U9D1-12 & S1 - What issues of culture and power can be related to members of non-dominant or diverse populations? See Details Below.

ISSUE 7 FAILURE SUMMER 2002

"Shades of Tarzan!": Ford on the Amazon

ELIZABETH ESCH

Though it is widely acknowledged to be the most American of American

companies, it is more accurate to describe the Ford Motor Company as

having been built by the whole world's labor, land, and natural resources.

By the end of the 1920s, Ford was operating factories on every continent,

in over 20 countries, and was selling more cars, trucks, and tractors than

any other manufacturer. In the US, the 100,000 workers in the mammoth

River Rouge Plant in Detroit came from over 70 countries. Determined to

"vertically integrate"— that is, to own and thus to control all the raw

materials that went into making a car—Ford purchased ships, railroads,

ports, forests, plantations, coal mines, iron mines, sand pits, and farms

across the US and around the globe.

As represented by Diego Rivera in his 1932 Detroit Industry frescoes in

Detroit, Ford's strategy linked nature to industry through human toil and

creativity. Among the most beautiful images in Rivera's frescoes is a

Brazilian rubber tapper. Separated by a smooth ocean from the Rouge

Plant, then the largest auto factory in the world, the rubber tapper bends in

a graceful, time-tested stance into the latex-producing heveas brasilis tree.

Existing as an unchanging conduit between the past and the present, the

figure is meant to suggest the mutually beneficial relationship that Rivera

imagined was possible between industry and nature, technology and

tradition, progress and continuity. Yet even as Rivera painted, the Ford

Motor Company was hard at work destroying the possibility he imagined in

the rainforests of Brazil.

Backed by a state department eager to free American industry from British

domination of the rubber market, Ford, Firestone, and Goodyear had all

pledged their allegiance to producing "American" rubber in Sumatra, Brazil,

Liberia, and Malaya. In 1927, Ford purchased 2,500,000 acres of land in

the state of Para in northern Brazil as the site for its rubber plantations. By

spring 1928, the Ford-owned Lake Ormoc had set sail from Detroit for the

newly founded Fordlandia. Carrying enough provisions to house and care

for the "American staff" for up to two years, and to construct a

powerhouse, sawmill, radio station, and hospital, the Ormoc's arrival on the

Brazilian coast signaled the beginning of a short but lethal misadventure in

the history of America's imperial adventures.

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Small pickup truck coming down a narrow road close to Fordlandia, ca. 1940. Images

courtesy The Henry Ford Museum

A company publication reported: "The first obstacle that confronted Ford

was the almost impenetrable tropical jungle. But it had to be cleared and

for every 40 acres a clearing gang of 20 native workers was organized." As

early as the summer of 1929, 1,500 acres of rainforest had been slashed,

burned, and planted with rubber saplings. By 1930, 3,000 acres were

cleared, and the infrastructure of the plantation—administrative offices,

barracks, a clinic—had been constructed. Intent on conquering the very

ecology that had nurtured the trees it was there to turn into product, Ford's

willful ignorance in the face of decades of local knowledge of rubber

production is staggering. Within a year, the first 1,500 acres of trees

planted were all killed by a fungus common to the region. Grown in their

natural environment, rubber trees are protected from the spread of the

disease by the shelter of other plant life and the distance between them.

Ford, having planted the trees in rows on barren land, could not stop the

fungus once it started.

This was just the beginning of the company's problems. Convincing enough

people to live and work on the plantation was the largest challenge it faced,

and one it was never able to win. The company clearly thought its plan—of

creating a waged labor force of single men who slept in barracks, punched

time clocks, and worked 11-hour shifts—was not only agreeable but

generous in contrast to the quasi-feudal social arrangements on other

plantations. At Fordlandia, workers were paid in money as opposed to

company scrip, and thus were not tied by debt to the plantation, although

they were still required to work off the costs of their own transportation to

the plantation, and to pay for their own food, hammocks, and tools. Ford's

managers had been certain that "in the beginning plenty of laborers can be

recruited on the Tapajos and neighboring rivers. These men when well fed

and cured of hook worm, malaria etc. will make good laborers." But Ford

was consistently proven wrong, and recruiting became a constant

necessity.

An early report by Carl LaRue, who scouted the Amazon region for the

company, offered the following:

The dwellers of the Amazon Valley are of three main stocks: Portuguese,

Indian and Negro. ... Admixture has gone on so long that it is difficult to

distinguish the different types. The mixture is not a particularly good one

from a racial standpoint but it is by no means a bad one ... The fate of

these people is more tragic because they are not possessed of the stolidity

of the orientals, but have enough of the white race in them to suffer keenly

and long intensely for the better things.

