Why Ford's jungle Utopia failed
As recession clobbers United States automakers, history might offer the balm of schadenfreude: the industry's founder entered the Great Depression mired in a cash-gobbling commitment to farm rubber in the Amazon.
In Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin tells how worries about a British-led rubber cartel persuaded the industrialist to invest $125,000 (about $1.5 million today) in a Brazilian land concession almost the size of Connecticut, and to pour millions more into it over the next 17 years.
The project began in 1927 and ran into trouble at every turn. Ford's agents were swindled on the concession's cost. A misunderstanding about import taxes led to a whopping bill. Labour was unreliable, with turnover hitting 300 per cent and the workers who remained hitting the bottle and the brothels. Insects, leaf blight and fickle weather kept smiting the rubber saplings like biblical plagues, abetted by Ford executives' refusal to bring in experts of any sort.
Add to this Ford's determination to transplant to the Amazon his own firm beliefs in order, efficiency, temperance and punctuality, and bring unto the jungle "an oasis, a Midwestern dream of Our Town" splendour.
With apt allusions to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Grandin notes that the project was seen "as a contest between two irrepressible forces", Ford and the Amazon. Ford eventually built a pair of model towns in the jungle, with lawns, picket fences, fire hydrants and weekly square dances.
The victory at best was Pyrrhic. After nearly two decades and the planting of more than three million trees, "hardly any Fordlandia latex found its way into a Ford tyre".
Grandin, a history professor at New York University specialising in Latin America, notes similar projects by other US companies, such as Hershey in Cuba and United Fruit in numerous Latin American countries, efforts to capture "in clapboard simplicity the assuredness with which businessmen and politicians believed that the American way of life could be easily transplanted and eagerly welcomed elsewhere".
The difference was they made economic sense. Ford, Grandin argues, was driven partly by frustrated idealism, by a sense that "something had gone wrong in America".
The saga of Fordlandia doesn't require the more than 400 pages, Grandin sums it up in three pages of his 2006 book Empire's Workshop, about US imperialism in Latin America. The new book supplies context and colour.
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