Fordlandia was the centerpiece town of a land grant concession, two-and-a-half million acres. It was the size of a small American state—Connecticut or Delaware, sometimes it was compared with Tennessee. And it was Ford’s attempt to get control over latex. It was the roar in 1920s. He controlled every raw material, he owned every raw material that went into the making of a car, except for rubber. And so, he moved into the Amazon. He moved into Brazil.
But it quickly became much more than that. It’s Henry Ford, and Henry Ford had—was quite an outsized historical figure. It became a bid to export America, Americana, to overlay Americana on Amazonia and replicate a small Midwestern American town deep in the heart of the Amazon.
Ford was the famous Fordism, the principle that if you paid workers $5 a day, it will allow them to buy the products that they make and thus expand the market, so profit was actually dependent on high wages. That was the idea. And for a long time, this was the centerpiece of US capitalism, and also, of course, his revolutionary assembly line process, which breaks the production process down to its simplest component. That all happens in the early 1910s.
By the 1920s, when he establishes Fordlandia, Ford is still being celebrated as the man who democratizes capitalism, but in reality, on the shop floor, he becomes to rely on quite a brutal program of anti-unionism. He relies on his thug, Harry Bennett, to enforce shop floor discipline with—that one historian compared to a totalitarian state. And so, in many ways, Fordlandia is Ford’s attempt to recapture a lost innocence or this mantle of being history’s redeemer. Ford revolutionizes capitalism, but then he spends most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle. In some ways, he’s the—you could think of him as the sorcerer’s apprentice. He attempts any number of experiments at social reform in the United States. He sets up these small, what he calls, village industries in northern Michigan that tries to balance agriculture and industry. Now, these were no match to the raw power of industrial capitalism. And he increasingly becomes idiosyncratic and quirky in his social vision. And Fordlandia, in many ways, is a kind of terminus of a lifetime of quite idiosyncratic ideas of how to organize society.
he was into not only controlling the workers on the shop floor, but also their lives in general. he had his employees surveiled, watched what they were doing, how they were enjoying themselves.
it was a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance, with the surveillance half increasing as the paternalist part fails in the United States.
In Brazil, it was a program of social regulation. He exported Prohibition. He didn’t like drinking, even though it wasn’t a Brazilian law. Or he tried to regulate the diet of Brazilian workers. He had them eat—he was a health food nut, so he had them eating whole rice and whole wheat bread and canned Michigan peaches and oatmeal. He also tried to regulate their recreational time.
Ford was a big proponent of old-time American dance. He didn’t like modern dance. He didn’t like jazz. He thought jazz was too sensual and too corrupting. So, in the United States, he was rescuing polkas and waltzes and square dances, and he did the same in Brazil.
Ford spent about a billion dollars, in inflation-adjusted dollars, on this project, and not one drop of latex made it into a Ford car. It was an absolute failure. And the more it failed, the more—this is also a resonance with recent history—the more it failed, the more he justified it in idealistic terms, not unlike, in some ways, the Iraq war. The more you fail to find weapons of mass destruction, the more it becomes a civilizational mission to bring democracy to the Middle East. The same thing with Fordlandia.
There were riots, and there were—workers rebelled against this attempt to impose Ford-style regimentation. One worker called it resisting being turned into 365-day machines.
And then, of course, the environmental aspect of it. Ford basically—by planting rubber trees so close together in the Amazon, Ford basically created a large incubator. Caterpillars and pests and blight just devastated the plantation. The more it failed, the more money that was poured into it.
The natives of the Brazilian Amazon did resist that heavy attempt to regulate every aspect of their lives, not just the industrial regime, but also their diet, their sanitation and medical regulation. And during one riot in particular, they smashed all the time clocks. This was a particularly symbolic rebellion against Midwestern industrialization.
This story has a lot of resonance with today. Tt wasn’t Fordlandia is a story of arrogance, but the arrogance isn’t that Ford thought he could tame the Amazon—he was actually kind of indifferent to the Amazon—he thought he could tame capitalism.
Embedded in Fordism, Fordism—Ford imagined Fordism to be this very powerful integrating mechanism. High wages would create large markets and happy workers, and everybody would be happy. Embedded in Fordism was also the seeds of its undoing, that by breaking down the industrial process to ever smaller components, beginning in the factory, as Ford did, but then eventually throughout the larger global economy, you can break that link between high wages and large markets. You can make goods in one place and then sell them somewhere else, and it doesn’t matter. Your market share isn’t dependent on creating prosperous, happy workers.
And Fordlandia, in some ways, is very resonant with this. Just, you go to Fordlandia, and there’s almost a yearning for this kind of holistic capitalism, a kind of paternal capitalism or developmentalism, where where industries cared about what happened to workers, in terms of education, in terms of healthcare. But you go 300 miles east of Fordlandia, and there’s this city of Manaus, which is the fastest-growing city in Brazil. It’s a free trade port in the middle of the Amazon. It kind of sprawls out like some kind of perverse Oz eating away at the jungle. And nearly every major electronics corporation—Nokia, Sony, Sanyo, Harley-Davidson and Honda have assembly plants there, where they assemble brand-name products for sale elsewhere in Latin America. So it’s a perfect example of how Fordism has been extended globally. So you have this nice two contrasts, Fordlandia and Manaus, side by side.
Greg Grandin talking.
Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at NYU. His latest book is Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.
– from democracynow.org