The company's own racism severely limited its ability to create Ford

workers out of the people living in the region, as well as its capacity to get

them to stay at Fordlandia once they were recruited. Ranking the people

they encountered in degrees of "savagery" and "tameness," Ford managers

projected their white supremacist fantasies onto the bodies of the "tropical"

people they needed to produce their product. From a tour of villages he

had been sent to inspect, one labor recruiter sent a telegram which read,

"Even if they were tame they are lazy and undisciplined." The company

replied, "Suggest we only take 100 with the distinct understanding that

they are subject to discipline or they will be of no value. They must

guarantee to do steady work every day or they would be without value and

if they cannot talk Portuguese we might be better off without them."

Every colonial administration has its own idea of what it means to "tame

savages." In Ford's case, the measurement was clearly capitalist work

discipline. A "tame" worker wore shoes, lived on the plantation, returned to

work the day after being paid, and worked for 11 hours through the heat of

the day. In kind, "taming savages" was not unlike what Ford did in Detroit:

there, the company required male immigrant workers to study English and

have their homes and wives inspected before they could qualify for the

five-dollar-a-day wage. Social control is a necessary part of making people

perform alienating wage labor. But in degree, Fordlandia was different. The

men Ford sought to recruit as wage workers lived in the region of Brazil

that had once provided more than 90% of the world's rubber. They came

from long traditions of skill, and while they worked in hierarchical networks

that accessed the global economy, their work was autonomous and it built

communities. Indeed, the poverty the company encountered when it

arrived in the region was the result not of the nature of rubber tapping, but

of the global economy from which the Brazilian rubber tappers had been

eliminated. Using seeds smuggled out of Brazil and nurtured in Kew

Gardens, British companies had launched large-scale rubber plantations

with which indigenous rubber tapping methods could not compete.

Mirroring the Brazilian eugenics movement's obsession with disease and

sanitation, the American managers at Fordlandia lived in a constant state of

fear of "the tropics," which included its people and its ecology. Hospital

visits and inoculations were compulsory, as was the wearing of shoes (to

guard against hookworm). Doctors played an increasingly significant role in

the management of workers on the plantation; the hospital was the place

where sick workers were distinguished from the "just lazy" ones: the latter

were fired.

Ford's extravagant commitment to its own ideas of how work should be

organized and workers managed, perfected in its auto factories in Detroit,

made little sense in Brazil. Yet the less those ideas seemed to work, the

more tenaciously—and absurdly—the company seemed to cling to them. In

an exchange of letters with steam whistle manufacturers, a manager

expressed concern that the company had not yet found a whistle that could

withstand a tropical climate, or that was loud enough for workers on all

sides of the plantation to hear it. Of course, the company had scheduled

the whistles at 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 7:00, 11:00, 11:30 am; noon; 3:30,

4:00, 4:30, 5:00, and 5:30 pm. But of what use is all this precision if no

one can hear the whistle? And what good is punching time cards if time is

not uniformly understood? As one manager put it, "Owing to the fact that

our daily labor is punching time cards, it is imperative that time signals be

controlled. Otherwise the hours of operation are not uniform throughout

the plantation." Indeed, Ford management thought electric service would

be advisable throughout the plantation in order to accommodate time

clocks and bells "similar to those in the factory."

A strike in December 1930 revealed the depth of disgust the workers felt

toward the highly controlled living arrangements on the plantation. The

strike began when workers in the cafeteria were told they would have to

wait in line for their food, rather than have it served at their tables. When

they confronted managers about the new policy, the workers were told that

"the Company now and then puts new rules into effect but it was always

for the betterment of the workers." Not satisfied with the "betterment"

program, workers immediately banded together as the managers fled by

boat. Targets of destruction during the strike included the cafeteria, all the

time clocks, the punch card racks, and all the trucks.

The Ford workers presented a list of demands to management which

included the dismissal of two managers who were considered particularly

vicious; access to the docks and river without passes; the right to visit

neighboring villages; the elimination of the rule that prohibited the

consumption of alcohol; the end of the requirement to eat in the company

cafeteria; and the cessation of arbitrary firing. In response, the company

called in the Brazilian military, which arrested more than 30 "ringleaders."

Following the strike, Ford required its workers to be photographed when

they were hired, and agreed to a police proposal to create passports for all

workers, which contained their fingerprints and previous police records.

Automobile stuck in the mud on the road to Fordlandia, ca. 1940

In 1934, after clearing 8,000 acres of rainforest, Ford admitted defeat at

Fordlandia. Marking a radical shift in strategy, the company abandoned

virtually the entire plantation, save what it would use for research

purposes, and bought over 700,000 acres of land 80 miles away. The new

plantation, named Belterra, promised better growing conditions and easier

access. The move to Belterra coincided with another shift in policy, as

management decided to allow some men to bring their families to live on

the plantation and build housing for them. Fantastic fears that the

plantation would be overrun by poor women and their children who would

require care but could not work had guided past policy. But as fewer and

fewer men were willing to uproot themselves from their communities and

families, and more and more single men left after working on the

plantation for a short period of time, the company conceded. Having

succeeded in creating neither a "loyal" nor a "disciplined" workforce, Ford

set its sights on the workers of the future: children.

