. The nursery had produced enough clones to graft hundreds of thousands of crowns onto trees already planted in the field, and for a stretch of 1944, workers were performing tens of thousands of top grafts a month. “Mr. Johnston and assistants are soberly confident,” wrote one journalist, “but without overflowing enthusiasm. They have battled Amazonia too long for that. The successful trees I saw, their leaves glistening and green as they should be, confront the Amazonian jungle as forerunners of millions of scions being prepared for other advance bases. Someone close to the development of plantation rubber in the Amazon Basin told me that anyone except Henry Ford would have surrendered long ago.” Admittedly, Ford’s rubber output might be but a “drop in the bucket,” but it was enough to “help plug the serious leak in our stock pile.” And it would “increase geometrically year after year.” As late as 1945, one writer was forecasting that Fordlandia would be producing five hundred tons of latex by 1950.
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