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

Henry Ford had a big idea that ultimately tanked

Greed was not the only impulse behind Henry Ford spending hundreds of millions of dollars to graft a bit of Dearborn, Michigan, unto the Amazonian rainforest. He had an idea in his head about how people should function in society, a model based on a fairy-tale America that was lost to the industrial urbanization of the United States. When you pour millions of workers into urban centers, you get social change -- change Ford hated, but change he himself had ushered in by the introduction of his revolutionary production systems.

The excellent history Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin, tells us not just what made Henry Ford create his Brazilian ham-fisted monster, Fordlandia, but how he went about making grand mistake after hysterically gross miscalculation on the ground, and in social relations. Ford attempted to transplant some mystical rural idyll -- endangered in America -- to the Amazon. This man who loved to bring simplicity to technical problems and complexity to human ones continued to support a completely disastrous business plan for almost two decades, until he quietly decided to abandon his folly.

By building his own empire in South America, Ford would break the Anglo-Dutch rubber monopoly and spread Fordism at the same time. He boldly sent his minions forth. (Ford never set foot in Brazil -- he was afraid of flying.)

Cultural and economic expansion as expressed by Henry Ford in the late 1920s seems completely silly, not only by modern standards, but also by the scientific norms of his day. Ford set about creating his own plantations to supply his company and the hundreds of thousands of cars he was to produce with rubber. To this end, he chose to not employ any botanists in the development of the Fordlandia rubber tree fields; instead he relied on the ingenuity of his company men. Having no prior knowledge of rubber-raising, his engineers made their best estimates, and planted about 200 trees per acre despite that the jungle only supported about seven wild rubber trees per acre. They had not accounted for the insects that would ravage their new abundant fields. They knew nothing about the terraced terrain they were working to cultivate. Their workers, not interested in the square-dances and Puritanism restrictions on offer, rioted, and their fields produced next to nothing.

When the final breakdown was complete, and by the last half of Grandin's exhaustively researched book, the feeling that this is not just another damaging portrayal of American greed and excess gradually seeps out of the text. In fact, by the end of the book, readers might long for a time when a big economic collapse is based solely on ignorant but mighty ideas gone horribly wrong.

Fordlandia, with its golf courses, movie theaters, manicured lawns, swimming pools, plus the prerequisite Model Ts putt-putting along paved streets, was a delusion. But considering what has happened to the area in the last few decades, as described by Grandin, Ford and his social engineering seem quaint by comparison to the indignities foisted upon the Amazon of today. Gone is any pretense of a working man's wage, or conservation for its own sake.

Ford, in the end, could not convince himself that the global forces he helped unleash could somehow be contained. 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 is a local free-lance writer.