In a letter to Detroit, a manager at Belterra described the "youngsters who

are growing up on the plantations … [as] our best prospects for future

employees." Photos of President Vargas's visit to the plantation show

smiling children waving Brazilian flags—which bear the slogan "Order and

Progress." One photo in a Ford promotional brochure bears the caption:

"Shades of Tarzan! You'd never guess these bright, happy healthy school

children lived in a jungle city that didn't even exist a few years ago!"

If Fordlandia became the site for experimentation with heveas brasilis,

Belterra became the site for experimentation with people. Virtually every

activity on the plantation carried the potential for Fordist ideas about

nationalism, thrift, science, and progress to be shaped into behavior-

modifying campaigns. With the introduction of family living at Belterra

came the imposition of a multitude of requirements. School was

compulsory for adults—"The night shift is reserved for adults and the one

who refuses, goodbye"—and for children. Required uniforms were provided

by the company: "Boys wore outfits similar to Boy Scouts and girls neat

white pleated skirts and white blouses." The decision to provide uniforms to

those children who could not afford them was defended by one manager

who noted, "It is our opinion that the psychological effect on the morale of

all the children justifies the expenditure." Working from a textbook called

Moral Education: My Little Friends, children studied Portuguese, geography,

Brazilian history, arithmetic, and geometry. Described by one writer as a

"children's paradise," the residents of Belterra learned American folk

dancing, an obsession of Henry Ford's, and were entertained by Ford-made

motion pictures. So successful did the company think this practice was that

Edsel Ford proposed to make films about the plantations and show them at

points "along the Amazon and northern Brazilian coast" in order to entice

workers to this "irradiating center of civilization."

From its inception in the late 1920s until 1940, no significant amount of

rubber was exported from Ford's plantations to Detroit for use in auto

production. One manager wrote that "a great amount of work has been

done… and a great deal of money spent but… very little has been done

along the lines of what we came here to do, namely plant rubber." In spite

of Ford's poor production record, its plantations started to receive a

tremendous amount of attention in the early 1940s due to the changed

global political situation. The US, worried that access to rubber would

become increasingly threatened, sought to support the development of

production in the western hemisphere. Both Time and Fortune magazines

asked to visit, though both were denied. The Detroit Times ran a series of

articles on the plantations that was republished as a small booklet

supporting the war effort. Harpers, Cosmopolitan and Business Week all

ran features on the plantations in 1944. The caption underneath a

photograph of a time clock in Business Week read: "And time

clocks—incongruous devices in the customarily indolent atmosphere of a

steaming Amazon jungle—measure the workers' 11-hour days."

In 1941, Ford published its own promotional pamphlet. "The Ford Rubber

Plantations" told the story of the lucky Brazilian people who were being

civilized through the generosity and vision of the company. Describing both

the natural and built environments at Fordlandia and Belterra, the

pamphlet seems designed to lure potential managers and scientists, as well

as investors in the US. The homey pamphlet set out "to give you some idea

of the problems that are involved in this vast project and of the methods by

which they are being brought to successful conclusion," and reminded the

reader that "the Ford Rubber Plantations of Brazil represent but one of

many Ford Motor Company projects for the scientific development and

utilization of natural resources… projects that in no small measure make

possible the building of finer and finer cars at low prices within the reach of

more and more people." The scary specter of "wasteland" and the "jungle"

featured prominently in the story of "natives" being brought into the fold of

modernity: "Paved roads, cement walks, comfortable homes, electric lights,

telephones—this might be any midwestern town. But it is Belterra, buried

deep in the jungle of Brazil.... Yes, there is even a golf course—a sporty 18

holes—at Fordlandia. Beautiful clubhouse, tropical foliage—and 700 miles

from civilization."

One journalist was moved to note the participation of the plantations'

schoolchildren in the creation of "Latin-Saxonian unity": "Undismayed by

isolation, these boys and girls are going ahead, playing their part in a great

movement that is not only setting an example for satisfied workmen and

© 2002 Cabinet Magazine

helping to unify the Western Hemisphere but producing a necessary

product for the Americas in the Americas."

But if the automobile remained a "necessary product," natural rubber did

not. With the introduction of synthetic rubber in the US, Ford—and the

American government—found a new solution to its production worries.

Having estimated in 1941 that the Ford plantations "would produce from 30

to 40 million pounds of high-quality rubber during the next ten years … and

thereafter a minimum of 10,000,000 pounds per year," in 1946, the

company left Brazil more abruptly than it had arrived, departing virtually

overnight. The plantations were sold back to the Brazilian government for

$250,000—a fraction of the sum of $20 million that Ford had poured into

the project.

Elizabeth Esch is completing a dissertation in the Department of History

at New York University.

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