99% Invisible - 298- Fordlandia

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies, and shipped them deep into the Amazon rainforest. Workers cut down trees and cleared the land and then they built a rubber plantation in the middle of one of the wildest places on earth. But Henry Ford wanted this community -- called “Fordlândia” -- to be more than just a huge plantation. He envisioned an industrial utopia. He paid his Brazilian workers good wages, at least for the region. And he tried to build them the kind of place he would’ve loved to live, which is to say: a small Midwestern town...but in the middle of the jungle. Fordlandia In the second segment, we discuss Roman’s other show What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies and shipped them deep into the Amazon rainforest. Workers cut down trees and cleared the land and then they built a rubber plantation in the middle of one of the wildest places on Earth. Ford's rubber development on the Tapajos River is an enterprise of historic proportion. Here, two million acres of jungle are being converted into a highly modernized plantation, capable of producing rubber on a large scale. The plan was to harvest the rubber and ship it back to Detroit, where it would be turned into

tires and other parts for Ford cars. But Henry Ford, one of this community, which he called Ford-Landia, to be more than just a huge plantation. He wanted it to be a kind of industrial utopia. He paid his Brazilian workers good wages, at least for the region, and he tried to build them the kind of place he would have loved to live, which is to say a small Midwestern town. than the kind of place he would have loved to live, which is to say a small Midwestern town, but in the middle of the jungle.

Deep in the wilderness, this model community is self-sufficient in every detail. It has its own powerhouse, electric lighting, a telephone system, its own machine shop completely equipped with modern tools. There's a laboratory for processing rubber, an ice plant, and a fire department. You had a church, you had a hospital, you had a power plant, you had a big sawmill.

That's Roger Weber. He's the host of a podcast called Miss Match. And this story is an adaptation of one that recently aired on his show. And so he wanted to create this village for the workers down in Fordlandia. And while it's easy to look at him as some greedy imperialist capitalist, very easy, he actually felt that he could help these people. The company hospital with a best of modern equipment and accidentally staffed provides free medical aid for the employees. Later an outdoor luncheon is served, followed by tempting delicacies. Then comes the afternoon round of golf,

played on the plantation links against a beautiful, jungle backdrop. Today, the Ford Plantation is a successful enterprise, a tribute to skill and science, the new weapons of the 20th century pioneer. But the reality is that Ford Landia was not a successful enterprise, nor was it really a tribute to skill and science.

It was a colossal, expensive, and tragic mistake, and it took Henry Ford nearly two decades to give up on it. It's a parable of arrogance, but the arrogance isn't that Ford thought he could tame and conquer the Amazon. Historian Greg Brandon. He had his sights on something actually much bigger. He thought he could tame and conquer capitalism, industrial capitalism.

Ford wanted to export his brand of industrial paternalism to the Amazon, pay workers well, and provide services so that they stayed healthy, productive, and most importantly, loyal to the company. And that didn't happen. In the early 1900s, a couple of decades before Ford set out to build for Landia, a massive shift was underway in the rubber industry. For years, Brazil had been the world's main supplier of rubber.

Pretty much all of the rubber went into bicycles, that went into condoms, that went into gaskets, that went into valves, that went into tires, all came from Brazil. And the way rubber was cultivated was very labor intensive. Rubber tapers would go out into the dense jungle and find rubber trees. They would slash the trees, and then they would extract the latex that flowed out the side of the trees, they would boil, in essence, this milky fluid and turn it into a large balls of rubber, which they would then try to sell. Passing it on this kind of very decentralized chain up until it wound up in warehouses in Manchester or in Detroit, rubber tapers would work part of the year tapping rubber

and they'd work part of the year growing other sustenance crops in order to survive. This was the economy that lasted for years in Brazil. But this economy could be brutal for workers at the bottom of the production chain. As rubber plantations grew, they struggled to find enough workers. Some rubber barons started enslaving indigenous people

and forcing them to tap trees. Even the workers that were being paid didn't make very much. The so-called latex lords at the top grew enormously wealthy, living in palatial homes in gilded cities in the jungle. This system all started to change because of a British explorer named Henry Wickham. He'd come to Brazil to seek his fortune in the Amazon, and then in 1876. Henry Wickham managed to steal thousands of rubber plant seeds, and he sent them back to England and eventually they went to the English colonies.

