Fordlandia

The word that kept popping into my head while reading Greg Grandin's fascinating book Fordlandia was hubris. It tells the story of how auto magnate Henry Ford bought a huge patch of land--an area about the size of Connectict--in Brazil to harvest his own rubber, and then tried to import American values and create an ideal American town in the heart of the Amazonian jungle. As Grandin puts it, "Over the course of two decades, Ford would spend tens of millions of dollars founding not one but, after the first plantation was devastated by leaf blight, two American towns, complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and, of course, Model Ts and As rolling down the paved streets."

As interesting a story as this, it is outshone by the character of Henry Ford himself. I spent a great deal of my childhood in Dearborn, Michigan--I consider it my hometown--and you can't go far without seeing something of his legacy, as parks, roads, schools, shopping malls and almost everything else has his name on it, and the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company still dominates the economy. But the man was, to put it kindly, complicated. He frequently held two contradictory notions at the same time, and in the case of Fordlandia it was his longing for the simplicity of small-town life while at the same time his revolutionizing industry destroyed it. "Many in the press judged Ford's antiquarianism with contempt," Grandin writes, "pointing out the irony of the man singularly responsible for the disappearance of small-town America now claiming to be its restorer. 'With his left hand he restores a self-sufficient little eighteenth-century village,' wrote the Nation, 'but with his right hand he had already caused the land to be dotted red and yellow with filling stations.'"

Consider Ford's treatment of his workers. "In early 1914, Ford made an announcement that sent seismic shocks across the globe. Henceforth, he proclaimed, the Ford Motor Company would pay an incentive wage of five dollars for an eight-hour day, nearly double the average industrial standard. The Wall Street Journal charged Henry Ford with class treason, with 'economic blunders if not crimes.' Yet his absentee and turnover rate plummeted and Ford was jolted into the ranks of the world's most admired men, 'an international symbol of the new industrialization.'"

But there was two sides to that coin. "Ford conditioned his Five Dollar Pay plan with the obligation that workers live a wholesome life. And to make sure they did, the carmaker dispatched inspectors from his Sociological Department to probe into the most intimate corners of Ford workers' lives, including their sex lives." Throughout the book, we get glimpses of the strange paternalism of Ford, with him pushing activities on his employees such as ballroom dancing and gardening, and even compelling his Brazilian workers to be only allowed to eat in the company's cafeteria, thereby controlling their diets. This led to a riot in Fordlandia.

Other Ford curiosities were his pacifism (he came to loggerheads with Theodore Roosevelt during World War I), his rampant anti-Semitism, and his belief that "history is bunk." In fact, many thought Ford was illiterate. He also had an aversion to experts: "He liked to brag that his company never employed an 'expert in full bloom' because they 'always know to a dot just why something cannot be done.' 'None of our men are experts,' Ford said. 'We have unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert--because no one ever considers himself expert if really knows his job.'"

This kind of counter-intuitive thinking was the ruination of Fordlandia. Ford sent down many men to plant a crop to harvest latex, but that team did not include entomologists or botanists. The company in Dearborn had no clue how to treat workers in the Amazon jungle. High wages in cash were fairly meaningless to them, as there was nothing to buy. They tended to work for a while and then drift back home. Engineers unaccustomed to the climate made blunders such as building houses with metal roofs, which trapped the heat inside rather than blocking it. Deaths from malaria and yellow fever were high, and despite Ford's attempts to make his plantation a moral oasis, vice still won out. Then there was leaf blight and insect infestation, which destroyed much of the crop.

Ford never visited Fordlandia, which made him something of an Oz-like figure. The locals were constantly waiting for him to arrive. Instead, when he yielded the company to his grandson, Fordlandia was sold back to the Brazilian government for a fraction of its value. As Grandin puts it, "Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism--and by extension Americanism. It reveals the faith that a drive toward greater efficiency could be controlled and managed in such a way as to bring balance to the world and that technology itself, without the need for government planning, could solve whatever social problems arose from progress's advance. Fordlandia is indeed a parable of arrogance. The arrogance, though, is not that Henry Ford thought he could tame the Amazon but that he believed the forces of capitalism, once released, could still be contained."