Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

“Grandin tells a gripping story of high hopes and deep failure, a saga that in some ways is a morality tale for the American century.” ― The Boston Globe “Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a marginal event. . . and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry's contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.” ― Timothy Rutten, The Los Angeles Times “Fascinating. . . Indeed, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness resonates through every page of this book. . . . a haunting story.” ― The New York Times Book Review “Greg Grandin's riveting account of this 'forgotten jungle city' demonstrates that in business, as well as in affairs of state, the means may be abundant but the ends still unachievable.” ― The Wall Street Journal “A sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious picture of the automaker's attempt to bring the light of American industry to the Amazonian heart of darkness . . . Grandin tells a marvelous tale.” ― Star Tribune (Minneapolis) “Grandin, a distinguished historian of U.S. misadventures in Latin America, offers a fluently written, fair-minded guide to the Ford Motor Co.'s jungle escapades. In addition to his research in company records, he has ransacked the many Ford biographies to assemble a telling portrait of his central character.” ― Brian Ladd, San Francisco Chronicle “Grandin offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford's attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil's Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Grandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictions of Henry Ford. . . Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century.” ― Publishers Weekly, starred review “Excellent history. . . Fordlandia is keenly and emotionally observed and a potent record of the last hundred years of economic thinking and U.S./South American relations in the form of a blunt blow to the head.” ― M.E. Collins, The Chicago Sun-Times “Written with a flair and deftness that one might expect to find in a well-crafted novel. . . he brings to life the rogues and cranks who animate this tale. . . Excellent.” ― The American Conservative “Fordlandia was, ultimately, the classic American parable of a failed Utopia, of soft dreams running aground on a hard world--which tends to make the most compelling tale of all. It's such an engrossing story that one wonders why it has never been told before in book-length form. Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone--about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.” ― The American Scholar “An engaging and passionately written history. . . Grandin is alert to the tragedy and the unexpected moments of comedy in the story, which is at times reminiscent of both Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .” ― Paul Maliszewski, Wilson Quarterly “Defines the old cliché that the truth is stranger than fiction. . . It is a masterful portrayal of capitalism and social paternalism unleashed to disastrous effect.” ― Nancy Bass Wyden, The Daily Beast “Grandin's account is an epic tale of a clash between cultures, values, men, and nature.” ― David Siegfried, Booklist “Stranger than fiction but with power of a first-rate novel to probe for the deepest truths, Fordlandia is an extraordinary story of American hubris. Out of the Amazon jungle, Greg Grandin brings us an unforgettable tale about the tragic limitations of a capitalist utopia.” ― Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace “Greg Grandin's Fordlandia brings to light a fascinating but little known episode in the long history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company. The auto magnate's experiment with a vast rubber plantation in the Brazilian jungle involved not only economic and ecological issues of the greatest importance, but a cultural crusade to export the American Way of Life. Grandin's penetrating, provocative analysis raises important questions about the complex impulses driving the global expansion of modern capitalism.” ― Steven Watts, author of The Peoples Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century “Grandin places the Ford story within in a much broader social history of Amazonia, and rather than a saga of some novelty or the vanity of the rich, makes the resistance and the failure part of a larger Amazonian history rather than just the exotic ambitions of a man with too much money.” ― Susanna Hecht, Professor, School of Public Affairs and Institute of the Environment and co-author of Defenders of the Forest “As a reader, I was fascinated by this account of Henry Ford's short-lived rainforest Utopia, complete with golf course and square dances. As a writer, I envy Greg Grandin for finding such an intriguing subject--whose decline and fall has an eerie resonance at our own historical moment today.” ― Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost “Magic happens when a gifted historian and master storyteller finds a treasure trove of untapped materials to exploit. And Greg Grandin's book on Fordlandia is simply magical. Here is the truly epic tale of American adventurers dispatched by Henry Ford in 1928 to conquer and civilize the Amazon by constructing an industrial/agricultural utopia the size of Tennessee. Among the dozens of reasons I will be recommending Fordlandia to friends, family, colleagues, and students is the scale and pace of the narrative, the remarkable cast of characters, the brilliantly detailed descriptions of the Brazilian jungle, and what may be the best portrait we have of Henry Ford in his final years as he struggles to recapture control of the mighty forces he has unleashed.” ― David Nasaw, the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Andrew Carnegie Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth , which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Fordlandia , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His widely acclaimed books also include The Last Colonial Massacre , Kissinger's Shadow , and The Empire of Necessity , which won the Bancroft and Beveridge awards in American history. He is Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Fordlandia The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City By Grandin, Greg Picador Copyright © 2010 Grandin, GregAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780312429621 Introduction NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ANYTHING January 9, 1928: Henryxa0Ford was in axa0xa0spirited mood as he toured the Ford Industrial Exhibit with his son, Edsel, and his aging friend Thomas Edison, feigning fright at the flash of news cameras as a circle of police officers held back admirers and reporters. The event was held in New York, to showcase the new Model A. Until recently, nearly half of all the cars produced in the world were Model Ts, which Ford had been building since 1908. But by 1927 the T’s market share had dropped considerably. A half decade of prosperity and cheap credit had increased demand for stylized, more luxurious cars. General Motors gave customers dozens of lacquer