There was technically no law at the time preventing the export of the seeds, but Wickham had applied for an export license under false pretenses. He smuggled the tens of thousands of seeds back to England in the hold of a steamship. Each seed was about three-quarters of an inch long. His entire seed cash weighed over one thousand pounds, and he may not have known it at the time, but his act of bio-piracy would totally transform the rubber trade. From England, Wicom's rubber seeds traveled to various European colonies like Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.

The trees thrived in these warm tropical environments where no blight or bugs had evolved to eat them. Growers set up plantations with rubber trees planted in dense rows, and these new colonial plantations ended up massively outperforming the traditional Brazilian rubber tapers. Say, around 1910 Brazil had, by that year, pretty much lost its control over the rubber industry. Meanwhile, the new European rubber barons were talking about setting up a kind of cartel. They now dominated the global rubber trade, and they realized that meant they could set its prices, which made a certain American industrialist control freak extremely nervous. Henry Ford was used to controlling everything. Well, a Ford Motor Company in the 1920s pretty much controlled nearly every raw material

that went into the making of a motor car, the glass, the iron, the wood, the lumber, everything except latex. This looming European-controlled rubber cartel represented a big threat. If rubber prices went up, it could make the tires and gaskets and tubes more expensive. So Ford wanted to create his own rubber supply. But his problem was that rubber doesn't grow in the US. So not only was Henry Ford vulnerable, but Brazil was vulnerable. And that's why the nation of Brazil basically gave him this huge,

tractive land about the size of Connecticut to try to start his doomed rubber plantation. Brazil was placing a big bet, but betting on Henry Ford wasn't the worst idea. You look at a guy like Henry Ford and all he had achieved with the Model T and the $5-day wage, they're looking at a real opportunity. And who better than Henry Ford to come down there and had achieved with the Model T and the $5-day wage, they're looking at a real opportunity and who better than Henry Ford to come down there and restore that former glory of controlling the rubber market. It was a boondoggle from the very beginning.

The Ford Company shipped in supplies on the Toposhoce River. They brought in American managers and hired a Brazilian workforce. Then they started clearing the land to build, Fort Landia. The jungle, of course, is just a very challenging place. And right away, things started to go wrong. You have, for example, the workers who are trying to clear the land. They'd be working out their bear chested and would be suddenly

covered with biting ants and hornets and scorpions and even worse they would reach in and suddenly a pit viper would bite them and kill them. So they were dealing with a life and death struggle here. Eventually the workers managed to clear the land and build a town in the middle of the rainforest, and Ford had a very particular vision for this town. He wanted it to feel like the small Midwestern town he associated with his childhood. He grew up in a farm. He believed that there was a kind of healthy connection between agriculture and industry, as crazy as that seems. He saw them kind

of intermingling. And he really brought these boyhood memories of the farm into his adult life, just this nostalgic yearning for a bygone era. This nostalgia was for a very narrow slice of America, small town, mostly white America. That was Ford's model for Fort Landia, even though he was importing it into a very different cultural environment. When you go to Fort Landia, there's an uncanniness to it, a familiarity. It doesn't seem exotic. It's very recognizable.

The company then set up Plantation-style rubber Fields, lots of trees, densely planted, in the style of the colonial rubber tree plantations in Southeast Asia. They started recruiting even more Brazilian workers from the surrounding areas, and a lot of them were excited to work for Ford. Ford was promising something they'd never really had, free health care, free education. He wasn't a guy just running roughshod over that area. He felt he could improve the lives of these workers. And this wasn't just Ford being benevolent. This was Ford being strategic. Back in the U.S. he discovered that if

he paid his workers well and let them work reasonable hours, if he didn't totally exploit them, in other words, he could dramatically reduce turnover. And that's what he wanted to do in Brazil. In a sense, they're trying to apply lessons from the factory to a plantation. That's exactly what they're trying to do. That's Matt Anderson from the Henry Ford Museum being interviewed by Roger. Try to run a plantation in South America

as though it were industrial facility here in the Midwest. You know, bring in the time clocks, have the workers work eight hour shifts, clock on, clock off, serve them cafeteria style. industrial facility here in the Midwest, bringing the time clocks, have the workers work eight hour shifts, clock on, clock off, serve them cafeteria style. Why was that part of the world so forbidding to what he was trying to accomplish? Part of the problems were cultural.

