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Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
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Product Description
The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon
In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.
Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford’s early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia’s eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.
More than a parable of one man’s arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford’s great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.
Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. An associate professor of Latin American history at New York University, and a Guggenheim fellow, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New York Times.
A National Book Award Finalist
In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.
Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford’s early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia’s eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.
More than a parable of one man’s arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a quixotic mission to recreate the small-town America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this mordantly observed history, Ford’s great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.
"Henry Ford dreamed big as a matter of course, and in 1928 he decided to find and develop the ideal location to revive commercial-level rubber production in the depths of the Amazon rain forest. Greg Grandin tells the fascinating tale of Ford's campaign to transplant modern industrial methods that had succeeded for him in Detroit to the site he had selected along the Tapajós River, a branch of the Amazon. Brazil, of course, welcomed its illustrious benefactor with open arms (and, in many cases, open palms). But financial largesse and benevolent attitudes can mask less selfless motives in a donor's agenda. After all, latex was the sole component for his industry that Ford didn't control, and he had plans for changing that with his Brazilian venture. As part of his jungle dream, Ford also planned to build a town, Fordlandia, that would showcase all the virtues of the American 19th century small-town life of his youth. Imagining Brazilian plantation workers thriving under his personal ideal of high wages and healthy, moral living, he 'built Cape Cod-style shingled houses for his Brazilian workers and urged them to tend flower and vegetable gardens, and eat whole wheat bread and unpolished rice.' Ballroom dancing and golf were leisure activities that he promoted. Nobody had the temerity to ask, 'In the middle of the Amazon rain forest? Are you deranged?' Even if people had challenged him, Ford was so fixated on his idea that he probably would have ignored them. The Amazon (or, rather, his idea of the Amazon) represented a fresh start in an environment he considered uncorrupted by all that he saw blighting the American commercial landscape (like unions). Ford believed his will, capital and expertise could mold the world and was either ignorant of, or dismissed, 'the emotions of nationalism and deaf to the grievances of history.' For starters, humidity, rainfall, dense forest and bugs proved to be severe challenges for managers used to less extreme conditions in the American Upper Midwest. Fretting endlessly over finding a factory whistle that would not rust in the jungle, they remained dangerously clueless about the culture they had invaded. As one local priest astutely observed, the Ford men 'never really figured out what country they were in.' The inevitable came in December 1930, when a manager changed the way food was served to workers: he may have considered the change trivial, but the workers rioted and reduced Fordlandia to rubble. Today the site of Ford's dream town is a ghost city, decayed and overgrown, along the still-wild Tapajós."—John McFarland, Shelf Awareness
“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 chara
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2747 in Books
- Published on: 2009-06-09
- Released on: 2009-06-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780805082364
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: Proving that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, Fordlandia is the story of Henry Ford's ill-advised attempt to transform raw Brazilian rainforest into homespun slices of Americana. With sales of his Model-T booming, the automotive tycoon saw an opportunity to expand his reach further by exploiting a downtrodden Brazilian rubber industry. His vision, the laughably-named Amazonian outpost of Fordlandia, would become an enviable symbol of efficiency and mark the Ford Motor Company as a player on the global stage. Or so he thought. With thoughtful and meticulous research, author Greg Grandin explores the astounding oversights (no botanists were consulted to confirm the colony's agricultural viability) and painful arrogance (little thought was paid to how native Brazilians would react to an American way of life) that hamstrung the project from the start. Instead of ushering in a new era of commerce, Fordlandia became a cautionary tale of a dream destroyed by hubris. --Dave Callanan
Take a Closer Look at Images from Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
(Click on images to enlarge)  A sketch of the opera house in Manus, Brazil (aka. "the tropical Paris") |  An Amazonian family employed in the rubber trade |  Ford executives on the deck of The Ormoc en route to the Amazon |
 Workers clearing the rainforest before construction can begin |  Mundurucú mission children with German nuns |  A Lincoln Zephyr stuck in Fordlandia mud |
 Fordlandia's Riverside Avenue near the Tapajós River |  Ruins of Fordlandia's powerhouse |  Ruins of the sawmill at Iron Mountain |
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Gandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, 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. Gandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon—where 7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles—could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Grandin concludes that Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism. Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century. 54 b&w photos. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
In 1927, Henry Ford purchased a tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon roughly the size of Connecticut, with the intention of growing rubber for his automobile factories. During the next eighteen years, Ford invested a quarter of a billion dollars (in today’s money), but Fordlandia, as the place came to be known, was a spectacular failure, its plantations supplying less than one per cent of the world’s latex. In spite of this, the town had a golf course, movie theatres, Cape Cod-style shingled houses, and sidewalks dotted with fire hydrants. A “work of civilization,” in the words of one American associated with the project, it was Ford’s attempt to export the small-town virtues that his own assembly lines were breaking down in the United States. Grandin gives an exhaustive account of the project’s failure and of the light it sheds on Ford; disastrously, he was reluctant to hire native naturalists, who could have best advised him on growing rubber in the region.
Copyright ©2008
Customer Reviews
"Midwest of his imagination"
This book offers a rare and fascinating look into Henry Ford's grand economic experiment in the Amazon jungle.
In 1927, approaching his 65th birthday, Ford sent his first two ships to the area. He had purchased 2.5 million acres of Amazon land - roughly the size of Connecticut. He planned not only to plant rubber trees, but also to mine the land for gold; drill for oil; and harvest timber. In addition, he hoped to bring his American-style sensibilities to the region: the production line; sanitation; buildings such as Churches, cottages; a hospital; a movie theater; and the idea of fair wages for hard work. What he didn't bring was a an expertise in growing rubber trees, or an understanding of the Amazon and it's people.
One other thing Ford never brought to Fordlandia was himself. Between the inception of Fordlandia in 1927 and Ford's death in 1947, he never set foot in the Amazon.
This is the story of the creation of "Fordlandia", amazing in itself. But, it is also the story of Henry Ford (a man of sharp contradictions); the struggles of the American and Brazilian laborers who worked in the City; and of the Amazon. It also speaks of a different era, when seemingly impossible things could be attempted.
Very well written and researched. Lots of old photographs. I can find no flaws. Highly recommended.
Riveting from Beginning to End
One of the best books I have read on Henry Ford, and I've read most all of them. The author provides a fascinating rendition of so many topics, including the Amazon, Diego Rivera's Detroit murals, the booming 1920s and the hard times of the 1930s. The book is epic in scope, a really wonderful journey that takes readers from Detroit to the wilds of northern Michigan, the Tennessee River Valley (I didn't know that the idea for the TVA came from Ford!) and then to the Amazon. I fully recommend this book.
Fascinating, Well Written and Well Researched
Fordlandia is that rare non-fiction written by an historian that is a great read. Author Greg Grandin takes the reader on a wonderful voyage down the Amazon as he uncovers a magical mystery escapade of Henry Ford. Not unlike many of the recent forays into Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Ford's desire to claim the hearts, minds and raw materials of Latin America, specically Brazil seem very modern and familiar. He seems to have made all the classic errors of neo-colonism: ignoring the host culture, trying to impose an inappropriate culture and economic system, sending personnel not schooled in the language or culture.
On top of this, the Amazon was an unfriendly climate for those used to the cold winds of Michigan and the Puritan work ethic of the United States. Insects, diseases, "indolent" workers, lack of modern conveniences and the very essence of the area combined to doom Ford's dream of establlishing a town/plantation devoted to cornering the market on rubber.
Ford's efforts to transplant his River Rouge auto plant to the jungle of Brazil makes for fascinating and thought provoking reading.
