Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten City
Greg Grandin, 2009
Henry Holt
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312429621
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970-71
• Where—N/A
• Education—Brooklyn College, CUNY; Ph.D., Yale University
• Awards—Bryce Wood Award, Latin American Studies
Association
• Currently—teaches at New York University (New York City)
Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. A professor of 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.
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books), published to critical acclaim and commercial success, was the first book to draw parallels between the U.S. government’s actions in the "War on Terror" and its long-obscured and dubious history of intervention in our own backyard—Latin America. Grandin reminded us that before Iraq and Afghanistan, a political philosophy that embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics was unleashed much closer to home. In the words of Naomi Klein: "Grandin has always been a brilliant historian; now he uses his detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present."
The Last Colonial Massacre: The Latin American Cold War and its Consequence (University of Chicago Press), argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle between two visions of democracy. Using Guatemala as a case study, Grandin demonstrates that the main effect of U.S. intervention in Latin America was not the containment of Communism, but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy. Eric Hobsbawm described it as a "remarkable and extremely well-written work… about how common people discover politics, the roots of democracy and those of genocide, and the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left."
Grandin’s first book, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke University Press, 2000), a two-century history of the development of Mayan nationalism, was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for most outstanding book published in English in the humanities and social sciences on Latin America. In the London Review of Books, Corey Robin proclaimed it "remarkable… Grandin’s book performs a modest act of restorative justice: it allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words."
Grandin received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1999. His many books and articles explore the connection between the diverse manifestations of everyday life and large-scale societal transformations that took place in Central America related to agricultural commodity production and state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Grandin has published extensively on issues of revolution, popular memory, US-Latin American relations, photography, genocide, truth commissions, human rights, disease, and the tensions that exist between legal and historical inquiries into political violence. In 1997-1998 Grandin worked with the Guatemalan Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico—the UN-administered truth commission set up to investigate political violence committed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Haunting.... Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness resonates through every page of this book.
New York Times
Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a marginal event...and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.... Fordlandia is precisely that—a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. It’s a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.
Timothy Rutten - Los Angeles Times
Excellent history.... 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.
Chicago Sun Times
Fordlandia was, ultimately, the classic American parable of a failed Utopia, of soft dreams running aground on a hard world—which tends to make the most compelling tale of all. It’s such an engrossing story that one wonders why it has never been told before in book-length form. Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone—about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.
American Scholar
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.
Publishers Weekly
Henry Ford's doomed attempt to establish a rubber industry and an attendant "work of civilization" in the rain forests of Brazil. The rising price of rubber and a threatened British-led cartel inspired the famously independent Henry Ford in 1927 to purchase a Connecticut-sized plot of land for the purpose of growing his own. The South American leaf blight and the advent of synthetic rubbers forced the company to abandon Fordlandia in 1945, long after Ford had poured millions of dollars and years of strenuous effort into the project. So why did he persist? Grandin convincingly argues that, for Ford, the enterprise was more than a purely economic venture. It was a missionary application of Ford-style capitalism—high wages, humane benefits, moral improvement—to a backward land. Ford's belief that he could harmonize industry and agriculture was always at war with the forces he had unleashed in the United States—mass-produced, affordable cars that encouraged mobility, and fear induced in workers by hired thugs like Harry Bennett, who assured that the company would remain nonunion. With his vision of an industrial arcadia slipping away at home—due to what Grandin acutely terms "a blithe indifference to difference"—Ford attempted to construct in the Amazon a world he had helped obliterate in America. The author follows a succession of Ford representatives and managers overwhelmed by the challenges of doing business where the implacable terrain, jungle diseases, mounting costs, floundering construction, government bumbling and worker resistance all conspired to sink the project. The plantation's original motive, to grow rubber, gave way to an unsustainable sociological experiment, which despite its amenities—weekly dances, movies, tennis courts, garden clubs, schools and hospitals—made no economic sense and became a mockery of the Ford Motor Company's reputation for orderliness, efficiency and synchronization. Works both as a nice bit of recovered history and a parable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Fordlandia:
1. What first prompted Henry Ford in 1927 to buy the plot of land in Brazil? Did his motives change over the years? If so...into what?
2. Describe Ford's capitalistic ideal. What did he envision for Brazil, and how did he attempt to impose it on the Amazonian jungle?
3. How was that capitalistic ideal slipping away from him at home in the US? What forces had Ford unleashed in this country that undermined his core beliefs in a humane, moral order?
4. Talk about the many forces at work against Ford's vision in Brazil? What happened? Who—or what—was at fault in the project's many failures? Was failure inevitable?
5. Describe Henry Ford. Was he an idealist, an autocrat, an elitist or friend of the working man?
6. How did Ford's attempt 80 years ago, to convert the lush, naturally abundant Brazilian landscape into industrial agriculture, foreshadow today's destruction of the rainforest?
7. In what way might this account be seen as a parable for 21st-century attempts at globalization? Are there lessons to be learned? Or would that be reading too much into what is a single moment in history?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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