People down there were used to living in a different way. They were not used to the eight hours a day, sort of factory clock shift that we're used to here in the United States. And part of that was with very good reason, the climate there's very different. They're just 150 miles or so from the equator. Temperatures routinely get well over 100 degrees during the heat of the day. They were used to going into work in the early morning hours before the heat really kicked up. Taking a break for several hours in the middle of the day and then coming back at the end of the day to finish up. And of course,

that's not the way Ford did things. You'd punch in at nine, you'd work right until five, and that was it. Then, other problems started to become clear. Back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers could actually afford to buy the products they made. But in the Amazon, there wasn't really that much to buy. There was no consumer society within the Amazon,

so they didn't actually need the high wages that Ford was promising. They would work a few weeks or a few months and then they would disappear and they would go back into the jungle to work their plots to produce their own food. And maybe they'd come back the following year. And this would drive the Ford managers mad.

If Ford solved the problem of turnover and Detroit, the problem of turnover in the middle of the Amazon at the top of Schoes River just proved insurmountable. The cultural disconnect also went beyond just work culture. And Reford had very particular ideas about how society should be arranged and what people should enjoy. For example, he loved square dancing. He met his wife Clara at a square dance. And so he figured, well, we've got this big hall down there in Ford Landia, and so let's

play some square dancing music. Address Platinum. Surprise, you know, it wasn't all that popular down there. Who would have thought? Ford was also a tea toater, so know, it wasn't all that popular down there. Who would have thought? Ford was also a tea-tother, so even though drinking was legal in Brazil, he prohibited alcohol in Fort Landa. Again, you have Henry Ford trying to impose his will thinking, well, it works for us in America. Although a lot of Americans at the time didn't think the prohibition worked, but he was,

by golly, he was going to make it work in Brazil. It turns out he wasn't going to make it work in Brazil. Some savvy entrepreneurs set up a bar and brothel on a little island near Fort La India. They called it the island of innocence. And they were technically outside of Fort sovereignty sovereignty or Ford's control, and they couldn't do anything to stop it. And then there was the food. Henry Ford was a vegetarian and an early advocate of healthy eating. And so he wanted them to eat whole wheat products, and he just felt that this was going to be

better for their health. This actually led to a riot. The riot happened in 1930. Workers resented having to eat the exact kind of food that Henry Ford told them to eat, but the other problem was that they'd initially served lunch to the workers' restaurant style with waiters. Well then somebody got the idea, listen, we have the assembly line up in the United States. So let's have them eat cafeteria style. It's more efficient. We can keep track of things. Well, the workers absolutely hated that approach.

They felt like they were being treated like cogs in a wheel and suddenly went on a rampage. And the town was practically destroyed. And one of the first targets were the time clocks. Which they smashed to pieces. Yes, the managers had to flee, right? The managers had to flee on boats and into the jungles, right? Because of the fury of this uprising. And the town was eventually retaken with the help of Brazilian security. And then rather than give up, Ford recommitted.

Ford even more money into trying to realize this Midwestern ideal. At this point, Ford was only a few years into this Fordlandia experiment, and it wasn't paying off. But the company just kept pouring money into the rubber plantation. Grandin says there always seem to be a way

to justify the project. I mean, in the 1920s, it was going to be a symbol of what industrial capitalism could bring to the backwater of the Amazon. In the 1930s during the Depression, it becomes a symbol of how to survive the downturn. And besides, who was going to say no to Henry Ford? No one really had the gumption, the determination,

the bravery, perhaps, to challenge Ford on these big decisions, because he was a tough fellow. More and more, as the years went by, he got set in his ways, and that was it. His word was what was going to happen. But Ford Landia was up against insurmountable challenges. More than the time clocks, more than the time clocks, more than the square dancing, more than the way meals were served.

The real problem was bugs, the insects, and fungi that were the rubber trees' natural predators in the Amazon. Ford hadn't really bothered to learn anything about botany or agronomy before embarking on his Fortlandia experiment. He didn't trust the experts that could have warned him what he was getting into. In fact, he didn't trust experts at all. He demeaned the idea of experts sort of slowing the progress of an idea. In his experience, they could go to the factory floor and maybe they had a problem with a widget or a wadget and they would have trial and error and they would just figure it out

and they didn't need somebody with a title or an education and some specialty to tell them what to do. That was part of the problem with this that I think Ford bought into his own kind of invincibility, his own press if you will thinking that he could just go down there and take this kind of raw jungle and turn it into an industrial enterprise, a working industrial enterprise. And I think his eyes were bigger than his stomach, so to speak. His ambition's got ahead of his abilities in this case, because he wasn't willing to listen to the experts who wasn't willing to bring them on board.