colors and a range of upholstery options to choose from while the Ford car came in green, red, blue, and black— which at least was more variety than a few years earlier when Ford reportedly told his customers they could have their car in any color they wanted, "so long as it’s black."1 From May 1927, when the Ford Motor Company stopped production on the T, to October, when the first Model A was assembled, many doubted that Ford could pull off the changeover. It was costing a fortune, estimated by one historian at $250 million, because the internal workings of the just- opened River Rouge factory, which had been designed to roll out Ts into the indefinite future, had to be refitted to make the A. Yet on the first two days of its debut, over ten million Americans visited their local Ford dealers to inspect the new car, available in a range of body types and colors including Arabian Sand, Rose Beige, and Andalusite Blue. Within a few months, the company had received over 700,000 orders for the A, and even Ford’s detractors had to admit that he had staged a remarkable comeback.2 The New York exhibit was held in the old Fiftieth Street Madison Square Garden, drawing over a million people and eclipsing the nearby National Car Show. All the many styles of the new model were on display at the Garden, as was the Lincoln Touring Car, since Ford had bought Lincoln Motors six years earlier, giving him a foot in the luxury car market without having to reconfigure his own factories. But the Ford exhibit wasn’t really an automobile show. It was rather "built around this one idea,"said Edsel: "a visual demonstration of the operation of the Ford industries, from the raw materials to the finished product."Visitors passed by displays of the manically synchronized work stations that Ford was famous for, demonstrations of how glass, upholstery, and leather trimmings were made, and dioramas of Ford’s iron and coal mines, his blast furnaces, gas plants, northern Michigan timberlands, and fleets of planes and ships. A few even got to see Henry himself direct operations. "Speed that machine up a bit,"he said as he passed a "mobile model of two men leisurely sawing a tree, against a background of dense forest growth."3 Though he was known to have opinions on many matters, as Henry Ford made his way through the convention hall reporters asked him mostly about his cars and his money. "How much are you worth?"one shouted out. "I don’t know and I don’t give a damn,"Ford answered. Stopping to give an impromptu press conference in front of an old lathe he had used to make his first car, Ford said he was optimistic about the coming year, sure that his new River Rouge plant— located in Ford’s hometown of Dearborn, just outside of Detroit— would be able to meet demand. No one raised his recent humiliating repudiation of anti- Semitism, though while in New York Ford met with members of the American Jewish Committee to stage the "final scene in the reconciliation between Henry Ford and American Jewry,"as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described the conference. Most reporters tossed feel- good questions. One wanted to know about his key to success. "Concentration on details,"Ford said. "When I worked at that lathe in 1894"— the carmaker nodded to the machine behind him—"I never thought about anything else."A journalist did ask him about reports of a price war and whether it would force him to lower his asking price for the A. "I know nothing about it,"replied Ford, who for decades had set his own prices and wages free of serious competition. "Nothing is wrong with anything,"he said, "and I don’t see any reason to believe that the present prosperity will not continue."4 Ford wanted to talk about something other than automobiles. The previous August he had taken his first airplane ride, a ten- minute circle over Detroit in his friend Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, just a few months after Lindbergh had made his historic nonstop transatlantic trip. Ford bragged that he "handled the stick"for a little while. He was "strong for air travel,"he said, and was working on a lightweight diesel airplane engine. Ford then announced that he would soon fly to the Amazon to inspect his new rubber plantation. "If I go to Brazil,"he said, "it will be by airplane. I would never spend 20 days making the trip by boat."5 Ford didn’t elaborate, and reporters seemed a bit puzzled. So Edsel stepped forward to explain. The plantation was on the Tapajós River, a branch of the Amazon, he said. Amid all the excitement over the Model A, most barely noted that the Ford Motor Company had recently acquired an enormous land concession in the Amazon. Inevitably compared in size to a midranged US state, usually Connecticut but sometimes Tennessee, the property was to be used to grow rubber. Despite Thomas Edison’s best efforts to produce domestic or synthetic rubber, latex was the one important natural resource that Ford didn’t control, even though his New York exhibit included a model of a rubber plantation. "The details have been closed,"Edsel had announced in the official press release about the acquisition, "and the work will begin at once."It would include building a town and launching a "widespread sanitary campaign against the dangers of the jungle,"he said. "Boats of the Ford fleet will be in communication with the property and it is possible that airplane communication may also be attempted."6 In the months that followed, as the excitement of the Model A died down, journalists and opinion makers began to pay attention to Fordlandia, as Ford’s Brazilian project soon came to be called. And they reported the enterprise as a contest between two irrepressible forces. On one side stood the industrialist who had perfected the assembly line and broken down the manufacturing process into ever simpler components geared toward making one single infinitely reproducible product, the first indistinguishable from the millionth. "My effort is in the direction of simplicity,"Ford once said. On the other was the storied Amazon basin, spilling over into nine countries and comprising a full third of South America, a place so wild and diverse that the waters just around where Ford planned to establish his plantation contained more species of fish than all the rivers of Europe combined.7 It was billed as a proxy fight: Ford represented vigor, dynamism, and the rushing energy that defined American capitalism in the early twentieth century; the Amazon embodied primal stillness, an ancient world that had so far proved unconquerable. "If the machine, the tractor, can open a breach in the great green wall of the Amazon jungle, if Ford plants millions of rubber trees where there used to be nothing but jungle solitude,"wrote a German daily, "then the romantic history of rubber will have a new chapter. A new and titanic fight between nature and modern man is beginning."One Brazilian writer predicted that Ford would finally fulfill the prophecy of Alexander von Humboldt, the Continues... Excerpted from Fordlandia by Grandin, Greg Copyright © 2010 by Grandin, Greg. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more