FORDLANDIA

The Amazon has always proved fertile soil for extravagant utopian fantasy. Victorian explorers, American industrialists, ideologues and missionaries all projected their dreams and ideas onto this terra incognita, this untamed wilderness of exotic possibility.For Europe and North America, the vastness of South America was a focus for romance, discovery and potential profit, and also a canvas on which to paint a new world according to individual belief. Elisabeth Nietzsche, the sister of the philosopher, plunged into the jungles of Paraguay in 1886 intent on creating her own vegetarian Aryan republic, spurred on by the anti-Semitic effusions of Richard Wagner. Theodore Roosevelt predicted the great river system could be harnessed to create “populous manufacturing communities.” 

The Amazon had a way of swallowing up dreams.

Elisabeth Nietzsche left her flyblown, half-starved New Germany to rot, and scurried home to distort her brother’s philosophical legacy. Roosevelt returned from his Amazon expedition of 1914 declaring the jungle to be “sinister and evil,” a place inimical to man. Alongside the myth of the Amazon’s boundless opportunities grew another: the jungle as impenetrable nature, immune to modernity, a world savage and primeval where each successive conquistador arrives puffed with pride, and is conquered.

 Henry Ford’s failed endeavor to export Main Street America to the jungles of Brazil. Fordlandia was a commercial enterprise, intended to extract raw material for the production of motor cars, but it was framed as a civilizing mission, an attempt to build the ideal American society within the Amazon. As described in this fascinating account, it was also the reflection of one man’s personality — arrogant, brilliant and very odd.

In 1927, Ford, the richest man in the world, needed rubber to make tires, hoses and other parts for his cars. Rubber does not grow in Michigan, and European producers enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the rubber trade because of their Asian colonies. So, typically, the car magnate decided to grow his own.

Ford’s vision was a replica Midwestern town, with modern plumbing, hospitals, schools, sidewalks, tennis courts and even a golf course. There would be no drink or other forms of immorality, but gardening for all and chaste dances every week.In Grandin’s words, this outpost of modern capitalism was to be “an example of his particular American dream, of how Ford-style capitalism — high wages, humane benefits and moral improvement — could bring prosperity to a benighted land.” Instead of a miniature but improved North American city, what Ford created was a broiling, pestilential hellhole of disease, vice and violence, closer to Dodge City than peaceable Dearborn.

The American overseers found it hard to retain employees, who tended to wander off after earning enough to satisfy their immediate wants. Those who stayed died in large numbers, from viper bites, malaria, yellow fever and numerous other tropical afflictions.

Meanwhile, some of the Americans brought in to run the project went mad. Indeed, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” resonates through every page of this book, as the white men struggle and succumb to the jungle. 

He never set foot in the town that bore his name, yet his powerful, contradictory personality influenced every aspect of the project. The story of Fordland ia is a biography of Ford in relief, the man who championed small-town America but did more to destroy it than any other, the pioneer who aimed to lift workers from drudgery but pioneered a method of soul-destroying mass production that rendered them mere cogs.

Ford was obsessed, among other things, by Thomas Edison, soybeans, antiques and order. He hated unions, cows, Wall Street, Franklin Roosevelt and Jews. 

The intransigence of the jungle, changes in the world economy and war ensured its ignominious demise. The Ford Motor Company invested $20 million in Fordlandia. In 1945 it was sold to the Brazilian government for $244,200.