He was in far too deep the over his head. The problem was that rubber trees had never grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford Company was trying to grow them. In dense plantations, with trees planted in tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian plantations run by Europeans, but that's because the bugs there hadn't evolved to eat rubber trees. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an environment where native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived.

What Ford was basically doing was building a giant incubator, in which the bugs and the blight and the fungi that feed off of rubber was able to grow exponentially because the trees were close together. For example, there were these caterpillars that were very fond of rubber trees. One of the predators was caterpillars, right? And at first all of the caterpillars were on the bottom of the leaves, so for landia, the managers would send out battalions of workers to pick the caterpillar. And they even gathered all the caterpillars together and in buckets and then poured them

together and then had a huge bonfire. But within a few years, guess what happened? When the caterpillars weren't actually eating the leaves from the bottom, they were eating the leaves from the top. So you couldn't actually see them and so therefore you couldn't pick them. Again and again, they replanted the trees, only to have them killed off by pests. This went on for years, and then decades. It wasn't until 1945 that Ford finally decided to shut down Ford Landia. At that point, Henry Ford had turned the company over to his grandson, and Ford Landia with

it. And within a few months, he sold it back to the Brazilian government for like $250,000 and then it was over. Henry Ford died a couple years later, and after all the money and time invested, weirdly, he'd never even visit it for landia. He'd orchestrated all of it, right down to the square dances from his home thousands of miles away in Michigan. You know, part of it maybe he was just afraid of going and seeing the failure there in person, so to speak. I mean, he certainly was reading the reports,

the memos, knew what was happening or what wasn't happening in Fort Lantia, so perhaps he didn't want to reckon with it personally. personally. Fordlandia is still a town today, and although a lot of the old buildings are now falling down, people continue to live there. Historian Greg Grandin has visited twice, that's two times more than Henry Ford ever did for those of you keeping count. Grandin made the day and a half long trip up the Toposos River by boat. You just turn, you just come around a bank and then all of a sudden you see this enormous

water tank and back in the day the word Ford was written on the water tank and you could see the outlines of what was for landia is still there. It's now a regular town. Brazilians are moved in and taken over all of the houses, but you still get a sense of what it looked like in the 1920s and 1930s. My house is very close. From my house, we can see the water tower. It's Ana Hita Soza and she's lived in Fort Landa since 2009. It's less than a kilometer. We can see it.

The water tower is beautiful. It's historic. It's a wonderful thing to see. There aren't many jobs left in the area for the 2000 inhabitants of Fort Landia. Most of the economy in the region now revolves around industrial soybean production and cattle ranches. There's a little bit of tourism too, which people like Sosa count on. She works at a hotel in town. We receive people from all countries.

They search for the history. They are curious to see in person this history. What is left? There are a few things yet. They come to see the village, the big houses, the school, the cemetery, the hospital. People come to see what's left of Ford's crazy vision. The American style town in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, the culturally insensitive and paternalistic boom doggo that, for all its

faults, still created good pain jobs for its workers. e foi muito audacioso. a lot of jobs for resilience. People from all over Brazil migrated to here looking for a job. Soza wasn't there to see all the ways for landia went wrong. For her, the history represents a time when this sleepy town was the focus of a massive experiment by a world famous industrialist. Now with its crumbling old buildings, Fort Landia is a different kind of lost civilization than you'd expect to find in the middle of the Amazon. A Midwest fantasy land returning to the jungle.

Do you know I host and produce another show? It's about the Constitution, Twitter, and Trump, and it's actually really fun. It's called What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. And this week is the last episode of the second series of that show, and I'm going to talk about it with my co-presenter, Elizabeth Jo, right after this. So I host another radiotopia podcast called What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. And in it I invite over my friend and neighbor Elizabeth Jo to teach me a little about constitutional law using tweets from Trump as a jumping off point.

