Americana

 
Henry Ford's American suburb, transplanted into the depths of the Brazilian jungle. 

In the early years of the twentieth century, Henry Ford seemed to know how to do everything better and faster. He built cars that got Americans moving faster than ever before, and he built them in a way that people could afford. Year after year, he was able to increase the number of cars he built while also reducing the number of workers needed to build them. Whatever he tried, worked. Ford was a man who knew he was right, and knew that his way of doing things was the best way, and he saw no reason why those ideas shouldn't apply everywhere to everyone. He was wrong.

In Fordlandia, Greg Grandin tells the story of Ford's misbegotten attempt to build a rubber plantation in Brazil in the late 1920s. This is one of those little pieces of history that can best be described as "rolling disaster," as in people making mistake after mistake at every turn. The choice of site was wrong; the Americans didn't get how to do business in Brazil; Ford didn't hire experts of any sort (botanists, people who knew how to run a plantation, people experienced with working in the Amazon). And of course, the rubber boom in Brazil had ended decades before; the British had realized that they could grow rubber trees on their plantations in Southeast Asia, where a pest that killed the trees in South America didn't exist.

 
An image that speaks volumes--a Ford stuck in the mud in Fordlandia. 

The biggest mistake Ford made, though, was to try to run his Brazilian plantation the exact same way as a car-manufacturing Ford plant in Michigan. This made no sense in Brazil, where people didn't have the same consumerist motivation that Americans had developed. In America, people worked to earn enough money to buy things; making a good daily wage for a steady amount of time made sense because it allowed a person to buy a house, a car, a better house, a better car, more clothes, more toys. But workers in Brazil didn't have those kind of shopping and status dreams. In many parts of the Amazon, food was plentiful, so workers didn't have to struggle for food. The Americans who came to build the rubber plantation and town were dismayed at the initial high turnover of workers who came, worked for a few weeks, bought a few necessities, and then disappeared to go fish or plant crops. The idea of Ford's famous "$5 day" wage meant nothing to the Brazilians.

Along with trying to import the Ford way of doing business, Ford also hoped o import the Ford way of living. Ironically, this didn't mean the fast-moving American lifestyle that Ford had more or less created with his affordable cars, but rather an ideal late nineteenth century/turn of the twentieth century life that was long gone--a life of Main Streets, ice cream socials, and band concerts in the park, where people lived and died in the towns where they were born. This hope led to such follies as building American style houses that were outrageously unsuited for the Brazilian weather, and a ban on alcohol that infuriated pretty much everyone. The Brazilians who moved into the town (often as a job requirement, not because they wanted to) hated the lifestyle. They loathed Ford's demands for planting little picket fence enclosed gardens at their homes, and resented the constant health inspections of themselves, their families, and their houses. They hated the food Ford ordered served in the plantation mess hall (Ford was the worst kind of early twentieth century health nut, who insisted on menus made up of plain brown rice, whole wheat bread, and adventures in soy products); a switch from waiter service to a cafeteria style way of eating (Ford efficiency again) was considered demeaning and led to an epic riot whose violence far outstripped the event that tipped it off. Meanwhile, the Americans who Ford sent to run operations wilted in the heat and suffered enormously from the diseases of the jungle (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). Some went mad; two men who were sent to find a new source of rubber tree seeds went rogue, drinking and spending money wildly, and calling themselves rubber kings; the parallels throughout the venture have more than a passing similarity to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (translated into "Apocalypse Now" for me).

Ford never saw any of this. He kept promising to visit Fordlandia, but couldn't seem to find the time, or really the inclination, to get there. After his death his family sold the land to the Brazilian government for a fraction of a fraction of what they had spent on the failing enterprise. Pieces of Fordlandia still stand, but it's nothing more than a ghost town.

I finished this book more than two weeks ago and haven't had a chance to write about it until now, so forgive the lack of detail. Or maybe you should be grateful for it, because I hope you are now intrigued enough to go out and read all of Grandin's excellent, well-written book. It is the story of the Fordlandia folly, but is also a fine minibiography of Henry Ford himself. The portrait of Ford is one of a man of good ideas who had a lack of self-awareness, and oddly, for someone who thought he was doing his best by people, seemed to have no human touch. Ford believed that the efficient factories he built were great for workers, but he didn't know when to stop. He didn't see that the efficiency he prized had its limit, and that doubling and tripling production was killing--spiritually and almost physically--his workers. He didn't get understand that people didn't all want to live the way he wanted them to live. It would have puzzled Ford, if he had stopped and listened. He thought that if he said "this is the best way to live, eat, work, decorate, shop," people would be grateful. But human nature doesn't work that way. Everyone gets sick of being bossed around after a while. Ford had theories that made sense in a cold, logical way, but when put into practice and extended to the nth degree, they didn't work. People are slippery and illogical and don't always choose what's best for them--sometimes for good reasons that can't be accounted for by logic. And though one might expect Ford to have been confounded by this, and frustrated by the failure of some of his ideals, he didn't seem to see it. He believed in what he believed, and that was it. While he may have had the imagination and vision to play a huge part in the technological revolutions of the twentieth century, Ford lacked the insight to see the consequences of his actions, and the will to see that what he believed might be wrong.

 
A fragment of Fordlandia today.