So for example, the episode coming out this week starts with Trump's tweet about giving guns to teachers in school. And then we use that premise to look at the Fourth Amendment and what it says about the use of deadly force by the government. Usually the government employee that would potentially use deadly force is a cop, not a teacher, but the world has gone crazy. Presidents have always pushed against the Constitution in different ways to forward their agenda. But the reason why Trump is such a good foil for these types of hypothetical discussions

about the Constitution is because we have this unique window into what he's thinking because of Twitter. We've never had sort of direct access to a president's thoughts, his id, his moment-by-moment thoughts on every piece of news or policy, which may only hold for the next five minutes, but nevertheless, we get as snapshot into what he's thinking. And that's been important because this has been a norm breaking presidency. It's almost

a tired phrase now to say this is abnormal. I mean, the abnormal has become normal. And in some ways, that's been the genesis of this whole series. And Trump has definitely changed the way that Elizabeth teaches constitutional law at UC Davis. When I sort of survey my class and ask like, what would you like to talk about this semester? We'll try to address some of those things. They're all Trump related. They all want to know basically, you know, whatever the topic is, can he do that? Is he allowed to do that? And I think that's been what's really remarkable. And so yeah, it's very different to be a student, I think, in a teacher of constitutional law. It's very different just to be an American today

to think about what's normal in terms of expecting certain kind of behavior out of an American president. That's totally changed. We're using this opportunity to teach people about the constitution in new ways. And that seems to be going on beyond the reach of this podcast. Is that a silver lining that you see in all this that people are actually talking about the Fourth

Amendment and the 10th Amendment? Do you take pleasure in that? Yes, that has to be the one silver lining that people actually want to learn about how the government works. And that people are slowly discovering that despite the fact that we have a constitution and we have so many Supreme Court decisions on a variety of topics, the real thing that was always binding us, the cohesion, the glue for society was norms, that it wasn't the law, the law came second,

that the norms actually make our shared experience of what government should be possible. And when those start to unravel, people are understandably nervous. So that's been a big learning experience for all of us. Do you have a greater sense that we are dependent on norms than you did, I don't know, 18 months ago? Sure, absolutely. I mean, it's showing us that,

you know, what we need is this kind of collective faith that our institutions are collective faith in what the president should and should not be doing. And when that starts to come apart, I think that that raises new kinds of questions for how we ought to think about all of these offices and institutions, Congress, the president, how law works, what we should think about courts. I mean, we've never really had this kind of ultimate question begging moment. What does this all mean?

In the very, very beginning, when we started this show, we talked about the constitution having only 5,000 words, and it's just the scaffolding that can be interpreted in a lot of ways. Do you kind of wish now that there were more words in the constitution that it was a little more exact? No, I don't think so, because I think there's, I mean, one of the reasons why so far anyway, our system has been remarkably resilient and long I mean, one of the reasons why so far anyway, our system has been remarkably resilient and long-lasting is because of the flexibility and the document. You know, if they, we had spent specific that, you know, you can't use muskets and every

person should pay, you know, one dollar in taxes. It would be a very different document and probably we would have abandoned it a long time ago. But it's the open-endedness of it, which kind of shows the genius of the original framers, I think, to show that they were writing a document that was supposed to last for a long time. Now the problem with that is that we end up arguing a lot about what that means. And so that's kind of the thrilling part of constitutional law or had been. And now sometimes it's becoming the scary part of constitutional law. So if you want to take the chaos of unhinged tweets and endless political news and channel

that into learning the Constitution. I welcome you to join me as a fellow student on what Trump can teach us about Khan Law. Can Trump fire Mueller? Can Trump harden himself? What does it mean when Trump questions the legitimacy of judges? Can he even seize the necessary land to construct a border wall? Elizabeth Jo explains it all on what Trump can teach us about Conn Laugh.

We call it Trump Conn Laugh, for sure. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Radio Public, or wherever you download podcasts. 99% Invisible What's Produced This Week By Our Senior Editor Delaney Hall, Mixed In Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Rial, Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colesstedt is the digital director. The rest of the staff includes Avery Trouffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Teran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Thanks to Roger Weber and Zach Rosen, the host and producer of the Mismatch podcast, from the Graham Media Group and WDIV local four in Detroit, we

adapted the Fortlandia story from them. Thanks also to Paula Moota for production and translation help. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners, just like you. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Ork, on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But we have all kinds of pictures of Ford Landia, and they are weird and definitely worth

a gander, at 99pi.org. Radio tapio from PRX.